The Universe

I come up with some crazy ideas sometimes, or many times. Sometimes, to get places you have to stop being rational and think crazy, impossible, unrealistic things. I’m sure great scientists made the greatest of discoveries because they were thinking “outside the box”. Einstein said (sorry, I overuse him, but his quotes are great!): “Knowledge will take you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.” Needless to say, I have a very hyper imagination, and I do come across as crazy or odd to the more conventional thinker.

For those that do not know, science is not truth, it is merely the road to truth, a means to get there, and sometimes roads are closed or incomplete. As our frontal lobes evolved and we became more sophisticated and intelligent, people came out to explain laws of nature. Newton’s classical mechanics and James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory provided a way to see the “rules of the game” that govern nature. These rules still work, up to a certain point, and then break down. Newton’s laws break down at the atomic level, and hence, freaky smart physicists discovered something else. One was Paul Dirac who said, “It has been found possible to set up a new scheme, called quantum mechanics, which is more suitable for the description of phenomena on the atomic scale and which is in some respects more elegant and satisfying than the classical scheme.” So, now we have quantum mechanics and special relativity these days. And yet, science still is changing. There is stuff out there in the universe that neither quantum mechanics nor relativity can properly explain, like the expansion of the universe. New theories are in order, like Superstring theory which tries to unify the four forces of nature with vibrating “strings” and M-theory, a larger framework of string theory. These new approaches are still in development, and demand at least, an 11 dimensional universe (we only know 4).

I started reading into Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the increasing expansion of the universe and I started thinking, what exactly is pulling all the galaxies farther and farther away from each other? A physicist recently blew my mind away, telling me that the notion that we have that everything in the universe is made up of the ingredients found on the Periodic Table is wrong; it is estimated that only about 4% of the universe is made from the Periodic Table. There is other stuff out there, called dark matter. Dark matter is hypothetical matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic force, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. This matter accounts for a great deal of mass in the universe, 22%. This type of stuff shifts in and out of existence, disappearing and appearing in different dimensions. I, myself, always thought of getting a “cosmic” knife and cutting “reality”, cutting the air, prying open the “cut” and peeking inside at another dimension (s). I know, I must sound nuts, but I really think of stuff like that! Continuing, you might be wondering, what makes up the rest of the universe? Well, 74% is theorized to be Dark Energy which is even stranger, it is a bizarre form of energy that is located all over empty space. It is widely speculated that Dark Energy is responsible for the acceleration of the universe, which started approximately 5 billion years ago. According to a physics instructor, this vast energy supply, just a mini-mini-minimal amount can power entire civilizations. No more relying on fossil fuels. Maybe Obama has this in mind.

Not too long ago, I proposed a thought experiment to Caltech’s Kip Thorne, he is a very famous physicist, as you know, and a dear friend of Stephen Hawking. I proposed a Swiss-cheese or Dalmatian theory of the universe. I told him that the universe is shaped like a box, and on the walls, floor, and ceiling of this box there are holes, big holes. And each hole is a black hole larger than individual galaxies, (possibly powered by Dark Energy instead of Gravitation). These holes could be responsible for pulling space and galaxies farther apart. It kind of works, make a whole in a shoe box that contains a marble, stick a vacuum accessory in the hole and turn it on. If you have a good vacuum, it should have sucked up your marble, a.k.a-galaxy. Thorne liked my idea: “thanks for your thoughts, which are new and intriguing, but don’t seem very plausible to me: all the observational evidence we have suggests that the universe is virtually the same at the outer edge of where we can observe, as it is near us.” 
So, he sure told me, but I still continue to think crazy stuff! Maybe one day, I will get a medal!