"Eventually, God sneezed, and then the entire universe was suddenly created."

There may be anti-matter galaxies floating around out there somewhere. We should not assume there isn't absolutely until we perchance run into one. But the likelihood seems greater that the universe that we can see and infer seems mostly built in one way, and not the other. This is a universe that has been built on the stability of the proton. The proton appears to be an extremely stable fundamental system of physical reality. It is not only super stable in the structure of the long run, but super-abundant in the structure of the large. Received Big Bang models hypothesize that most protons were created in the first few seconds of the somewhat "immaculate" birth of the universe. This Catholic, Gamowian vision of our universe has never been seriously contested except by means of Fred Hoyle, Gold and Bondi's idea of a "Steady State System." Perhaps as a boy I liked Hoyle's model better than Gamow's single creation event. Never good in life to take sides with the losing party in any debate. I must side with a kind of "Steady State System" because, in the main, it is precisely in keeping with a framework of universal systems theory, even if the exact mechanisms or nature of this systems state is not yet well described and the original cosmological model developed by Hoyle et. al. was not quite correct.

The basic dilemma of any cosmological argument about origins or total scale of universes is the question "one came before" whatever it is we say came first, and what created that. Alternatively in terms of scale, whatever boundary or limit we may imagine for the universe, we must ask, what is beyond that and how is it contained? To say there was something that just was, that always was, that was not somehow previously created, that was everything, is, once again, scientifically unproveable hence untenable as scientific explanation.

The exact mechanism of the original production of the proton, and especially of so many protons, has not yet been sufficiently explained or empirically validated one way or another. The point is, whatever our received or agreed upon models of Cosmology may or may not be, we just don't know for certain and do not have enough evidence to say one way or another. Reason can therefore spin on a proverbial pin-head.

The only obvious instability of a proton seems to be its nucleonic nature in the context of the atomic nucleus--its apparent ability to receive an electron and shift states back and forth from a neutron to a proton. I'm not sure that the exact configuration of a nucleus of an atom can ever be completely determined at any particular moment, but that this kind of nucleonic transvestism is not going on continuously as protons and neutrons switch back and forth on a regular basis. But this appears to be a relatively minor point to make. 

A point that might be made is that protons appear hardly ever by themselves without an electron or set of electrons potentially hanging about. I think even in a neutron star that has shed its electrons and electronic orbitals to comprise an extremely dense for of nucleonic matter, we would find the absorption of electrons and the radiation of alpha particles and positrons as a consequence. We can speculate that a black hole may be composed of a form of super-matter that is relatively devoid of any electrons, and that may be just a large mass of protons all bound together, perhaps interlaced with neutrons. I would be inclined to call this "super-matter" in the sense that it would be the equivalent of a single mass of rather homogeneous element--perhaps we can find the occurrence of the "magic islands" of stability that are projected from an extension of the periodic table to higher atomic numbers. With the end matter of an expired Sun like ours we may end up with a large iron type of core, with some radiation and a lot of molten heat. With a larger mass like those leading to black hole development, we might expect possibly a stable configuration of elementary mass, albeit higher on the periodic table. This is of course largely conjectural as no one really knows what it may be like inside a black hole and its possible no one will ever find out and live to tell about it.

It is of course the other end that I'm interested in understanding more--rather not the end but the beginning of basic things in the Universe like protons. My argument goes as follows:

If something, even protons, exist in the universe, they have to have been somehow created, not by the hand of some nameless God, but by the concatenation of event structures that, in systems parlance, can be described as self-organizational. The mechanisms of this process of creation of protons must be therefore available to descriptive scientific explanation.

Protons, like all other "things" in reality, are "systems" and all systems in principle are susceptible to systems explanation. One of the basic principles of all finite systems, and a proton is definitely about as finite a system as we can find, relativistic considerations notwithstanding, is that all finite systems represent temporary event structures--they have a beginning, a life-trajectory, and an end. If something can be made (systems-wise) then it can be destroyed, and if it was made, it will be eventually destroyed. 

Our alternative here is logically untenable without making a final (unscientific) leap of faith. We can assume that protons are indestructible and last forever. We can logically conclude therefore that: 1.) they were never created, but always existed, because they had no beginning; 2) they will always exist, and will not change in basic form--they exhibit no pattern variation whatsoever. If we make these assumptions, we must conclude by deductive reasoning that the universe is infinite and eternal. We must also assume that the universe was created by some source of divine predetermination that was ultimately supernatural and that cannot be finally explained within a systems framework.

