It all started with a Big Bang, or did it? We have a big problem, we don’t exist. Nothing exists, or at least that is one possibility. I’m not being very clear. Let’s try this a different way. Either an infinite universe existed before the Big Bang, which quantum physicists will tell you makes such an unusual event an almost certainty. Or the universe sprang from the Big Bang itself. The first possibility would still not explain the origin of the universe, and so it is generally ignored. The second possibility is more measurable, but has problems of its own. Is the universe now infinite, having sprung from the cataclysm?
If the universe is infinite then that gives us problems. If an infinite universe sprang from a measurable and finite event then we can start by throwing math out the window. We also know that the amount of thing that can be understood to travel infinite distance in an instant can be counted on exactly zero fingers. If we were to ask Einstein what would happen to a universe that expanded from nothing to infinite in exactly no time whatsoever, he would give a long winded explanation about the warping of space time that would cause that infinity to travel backwards in time infinity, (see first possibility) this causes a causality loop… Are we having fun yet? What’s more this possibility trashes the conservation of energy concept as the energy of the Big Bang disperses through the universe, sending us to the inevitable and ironically named “heat death” scenario.
Much of this is fixed by a closed, finite universe, or it would be if the universe weren’t still expanding. We measure whether things are getting farther apart or coming closer with Doppler effects on the light that we see from distant stars (that’s the simple version of it). We have looked deep into the sky with telescopes that see light, heat, x-rays, radio frequencies, ultraviolet, and infrared… and I’m possibly leaving out one or two things. We have figured out roughly where the Big Bang happened, and where the walls of our expanding reality are. We have even figured out the mass and energy in the universe (very big numbers, that can only be truly described by other very big numbers). The take out from all of this being that we didn’t have enough mass to account for the gravity that objects were exhibiting on each other
Well science to the rescue, or math more precisely, as a bunch of mathematics PHDs decided to call themselves scientists, and we all believed them. We weren’t sure what they were doing for a living either so maybe they were the same thing. The point is, all we had to do was add more mass, never mind that this bollixed observation, that pesky scientific method was getting in the way anyhow. They called it Dark Matter, rather convenient. All we had to do is pretend that the universe was mostly made up of stuff we couldn’t see, and the mass and rotation of the universe worked. Thee cheers for math, er science, whatever.
This turned out to have its own problems however, with that much mass, the energy in the universe was not enough. “I canna’ give em’ any more Cap’n.” By all rights we should be in the middle of being sucked down into a singularity the size of a… well a singularity, not to put to fine a point on it.. Not to worry though, those clever guys with the blackboards, slide-rules, and graphing calculators came up with a solution just in time to save us from the ultimate needy relationship. They added energy! Dark Energy, there’s a theme happening here. Now most of reality was made up of stuff that was, well, made up. The math worked though so at least the universe worked when written on a ledger…
To kick this all in the the proverbial knackers is the idea, after all of this, to say that this isn’t really a theory, more of a proven fact. I love science, when do we get to start doing it again?
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