Musings about space-time...

Whilst it is fun to write about our national political failures, both human and in actions, it doesn’t stop the mind thinking about everything around itself. In particular the space we all live in. Like for instance, expanding space. The question about how our universe started. Big Bang? Big Whimper? Or no bang or whimper at all? Obviously I am not a scientist, although it doesn’t stop me thinking about the subject. For what I am seeing and hearing, scientists also don’t really know much about it either. The reality on the ground is pretty simple. Everything falls down. In other words ‘gravity’. A force not to be taken lightly either. The next thing I am thinking, our universe is there, we can see the stars in it. Our enormous telescopes are showing it in great detail. Then the idea of the ‘expanding’ universe. But is that really true? Of course, there is the ‘red-shift’ but does that actually indicate the universe is expanding? Or that star systems are just moving about. As everything seems to be in motion the question would arise as to where the initial energy would have come from. If there was a Big Bang or perhaps just a gradual expansion of matter into a vacuum then that energy will eventually run out of steam. To be followed by a Big Collapse? Or a dissipation of matter aimlessly floating until captured by something else. There is the idea of multiverses.

It is difficult to grasp time. We know clocks tick away second by second. But what is ‘time’ exactly? If, as some scientists think, there is ‘nothing’, then there would be no ‘time’. Time belongs to ‘something’. In other words time begins when something happens. So time began when one way or another our universe began. For us humans time began when we became aware of our existence, day and night. Think about it, how we measure it, and what for. Thus our universe has a ‘time frame’. One frame we will never really fully experience as it’s virtually endless compared to our existence and even our solar system. On one very interesting website – ‘https://scitechdaily.com’, a rather interesting idea is shown. Simulation of quantum vacuum fluctuations in quantum dynamics. An image showing the fluctuations of matter to energy and vice versa. The spacetime vacuum state is seething with particles constantly being created and destroyed, apparently “out of nothing”. But it also shows that matter disappears in ‘one place’ and appears in another. Also it postulates the idea of a cycle. From a hot dense state to a cold dense state. When the hot state grows bigger the cold state shrinks. Nice but when then will it reverse? These ideas are metaphysics but nevertheless appeal. They do to me! An eminent professor Roger Penrose said this: he showed how the cold dense state and the hot dense state could be related by such rescaling so that they match with respect to the shapes of their spacetimes – although not to their sizes’. Difficult to grasp when talking about size. How can two things be ‘identical’ and have different sizes. I suppose it would depend on their density. Interesting, the writer of the article also said: ‘It may help to understand the hot dense state as produced from the cold empty state in some non-causal way. Perhaps we should say that the hot dense state emerges from, or is grounded in, or realized by the cold, empty state’. If you now have a headache, don’t worry. I have one but also am excited by these ideas.

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