Man of String

say good bye to the Universe, hello to the Reverse and Proverse

Q: Where is everything?

A: It’s behind you!

The inflationary model of the universe is widely accepted but only narrowly liked. It provides an answer to a problem but only if you’re willing to accept that it’s OK to break the laws of physics at the beginning of creation because the laws haven’t been made yet. And it doesn’t do much to help explain where everything is, by which I mean the 95% of all matter that has to be somewhere if our understanding of the shape of the universe is correct, or why the universe is growing at an accelerating rate.

Since I have no qualifications of any sort to weigh in on this topic, I feel entirely liberated to do just that. And I would like to propose a new reading of the inflationary model that is much simpler, breaks no laws, and might even be useful in other ways.

My proposal is that the universe is made up of two parts. The first part is the one we inhabit, the part that includes all “normal”, matter and whose arrow of time points forward (from our perspective at least). I’ll call this the Proverse. The second part occupies the same space as the first but its arrow of time is opposite to ours. I’ll call this the Reverse for obvious reasons.

In the first moments of the big bang, the Reverse was created, expanding faster than light and, as a result (according to physical law) travelling “backwards” in time. After some period, some small part of the Reverse, accounting for only 5% of its matter but represented by the heavier bits, cooled and slowed down. When it slowed down to the speed of light, the arrow of time for that small part flipped, creating the Proverse. The rest of the Reverse didn’t stop but rather continued its expansion at a faster speed than the Proverse, taking with it the other 95%, what we in our ignorance call dark matter and dark energy.

The diagram below depicts this model of the Big Bang from time and space perspectives. The time perspective (on the left) shows the Reverse coming into existence first (BBR = Big Bang Reverse), with the Proverse slightly paradoxically emerging second and yet “earlier” (BBP = Big Bang Proverse).

The space perspective (on the right) shows the Proverse appearing to come first (thanks to the Reverse actually coming first but travelling backwards in time), followed by the Reverse. Where the two cones of space intersect marks the point where the standard inflationary model defines the Big Bang (BBP inflationary).

This new model provides a simpler model of the Big Bang. It also does another couple of useful things.

First, it provides an explanation for the apparent weakness of gravity compared to the other forces, which is that gravity in the Proverse is being partially counteracted by the equivalent force in the Reverse.

Second, and related to the first, it suggests a reason for the acceleration of the universe. There is an ongoing struggle between Proverse gravity and Reverse gravity. In the early days of the Proverse its gravitational forces were more dominant, leading towards the creation of stars and galaxies. As time proceeds and massive objects in the Proverse move further away from each other (on average), so their gravitational attraction weakens in comparison to the equivalent force in the Reverse. The Reverse is pulling the Proverse “out” and will continue to do so.

One final thought: if our universe really is composed of two parts defined by their relative position with regard to the speed of light, it may be possible that the particles which move at that speed somehow exist at the intersection of time, sometimes moving forward with the Proverse, sometimes moving back with the Reverse, and probably switching from one to the other regularly in relation to their wavelength. Could this explain puzzles like the famous double-slit experience and spooky interaction at a distance?

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Tesla Motors and equivalence

Last week I took part in a scenario planning workshop for one of our clients on the subject of the future of transportation.  I was talking about equivalence with one of our invited experts, Lee Schipper, and he said that he thought cars are becoming more like computers.  Not literally perhaps, but what he had in mind primarily was the new generation of electric car entrepreneurs like Tesla Motors.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, co-founder and investor, is not a typical automotive guy.  He is a serial entrepreneur best known so far for co-founding PayPal, although in the future he will most likely be better known for his accomplishments at Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity.   Nor is Tesla a typically car company, describing itself first and foremost as a technology company that “has brought the best of the automotive and technology worlds together”. And as a technology company it anticipates performance improvements and accompanying cost reductions as a normal part of its business model.

The product itself is also a different kind of a beast.  The heart of an electric vehicle (EV) is not the engine but rather the battery, in Tesla’s case the same type of lithium-ion battery that powers your laptop.  As battery technology evolves, the heart of your car will become a modular “off-the-shelf” component that can be swapped in and out as necessary.

The number of parts in an EV that require specialist knowledge to maintain is considerably smaller than in a traditional internal combustion engine (ICE), and those parts are increasingly digitized, (including digital, rather than analog, motor control, as described in a Tesla blog post “from waves to bits”) meaning that the good folk at Tesla can act more like a Geeksquad, connecting locally or remotely to customers’ cars and troubleshooting them in the same way they would your computer or home network. 

In some respects, then, the car really is becoming more like the computer; increasingly digital, increasingly connected, and increasingly modularized.  In an earlier post I proposed three laws of equivalence, and I would suggest that Tesla specifically, and EVs in general, may be indicators of the third law at play in the automotive world:

“Any product or service that cannot be made equivalent will most likely be made redundant by another that is, through the forces of scientific and technologic advance and/or modularization”.

The ICE will eventually be made redundant by the battery, and as it does, the businesses and industries that were founded on their unique ability to produce, support and/or distribute it (e.g. gas stations, auto repair shops etc.) will see the value of that ability begin to disappear.  Smart businesses will get ahead of this shift while others will go under, tied to conditions that no longer apply and to solutions that no longer matter.

One small step closer...

March 22nd, 2010 was not just an important and tumultuous day in the world of US health care reform, although it was certainly that.  For those of us interested in such things, it also marked another small but important step towards the human invasion of space.  Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites successfully performed the first captive carry of VSS Enterprise by VMS Eve on behalf of Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic.  Story in full and images can be found here. 

The partnership between Rutan and Branson is a fascinating one.  Rutan is one of those rare engineers, like the genius Fazlur Khan, whose work is as unconventionally beautiful as it is uncompromisingly effective. Branson is an adventurer and entrepreneur, unafraid of leaping into industries and situations of which he has little or no experience.  Naming his company "Virgin" was as much a descriptive act on his part as a provocative one.  But this is a new challenge for him, catalyzing the development of a market rather than entering a mature one.  Admittedly it is only a tiny market at the moment of a few hundred affluent buyers and a handful of sellers, but the early histories of the car and the computer were not so very different.