Author: Trevor Pitts

Quora answer

Which came first: the universe or time?

Answered just now

There is no time separate from space. There is only Einstein’s spacetime, which expands outward from the origin. Since I believe the Symmetrical Time Hypothesis is true, I suggest that spacetime also expands backward in time from the origin, full of what we would consider to be antimatter, identical in all ways to our matter, but moving oppositely to us in spacetime. The histories would be divergent, but within the same physics as us. There is no antimatter you. The Big Bang was at the center of time. The only events occur at the two opposite present moments, 27,000 million years apart, at which the twin Universal wave functions collapse to create the next events throughout them. There is no actual past or future, only now, gone and maybe. Enjoy NOW, it’s all there was and ever will be.

So the answer is, time, the space and the material objects in the universe are inseparable. They arose at the same instant and are expanding outward in both directions in spacetime. What we call time is that expansion.

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Quora Answer 12/31/20 on entropy at the Big Bang

Is the source of the energy, the available energy, the low value of entropy, at the moment of the creation of the universe understood by physicists?

Trevor Pitts Former former CEO of an environmental remediation Corp. Chemist.

Roger Penrose was very puzzled by this question, essentially, how could the universe be at extremely low entropy at the beginning? The general feeling was that low entropy is some sort of inverse bank, allowing events to occur by increasing. I believe entropy is fundamentally misunderstood. It is not a driving force, it is a measurement. The universe is expanding in spacial size, like raisin bread, the raisins get further apart, and the farther they are apart, the faster they separate as the dough rises, ie it expands evenly throughout. The Hubble expansion is not like a hand grenade, blowing outward, leaving an expanding void as the shrapnel flies away from the explosion. The universe also gets older. Space and time are inseparable, spacetime expands. What we call entropy is fundamentally dilution.

Mass gets further apart and energy density falls. This is the redshift, light and other electromagnetic waves increase in wavelength. The intense light released when the temperature of the universe fell enough to form ordinary matter from plasma, so that space became transparent, was stretched until it became the cosmic background radiation. If the universe were not expanding, no complex events could occur, because no heat sink would exist. Why? Olber’s Paradox, an example of how scientists can believe the impossible.

Olber’s paradox is quite simple. Light fades as the square of the distance, the inverse square law. But light sources, stars, increase with the volume, ie the cube of the distance. So if the universe were static, no matter how huge, eventually the temperature of every point would rise to be the average temperature of the surface of stars. The sky would be purplish white, at 10,000 degrees K at least, not the current 3 degrees K. Obviously this had not happened, yet everyone, including Einstein, thought it was static, until Hubble proved otherwise. The expansion of spacetime IS time. Increasing entropy does not drive the arrow of time, it is the other way round. The only means allowing heat engines to work is the great, cold, expanding vacuum acting as the ultimate heat sink. Every activity we indulge in from metabolism to rocketry, ends in heat, which must diffuse and then radiate into space. Gravity appears to be too weak to slow or reverse the expansion. Time’s arrow is simply outward, expanding everywhere, like space and with space. To talk of the entropy of the universe is simply to talk of its age.

Physicists will still quibble that time is not symmetric, but I proposed an answer to that, in 1999. This is to propose time symmetry via another universe on the other side of the big bang, where time expands outward in negative time from the origin, which is in the center of time. According to Feynman the matter there would be antimatter to us and vice versa for them. Nobody is “before” the big bang and yet both us and the antipeople are “after” it in terms of time’s arrow. The distinction does not exist.

Details and references are at:https://fundamentalstudies.org/

This was a quora answer- it gives an update re supporting theory and possible evidence of the antiuniverse from Antarctic neutrinos

What caused or initiated the Big Bang if there was nothing before it? Trevor Pitts · July 9Oxford Philosophical Society Member since 1989

The latest idea is that the Big Bang was both at the center of time and the beginning of time. That is, that there are two universes with identical physics, but that in each the direction of time is reversed relative to the other. According to Feynman, all particles have the potential to travel backward in time, whereupon they are equivalent to antimatter. To us, the universe at the other side of the Big bang would appear to be full of antimatter, to them, so would we. In reality both universes are expanding outward in spacetime at the same rate. Both would perceive events as we would, but experience divergent histories due to Quantum indeterminacy leveraged by Chaos and Self-limiting Criticality (avalanche, earthquake etc physics). This concept has great merit because the universe was built upon Symmetry, but unidirectional time, and the dominance of matter versus antimatter in our universe, when both are created equally from energy, clearly violate that symmetry. More particularly, without this hypothesis, a very important symmetry, CPT Invariance, Charge, Parity, Time, Invariance is violated. Basically symmetry requires that if time is reversed, charge (+ or – on battery terminals, -ve electrons versus +ive , antimatter positrons) is reversed and parity reversed. Parity can be understood in that physics is the same in a mirror reflection of a coordinate system.

All equations describing physical interactions work forward or backward in time- time symmetry. This hypothesis can explain the extreme imbalance of matter versus antimatter in our universe by having an equal, opposite, imbalance in the mirror universe, when the big bang’s huge burst of energy must have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, almost all of which annihilated each other as the mirror universes expanded and cooled. The tiny amount remaining built the stars, planets etc. here, and their mirror equivalents on the other side of the Big Bang. The two universe are about 26 billion years apart in time- twice the age of either universe.

