I was a freshman in the tough Reed College physics program in 1965. I understood the concept of calculus, but applying the mathematics to solve problems baffled me, so given the choice between morning calculus class and breakfast at the cafeteria, I thought breakfast would do me more good, and I almost failed the course. I left Reed to change fields, build a career, and raise a family. But I never lost my interest in physics and have followed developments in the field.
My mother, Betty Beeby, was an artist who valued creativity above all else, and I grew up thinking “outside the box.” Never having to focus on a minute area of physics to get a PhD allowed me to think of some possible answers that still baffle researchers. Unfortunately, I’m not trained to do the math nor do I have time enough to do the research to work on any of these ideas, but some of you readers do have the skills and hopefully the resources. So take a look at these ideas from an outsider and see if they open new fields of inquiry. Not all these ideas are going to be correct, but these are at least new and worth considering.
Antimatter: To begin, I’m pretty sure I know where the missing antimatter is located. One thing I am sure of is all of the “stuff” that makes up our universe had to come from nothing. Logically, everything had to start from nothing, because if there were something, where did that come from? But we know that this nothing is unstable due to quantum oscillations. One can get something from nothing if something less than nothing is created at the same time. We know that matter-antimatter pairs are constantly popping out of space constantly. But there is a problem with the matter and antimatter we often see. When it recombines, we get energy. Energy is something. We are looking for true antimatter that combines with matter to produce nothing. Matter has spin, charge, and mass/energy. True antimatter must have anti-spin, anti-charge, and anti-mass/energy that combines to make absolutely nothing. Equal amounts of this true antimatter must have been produced at the time of the “Big Bang/Expansion,” so where is it?
The answer seems obvious to me. The ordinary matter and energy that we see is going forward in time. True antimatter must travel backwards in time. Anti-space and anti-time. It occupies the same space as the ordinary matter we see, but we can’t see it because it is currently 28 billion years in our past, and it does not annihilate our ordinary matter because of the temporal separation. Collider experiments might be able to see true antimatter by looking at what happens in the detectors before particles collide. In our forward-time, true antimatter going backward in time should look like ordinary matter rushing to the scene of the collision before they collide.
Gravity: If gravity works across time, this theory could explain a couple of things. First, if gravity works on both matter and true antimatter, we would expect matter to clump in places where true antimatter concentrates in the anti-universe. If the anti-universe evolved the same way as our universe, there will be anti-galaxies and these would tend to cluster near our galaxies. This may be some of the dark matter we are looking for. We can only see the effect of its gravity on space-time.
Secondly, if gravity operates across the temporal separation between our universe and the anti-universe, this could explain the apparent weakness of gravity. As the temporal separation increases with the passage of time, we would expect gravity to weaken with time. This would look like the expansion of the universe is accelerating as the temporal separation increases. This could be part of the explanation for dark energy. Models might show this effect.
Cosmic Evolution: There is a question of how our universe got so big from quantum oscillations. Firstly, “big” is relative. We have no objective “small” to compare to. Secondly, as both universes evolve, we would expect symmetry between them to diverge as chaotic processes like life and quantum variations create differences between the two universes. It is unclear if some process causes the Big Expansion to reverse and collapse eventually. I know of no process other than black holes that could do this. But matter and antimatter recombine on a small scale and I believe that universe expansions are cyclic, at least early in their evolution. When universes and anti-universes re-combine, the match will not be perfect due to chaos and quantum oscillations. Time and space will not exactly match at the collision of opposite universes and the excess matter and energy would not completely annihilate. This would form two or more new universes of matter and true antimatter. Iterations of this process over time could form larger universes and parallel universes. There is currently no way to tell if our universe is an original expansion from nothing or one of many iterations. Or maybe our universe is the inside of a black hole formed inside some ancient older universe.
