Cosmic Swan Talks about Time

Earth physicists are getting wound up in their attempts to find out what makes the universe tick.

Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like bananas, as you may hear in North America, Earth. No one can argue with the fruit flies taste, but so much is written about how time flies that you’d think some hideous menace threatens mankind if they don’t know its inner secrets. According to Roger Highfield, Science Editor of the Telegraph.co.uk, “We all have a sense that time is flowing... but now time could be running out -- for the very concept of time itself.”

Highfield has written a series of sensational articles parading out beautiful but fictional “theories” of time that a number of currently flourishing mathematicians have built. I put theories in quotes because none of these theories will ever be demonstrated in any way that has meaning for humanity. They are not testable in any way.

With a headline “Mankind 'shortening the universe's life' “he is trying to put readers in a headlock so he can ram our brains with all the fiction that mathematicians can dream up. “Oh no!” a reader is supposed to say out loud to his companions. “We are going to run out of time!” I often wonder why so much sensational science fiction makes it to widely-read publications, such as the Telegraph. Even well-educated readers can take nothing away but some vague feeling of unease about what may confront mankind billions of years from this point in time.

According to Highfield, “cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles...” What makes this theory powerful? Because it hypothesizes that “...quantum systems can exist in many different physical configurations at the same time.“ To understand why this is not powerful, consider how many different structures you can make with Tinker Toys. To mathematicians and physicists the components of quantum systems and the infinite number of states they can be in, are the toys they tinker with. You can imagine a quantum in many different states at once but when you carry out a measurement, you only pick out one state. Physicists want to say we have picked out a single quantum state, but picking in the sense of choice has nothing to do with it.

The “mind-boggling” Schrodinger’s cat experiment is no experiment at all. It is mental quantum mathematical exercise that tells you nothing more than when a horse race is still running, anyone of the horses can win with a certain probability. But when the race is over, when the cat is out of the box, there is only one result. Only one horse wins. The cat is either dead or alive. The universe does not split in two except in the mind of the hard-headed quantum physicist. The truth, the result of actual experiment is hard to accept.

Professor Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University is quoted as saying, “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay."

Let’s think about the heritage of “dark energy.” It is one of the latest epicycles that had to be added onto to the Byzantine complexity of the Big Bang “Theory” to make the mathematical model come out right. Like the Earth-centered cosmos that required physically unsupportable epicycles in orbits of planets, the Big Bang Theory requires Dark Energy to explain what seems to be accelerating the galaxies apart. No scientist knows what Dark Energy is. No experiment can detect it, localize it, or explain its relationship to known physics, except in untestable mathematical models.

We cannot go back to the moment of the Big Bang and verify anyone’s physics. We cannot follow along and verify each hypothesized stage of evolution of the model. We only know what we can see now. All we know is that there is a red-shift in the light that comes from distant galaxies and the shift is apparently greater, the greater the distance to the galaxy. For all distances we cannot verify independently, the red-shift is taken as a measure of distance, and so our scientists have created circular-reasoned predictions.

For the Big Bang model to work, they had to invent new Tinker Toys:
Dark Energy that cannot be found
Dark Matter that cannot be found
A universe with accelerated expansion with galaxies that do not expand
A universe that expands faster than the speed of light, while demanding that nothing can travel faster than light
Expansion without any center and without any edge

These hypothetical extra Tinker Toys that cannot be found look like science fiction to me. The fundamental principle of Occam’s Razor had to be thrown out to build a cosmology to support the Big Bang Theory.

Yes, as Highfield points out in one of his articles, all this leads to a “depressing conclusion.” Professor Krauss says, “...our detection of dark energy may imply both an unstable universe and a short life expectancy.” This is depressing indeed.

Some mathematical theories suggest this kind of universe, some suggest that kind of universe, and some priests with similar roles in society a few hundred years ago suggested that an infinite number of angels could dance on the head of pin, because, after all, there is no limit to what God can do. Those medieval priests had their own predominance over the philosophical thinking of their day, just as our latter-day Big Bangers. Neither can prove their theories by any stretch of the mind. An infinite number of angels on the head of a pin makes as much sense as a universe that started out at infinite density.

Well, time runs out for all of us individually, although I the Cosmic Swan will live for an awfully long time. Time may run out for human beings if they fail to prepare as a species for the known risks the universe can throw at them. They are more likely to do that if they are not constantly bombarded with science fiction, purporting to be science, that sends dark messages of their ultimate doom.