If the expansion, from a point into infinity, bothers you (as it does me), the following theory may placate your mind.
The ‘Big-Bang” theory, wherein the universe started at a point – and then expanded into nothingness, has bothered me. If there was a point, there was a centre. If there is expansion, there is an edge. But physicists tell us that there is no centre; there is no 'outside'; there is nothing into which the expansion is taking place.
One approach to resolving the incongruencies of this all is to say they must be wrong. I suggest they are merely mistaken.
Instead of starting off as a point, the Universe ‘started off” completely filled. In this theory, at the moment corresponding to the initiation of the Big-Bang in the conventional theory, the Universe was filled, completely, with (let’s call them) pips. The volume already extended out to infinity. Ok, I have a problem. I do not know where the pips came from. So, I know no more than the physicists, who don't know where the matter that exploded in the Big-Bang came from. I do not feel defeated.
Initially, the Universe was solid with pips, each touching its neighbours. As time proceeded, the pips shrank in size, and as they shrank they pulled away from each other and floated around each in their own space. As an analogy, consider a room filled with balloons – completely filled, and then slowly deflate each balloon. Without gravity, each balloon will stay where it is, shrinking away from its neighbours.
If, instead of using a fixed unit of length, one uses a changing dimension – the shrinking diameter of a pip – as a unit of length, one sees the pips as moving away from each other. If one considers two pips, which start out touching and later on are separated by one pip-diameter of free space, one might think that the spacing has doubled. In the same time-span, two pips that started farther apart will end up, again, separated by double the original distance. In the time a neighbouring pip has receded by one diameter – or rather has shrunk to be one-diameter away – the pip beyond it is two diameters away. This is indistinguishable from the conclusion that objects farther off are receding faster; The red shift.
As this shrinking of pips continued, there came a time when individual pips were relatively free of their neighbours. The interaction forces could prevail and with random motion they could associate into trios and condense into quarks. Just how the trios joined could determine which flavour of quark they formed.
As time continued, and the shrinking proceeded, the quarks were able to condense into nucleons, and later, the nucleons into atoms (mostly H). With gravity forces, the Hydrogen was able to condense into stars.
Notice how, in this expansion, there is no great speed. The pips drift into each other, as do the quarks and nucleons. There is no need to explain the source of great energy which threw particles away from each other – because nothing is really moving away – it is all just shrinking – and the shrinking is no faster 'here' than 'there'. Furthermore, there is no centre to the shrinking. It is only when the changing unit of distance is applied that objects are deemed to have speed.
Conventional observations have shown that objects that are farther off emit light that is red-shifted. Their radiation appears to us to have a longer wavelength than one would otherwise expect. The conventional theory explains this as a result of the expansion; objects that are farther off are receding faster. Of course, if the radiation were emitted when the base unit of measure were longer, then one would expect the same – a red-shift in light from farther-off objects (or rather in older light). Yes, I admit to applying the 'magic' stating that while pips shrink, light retains the wavelength it had when it was emitted.
What does this do to the speed of light? It could be the speed of light is constant. It started off taking a specific time to propagate the diameter of a pip, and it still takes that time. (But, since the size of a pip is shrinking, the speed of light is accelerating.) It could be the speed of light is constant. It started off taking a specific time to propagate the distance from the center of one pip to the next, and it still takes that time. (But since this distance is getting longer, relative to our shrinking unit of measure, time must be speeding up (whatever that means).)
In the beginning the pips (baloons) would have been ‘inflated’ so as to be touching, with no space between them. That is, there was no singularity.
Alternatively: In the end time may pass so quickly it ends in a singularity.
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