Chapter 1

In the Beginning

This is the story of our Universe: yours, mine, my friends', your friends'—all locally the same, all intermingled; where they all came from, how they all began, and how they merged to become ours—each having its own center; each having its own edge.

We are going to place myself at the starting line of the universe and speak from there as we watch it develop. Every now and then, we will pop back inside the real world when necessary.

In the beginning, only pure energy exists: a composite energy that contains all forces and all energies—a super energy. These forces are the strong interaction force, the weak interaction force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. Energies are many: thermal, kinetic, potential, and so forth. They are all wrapped up in one humongous sphere.

Now, let’s repeat. In the beginning, only super energy exists. How that super energy or composite energy came to be is really unknown. It may very well have come about with the famous Big Bang. But our Universe does not begin there. It begins at the first appearance of space and matter. Space requires elaboration.

Space is probably the most misunderstood and misrepresented entity of our Universe. For this alternate view, it will be defined as an entity: a thing, an item, or an object. It is as much of an object as matter. Anything that occupies space is a thing. Anything that displaces it is matter; that is, only matter displaces space. Energy does not. It occupies space. Space is one of the super forces, a thing. To displace space means to push it aside and replace it with something else. To occupy it means to be inside and move freely about. Further, space has two properties, length and time. An object’s velocity also affects each property, length and time, within its locality.

Space is created cell by cell—the leftover of what once was composite energy. The cells cannot be combined, but material and energy can move freely between them. They are elastic. They can flow and take on different shapes. Space is the summation of all those cells. And like matter, space can neither be created nor destroyed.

Right off the bat, we need to dispel the belief of some folks that space is a vacuum. It is not a vacuum, but it may contain a vacuum. People use the terms interchangeably, but they are not the same. Since we can’t change past beliefs, we must interpret that when anyone discusses an atom and its orbitals operating in a vacuum, they really mean that the atom and its orbitals operate in space. Space separates an electron from its nucleus, not a vacuum.

Trying to understand how an explosion brought about our Universe doesn’t make sense. Explosions have centers where forces spread outwardly. Our Universe does not have one center. Everyplace is at its center. Even if one could travel from Earth to a planet a billion light years away in an instant, they would still be at the center; the edge would still be 13.9 billion years in any direction. Film at eleven.

What we’re about to describe takes place in hyper-slow-motion. At this point, there is no metric for size or time. The references may be just tiny or large or fast or slow.

So, let us commence the story again from the beginning: the moment in time when only pure energy exists. If a Big Bang occurs, it has already happened. Professor Alan Guth refers to this time as Inflation. There are no laws governing light speed or anything else, so super energy spreads at a tremendous rate. It may be easier to break up the beginning in phases. Phase I is the Bang, phase II is composite energy, and phase III is the creation of space and matter. If that makes everyone happy, we’ll begin there, phase III. Phase III happens, the others—maybe. If not, then we’re at phase I.

Our Universe begins when composite energy expands enough to change states. We have no idea how large this volume of energy is, but it contains every force and every type of energy that will become part of our Universe. It could already be a quadrillion miles across, or it may already be billions of light years across. We don’t know and don’t care. We only care that it now exists. Super energy is expanding, volume of energy growing larger, density of energy becoming less—thinner. It is now so thin it becomes unstable: like a cloud of water vapor that becomes so cool it changes from a gas state to a liquid state, and all the vapor turns into millions of raindrops; all of them, all at the same time. Liquid displaces less volume than gas. Matter displaces less volume than composite energy, and matter displaces space; energy does not.

There is no temperature scale, no size scale. Only relative comparisons exist; hot or cold, big or little, fast or slow, thick or thin. Everything is contained in this super energy. There is no light, no heat. There’s nothing else but super energy. Einstein’s famous equation, e=mc², does not exist. And there are no nuclear explosions—nothing to explode.

Suddenly something happens. A small bundle of super energy precipitates. The bundle cannot sustain the same form when less force is applied throughout, so it condenses to a more stable state, matter. This condensation is matter in its simplest form, a filum. We use the Latin word for string to avoid confusion with String Theory. This filum is the smallest bit of matter to exist. Filums or filaments will go on to build elementary particles that go on to build electrons and protons. They are the building blocks of things to come—all things to come. It takes a huge volume of energy to make one tiny bit of matter, the larger the volume, the more the energy. Any form of matter is a reservoir containing all the energy transformed into its changed state. It will store that energy with little loss forever.

