Ariel Ledesma Becerra
From what I read last year *, one of the texts that impressed me most was EdgarAllanPoe‘s ‘Eureka’.
Written in 1848, this cosmogony describes the ‘logical’ process of the creation of material universe by a spiritual force.
Poe called this essay ‘A Prose Poem’, which leaves a lot of room to speculate on the not-so-naive author’s vision about language. But what’s really impressive is that, decades before Friedmann predicted and Hubble proved the universe’s expansion, one from the GeneralTheoryofRelativity and the other through the telescope, Poe describes an universe with these characteristics, with the only tools of Newton’s physics and his own brain muscle.
Beware! Not that his description is accurate, given what we know now, but his process to coming to that is perfect, so similar to our current scientific creation myth, the BigBang and the expanding universe. The account is supposedly told to him by a visitor of the year 2848, which at times seems a reasonable explanation: if someone with a deep understanding of the ‘current’ cosmology had to explain it in the nineteenth century according to the knowledge of physics at the time, I guess he would tell a quite similar story, without messing with the four dimensions of space-time continuum, or the gravitational bending of such continuous, or the concept of ‘c’ (the constant speed of light). Maybe it was really a joke of a time traveler after all.
One very interesting thing that emerges as a corollary of this cosmogony, which is based on a creative moment of the Deity, and from there develops the whole workings of the universe (including the issue of homogeneity, which today is one of the key cosmological problems), is that it actually fits neatly as a logically necessary result of the singular creative act. Now, a creator Deity is a Judeo-Christian cultural aspect, in this case related specifically to the material History, that is, outside the other religions’ cosmogonies mythical space. Why is this interesting? Because it fits exactly the objection that FredHoyle and NalinChandraWickramasinghe made of the Big Bang theory: it is a creationist culture’s product. That is why the Vatican had no problems with accepting it and haven’t burn anyone in the process …
Seeing how without the today’s theoretical/experimental structure he could come to similar logic conclusions only from an spiritual creator principle, using the tools of deduction and induction (the scientific method, one might say), it’s tempting to ask whether indeed current theories of creation are just reverse engineering from a logical sequence which comes from a cultural premise.
Anyway … After this long introduction, because that is what it was, I have the way cleared for what really interests me: my own cosmogony.
Unlike Poe, I haven’t the same amount of analysis tools related to the knowledge of the subject he had in his time, nor was I visited by a 3007’s joker. But I never lack enthusiasm when it comes to digress a little.
Speaking of little … After all this intro, the writing that follows could seem very little … Whatever.
The cosmogony that I propose part of a hypothesis that resembles magic or homeopathy. That is: a simple matter of similarities, without any base on some physical or mathematical fundament that I know or even should be within my reach. So, it is just wild speculation.
The idea came from the supposed similarity (See? Just pure magic) between singularities hiding behind their eventhorizons, the Big Bang’s simple singularity and the many singularities of blackholes.
What is what I know about these hidden events? That the former produced all matter, energy, space and time at the beginning, while the latters swallowed it all for not to be seen again.
From there, in my wild imagination the image of a closed universe was formed, with multiple ‘drains’ (black holes) which transport all that was created to the central sewer (Big Bang). And it all begins again…
Again? Not necessarily, because time is a dimension of this model and then all comes together as fixed in Eternity. Horrible view from the philosophical point of view for free will, but luckily there’s the UncertaintyPrinciple and at individual level we recover all our freedom.
Returning to the issue of the scientific cosmogony (or pseudo-scientific in my case) as a result of previous cultural worldview, I must say that the image of Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail, always fascinated me to the point of playing with the idea of having it tattooed on me (and I have no tattoos yet, as far as I can see) and obviously has an influence on this proposed model.
It is impossible, at least for me, to have a complete picture of this model … Like remembering a dream, I almost sense a series of N-dimensional hyper-toroids, all centered on each black hole and somehow, in the Big Bang … And I almost visualize a fractal distribution for it … But it is the echo of a dream and nothing more.
* This article was written in 2007.
Spanish version here: http://argie-mibosque.blogspot.com/2007/04/kosmogonikon.html
Juan:
Thanks for the comment.
The knowledge of the Universe is always changing. With so many “clues”, almost every interpretation, for strange it could sound, may hold some true, at some point.
Interesting times we are living in.
Ariel:
In the hesitant “state of the art” of modern cosmology (except the background radiation proof for the big bang), your dream theory of hypertoroids centered in black holes looks to be possible since a torus has been observed around the galaxy NGC4261 and, probably, similar structures could be formed around black holes as a sequence of their accretion disks. This process is subsequent to the black hole formation and it does not imply the black hole annihilation but the primeval atom, as such, was annihilated in the bang process. However, given the “state of the art”, it is not ilogical to assume that the product of the bang would be an N-dimensional hypertorus (our expanding universe).