Glancing at the evening sky and watching a flock of birds
return home has never failed to amaze me. Why? The seemingly coordinated
movement of the flock is not controlled by any leader. Instead, it emerges
naturally as each individual follows a few simple rules, such as go in the same
direction as the other guy, don’t get too close, and flee any predators. This
phenomenon, is called emergence.
"It's not magic," the physicist Doyne Farmer once
said about emergence, "but it feels like magic." Birds, atmospheric
disturbances, and city dwellers self-organize, giving rise to flocks,
hurricanes, and distinct neighborhoods. Such entirely new properties and
behaviors "emerge," with no one directing and no one able to foresee
the new characteristics from knowledge of the constituents alone. The whole is
truly greater than the sum of its parts and can be very distinct and
unpredictable.
As long as there is an inherent affinity to self-organize,
chances are emergence will occur. The propensity to self-organize is abundant
on earth and since natural laws that hold good on our planet holds good for the
Universe as a whole, it must be that self-organization occurs everywhere in the
Universe as well.
It is this basic premise that I base my un-scientific theory
on the birth of the Universe upon. Un-scientific, because it is neither based on
facts nor evidence. But the circumstantial evidence, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, is so strong, I feel compelled to put it
out there and maybe, just maybe, some scientific community might just decide
there is an iota of merit in the proposition.
In the beginning, there was just dark matter. We know
nothing about dark matter, but, I will ascribe it one property – the affinity
to self-organize. When sufficient dark matter self-organized, the emergent result
was a Bang. The self-organization did not occur at one single point but
throughout the Universe, as long as sufficient dark matter could come together.
Thus, there was not one single Big Bang, but multiple Bangs. How the Universe
evolved after the Big Bang is well known and the same applies to each of these
Bangs, with one significant difference – INFLATION.
The first version of the Big Bang theory (aka standard Big
Bang) could not explain what is known as the Horizon problem. Our observations
tell us that distant regions of space in opposite directions of the sky are so
far apart that, assuming standard Big Bang expansion, they could never have
been in causal contact with each other. Why? This is because the light travel
time between them exceeds the age of the universe. So if nothing can travel
faster than light how come these regions are at a distance much further than
the distance light could possibly have traveled since the birth of the
Universe? Yet the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background temperature
tells us that these regions must have been in contact with each other in the
past.
To explain this observation, the Inflation theory was
introduced. It proposes a period of extremely rapid (exponential) expansion of
the universe followed by the more gradual Big Bang expansion. Since Inflation
supposes a burst of exponential expansion in the early universe, it follows
that distant regions were actually much closer together prior to Inflation than
they would have been with only standard Big Bang expansion. Thus, such regions
could have been in causal contact prior to Inflation and could have attained a
uniform temperature.
I always found myself not being able to reconcile to this
Inflation theory. It appears to me to be a classic case of “retrofit”. Strange
things do happen in the Universe, but this hyper expansion just for an exact
period of fractions of a second, hmmm….
Now let us go back to
the idea of multiple Bangs. Since each of these Bangs occur at points in the
Universe which are already at distances from each other, even if each of
the expansions follow the standard Big Bang, none of these have to travel so
further away from any one central point as needed by the single Big Bang. It thus
resolves the Horizon problem. Since the Bangs occur at various points in the
Universe, it would also explain the uniform background temperature found in the
Universe.
Now through this theory, there is purpose and reason for
dark matter, rather than being around just to provide the gravitational mass
missing in the other “non-dark” matter (the galaxies, stars etc.) of the
Universe. Present observations suggest that 380,000 years after the birth of
the Universe, the amount of dark matter was roughly 63% of all matter. Now,
nearly 14 billion years later it is roughly 23%.
I have an explanation for why this amount reduces all the
time. Because, there are Bangs taking place all the time in the Universe. Dark
matter continues to self-organize and give birth to new galaxies, stars, etc.
And with each Bang, the Universe expands even further. What does this mean?
That with each Bang, there is an expansion and each expansion, results in the
acceleration of some parts of the Universe away from the rest. The constant acceleration
of the Universe away from itself in every direction is another strange
phenomenon and the incessant occurrence of Bangs explains this phenomenon.
Does this then obviate the need for dark energy? After all
dark energy was introduced to explain the accelerating expansion of the
Universe and I believe we have a plausible explanation in the preceding
paragraph.
Now, I am not a cosmologist, not even a scientist and
everything I have written in this article might be wrong, but then, I believe I
have raised some interesting points worthy of consideration.
Would be interesting if some one chances upon this and
thinks it worth a scientific scrutiny!
Note: Certain text in this article have been re-produced verbatim from a) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/emergence.html and b) http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_cosmo_infl.html