That little loss will come about by allowing some of it to escape slowly over time in various forms of radiation. Sometimes it will set its energy free in large quantities quickly when its state changes suddenly to another form. But that change will require tremendous energy to ignite.

It will take billions of years before scientists understand filaments, but for now, a filament is a step down from super energy. When super energy becomes less dense, or thinner, tiny filaments appear. In large numbers, filaments take on a different form or personality. They change as a crowd of peaceful individuals may change into a violent mob.

Imagine all the forces and energy folded into one tiny piece of matter. It leaves a large hole in the composite energy field. It is the smallest cell of space in existence, and the filum is the only solid piece of matter. Although the volume of energy to matter ratio is millions to one, the cell is smaller than a proton by far which means its filament of matter is a really tiny thing. The matter belongs to the space that created it.

Super energy, or SE, doesn’t seem to get along with matter. A force pushes the filament to the center of the hole created by the change. This force also serves another purpose. It keeps the hole open. The surrounding SE cannot close in on the newly formed matter. If it did close in, there would be no space; it would be the end of our story. No universe would come into existence.

When SE becomes matter, that matter displaces a small volume that had been previously occupied by all those forces. However, not all super energy becomes matter. That force keeping the hole open is also brought to bear on the new matter. It wants to occupy the same expanse caused by the sudden displacement. This super force left behind is a flux. It is truly a force. It doesn’t suck. It doesn’t attract. It applies pressure to this new arrival. All lines of force want to be equal. Distance from the filament’s ends to the boundaries of its hole is shorter than the distance from its sides. The shorter distance squeezes the flux like a spring. Flux doesn’t like to be squeezed. It fights back. Since the force is greater on the ends of the filum, the additional pressure begins to roll the filament into a ball as depicted below. Equilibrium is important to these lines of flux, and motion is as important to the filament.

This single filament is running wild. It’s alone and bouncing around in the huge hole left in place of its bundled energy. There is an invisible connection between the filament and the surrounding super energy field. The field recognizes the filament as ex-energy and repels it. Another nearby bundle emerges and repeats the process, one more filament in its own extent. Two filaments running wild, fighting forces, crashing into the remaining field that defines their area and then getting knocked silly, whacked back to the center. The two holes leave a weak link separating them. The bond connecting the two holes breaks and is quickly absorbed by the surrounding field leaving one large spherical hole for two filaments to fight it out. They dislike each other. They repel each other, but the repulsion is weak. There is not enough room for the two to coexist, but the flux field of the remaining super force pushes them toward the center of the remaining space anyway. A fight with no winner continues as more filaments move into the crowded zone. But with each new filament comes additional volume temporally preventing filaments from becoming individual balls. Space is growing, becoming larger. Soon each small cell conjoins with its neighbor. Space is coming together in all local areas and all other areas of the composite energy—all in the same instant.

Filaments may come in several varieties with many characteristics. They tremble and move like a serpent or a fish. They send waves along their slim body from end to end. Some have a comfortable frequency they like—resonance. The bundled energy that produced the filament determines the frequency.

Many filaments have a single loop, some twist themselves into a corkscrew, and others wrap around themselves like jigsaw pieces. Something happens when they get within a certain distance of each other. It seems as if the end of one filament attracts the end of another. Two filaments with loops collide and become entangled like a Chinese puzzle. They are locked together and can only be undone by reversing the process, exactly. Others are mirror images. They collide and fit together perfectly like two magnets locked side by side—north to south, south to north. More and more collisions, more and more filaments combine and become balls: balls of filaments running around, growing with each additional filament pile on. Each ball begins to spin, slowly at first. As the balls grow, newcomers donate energy of motion to the ball causing it to spin faster.

Something weird is going on. The direction of spin depends on the view through the ball’s axis, and the axis of each ball point in different directions. The combined forces of filaments making up the ball produce a charge whose polarity depends on the direction of spin. The direction of spin depends on the view—from above or below, from left or from right. But there is no up or down in space. Flip up-down ninety degrees left and up-down becomes left-right. The opposite side becomes right to left. Nothing is as it appears. Clockwise becomes counter-clockwise depending on position of view.

But charge is real and unmistakable. Suddenly two balls with unlike charges are drawn together disappearing in a flash. Nothing is left but a huge lump of energy dissipating throughout the former matters’ remaining region. The change of state is very efficient. It left no matter behind. However, the state change is not efficient enough to get the matter back to its original state of super energy. Matter can never return to the composite energy from which it came: too many super forces were lost during the original transition. Another thing, the disappearing matter left its space intact.

