What Inflates the Universe? A reflection on the Nobel Prize 2011 for Physics

Understanding dark matter and dark energy. Image: Shutterstock

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 honoured revolutionary, completely unexpected observations of the inflation of our Universe.

The Award was divided in two; one half was awarded to Saul Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.”

Astronomer Hubble already noticed the expansion of our universe in 1929, forcing Einstein to revise his famous equations about space, time and masses. So, what made these new observations so special for the Scandinavian Award Committees? It was not the discovery that something inflates the universe, but that it expands with an increasing speed.

The scientists’ approach to evaluate this expansion was very smart. The teams observed special types of Ia supernovae — explosions of aged stars the size of Earth that are as heavy as our Sun. They did a great job in discovering more than 50 distant supernovae, and they registered that their light intensity was surprisingly lower than expected (the so-called redshift), drawing thereof the conclusion that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Einstein’s formulas have been already revised to cope with this new situation.

Two exciting, yet unsolved questions came up. What type of superforce or superenergy could be capable of pushing entire galaxies away from each other, revolting against the strong and far reaching gravitational forces of huge galactic mass clusters; and what stabilises these galaxies on top in a way that the outer stars move much faster on stable orbits than Newton’s and Einstein’s formulas allow?

Some years ago, scientists introduced the term “dark energy” to describe the accelerating expansion and the term “dark matter” to grasp the phenomenon of stable galaxies despite very fast moving remote stars. Dark energy and dark matter add up to an astonishing 96 per cent of the total energies of our universe, in case the new pictures are balanced against the earlier views of theoretical physicists and subsequent historical discoveries of astrophysicists.

This brings us right back to Einstein’s representations of space and time. Is it possible to enrich his formulations of space, time and masses to cover the new discoveries as well? Might this revision navigate science finally towards a first solution to combine Heisenberg and Planck’s quantum physics with Einstein’s space-time continuum?

The answer seems to be yes, because there is still one peculiarity in Einstein’s formulations that has not been used as much in the reflections about an accelerating expansion of the Universe. Einstein introduced time as an equal fourth dimension to the three space dimensions length, width and height. The theoretical frame argues that there are two or more universes overlapping in a simple way that one spatial dimension coincides with Einstein’s time dimension of all others, respectively. The result is as astonishing as it is exciting, because what we get are flat, overlapping 2D-spaces around us.

What would happen if Einstein’s time progress axis collides with one spatial dimension of these flat 2D-spaces around us? The answer is simple; the space of an observer would expand with increasing speed at the expense of remaining time reserves for the future. From this point of view, these flat spaces around us turn out to be one possible source of dark energy (the accelerating expansion of the universe). Several space points in time leap into simultaneous points in space. This is sort of a leakage from a potential future time span, to space expansion and towards a lower energy state — the storage of events in time needs additional energy, just like recharging a battery.

Finally, we could rotate two overlapping flat space dimensions further against each other, until they oppose each other’s time progress and space dimensions. We can do this by introducing Planck’s proven quantisation scheme for length minima and time minima. This way we can derive a remarkable dark matter effect, which accumulates as halos.

Henryk Frystacki has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics & Engineering and is a member of the Russian Academy of Technical Sciences, Moscow and external board member of the Institute for Gravitation and Cosmos at Penn State University. His book, Einstein’s Ignorance of Dark Energy is available on amazon.com; for more info, visit www.frystacki.de