Born to do Math 83 – Information, Spatial Curvature, Gravitational Pull, and Universal Expansion
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were listening to PR and Brian Greene. We were talking about dark energy off-tape. Can you expand on this, please?
Rick Rosner: Alright. So, I was listening to NPR and they had on Brian Greene, who is a pretty famous physicist who has made part of his calling writing books for general audiences and trying to explain physics to the public – particularly cutting-edge physics, cosmology, string theory, and stuff like that.
He was talking about dark energy, which is according to observations made in the last 15 years or so. The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating instead of slowing down, which is what you’d expect.
If the death star blew up a planet but they did not give enough of a push to the planet so that the pieces of the planet did not have mutual escape velocity, the planet would fly apart but more and more slowly and then eventually collapse back into itself.
That is basically one possibility of a general relativistic dynamic of the universe that it either is a Big Bang and the universe flies apart but it doesn’t have enough energy to overcome the mutual attraction of all the matter and it falls back into itself or maybe it does and it keeps going.
But in either case, the pieces after the initial explosion, the initial push, should not fly apart from each other faster and faster. With the gravity pulling on the universe, with a mutual attraction among all the matter in the universe the things should accelerate as they fly away from each other.
That mutual attraction should slow things down at least a little bit, but recent observations indicate that is not the case. Now under IC, we’re skeptical that these observations measure velocity as opposed to maybe something that is more informational, or it could be a mix, or it is purely velocital but the velocity is generated not by an initial Big Bang but is generated by the scale of the universe getting tighter as the universe incorporates more information into itself.
So, to get back to Brian Greene, he mentions that this acceleration can be mathematically characterized as a cosmological constant, which is an added factor that Einstein put into general relativity and then felt bad about because it contradicted some observational stuff and it was less mathematically elegant than the rest of the theory.
However, the cosmological constant can be set wherever you want to conform to experimental observational evidence and what it is; it is a dial for overall gravity whether on a universal scale gravity works the way we think it does based on local observations or whether on a universal scale there is a push outward that would account for the acceleration.
You can also dial it the other way and if there were experimental observations says the universe is slowing down faster than you’d expect. That is another position on the dial. But according to the observational evidence, there is a push.
A counter instead of gravitation on a universal scale pulling everything together is pushing everything apart. I have been skeptical of dark energy, but Brian Greene mentions this number. This tiny number that would be sufficient in terms of a push to account for the observed acceleration in the recessional velocity of the universe.
That makes me wonder if there is some mathematical parallel or equivalence that can be drawn between at least the apparent expansion of the universe and the amount of matter that is lost per unit time by photons being red shifted because the red shifting is a loss of energy due to the curvature of space.
So, there should be a direct equivalence between photons losing energy and the apparent size of the universe increasing or that is at least a possibility that as the universe gets more information from localized information being shed by individual photons and that information being spread out to the rest of the universe through the red shift.
You should see a gradual change in scale of the universe as the information leaking out of the photons more sharply defines all the particles in the universe which is equivalent to the universe being apparently larger.
Tighter looking particles, it is the same thing as the same sized particles in a larger universe. So, anyway, maybe, there is some math to be done to establish equivalence between the energy that is always being lost by a gazillion photons and what is happening with the apparent expansion of the universe.
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