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  1. Apropå Vetandets Värld 110518

    I ett märkligt samtal jag råkade tjuvlyssna på för många år sedan framfördes en mängd som jag tyckte befängda resonemang. Jag blev så fascinerad av det jag hörde att jag så fort jag fick möjlighet skrev ner på min laptop som jag uppfattade det. Under årens lopp har de tankegångar som framfördes inte lämnat mig någon ro. Jag har försökt få reda på om någon ägnat sig åt de två frågeställningar som är avgörande för hållbarheten i resonemanget men inte lyckats. Beroende på att jag som lekman, om än en naturvetenskapligt upplyst sådan, inte har de rätta färdigheterna att leta efter relevanta vetenskapliga publikationer. Eftersom samtalet jag avlyssnade fördes på engelska så skrev jag också ner det på engelska. Jag kopierar och klistrar in texten från hårddisken.

    Some years ago, before the Hubble telescope was launched, I was overhearing a conversation about a topic that could be described in the terms of ”a computer simulation of a condensing universe”. The three participants of the conversation obviously did not take any notice of me although they seemed to be very keen on keeping their project within a very narrow circle.

    ”I think that, if we succeed, we should wait to publish until the first observation of a galaxy older than the considered age of the universe. That would be a confirmation of our theories.” I heard one of them say.

    Two of the participants then began to outline the scheme for the third party who I understood was the one with the financial resources, but without a science education. I was amazed of how convinced the two scientists were that there would appear galaxies that undoubtedly were older than the present estimate of the age of the universe. As I understood, one of the scientists was an astro physicist, the other a particle physicist.

    I found the following account so interesting that I wrote down as much as I could remember on my laptop when I got back to my hotel room.

    The astro physicist began:
    ”There is a commonly used two dimensional visualization of the expanding universe; the dotted inflating balloon. This illustrates a universe beginning with an exploding singularity. I f you were an observer on one of the dots you would see all the other dots receding from you. The further away the faster.

    Imagine instead an already inflated balloon. Its surface is hydrophilic and covered with a very thin film of water. By some means, say a powerful UV flash in the center of the balloon, the property of the balloon surface is suddenly changed to a hydrophobic state. The water film breaks up into thousands of tiny droplets. Many tiny droplets will merge into larger drops. An observer on a droplet would come to the conclusion that he is living in an expanding universe. The further away a droplet is the faster it seems to recede. This illustrates a condensing universe.

    The primeval state of this universe existed hundreds of billions of years ago and consisted of an immensely diluted primordial “gas” composed of elementary energy potentials, moving randomly at the speed of light — an absolute null entropy state. What would be the nature of these energy potentials? We know that there is a minimum amount of energy required to constitute one bit of information. So one bit of information is also one bit of energy – an ”e-bit”. The e-bits have another peculiar property. An e-bit can be anywhere in the universe. But the probability that it occupies a position outside its trajectory is extremely to infinitesimally small. This primordial gas of e-bits went through a phase transition resulting in a condensation process. The phase transition took place during a very long period due to interactions between e-bits. Even if the mean distances between the e-bits were very large, sooner or later e-bits would collide, head on or at an angle. What then would happen?

    There are no forces of any kind in action that affects the e-bits in their free flight. The absolute speed can be defined as if two traveling e-bits should travel beside each other along parallel trajectories, the distance between the particles would be constant. Although this model started with the simplest of suppositions, as soon as the e-bits began to collide, things got complicated. In spite of the e-bits being infinitesimally small they would behave like billiard-balls when colliding, because the probabilities of an e-bit of being exactly on its trajectories could be described as a small cloud of probable positions centered on the trajectory. Depending on collision angles they would start spinning around axis of differing orientation in relation to the trajectory. The axis of spin could begin to tumble when spinning e-bits collided. After head on, or near head on collisions an e-bit would be retarded in its forward movement and therefore take on a spiral trajectory, thus conserving momentum but losing speed between the points A and B in space. Colliding spiraling e-bits would generate quite a lot of different outcomes, from the straightening of spiral trajectories to the creation of spiraling spiraling trajectories, like the filament in an electric bulb. The more contracted the spiraling trajectory the slower the speed of the e-bit between A and B. Thus originally mass less e-bits decelerate from their random free flight and acquire the equivalent of mass and behave in accordance with the laws of physics that state that a particle with mass can not reach the speed of light.