We need a law that governs matter movement. That law will become the conservation of energy. For that, we need a new term: material, or better yet, quantity of material per object. We require another, one that includes speed and direction at the same time—velocity. Now we’re cooking. Each filament has a certain velocity when it combines with another filament or a group of filaments or a ball.

Momentum, that’s what we get when we multiply the material within an object, m, times the velocity, v. M = mv, that is what gives rise to spin. But we already have an M, so it gets another letter, ρ—the Greek letter rho. The momentum of all filaments summed together using their direction produces the spinning ball. It will be either clockwise, or counterclockwise, or left to right, or right to left.

When a ball grows to a size the new universe deems stable, it stops growing. It’s no longer just a ball. It is a Lepton. Soon there are quadrillions of leptons. They take on their fundamental material’s personalities, except in a highly amplified way.

That slight repulsion? Forget about that. When all the filaments get together, that slight becomes gigantic. Leptons hate each other. They refuse to stay close and the field of energy that kept them close before is overwhelmed. They bang against the outer edge of their space avoiding each other. Super energy fills that position and knocks them away. The fight literally heats up. Now there’s heat, and it’s getting hotter, much, much hotter. Leptons in motion emit electromagnetic waves. Now there is light. Some of it, along with lepton radiation and opposite charge collisions (matter-antimatter), will be left over and discovered billions of years from now to become known as Cosmic Radiation Background.

Nature is not done with these new particles yet. Although stable, they are not as secure as the universe requires them to be. They want to live a long life, but some have too many filaments attached at one location. They wobble as they spin. They need more balance to survive. Nature can fix them. The universe demands these particles be perfect, reliable. The unwanted filaments must be removed, but they are locked in place. How?

Turn them back to energy. Not the super energy they once were, that’s forbidden, but to some lower grade energy. Anything will do. Just get them off this rotating body so it doesn’t wobble enough to disintegrate. These unwanted filaments want to hang on, but those opposing outnumber them. Another fight, an unwanted filament is flung off at a terrific rate—thrown back into space it helped create. But it’s free, and it’s weightless. It’s energy again and headed off to whom knows where. However, the body had to spend energy getting the thing off. It was just enough to set the lonely one on a journey to another state change. The journey will be known as radiation at some future date. The lepton continues to lose unwarranted material in this manner until it reaches a perfect state of balance and charge. Finally, it becomes completely stable—it is an electron. It will remain so forever or until some tremendous force acts on it.

Radiation will always be filaments way of converting themselves back to energy. Not the original it came from but energy none-the-less. It’s a two way street. When an electron needs material, it snatches a filament’s worth of energy from its surroundings, and the filum changes its state back to a solid that becomes part of the electron.

The conversation is restricted to the more familiar basic subatomic particles, so when an electron appears, recognize that it may have altered its appearance several times since it changed from the pure energy state. Further, the use of the word material refers to some number of filaments.

Although the universe is growing, there is limited room. The remaining super force squeezes all matter together. But electrons still don’t like it, so repulsive actions continue. They attempt to keep everything apart. Electrons repel other electrons, super energy repels matter, and lines of flux want to gather everything to a central location. This repulsion manifests itself into an outward pressure that guarantees a sphere of space surrounding all matter within. What a mess.

When a portion of super energy goes through the process of becoming an electron, that electron inherits all other links to all other matter that has undergone a change. However, the link’s role has been reversed. The new electron knows it is ex-energy and must abide by certain unwritten laws of nature that make it an electron: it must repel any other electron, it must produce a magnetic field perpendicular to its direction of travel, it must gain material while absorbing electromagnetic energy, and it must lose material while releasing electromagnetic energy.

Soon, strangers appear. They are not electrons. It seems a few filaments had gotten together and made themselves into a cookie-cutter. The result appears to be mass production of the strangers—more elementary particles. They are quarks, all types of quarks for future atom construction. Quarks are complex, and they will go on to build particles that are even more complex. In the future scientists will put leptons and quarks in a class called fermions.

Other strangers appear. Somehow, other matter governs how the complex quarks operate. They are various bosons that act as mediators—bosses directing what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. When filaments go on to build large complex elementary particles, it appears as if forms and jigs come into play that act as patterns for production of behavior, a precursor to DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) if you will. They may control two super forces of composite energy, that is, the strong force and the weak force: the forces that allow construction of atomic nuclei. The more complex subparticles become, the more complex their actions become. After all, without proper behavior of particles that make it up, no ordered universe could exist.

