image by Rob Kritkausky
Among the many brain-teasers in current science are these:
1) If matter and anti-matter are created simultaneously in equal amounts, why is there so much matter in this universe and so little anti-matter?
image courtesy of CERN
2) What the heck is dark energy? Nobel Prize-winning research on Type 1a supernovas has shown that roughly five billion years ago, the galaxies did more than their average rush apart. They began to speed up. They accelerated. They cannonballed away from each other with increasing haste. Acceleration takes energy. So where did the mystery energy jackrabbiting galaxies and stars apart come from?
image courtesy of NASA
One possible answer: the Bloom Toroidal Model of the Universe, aka The Big Bagel.
image by Sabine Allaeys
Imagine a bagel with one of those anally retentive, infinitesimally tiny holes.
image courtesy of http://www.foodsubs.com
Your bagel is an Einsteinian manifold, a sheet of time, space, and gravity. It's 13.72 billion years ago. An explosion spurts abruptly from the bagel's hole. Rocketing up the bagel's topside is a Big Bang of matter.
image by Bryan Brandenburg
image by Sabine Allaeys, wobbly lines by Howard Bloom
But gushing from the hole on the bottom is an equal and opposite, a big bang of anti-matter. That's where all the anti-matter goes.
image by Bryan Brandenburg
In Einsteinian manifolds, the shape of space tells matter how to move. A steep slope says "move fast; Very fast. Rush. Race. Speed."
image by Bryan Brandenburg
The slopes that funnel upward and downward from the bagel's hole are steep. That steep curve tells the matter and anti-matter universes to race upward (or downward) and outward at unbelievable speed, the speed known in physics and cosmology as "inflation."
But the traveling orders that space gives to matter change as the two universes approach the flatness of the bagel's upper and under hump.
image courtesy of http://www.foodsubs.com
The leveling, horizontal curve of space dictates a more leisurely pace.
image by Sabine Alles, scribbly black arrows by Howard Bloom (he should be ashamed of himself)
Like a cannonball reaching the high point of its curve, the universe and anti-matter universe begin to run out of the energy that has shot them apart from each other. Which leads to the second physics question of the day. What is dark energy?
The two universes reach the bagel's high and low point at the 7.7 billion year mark. Then the downward slope of the bagel tells them to speed up again.
image by bryan brandenburg
image by Bryan Brandenburg
Why does the matter in the two universes accelerate? Where does the extra energy that rushes galaxies apart from each other come from? The answer? Gravity. As it slips down the bagel's outer slope, the normal universe falls under the seductive sway of the anti-matter universe's gravity and speeds up. And the anti-matter universe is caught by the come-hither power of the matter universe's gravity. It, too, speeds up.
How will the universe end? At the bagel's outer edge,
the two equal but opposite universes meet and do what matter and anti-matter always do. They annihilate. But here's the trick. They annihilate in a burst of energy.
incompetent sketch by Howard Bloom
And the bagel's outer rim is also its center. So the explosion of annihilation is, guess what? The next big bang.
That's it: the Big Bagel. For the story behind Big Bagel theory, see The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates by Howard Bloom, a book that Harvard Nobel Prize-winner Dudley Herschbach calls "Truly awesome. Terrific."
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