Science can explain everything that happened after the Big Bang. However, when asked what happened at the Big Bang, scientists resort to mysticism: 'There was a singularity'. The Big Bang must have been simple and, so the theory goes, it happened as a sub microscopic quantum fluctuation that happened in no time at all (because time was created at the Big Bang) and everywhere (there was nowhere else). A mysterious mystical singularity that made 125 billion galaxies deserves an explanatory theory.
Two concepts,
nothing and
infinity, seem outwith human imagination and comprehension.
Firstly, the concept of nothing, a total absence of anything at all (including the eight entities of mass, energy, particles, fields, time, waves, space and forces) and nothing, having no boundaries, must have been infinite and thus have infinite potential 'suction' energy. Each of these eight entities is defined in terms of at least one of the others so they are interrelated. Indeed, nothing would be nothing until something, no matter how small, came in existence to reveal it.
Secondly, infinity likewise has no boundaries. Infinity is not a number and how, in the name of semantics, can there be different sizes of infinities? Logically, there can only be one infinity. The mythical Hilbert's hotel has an infinite capacity, so no problem in accommodating any number of arriving guests, even an infinity of guests (a perfect example of treating infinities as numbers). If it couldn't accommodate them, it does not have an infinity of rooms. It may be difficult to imagine and comprehend but infinity is not a stupendously large number, it is infinite.
Perhaps the Big Bang was not a classical intrinsically-driven explosion as often described but was an externally-driven explosion driven by the suction of nothingness after a quantum fluctuation created two linked entities for simplicity and clarity labelled 'plus one' and 'minus' one (+1-1 = nothing) which were then sucked into the infinite nothingness (an incomplete analogy would be putting an inflated balloon into a vacuum). Perhaps dark energy and dark matter have not been identified or located because they are a manifestation of nothing.
The Casmir effect supports the 'plus one and minus one' suggestion. Two plates that are very close together are mutually attracted or repelled (depending on their configuration) because of evanescent quantum fluctuations between the two that can be considered as energy or particles. If such a fluctuation occurred surrounded by nothing, they would immediately be acted upon by the then realised infinite potential energy of nothing. The suction pull of nothing might well have had different effects on each member of a pair of a quantum fluctuation, perhaps explaining why there is more matter than anti-matter. Such entities would always want to be reunited – hence gravity.
Being all that then existed, the universe could initially have inflated at an infinite speed – greater than the speed of light (speed being an interaction between space and time). Only slow-moving things like us perceive a limited light speed. The speed of light is infinite, again not a number, because time does not pass at light travelling at light speed. Does any entity travel faster than light? The phenomenon of entanglement (each of a pair of entangled particles, no matter how far apart, respond instantly to a change in its entangled partner) suggests it does. The theory of inflation also suggests that space expanded faster than light, as does the fact that 'our' Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago in our time scale, but the size of the observable universe is 93 billion light years. The suction of nothing must be pretty powerful to have achieved this.
I find it amusing that sentient beings living in galaxies 13.8 billion years ago in our time scale will be receiving light we emitted 13.8 billion years ago in their present.
If all the eight entities mentioned previously (mass, energy, particles, fields, time, waves, space and forces) could be brought back together, there would be nothing again, but nothingness is infinite and its potential energy would be available to prevent such a collapse. Indeed, it would continue to suck 'outwards', hence we have an expanding universe.
So the answer to life, the universe and everything, as posed in Douglas Adams'
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is not 42. It is nothing.
Philip D Welsby was a Consultant in Infectious Diseases in Edinburgh. He writes extensively on medical and other matters and, as a consequence, is driven to distraction by requests from predatory journals (journals that charge the author for publication) almost invariably dealing with subjects about which he knows little