I apologize for the level of abstraction here, but CPT invariance is fundamental, and without this mirror universe on the other side of the Big Bang, this universe violates it, so our physics must be wrong, or more accurately, incomplete, without such a hypothesis. I wrote a paper on this subject twenty years ago: arXiv:physics/9812021v2

. It was not taken seriously. More recently, Neil Turok’s group at the highly prestigious Perimeter Institute published a series of papers on the subject, giving the hypothesis firmer mathematical support from a loop quantum gravity basis:

Our universe has antimatter partner on the other side of the Big Bang, say physicists – Physics World

They were taken seriously. Turok’s group were able to make a prediction, based on this hypothesis of the mirror universe, about the mass of a type of heavy neutrino that is a plausible candidate for explaining dark matter. This was given support by the detection of neutrinos coming upward out of the Earth in an experimental apparatus in Antarctica. Their masses were a close match for the Turok group predictions. In physics, that is a huge deal- it massively supports the hypothesis.

Hunting Neutrinos In The Antarctic

I should point out that this is very cutting edge physics. It potentially solves multiple huge problems that have plagued physics for ages, if it survives further study. If it does, it is Nobel Prize material, plus, when you think about it, the largest discovery in history- an entirely new universe!

In my mind this hypothesis, time-symmetry across the Origin, answers the question of what was before the Big Bang. There was no “before”. The quantum fluctuation that was of sufficient magnitude to collapse itself into realty (per Penrose’s gravitational collapse of the wave function theory) created spacetime, which exploded outward from the origin in both + and – time. Now there is a whole universe of history “before” the Big Bang, but the creatures living there think we are the ones “before” it. Time is the result of the quantum process of creating events as space and time expand outward together. We think of time as eternal, not so. It was created together with space. Neither can exist without the other, according to Einstein. To ask about time outside spacetime is meaningless. We live in a magnificently complex vacuum. It arose, in my view, because the gigantic sum of all potential histories of quantum events in a universe with exactly the physics that allowed the existence and flourishing of technologically advanced intelligent creatures, overwhelmed the zero history alternative of non-existence. In quantum logic, existence was overwhelmingly more probable than non-existence, if the “right”, suitably fine-tuned quantum fluctuation occurred, perhaps after some unimaginable amount of failed fluctuations. Survival and expansion of the “fittest” universe for non-simple histories?

Shrodinger’s Cat is leaving her box, having killed Determinism

Science, and knowledge in general, is often like a locomotive – lots of inertia and running in fixed lines. Occasionally a crucial experiment derails the old locomotive, which I hope will happen soon.

I joined the Philosophical Society, associated with the Oxford University Dept. of Continuing Education in 1990. The President was Dr. Michael Lockwood, who, unusually, combined expertise in Philosophy with expertise in Physics. He set up study weekends where members would listen to lectures by and question world- renowned scientists or philosophers. Being a chemist myself, I have enjoyed the informal discussions both between members and with the guest lecturers.

The one thing that has disturbed me was that the following five ideas, which I dispute, seemed common to most philosophers and scientists:

  • Strict Classical determinism- past and future are fixed
  • The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory- quintillions of new universes are born every second, none of which can be detected by each other
  • Time, and therefore events, could be reversed in time direction
  • The present moment is an illusion, that someone could be alive in the past
  • Free will does not exist

I am publishing the linked essay now because experiments I have long awaited seem to be in progress and likely to be successful soon (Brooks, M. 2015, http://tinyurl.com/NewExperiments). These experiments will show that general relativity is not in conflict with quantum mechanics, but indeed essential to crucial quantum effects in the world. They will demolish the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory and eventually determinism as a basis of science and philosophy. I expect the resulting intellectual changes to be profound. This essay is an attempt to describe them.

My essay shows that, if we abandon the five ideas above, we already have plausible answers to all of the following scientific/philosophical problems that had no accepted solutions. It also shows a means of refuting the five ideas. Many of the important papers and insights referenced have been ignored or misunderstood for years; they are neglected science.

  • Einstein’s relativity supposedly implies determinism, which is in philosophical and mathematical formalist conflict with quantum indeterminacy, basic to quantum mechanics, the most successful theory of all- with implied determinism, we cannot reconcile the two most basic theories of reality
  • The irreversible forward arrow of time and the uniqueness of the present moment- we do not understand time
  • The “collapse of the wave function” – we do not understand how events arise
  • Causality and the “entanglement” of distant quantum states with each other, or “spooky action at a distance”- Einstein spent much of his life on this, with no resolution
  • The imbalance of matter versus antimatter in the universe, equivalently, why was matter not completely annihilated at the origin by the required equal amounts of antimatter- we have no accepted explanation for the existence of matter
  • Why there is something rather than nothing, and how could our particular spacetime background be constructed consistently with known physics
  • How did our universe arise, whose most fundamental constants and parameters appear to have been “tweaked” to be perfect for life, against astronomical odds: The Fine-Tuning Problem
  • The accepted, symmetry-based Standard Model of particle physics requires 19 unrelated constants of arbitrary magnitudes. Further, the possibility of neutrino mass seems likely to require at least six more, in the view of most specialists in the field: another fine-tuning problem?
  • Roger Penrose’s concern about the anomalously extreme low entropy state apparently required at the origin
  • Free will and responsibility versus the jazz song lyric “I’m depraved because I’m deprived”