B1289-HB1
New Theory Says The End of the Universe is Nigh: Howard Bloom's Big Bagel Universe Theory (Explained Simply)
Copyright © by Howard Bloom, 10/6/12
It took me
fifty three years to realize it, but a new theory of the beginning, middle, and
end of the universe I hatched in 1959 predicts that the end of the universe may
come sooner than you and I may think. Standard cosmologies predict that
the end of the cosmos will not arrive for hundreds of trillions of years.
But the Big Bagel—The Bloom Toroidal Model of the Universe—predicts that the
end may be as little as 1.68 billion years away. Yikes!
Big Bagel theory appears in my new book The God Problem: How A
Godless Cosmos Creates. Dan Schneider asks this question: “Is The God
Problem a great book?...like Darwin’s The Origin Of Species, Lyell’s Principles
Of Geology, or Newton’s Principia Mathematica?” That’s an
extremely encouraging question for an author to hear. But as the writer of
the book, I’m too close to answer it. However The God Problem has
been endorsed by one Nobel Prize winner, two MacArthur Genius Award winners, one
astronaut who walked on the moon, and over twenty three others. Dudley
Herschbach at Harvard University, the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, says The
God Problem is "truly awesome. Terrific." Francis Pryor, President of
the Council for British Archaeology says, “Bloody hell...What a truly
extraordinary book. I'm gob-smacked." And Penn State loop quantum
gravity cosmologist Martin Bojowald gives the greatest compliment a
mathematician/theoretical physicist can dole out. He says The God Problem
is not only “entertaining” and “suspenseful”, but is “rigorous,
and thoroughly mathematical.” So The God Problem’s Big Bagel theory
may be worth taking seriously.
What is Big Bagel theory? The easiest explanation is in
a new video
animation on YouTube.
And what’s the Big Bagel theory’s importance, if any? The Big
Bagel may be the only theory to explain two of science’s biggest mysteries:
1)
dark energy; and
2)
why there is so much normal matter in this universe and so little anti-matter
(the parity problem).
One more word
before we dive into the Bagel itself. Scientists don’t believe in a new theory
until it makes predictions that can be proven true or false. Big Bagel
Theory has already proved its predictive powers. Again, I conceived
the theory way back in 1959 when I was sixteen years old, the age at which Carl
Friedrich Gauss made his first mathematical discoveries. I had been
involved in theoretical physics and cosmology since I was ten years old.
In 1959 I was working for the summer at the world’s largest cancer research
facility, The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. I came up with
the toroidal model of the universe in a two and a half month period of
brainstorming with other Roswell Parkers on the implications of CPT (charge,
parity, and time) symmetry. Then, at the end of the summer, I threw Big
Bagel Theory away, convinced that it was comic book science.
But the Big Bagel Theory made two predictions—that the cosmos
would expand at unbelievable speed in the first flash after the big bang; and
that the cosmos’ expansion would slow down, then accelerate again.
In 1980, Alan
Guth confirmed prediction number one--the extraordinary speed of expansion in
the newborn universe--with his theory of inflation, a theory that is now
standard in cosmology. And in 1998, Adam Reiss and nineteen
collaborators measured type 1a supernovas, standard candles, and discovered that
the cosmos’ expansion had begun to pick up speed 6.02 billion years ago.
Which left a question: where did the energy for that acceleration come from?
Big Bagel Theory answers that question brilliantly.
So I resurrected Big Bagel Theory and used it to close my new book,
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates. I was scared witless
to do it. New theories can be trounced, bounced and ridiculed. But
the Big Bagel may be one of the reasons that science junkie and National
Magazine Award winner Barbara Ehrenreich says, "If Howard Bloom is only 10
percent right, we'll have to drastically revise our notions of the universe.
…Bloom’s argument will rock your world.” And it may be one of the
reasons that Brian Smith McCallum in Library Journal said,
"the God Problem is paradigm-shifting.”
***
Okay, once
again, what the hell is Big Bagel theory? Here’s a quick Big Bagel
primer.
Among the many
brain-teasers in current science are the two you’ve read about above:
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? (The parity
problem.)
2)
What the heck is dark energy?
The Big Bagel, answers both of these questions.
