Puzzle Universe 2:
Making a Universe
https://hyperallergic.com/102457/rediscovering-the-dark-splendor-of-gustave-dore-with-edgar-allan-poe/ downloaded Feb 18, 2018
We’ll not be able to get rid of everything that looks like magic, but maybe we can reduce the number of things. First let me borrow a neutron; L (A frown will mean I must resort to magic; a smiles will mean I have accounted for something that might have looked magic without stooping to that.) I won’t need your neutron long. The use of this neutron constitutes our first use of magic.
We shall assume there is nothing, which is the whole point, and call this nothing “Out There.” So what must it be like Out There?
- No matter.
- No rules of logic. (You can’t have logic without a universe to be logical about.)
- No dimensions and an unknown number of potential dimensions, at least 3.
- Time undefined, so we shall set it at zero and neither going forward nor back.
- No moral order, good or bad.
So we set your neutron loose. It follows an irregular course, because places where it bunches up tend to pull the path inward by gravity; you lent me gravity when you lent me the neutron, because a neutron has mass. The reason all neutrons are alike is because it’s all the same neutron.
Eventually the neutron flies right up its own tailpipe, and I can give it back to you at exactly the time and place you lent it to me. Let’s say the path of the neutron was, a tad simplified, like this.
Fig. 2
You see where you gave me and then took back the neutron. The path is clumpy because gravity tends to pull the neutron into a place where there are other neutrons, which is to say the same neutron at a different part of the path. We shall declare the clumps to be mass. Of course, the neutron may turn into a proton and electron and a bit of energy, and the same process can go in reverse. There’s not much anti-matter because the neutron you lent me was a garden variety one.
Now that we have collections of mass, we can define time. If you are looking down at something heavy, and I am down there shining a light up to you, the light has to climb against gravity, which makes it lose energy, which gives it a longer wavelength, so it wiggles slower. I don’t make much of that up when I come up to you. So time is moving slower for me down here than it is for you up there.
Fig 3 Down a gravity well.
Now suppose our tangle of neutron path is so dense that light cannot escape at all. The upgoing wiggle above comes to a dead stop. That is a black hole; ours will be three dimensional. Now that we have a black hole we can define a difference between In Here and Out There.
Fig 4
Out There time can wander around in any direction in any place; on average it will be slightly the opposite of time In Here. But In Here it has to move always in the same direction, since our black hole, the contents, are contracting and the gravity well is getting deeper. We will say that Out There time is moving forward while In Here it moves backward. Not only can nothing get out, nothing that falls in can catch up with what’s already here so In Here we are truly isolated. Of course, it all has to wind up crunched in the middle, the opposite of the big bang, which didn’t happen; it just looks like that from In Here. J
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