Course Five: Spectrum, Part 2 269
verse, 14 billion years old and
14 billion light-years away, what
we see is innumerable quasars
(“quasi-stellar radio sources”)
—not concentrated in one small
area of “beginning,” but equally
in all directions. Each of these
blazes forth with the light of a
hundred galaxies—a billion
years before any galaxies are
supposed to have existed.
What are these, and where do
they come from?
The universe does appear
to be expanding, with galaxies mov-
ing farther apart through time. All
calculations based on the premise of an original Big
Bang predicted that the rate of expansion would eventu-
ally slow down—perhaps even come to a halt and begin
to contract. But, in fact, we have now discovered that
the expansion rate is accelerating! How can this be?Continuous Creation
(infinite & eternal; no beginning)
The opposing view to the Big Bang is the Steady
State, or Continuous Creation hypothesis, which main-
tains that the universe has always been here, and that
new matter is being somehow created continuously
out of nothing. It’s that “out of nothing” part that
provides the greatest difficulty with any theory of
cosmogenesis. Because, of course, the most obvious
questions then become, “Where did it come from?
What was before?” And neither of these theories an-
swers these key questions. Just saying “God (or the
Gods) did it,” only begs the question: Then where did
God (or the Gods) come from? You just can’t have
something coming from nothing!
Astronomers Paul Davies and John Gribbin write:
“the Big Bang was the abrupt creation of the Universe
from literally nothing: no space, no time, no matter.
This is a quite extraordinary conclusion to arrive at—
a picture of the entire physical Universe simply pop-
ping into existence from nothing.” (The Matter Myth,
p. 122) If there was no space, matter, or energy before
the hypothetical “Big Bang,” then there was obvi-
ously nothing to appear and nowhere for it to happen!Cosmic Loopholes
Any good Wizard worth his salt seeks to answer
cosmic questions in his own manner. I have have been
working on an alternative theory of cosmogenesis that
addresses some of these questions, as well as the
mystery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Every galaxy, of whatever size or shape, has a super-
massive black hole in its center with a mass about 1%
of its entire galaxy. Just like a vortex of water spiraling
down the drain of your sink, that black hole is con-tinually sucking down the rest of the
galaxy, giving it its spiral shape. So
where does all that stuff go?
Many astrophysicists believe that
a black hole is a kind of “Star-gate”—
the opening of a wormhole to some-
where else. But, according to theory,
a wormhole is not just a tunnel through
space; it’s also a time tunnel. Stuff
entering a small black hole of maybe
10 solar masses might come out in a
“white hole,” say, 100 light-years
away, and thus also 100 years back in
the past. Well, the black hole at the
center of our Milky Way galaxy has a
mass three million times that of our
sun! If this is the opening of a huge wormhole, then
the other end could easily be billions of light years
away—and therefore billions of years in the past. What
if all those distant quasars are the other ends of the
black holes at the centers of all the galaxies, cycling
through time and space in
an endless series of
cosmic loops?Imagine
if you stepped into
a time machine and went
back to yesterday. There would then be two of you. And
every other trip into the past where you already existed
would add another one of you. Could all the galaxies
be part of a single vast infinite series of loopings around
and around through time and space—like the spring
on a spiral notebook—adding one more with each cycle,
and therefore continually expanding the past and push-
ing the present faster and faster into the future?The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know;
Twelve million miles a minute,
And that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger-all down here on earth!
—Monty Python, The Meaning of Life
(written by Eric Idle)Computer simulation of cosmic structure,
by Lars Hernquist & Volker Springel.Corrected pages PM.p65 15 3/25/2004, 2:27 PM