    After a large number of collisions some e-bits have been deviated from their original path so much that their trajectories resemble balls of yarn, balls which to the observer behave like heavy particles. Other e-bits have remained almost unaffected by collisions and still move in straight or very elongated spiral trajectories. There now is a spectrum of e-bits which have experienced from few to millions of events. This beginning condensation process has been going on for a very long time – hundreds of billions of years.

    Looking at the scenario in macro scale, after billions of collisions per billions of e-bits, the random even distribution has been disturbed because so many e-bits have deviated from their primordial random motion. Those following a spiraling trajectory have a greater chance of colliding than those following a straight path. Density gradients evolve. Collision chances increase in the denser volumes and decreases in the diluted volumes, which by and by develop into growing voids while the denser volumes form filamentous structures. This beginning condensation process has left a remark in the sky that we can observe today as the cosmic background radiation.

    The voids are not absolutely empty. But the mean distance between the e-bits crossing the voids is so large that the e-bits pass the void unobstructed. Many of the e-bits are retarded and caught in the filamentous structures. Some pass and continue through the next void. The larger voids grow and the smaller shrinks because the compound pressure on the filaments surrounding the small voids from the e-bits crossing the larger voids exceeds that from the e-bits crossing the smaller voids. Thus filaments encounter. Along the shear lines appear bends and vortexes analogous to those of atmospheric low pressures.”

    ”This is not to say that we claim that this is the true way that our universe was born and developing”, I heard the astro physicist say, ”this is a fictitious model of a course that we want to simulate, which requires a lot of programming and considerable computing power – and that has to be financed.”
    He added that this only was the first step in a chain of computer simulations. They also wanted to address the concepts of repelling and attracting forces. The particle physicist continued:

    ”The logical problem with the concept of attraction between things is, that onething exerts an influence on an otherthing, to make the otherthing encounter the onething in the future. Einstein overcame this problem by the mathematical construction of the space-time grid in which a lump of matter creates a sink in the grid and another lump of matter traveling in space has to follow the bendings in the grid created by both itself and other lumps of matter.

    Is there a way in which the “e-bits” could interact and even bind to each other without help from any forces or fields or intermediates?
    Imagine the kind of ring with a stick that children use when they are blowing soap bubbles. Fasten the stick in the chuck of a high speed mini-drill. When the ring is rotating at a sufficiently high speed it is impossible to blow a pea through the sphere created by the rotating ring. The ring has become a shell. Likewise the rotating ring will confine a freely floating little ball. But how fast must the ring rotate? So fast that it is impossible to manufacture such a ring with sufficient strength and accurately balanced?

    Let us leave this primitive experiment device and disregard the restrictions imposed by the mass of the ring. Describe the geometries of the ring and the confined ball mathematically. Computer simulate a freely rotating ring and the interaction with the confined ball. Change size relations. Give the ball different mass and elasticity properties. Change scales down to nano levels or smaller. Under which circumstances is the rotating ring capable of confining the ball? May be it is never possible. Or does chance enter so that during certain conditions the ball will escape after a short time, and during other conditions millions of years will lapse before the the ball escapes, or thirdly some parameters hold the ball confined forever?

    Replace the spinning ring with an e-bit circling around with the speed of light. The circular path of the e-bit is like a ring moving freely in space. As the e-bit is mass less there are no complications with inertia or centrifugal force. The “ring” is created when an e-bit in a spiraling path collides with a “heavy particle” constituted by e-bits following yarn ball-like paths – the equivalent of a ball. The collision stops the e-bit in its way through space and transforms the spiraling path to a “ring” that spins, forming an unpenetrable “shell” around the “heavy” ball – pretty much like a simplified atom. No weak, no strong, no electromagnetic forces involved so far. Of course the two parts of the system will bounce frequently but the speed of the encircling e-bit is so high that its compound track can be considered as a shell confining the “nucleus”. Consider also the further complications caused by the probabilistic nature of the e-bits. Is there a hitherto unconsidered confining mechanism acting in the world of elementary particles? Something that could be called ”confining mechanics”.
    Now, in a computer it is possible to perform actions that seem impossible in the real world that we perceive. To mathematically analyze all possible and impossible outcomes of the confining mechanics is a formidable task but so far we have indications that there really exist confining situations during certain prerequisites. Peculiarly no one seems to have immersed oneself in the topic.”

