The standard Big Bang model suggests that the universe began as a single point, and then expanded outward into nothing. This picture has always troubled me. A point implies a centre; and expansion suggests an outer surface; and yet, physicists tell us the universe has neither. There is no ‘outside,’ and nothing exists beyond the universe into which it could expand. I don’t suggest they are wrong; only that they may be framing their model in an unhelpful way.
Instead of beginning as a point, imagine the universe already infinite and completely full at the outset. At the moment corresponding to the Big Bang, space would have been filled everywhere, out to infinity, with units of substance. To name them, I’ll call them pips. I cannot explain where the pips came from, but physics cannot explain where the Big Bang’s initial matter came from either – so we are no worse off.
At first, the universe would have been densely packed with large pips, each touching its neighbours. Over time, however, the pips shrank, and as they became smaller, space opened up between them. It may be useful to imagine a room completely filled with balloons. If every balloon slowly deflates (and assuming gravity has no effect), the gaps between them widen even though none of them has actually travelled anywhere. Indeed, if we measure distances using the shrinking diameter of a pip as our unit of length, objects appear to drift farther and farther apart; just as current cosmology describes. The greater the original separation, the greater the apparent rate of recession, when using our shrinking unit of measure. And yet, when viewed with a non-shrinking ruler, there is no expansion. Also, it may be noted that since space was filled out to infinity at the beginning, there is certainly no need of any ‘beyond’ into which expansion takes place.
As the shrinking continued, I suggest the pips became sufficiently separated for physical interactions to dominate. Many could group into tetrahedral quadruplets which consolidated into quarks. Then, as space between opened up, quarks coalesced into nucleons, and nucleons formed atoms, mostly hydrogen, which later gathered under gravity to form stars. In this picture, there is no need to explain an initial blast of enormous kinetic energy; the apparent motion is simply a consequence of the changing size (when measured with a stable unit of length) of the original matter itself. There is no centre to the shrinking, and no privileged location. The expanse is equally infinite, in all directions from all vantage points. The shrinking is mostly uniform, and with the superposition of drifting from the forces causing consolidation, only the non-infinite speed of light has us seeing what was.
Perhaps, in the far future, shrinking could accelerate toward a singular end – or perhaps not. Either way, this model offers a way to reconcile expansion-like observations with a universe that has no edge, no centre, and no ‘nothingness’ into which it expands.
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