Others assert that if one takes off in one direction and travels long enough he/she will will arrive back home from the other direction. Still others claim “curved space” to be the mechanism at work, which is pure nonsense, of course.
Reminds me of an old friend of mine, an Objectivist physicist, who asked once, “What in the world is wrong with curved space-time?” Indeed. It’s not pure nonsense, and certainly not as a matter of course.
By accepting the present idea of a Universe, as currently defined by Cosmologists, some Objectivists are, implicitly, accepting the Expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang and, neccessarily, an act of Creation.
No, not necessarily. The expansion of the universe implies that at a certain time around 15 billion years ago, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a very small space; this might have occurred from a previous collapse. That we can’t know anything at present about what the universe was like before a certain time (the time at which the density was greater than our current knowledge of physics can confidently handle) is uncontrovertible; however, that’s not the same as saying it was necessarily a moment of creation.
However, I intend to prove that Existence is much more than our obervable universe, or an existent, but is instead an infinite and eternal State of Being, within which existents exist.
I looked at your proposal and off the bat already see a number of problems with it.
An obvious problem having to do with an eternity of existence is posed by the fact that all the stars of the Observable Universe are busy spewing mass into space (material mass via the stellar winds, and energy mass via the conversion of mass into energy), i.e., they are dying. Obviously, if they had been doing this for an eternity all galaxies would have been burned up an eternity ago. The fact that they haven’t mandates a source of new galaxies, one that precisely offsets the number of galaxies being burned up each billion years, or each year.
One problem is that the stars produce energy by fusing lighter elements into heavier elements, but that process can’t go on indefinitely. Once you start producing iron-56, you’ve reached the end of the road; any further fusion would require an input of energy. (Which is what happens during supernovae; some of the enormous energy production is expended in fusing the heavier isotopes. Indeed, it’s thought to be what causes supernovae–once the star starts fusing lighter elements into iron-56, the production of energy in the core ceases, causing a collapse in the radiation pressure holding the higher layers of the star up against gravity; this collapse in turn causes a shock wave outward that blows the topmost layers of the star off into space.) The proportion of matter in the universe in the form of iron-56 would inescapably increase over time given what we know of nuclear physics; in an eternal nonexpanding universe, you’d end up with an eternal Iron Age after umpteen billion years, if you will. Not that all the matter will be iron-56–there will be lots and lots of matter in neutron stars, burned-out white dwarfs, and so on. But note that as time passes, more and more matter gets locked up in the burned-out remnants of stars–burned-out because they don’t have sufficient mass to fuse them into heavier elements. That’s the end of the bright shining stars. Yes, it would be billions and billions and billions of years in the future, but if it’s an eternal universe those umpteenillions of years would be nothing compared to the dark eternity to follow.
What I take to be your proposed mechanism doesn’t get around this. Yes, you have a continual outflow of mass from the stars. The stellar wind would provide matter (mostly hydrogen and helium) that would eventually condense into new stars, as do novae and supernovae; that’s standard astrophysics. (Note that it doesn’t result in new galaxies, however; the matter for the most part remains in interstellar space within the galaxy. But you’re doing a mass balance, so that’s okay.) It’s the radiation from the stars that’s the problem (and as your figures show, it’s 95% or so of the mass loss). What you seem to be aiming for is to set up a mechanism whereby radiation loses energy as it travels very large distances; since this energy has to go somewhere, presumably the energy lost from radiation is converted into matter. There are a number of very serious and fairly obvious problems with this. Now, to have a universe which would be eternal and roughly unchanging over that time (so that you don’t end up with everything in burned-out stars), most of this energy would have to be turned into hydrogen.
First, this would require some sort of pair production (an electron and a positron or a proton and an antiproton, for example; you could have other types of pair production, of course, but most of the particles would decay into electrons, protons, neutrinos, etc., quite quickly) since there’s charge and momentum conservation, not to mention the other conservation laws of contemporary particle physics–which means there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter produced uniformly throughout the universe, including in our own galaxy. Yet there is no indication that there are substantial amounts of antimatter around. Where is it?
Second, you’d have to have a rough balance between the production of protons and electrons, which you wouldn’t expect since protons are so much more massive than electrons and thus should be produced at a much lower rate.
Third, the whole idea of radiation gradually losing energy over long distances goes against what we know of quantum mechanics. Pair production would be a discontinuous process; that could happen only when a certain amount of energy had been built up in a given region (and one wonders how large a region would be involved). How would this energy be manifested before the particles are produced? Would its energy levels be continuous or quantized? Presumably continuous, since the energy loss would have to be proportional to the energy of the radiation to preserve the spacing of spectral lines. However, this wouldn’t work under quantum mechanics, which requires a minimum quantization of energy. On the other hand, I consider this the least of my objections.
Fourth, this pair production would have to be uniform throughout the universe–it would depend only on the amount of radiation traversing a given region, and in an infinite universe you’d have to have such uniformity because galaxies would have to be fairly uniform. (Otherwise over the umpteenillion years nonuniformities would be removed by gravitational attraction until a fairly uniform state would be reached.) Thus, what you would expect would be a constant “condensation” of radiation as matter throughout the universe, not just around Seyfert galaxies. In other words, even if we follow you in assuming that Arp’s work shows there must be constant renewals of radiation as matter throughout the universe, Arp’s work doesn’t fit your model since your model wouldn’t predict this condensation to be localized around existent galaxies.
Fifth and most serious, even assuming you get around all that, it still just wouldn’t work. Energy is produced in fusion by converting the mass difference between the reacting nuclei and the reaction product, and this mass difference is only a small percentage of the reacting nuclei. How many reactions would you have to have to produce one hydrogen atom? Since you have an infinite universe, all the energy in all light traveling large distances would eventually be converted back into matter (assuming it’s not absorbed by matter, of course–which it wouldn’t by definition, but it does bring up the question of how much of a bound we could put on the loss of energy from radiation with the laboratory techniques we have right now). Take the fusion of hydrogen into helium as representative, since it’s the source of most of the radiation of most stars. You have the fusion of four protons into a helium-4 nucleus, which has 0.7% less mass than the four protons. So, to produce one hydrogen atom by losing energy from light would require the production by fusion of around 140 helium-4 nuclei, and hence the fusion of around 560 protons. (In fact, in practice it would actually be twice that since you’d have to produce an antiproton as well. However, the ratio would be the same.) The situation’s pretty much the same for all the other fusion reactions within the stars. That ratio of 560-to-1 doesn’t come anywhere close to offsetting the constant rise in the proportion of heavier isotopes; indeed, it doesn’t even allow you to push back the Big Bang very much! In short, even if we accept your use of Arp’s figures as indicating mass “creation” or, rather, “condensation” (which is a very big if), your proposal does no better than the standard model in escaping the eventual death of the universe and an eternity of darkness–and this follows directly from conservation of energy.