Imagine a bagel with one of those anally retentive, infinitesimally
tiny holes.
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. 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.
In Einsteinian
manifolds, the shape of space tells matter how to move. A steep slope says
move fast. Rush. Race. Speed. 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 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.
The leveling, horizontal curve of space dictates a more leisurely pace.
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. Why do they 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 will meet and do what matter and anti-matter always
do. They’ll annihilate. But here’s the trick. They’ll
annihilate in a burst of energy. And thanks to a topological trick, the
bagel’s outer rim is also its center. So the explosion of annihilation
will be, guess what? The next big bang.
***
Where are we on the bagel in 2012? We passed the bagel’s
hump 6.02 billion years ago. Which puts us perilously close to the big
smash at the bagel’s outer edge. Roughly 1.68 billion years
from that smash. So pack up your stuff and get ready to be crunched.
That’s it: the Big
Bagel. A Bagel that explains dark energy. A Bagel whose shape hints
that the end of the cosmos may be nigh.
***
But don’t take my word for it. I’m biased. Here are
a few expert opinions on whether the Big Bagel is worthy of serious scientific
consideration:
“It
is very thought provoking. it takes on the asymmetry of matter/antimatter
and is therefore worthy of future development by specialists.”
Dr.
Gregory L. Matloff, emeritus associate
professor
of physics at New York City College of Technology (NYCCT), consultant for
the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Fellow of the British interplanetary
Society, Hayden Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and
Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics.
“I
like the model . I’ll never look at bagels the same way again”
Mark
Lupisella, systems engineer, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
“Ingenious.”
Martin
Hoffert, emeritus professor of physics, New York University
And here are
more bona fides—
REFERENCES
Ralf
Aurich et al, “Do we Live in a ‘Small Universe’?” Classical Quantum
Gravity, June 21, 2008.
L.
Bergstrom and A. Goobar, “Particle Astrophysics and the Dark Sector of the
Universe,” in Astrophysics Update, ed. John W. Mason (Berlin: Springer, 2004),
1: 113.
Bojowald,
Maartens, Singh, “Loop Quantum Gravity and the Cyclic Universe.”
arXiv.org, September 23, 2004, arXiv:hep-th/0407115
Martin
Bojowald, Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe, (New York: Knopf
2010, Kindle Edition).
Cédric
Deffayet, Gia Dvali, Gregory Gabadadze, “Accelerated Universe from Gravity
Leaking to Extra Dimensions,” Physical Review D, 65:044023, 2002.
Amanda
Gefter, “Dark flow: Proof of another universe?” New Scientist, January 23,
2009, pp. 50-53.
Theo
Koupelis, In Quest of the Universe (Sudbury MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2011), p.
532.
Paul
L. McFadden, Neil Turok, Paul J. Steinhardt, “Solution of a braneworld big
crunch/big bang cosmology,” Physical Review D, 76, 1040 38 (2007).
Zeeya
Merali, “Doughnut-shaped Universe bites back: Astronomers say Universe is
small and finite,” Nature, May 23, 2008.
A
de Oliveira-Costa, M Tegmark, M Zaldarriaga, Andrew Hamilton, “Significance of
the largest scale CMB fluctuations in WMAP,” Physical Review D, Volume 69,
Issue 6, March 25, 2004.
Dennis
Overbye, “Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate,” New York Times, March
11, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/
(accessed April 16, 2011).
Roger
Penrose, Cycles Of Time: An Extraordinary New View Of The Universe (New York:
Random House, 2011).
Adam
G. Reiss et al., “Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating
Universe and a Cosmological Constant,” Astrophysical Journal, September 1998 .
Brian
P. Schmidt et al., “The High-Z Supernova Search: Measuring Cosmic Deceleration
and Global Curvature of the Universe Using Type IA Supernovae,” Astronomical
Journal, November 1998, pp. 46–63
M.
Tegmark, “Measuring spacetime: from the big bang to black
holes,” Science, May 24, 2002, pp. 1427-1433.
Yun
Wang, Dark Energy (Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH, 2010), p. 219.
***
Here’s the bottom line. As far as I’m concerned, the most important judge of the Big Bagel’s validity is you.
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