Our Universe is born through expansion, and it continues after birth. Remember, expanding composite energy brings about matter. Billions and then trillions of particles create even more nodes of space, and these spheres cluster and spread throughout the new universe. They collide, maintain contact, and space and matter appear in one super large sphere. And it keeps on growing. Each nodule acts like a spring. When thinning super energy creates another node, it is already in motion.

Far into the future, a creature will interpret this motion as if our Universe is expanding at the speed of light. But it is not. Revealing itself at the speed of light, it is. Our Universe has more matter today than yesterday because light revealed more of the universe in the past twenty-four hours. The edge is 16,094,799,101 miles farther away in every direction. In a few million more years, the new matter revealed today will have become quasars or galaxies along with an additional 84% more space. How that extra space appears will become clear soon.

With each new quark comes even more space. Quarks do not fight. They get along just fine and leave a greater distance for electrons to separate farther away from each other. As more quarks come into existence, other subparticles appear. Somehow, the bosons have rendered themselves even more helpful. The new guys are gluons. Their job is to regulate quarks in such a way as to hold them together while building up a very complex, fully grown subatomic particle.

As the universe grows, distance between warring factions increases, and things settle down giving a cooling off period. Yes, since there’s heat, there is cool.

There is now space, distance, light, and heat. With distance comes a need for one action to influence another over that interval between. How far away? How long it takes? Time. Add time to our list. Further, combine two properties of the universe into one, space-time. One of this author’s favorite scientists sometime refers to the two as the fabric of space-time. In a way this fits where flux represents thread, waft represents length, and warp represents time. A very important and necessary property of matter is still missing. It already exists but not defined. That definition will have to wait.

When energy changes to matter, the amount of energy is in direct proportion to the material making up that matter. At this point, imagine the amount of material being a number of filaments. Of course, that number is TBD (to be determined.) As in the beginning, volume of super energy is a representation of that material. That is, particles with the most matter require more volume. A standard relationship of that volume of energy will come about in a few billion years that will depend on its type. Some quantity of electron volts per unit of material will define that relationship.

While leptons are becoming stable as electrons, quarks and bosons and gluons are busy forming up to become a much more complex object, a proton. Its charge is opposite than that of an electron; it is positive with a sign of (+). Of course the opposite of plus is negative with a sign of (-). Protons repel each other just like electrons, and they have much more material—over 1836 times more material than electrons.

As holes grow when more matter forms, a greater volume becomes available as they unite. Electrons find friends in protons. They are drawn to each other. Since the proton is much larger and heavier, the electron does the traveling. When it approaches the proton indirectly at a great pace, it misses but continues to circle the proton. When it finally settles down in a stable orbit, together they become neutrally charged. Nature prefers neutrality, stability. The new pair is magic, an atom. The proton becomes the nucleus. Together they will be called hydrogen and be known as an element: the first and tiniest element of all yet to come. When another electron approaches the pair, the one in orbit repels the new guy.

If an electron approaches a proton at a bad angle, it collides with the proton and releases all of its energy of motion. The added material forms another subatomic particle. It is totally neutral because the charges cancel. The new sub particle is a neutron, and it roams around the growing universe without a care. Collisions between electrons and protons occur less frequently than the capture of an electron by a proton, so protons outnumber neutrons. However, a lone neutron is short lived. If it doesn’t join up with an atom right away, the electron is cast off along with a weird object generated from filums of the neutron, a neutrino.

Since electrons and protons have no effect on the neutral object, the superforce has its way with a neutron. It can combine with a proton by giving up a little of its energy. Hydrogen is comfortable with its new friend and together they make an isotope, a very stable isotope. While not a new element, it provides a new attribute to hydrogen and will be become known as deuterium. Rarely, a second neutron will join the other to become tritium.

Hydrogen atoms are still single as our Universe continues to make up rules. A lone electron going around a nucleus is deemed unstable. There is another new law, and it has a mathematical relationship. The minimum number of electrons allowed to occupy an orbit is two, and that orbit’s identifier depends on its distance from its nucleus. It begins at two electrons, and it will go up from there depending on future’s nucleus’ makeup.

But for now, hydrogen has no other choice. The separation is too great for individual atoms to be concerned. However, a few may come into contact and form up as a pair to become a very stable molecule of hydrogen. That is two electrons in orbit around the nucleus of two protons. Sometimes a neutron will accompany the protons and become part of the atom. Our new Universe is coming together in a hurry.