The Conical Universe

While that scenario has theoretical advantages, there may be other ways to understand the universe. It may be that there was no explosion at all but rather a rapid expansion. Rapid meaning expansion at the speed of light. It may have been that, since everything was expanding at the same rate, that the expansion was very orderly, boring even. At some point the expansion in some regions changed rate in relation to other regions. This relationship eventually defined the properties we call matter and energy. It may be that matter and energy are really the same "thing" distinguished only by their relationship to each other.

What seems more intuitively likely is that the initial conditions of the expansion were such that there was no distinction between one "thing" and another; everything was, in effect, a vast blob of stuff. At some point in the expansion, the distance between "things" created a separateness which made unique "objects" and events possible. Even then, there was no real difference, only relative speed of one object to another. This is because, as expansion increased, the angle of any point from its origin (the Big Bang) relative to any other point, likewise increased. Things that were right next to each other at some earlier time, were now far apart but only because of the angle between them.

The universe is actually a series of cones with the center being the point of the observer and the apex at the Big Bang. The radius at the base of the cone is always increasing at the speed of light. The base of the cone expands into space at the speed of light so the volume of observable space likewise increases at that same rate. Since we can't observe this expansion, since the universe continues to appear pretty much the same, another consequence of expansion becomes obvious. Everything in the universe is expanding at exactly the same rate so that it's impossible to ever observe the expansion.

What all this means is that it's not only the big stuff like galactic clusters or individual galaxies that are moving away from each other, but everything in them, all the way down to the smallest sub-atomic particle. If even the individual atoms are expanding at the same rate as the universe as a whole, it follows that whatever is composed of those atoms will also be expanding. Since the expansion is uniform everywhere and at all times, there is no reference by which it can be judged. We can't see it.

The red- shift apparent in distant galaxies has nothing to do with their actual speed but is wholly the effect of the increasing angle of the expansion. Things far away are increasing their angle from us so that they seem to be accelerating away from us. Since we are also increasing our angle from the distant object at the same rate, the apparent affect is a doubling of the actual speed of its recession. It's all a cosmic optical illusion. At some point in this expansion, the things that compose the universe will have reached the maximum point of angular deflection beyond which any coherent existence is impossible. Everything will just kind of disintegrate into a rarefied gas. Some folks can't wait (see this).

There is yet another insight available to us because of this discovery. Since the expansion of the Big Bang, the part of the universe that we can see is limited by the "shape" of the universe since the Big Bang. It's tempting to view the Big Bang as expanding as a sphere; everything shoots off in every possible direction away from the center. But we can never observe that, all we can see is a tiny fraction of all there is "out there". In fact we are in the exact center of the base of a cone whose radius increases at the speed of light. The universe we can see exists right now and then immediately changes. This has some interesting consequences for our concept of time as well, see this.

This suggests that there's a direction in which we move, what we assume is away from the original point of the Big Bang. Since we also know that space is curved (even light is affected by this curvature), our present point hasn't followed a straight trajectory, but a curve. If the expansion continues, all points will eventually end up right back where they started. They won't all fit in the same space of course so there will be another Big Bang and the whole cycle will repeat. The universe turns itself inside out from time to time, kind of like an oscillation. There are further issues covered, Here.