Time 2: Speculations into Time Dilation and the Expanding Universe

Dreaming the universe, the big view...

Introduction

In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding: in a manner analogous to the changing pitch of a train whistle as it passes you, light from very distant galaxies is redder than light from closer galaxies. This “red shift” indicates that the farther away from us something is, the faster away from us it’s moving. So, if the universe is expanding, it must have been smaller in the past, back to the point where it once must have all been jammed into one “place.” Hence the “big bang” theory, generally accepted by cosmologists today.

Given that the universe started in a big bang, where is it going? Until recently people assumed that gravity will slow the expansion down over time, but there have been arguments about whether gravity will be able to eventually reverse the expansion so the universe is “closed,” ending in a “big crunch,” or whether gravity will slow the expansion, but never enough, so the universe keeps expanding forever while all the stars are extinguished in eventual entropic death.

The big bang to big crunch model is much more elegant, since it’s easy to imagine each big crunch becoming the next big bang, and the universe oscillating indefinitely — no ultimate beginning or end is necessary.

However, despite the difficulty accepting a single unique point of beginning, there were compelling arguments for the open-ended model also, and cosmologists eagerly gathered evidence to determine which model was most likely.

In 1998 this argument became much more complicated when it was discovered that the universe’s rate of expansion is not slowing under the influence of gravity as expected, but instead the expansion is accelerating! Now instead of the models we have above, it looks like we’re on a trumpet-shaped path:


The obvious problem is why — what possible mechanism could overcome the known attraction of gravity? Enter “dark energy” — most explanatory ideas are variations of a uniform repulsive force countering gravity, which is being called dark energy, and current investigations are looking into possible theoretical models and evidence.

The Dream

Image courtesy of SOHO consortium. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. (flipped horiz.)

I’ve been following these discoveries with interest, so they’ve been in the back of my mind. Sometime in 2010 I woke from a dream with an interesting alternate explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe, one which doesn’t require a form of dark energy. In the dream, I saw the whole sweep of time, start of the universe to it’s end, as analogous to a solar arc, a kind of solar flare.

Solar arc flares are eruptions on or above the surface of the sun constrained by its intense and complex magnetic fields. In the dream, I saw the universe erupt out of some larger “something” into a complex expanding arc, with time arcing out from and back to the surface of this “something.” Not only was space expanding, but so was time.

These diagrams capture the state of the space-time universe at several stages of its eruption. Time as we experience it is represented by the directional line centered through the shaded area of each stage, and each stage represents the whole past-present-future of the universe at that stage in the eruption. The spatial volume of the universe corresponds to the width of the shaded area at any one point. As shown, this model might be described as an eruption of time carrying with it an expansion of space.

How might this model explain our observations of the universe’s accelerating expansion? From the A-B-C diagram above, you can see that at any stage, the universe expands along the timeline (t), slows and eventually collapses again, which corresponds to the “closed” model mentioned earlier. As we know, light takes time to reach our eyes and instruments. Over short distances it seems instantaneous, but over cosmological distances, light can take billions of years to arrive. So we’re always seeing the universe at an earlier stage in its eruption; the farther away something is, the earlier into the universe’s eruption we’re seeing. For example, if we were at moment “p” in the last stage shown above, volume expansion along the current timeline is slowing. However, looking at immensely distant objects is also looking back to stage B, or stage A for the farthest and earliest objects. In those stages, spatial volume was expanding along the then timeline slower at all points than it is now, so we observe that the rate of expansion is faster now than it was then — we see the rate of expansion accelerating, and from a larger, eruption perspective, it is.

What was not explored in the dream was the ultimate result of the eruption, whether or not the whole eruption will continue to expand, eventually dissipating, or whether it will collapse back into whatever it came from.

Implications

The most obvious implication of this model is that there are (at least) two dimensions of change — time, along the timeline at any particular stage, and the dilation of time, which we can call the eruption. As shown in the diagram above, this eruptive dimension is perpendicular to time, pushing the whole timeline “sideways” or “out” from the original “something.” This implies both that “predestination” is a valid point of view, since at any one “moment” in the eruption the future already exists along the then current timeline, and also that the future, present, and the past all change, as the whole timeline expands and evolves. Free will might exist, in this scenario, in choosing a different past as well as a different future.

The next implication is that time is a field. Like the magnetic field which constrains solar eruptions to an arc, and which may be an eruption of the magnetic field dragging along electrically charged particles, this dream seems to be describing the universe as an eruption of a time field, dragging with it particles and other forms of energy with a time charge. In a time field the “poles” would be “before” and “after,” analogous to magnetic north and south.

Looking at the analogy of electrically charged and electrically neutral particles, an obvious question is whether there are time-neutral particles or energy. Given a constrained arc shape of the space-time universe, if the eruption included time-neutral particles and energy, they would not be constrained by the time field, so they would have “escaped” the universe — at this point there would most likely be none left.

When we look out into the universe, we see, thanks to light (and other electromagnetic radiation), back into the distant past. Given this model, with an existing past-present-future, we might expect to see events from the future, as well as the past. However in every spatial direction we see only the past, which means that light, as might also be expected, is not time-neutral. Light is also constrained by the time field, radiating in only one time direction — “before” to “after.”

Image courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams

We have learned a lot about how charged particles and magnetic fields interact; magnetic fields are created by electrically charged particles moving in circles or spirals, and the movement of charged particles is constrained by magnetic fields. Another image of a solar arc shows this dramatically. Here the magnetic field lines “are revealed because charged particles are spinning along them.” (from the SDO image caption)

If time is a field, as this dream implies, and there are time-charged particles, it would be a surprise if something similar didn’t occur between the time field and time-charged particles. Interestingly, as I mentioned elsewhere, we experience everyday time as both linear and cyclic. From this dream, linear time might follow the timeline, and cyclic time might be the circular “flux” exerted on time-charged particles and energy around the timeline, like the “right-hand rule” in physics. Time-charged particles would then travel a spiral within the time field.

To stretch this speculation even further, the interaction between the time field and time-charged particles might help define a relationship between time and gravity. If you imagine the path a moon takes around a planet and extend it over time, you will see not a ball object orbiting a larger ball object, but two extended spirals, like two intertwined stretched slinkies. This is exactly what might occur for time-charged particles in a time field.

There should be some wonderful and testable hypotheses buried in these speculations which might generate more questions and more hypotheses. If you find ideas in this article to inspire your research, go for it, as long as you also credit me. Curiosity is the psychological and spiritual drive behind growth, invention and progress. Maybe the whole time-space universe is driven by an eruption of curiosity.

Whitewolf (John Wilson), April 3rd, 2011