Black Holes: I’ve always had a problem with the idea of a singularity in the middle of a “black hole.” We are nearly certain that when matter and energy reach a certain value in a given region of space, gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape. Some physicists think that gravity collapses matter-energy to infinite density. I believe that it can only collapse to the Planck dimension, no further. The very center of any mass concentration is weightless because gravity is working from all directions equally, the center is weightless and under incredible pressure. As the event horizon forms, particles move under pressure to the event horizon where they stop (time stopped equals zero velocity). So as the event horizon moves out from the center of mass, the particles move with it, and the event horizon becomes an expanding shell. Mass is concentrated on the event horizon, with only Hawking radiation on the outside of the shell and with the inside hollow and weightless, filled only with particles that escaped the event horizon shell via quantum tunneling. Gravity of the shell would stretch the space-time within the shell and space inside would be flat. Matter within the weightless interior would clump via gravity, and the interior of very large black holes would resemble mini universes which would expand as a result of in-falling matter. Universes might bud from other universes in this way.
Hidden Dimensions: I may know where more dimensions are hidden. This is more speculative and comes from the thought experiment of a spaceship travelling near the speed of light. We believe that the laws of physics are invariant in all inertial frames of reference and the speed of light in a vacuum (C) is the same for all observers.
This means that occupants in a spaceship travelling at close to the speed of light will not see light appear to slow down in the direction of motion (the dimension parallel to the velocity vector) nor will Newton’s laws appear to change. Invariance requires that that space will shrink and time will slow in the direction of motion so that the speed of light from a laser shining forward will continue to be the constant C. The light has less distance to travel and time has slowed for the occupant, so C appears unchanged. The same goes for Newton’s laws of motion. At uniform velocity, pushing the laser in the direction of motion will appear to the occupants to have the same inertia as when the spaceship is at rest, because while the mass of the laser has increased due to velocity near the speed of light, the distance in the forward direction has contracted and time has slowed, so the inertia of the laser being pushed forward appears the same to the occupants.
But what if the laser is aimed perpendicular to the direction of motion? The spaceship has not contracted in that dimension, yet time has slowed, so the light traveling perpendicular to the direction of motion would have farther to travel than when aimed in the contracted forward dimension, but in less time by the spaceships clocks that are running slower due to time dilation. To the observers in the ship, light would appear to moving faster than C. This would violate invariance.
Similarly, if the now more massive laser is pushed perpendicular to the direction of motion, the occupants have more distance to move it in the same dilated time than in the contracted forward direction and the inertia would have appeared to the occupants to increase until at some velocity near the speed of light the occupants would lack the strength to move the laser or themselves in the dimension perpendicular to the direction of motion. This also violates invariance.
If we instead assume that rather than contract to a disk, the spaceship contracts toward a point as the speed of light is approached, invariance is still violated, because two spaceships traveling at the same speed in parallel at a fixed distance from one another would appear to the occupants of both spaceships to have moved away from each other, yet their com lasers would still communicate with each other with the same time lag, violating the constant C.
This apparent paradox disappears if we theorize that time dilates and mass increases only in the direction of motion, and both time and mass perpendicular to the direction of motion stay the same, just as space only contracts in the direction of motion, but stays the same in the two dimensions perpendicular. This preserves invariance of physical laws and the observer’s measurement of C in all inertial frames of reference.
However, if this theory is true, it means that time and mass are not point qualities that are uniform in all dimensions. It means that both time and mass are three-dimensional (or greater), just as space is three-dimensional (or greater). As velocity approaches the speed of light, mass increases, time slows, and space contracts, but only in the direction of motion. These qualities skew from the direction of motion, possibly accounting for inertia.
To date, high velocity particle experiments use what are essentially point particles. If experiments use larger objects at near light speed velocities, they may show this skew effect. If the qualities of time and mass are actually three-dimensional, then we will know nine dimensions of reality: three of space, three of time, and three of mass. They are not curled up, they are always visible, but only diverge at high velocities.
This last speculation about added dimensions stretched my ability to visualize and draw space-time light cones beyond my brain’s limits, so may contain logical errors. Smarter people than me should check it and possibly model it on computers. I’m quite a bit more confident of the earlier theories in this paper.