    I must confess that I had difficulties following the reasoning but frequent interrupting questions by the ”money man” helped me to conceive the reasoning. In my attempts to write down what I heard, I certainly have missed many details and also simplified to facilitate my own understanding. It all seems very strange but tantalizing to me.

    Apparently the aim of the two scientists was to construct a fictitious universe where only repulsion was the cause of interaction, yet the mathematics that describe it would conform with the equations of our laws of nature including the general and special theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and information theory.
    The astro physicist pointed out that we are so bound by generally accepted ways of describing natural phenomena:
    ”We handle the paths of the sun and the planets as following elliptical orbits around the sun. But, if you look at our planetary system from the perspective of the universe the sun and its planets all follow very elongated spiraling trajectories through the universe like a pack of shots from a shotgun. That also counts for a galaxy. When you are in the pack you are concerned only with the shots’ motions relative each other. Imagine yourself being a very tiny observer on one of the lead shots. Change the time scale accordingly and your life span is only fractions of a second measured by our clocks but on the shot you are living a long life observing your neighbor shots and trying to figure out what laws that govern the relative motions between the shots. You come up with a solution that you call ”the law of pulling” and become shot famous. Only we know what really caused the motions and interrelations of the shots in the pack – the firing of the shot gun, eons of shot years ago.”

    Another example was the common meteorological explanation of why it blows:
    ”You have heard it: a depression is passing from west to east, air from surroundings with higher pressure blows to lower pressure, the earth’s rotation creates a vortex, southerly winds before the depression, westerly south of the depression and northerly behind.
    The real cause: A flow of warm air from the tropics presses its way to the heat sink of the pole. On its way it meets a colder polar air mass. Along the interface shearing occurs, resulting in waves along the interface, the waves brake causing vortexes similar to the vortexes you can see when streaming water from the arch of a bridge meets the backwater. It is not the eye of the vortex that causes the air, or the water, to swirl around it. It is the energy loaded warm air or streaming water that causes the depression. It is events in the past that causes the depression. It is not the depression that causes the winds to blow to it in the future.”

    The particle physicist continued his explanation of how they intended to simulate a kind of elementary particle build-up based solely on the primordial e-bits.
    ”Consider the e-bit encircling a nucleus. It is not as simple as first envisioned. Suppose the circular path represented the mean of a spiraling path (like the filament in a light bulb), then the ends of the path must meet after one revolution, otherwise the e-bit would be losing or gaining speed. Now a passing e-bit gives the rotating e-bit a “positive” kick so that it gains momentum. Then the spiraling path elongates and the encircling e-bit “jumps” to spiral along a larger circumference.”
    This was beginning to become too much for my brain! I could not quite follow the continued reasoning, until he in his pedagogical way referred to the well-known conjurer’s trick with steel rings.

    ”Suppose you are called up to the stage. By some trick the conjurer can beat the rings through each other to form chains or other constellations. He unchains the rings, hands them over to you and ask you to repeat the trick, which of course seems impossible.
    Suppose e-bits in circular (or rather spiraling) paths could get interlocked the same way. Let these e-bits have different spins and follow left or right hand spiraling paths, then there would be prerequisites for both the formation of families of “particles” and “annihilations” i.e. collisions leading to the e-bits returning to their initial straight trajectories through space. Constellations similar to quarks would form, unable to survive on their own but forming very stable interlacings with other quark like formations constituting “heavy” particles of different kinds trapped in interlocking paths of a yarn ball like nucleus, not as simple as the model of a nucleus previously envisioned. The mass of the nucleus representing all the deviations from the original free paths of all the e-bits that constitute the parts of the nucleus.”

    I must admit that my account of this is fragmentary and not as stringent as I want.
    Next item, namely time, is controversial according to the astro physicist.
    ”Applied to the world of “e-bits”, time would be defined as “the ever increasing sum of events (interactions with other e-bits) a collection of e-bits has experienced since their primordial free flight” In the kind of universe that we are modeling local time would slow down in an aggregation of e-bits if they were accelerated to near speed of light and reverse, time would speed up if the same lump were decelerated. If we can obtain the computational resources to describe our model mathematically we would probably find that local time would behave according to the equations of relativity.

