It will be remembered that none of our modern cosmological models
have
even a reasonable answer to this question. The Big Bang model
gets the
hydrogen from the Fireball with no source for the Fireball,
and the old Steady
State model gets the hydrogen from the C Field
with no source for the C Field.
Can we come up with a more reasonable
answer?
On
a plane, on my way to the Summer Scientific Meeting of the
Astronomical
Society of the Pacific at Pomona in Southern California, I was
thinking
about the Big Bang model's suggestion that in the absence of the
Universe,
and in the absence of space and time, there would be nothing. And I
thought,
`Isn't that unwarranted?' In the absence of time we would have the
absence
of change, but not necessarily nothing. And I intended to ask my
question
to William Kaufman on the second day of the meeting. But Allan
Sandage
gave such a lovely talk the first day, on the Hubble Constant, that I
asked
my question of him.
I asked: Since we're now willing to talk 'creation event' (and I wiggled my
fingers for quotes), why must we assume that in the absence of the Universe and
in the absence of space and time there would be nothing? Isn't it unwarranted?
In the absence of time we would have the absence of change, but not
necessarily nothing, and in the absence of space we would have the absence of
dividedness and the absence of smallness, but not necessarily nothing. So I said,
that leaves the possibility that behind what we see there might be the
changeless, the infinite, the undivided, which to me seems a long way from
nothing. That remark brought that discussion to an end.
But several years later, at the University of California
in Berkeley, I asked
Stephen Hawking whether he saw any observational
evidence as to whether
what underlies the Universe which we see might
be a zero or whether it might be
the changeless, the infinite, the
undivided. He took the trouble to have his
machine answer me, "I'm
not sure it's a meaningful question." But to me it is a
meaningful
question, and to me the observational evidence is obvious.
As I see it the gravitational energy of the Universe is the observational
evidence that what underlies the Universe is undivided. That's why gravity falls
the hydrogen together to galaxies and stars. Inertia is the evidence that what
underlies the Universe is changeless. That's why matter fights every change in
its state of motion. And the electrical energy of the Universe is the evidence that
the underlying existence is infinite. That's why the electrical charge is self
repulsive and why the electrical energy of an electrical particle would go to zero
if, and only if, the size of that particle went to infinity.
It will be remembered that we have no other explanation for gravity,
electricity or inertia.
Richard Feynman has said, "It is important to realize that in physics today
we have no knowledge of what energy is." But / think that energy is simply the
underlying existence showing through in space and time.
Now there were some physicists long ago,
several thousand years ago,
who noticed that if what underlies the
Universe is changel6ss and we see it as
changing, it can only be
by mistake, because you can't change the changeless.
And, since you
can't have a mistake without a take (You can't mistake your friend
for
a ghost without seeing your friend.), the changeless, the infinite, the undivided
must show through in our physics.
But even accepting this point of view, we still have a problem. If we see a
duality, why doesn't the undividedness show through and close it down? And if
we see a plurality, why doesn't the undividedness show through and close that
down?
Enter Heisenberg and Pauli. The plurality can keep the duality up, and the
duality can keep the plurality up. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prevents the
collapse of the electrical duality of the electron and the proton in the hydrogen
atom because, although the electron, as Feynman has pointed out, is purely
electrical, the proton is not. The proton's rest mass is related to the plurality,
to its
separation in the gravitational field from all the rest of
the matter in the
observable Universe. And Pauli's exclusion principle
prevents the collapse of the
plurality because you can't put two
Fermi particles in the same energy state.
It may be that if we see what we see as in space and time it will
automatically take the form of hydrogen falling together to galaxies and stars.
And it may be that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle recycles the hydrogen from
the border of the expanding Universe with all its negative entropy restored.
John L. Dobson
December 23,
2005