    The paths of e-bits representing “radiation” would bend when passing near large e-bit concentrations (bodies) – not because of attractive forces but because of refraction caused by the increasing density gradient of e-bits in the space near a large body (planet, star, galaxy). The e-bits spiraling towards the body not because they are pulled, but because of events in their past, much like the winds in a cyclone are spiraling towards the eye because of passed atmospherical events.
    In our simulated condensing universe the matter in galaxies, stars and planets is pushed together due to event chains in the past. That is why, what we experience as the force of gravity, is not manipulable in contrast to the electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces.

    The most difficult to comprehend is to imagine the force of gravity to be a function of events of the past. For instance how do you explain the way a supersensitive gravimeter on a satellite measures the density variations of the earths crust? The answer is that all particles in the observable universe are tied together by their common past. The consequence of this is what the space-time grid mathematics describes.

    One of the toughest challenges for science to cope with, is to merge the fundamental forces in a common framework. Gravity seems to refuse to be a manageable part of such a theory of everything. In our fictitious model of a universe we have no such problems because gravity is not a force but instead a consequence of events in the past. This also means that in our model we do not need to introduce the concepts of dark matter and dark energy to explain behaviors similar to those observed in the real universe.

    To merge the electromagnetic phenomena into our model of a condensing universe is a challenge. We think that by applying a thermodynamic framework with the creation of energy sinks we will land mathematically in the vicinity of Maxwell’s equations.

    One interesting aspect of our model is that we don’t need any Higgs particle or Higgs field to account for the creation of mass. So if our universe model is possible and it mathematically conforms with the laws of nature as we know them and leads to the standard model of elementary particles, we could dare to predict two future observations, namely; no Higgs particle will be found at CERN and galaxies will be observed that are older than the presently considered age of the universe.

    If our simulated universe model obeys the same laws of nature as the real univers it will also indicate the possibility of a hitherto unrecognized law of nature, namely simply expressed; there is no pulling, only pushing”.

    Then followed a battery of questions, some of them quite critical, from the financier in spe. What kind of person he was, a man with money of his own, or a representative of other financiers I could not decide.

    Unfortunately I had to leave, I was already belated.

    De här tankegångarna som ju verkar helt befängda har brytt min hjärna i flera år. De följande två frågeställningarna är helt avgörande för om det kan ligga något i de spekulativa teorier jag återgett.

    Den första är det här med ett kondenserande universum. Har någon matematiskt simulerat hur en observatör i ett sådant universum upplever hur snabbt något som befinner sig mycket långt borta rör sig bort i förhållande till något som befinner sig nära? Är det så att observatörens mätvärden i ett kondenserande universum blir desamma som i ett expanderande universum? Eftersom mina matematiska kunskaper är begränsade så kan jag inte själv göra en sådan analys. Om den inte finns gjord någonstans, var hittar jag någon som kan belägga eller vederlägga?

    Den andra är den som beskrivs som ”confining mechanics”. Jag har ju letat på Internet för att se om det finns några spår av de tankegångar jag återgett i min berättelse men inte lyckats hitta något. Om du googlar på ”confining mechanics” så kommer du att hitta mitt inlägg på physicsforum.com den 23 mars 2006. Det blev väl betraktat som ett stolleinlägg för något svar fick jag inte. Eller också är det ingen som begriper vad jag försökt beskriva.

    Någon stolle är jag inte. Jag har haft ett lyckosamt yrkesliv och vad jag vet uppfattats som en intelligent och kreativ problemlösare. Visserligen har jag framkastat många idéer som vid närmare begrundan visat sig tokiga men också sådana som visat sig vara lyckade lösningar på knepiga problem. Men hur ska jag hantera de här frågeställningarna? Det borde ju gå att analysera med känd matematik och fysik, men vem kan göra det?

    Jag har full förståelse för om du tycker det här är helcorny och inte värt att ägna någon tid. I så fall vore jag tacksam om du kort och kärnfullt uttrycker det i ett svar till min mailadress: jan-axel.nyman@telia.com

    Helst skulle jag ju vilja ha två otvetydiga vederlägganden av frågeställningarna så jag kan bli fri från mina bryderier.

    Med vänlig hälsning
    Jan-Axel Nyman
    Hultgrens väg 21
    443 38 Lerum
    0302-51919, 0706 20 86 17

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