We must conclude therefore that the more reasonable scientific argument is that there is some pathway for the production of protons, a pathway that at least one point in the history of our universe was common and widespread, and that there is also at least one pathway for the destruction of protons, and for their demise.

We can also conclude a corollary of our argument that protons probably do demonstrate considerable degrees of pattern variability--we may eventually discover different "species" of proton or at least a broader range of variation of proton pattern and structure than a stereotypical model of the "indestructible homogene" leads us to believe.

We may also speculate that in the course of the history of the Universe there may have been more than one pathway of the production of new protons and more than one possible avenue for their destruction as systems. Not to be a self-promoter, I must plug my own model of the Dynamic State Universe, which is not a second-generation derivative of a Steady-State model, not exactly at least. On the basis of this kind of model, I hypothesize common secondary pathways by which new protons are created and destroyed, even under our feet, so to speak, though we do not yet see the flat world in a round way. But the hypothesis of common secondary pathways does not answer the basic question of a primary and original pathway, especially on a super-common and super-abundant scale.

A central question to try to answer in the resolution of this kind of problem is of course whether so many protons were made one time, all at once, in the beginning, so to speak, or if the universal abundance of protons points to a common pathway that still exists (i.e., protons are still being produced.) Solid answers to this question has a tremendous impact in the kind of cosmology we end up with.

I've myself been working on various possible models on how protons may be produce in large quantities, even vast quantities without any prior mechanisms "systems" being involved. We must speculate some kind of pre-existing "system" that would have lacked protons in the beginning, and that would therefore have lacked any matter as we know it. I would even argue that such a system lacked as well the differentiated forms of energy that we know it now by, though it had an basic quintessential and undifferentiated form of energy that was part of its substrate. It is beyond the scope to fully elaborate this hypothetical model or its many implications. Rather, I see possibilities like large-scale "space-time" tidal waves that surge across the vastnesses of the universe on a regular basis, even if undetected by our earthbound standards of measure, so far. The causes of these large scale event structures are hard to ascertain, though one kind of even that might precipitate it would be the explosion of a black hole as a final end event, or alternatively the collapse of two black holes into one another. Any number of possible scenarios might be imagined, and this is imagination at its scientific worst, but ultimately we need to explain things without resorting to such end-game players like black-holes etc., as we would need to then explain their origin before hand.

So about all I'm left with is a strange kind of "butterfly" effect. A rift, a ripple, a pimple, on the fabric of space-time, a cosmic hiccup, that perchance, for some unknown set of reasons, amplifies and propagates chaotically until we have this rolling, curling wave of space-time propagating itself across the vast emptinesses of the empty original universe--in its wake, or where such waves crash together, primitive protons get made, with all the consequences thereafter.

There is one main set of observations that are available to us, not clearly, but generally, that may help in this matter. Hydrogen gas in basic form appears abundant and pervasive throughout the universe, forming what are tremendous "clouds" or "nebulae" that appear to be relatively amorphous. The amorphous nature of these clouds suggests that they may not be quite as well gravitationally unified as are perhaps most clear galaxies that we can see. If my earlier argument is correct, that protons never seem to venture far without the accompaniment of electrons, then it is possible to see these regions of concentration of hydrogen gas as possible zones where new protons have been formed, or arising from such zones. 

The lack of overall gravitational unification of such regions--large collections, suggests a couple of other possibilities as well. First, hydrogen gas by its nature resists gravitational unification until certain relatively high densities can be achieved, and in those areas of relatively high concentration, spontaneous formation of new stars can be expected. This is in fact observable. Second, large hydrogen gas envelopes appear relatively amorphous and gravitationally un-unified. We must seriously question the occurrence of things like red-shift in these contexts that lack clear gravitational unification as systems. Such areas cannot be necessarily considered to be racing from some ancient origin in a uniform and self-consistent way, and if they demonstrate any kind of Doppler effect in terms of the red-shifting of the light received from these zones, it might be better explained in some other way that the presumed recession of galaxies.

If we examine the larger scale distribution of these tremendous "cloud formations" of hydrogen, we discover that they appear to be arranged in the universe like the matrix of huge three dimensional cells, irregular, but with a consistency of form and unevenness of distribution that suggests that the larger structure of the universe may be something we have hardly yet guessed at.

Certainly, any extant galaxy must have arisen from such gas clouds in the first place, just as the creation of a sun can only be explained in terms of its formation by the condensation of hydrogen at specific and sufficient concentrations. If we find well formed galaxies at a distance of 13 billion light-years from earth, surely these galaxies must have already been well formed much earlier than 13 billion years ago--adding considerable time depth to the current structure of the universe. And the mechanisms accounting for these early galaxies can be presumed, by an extension of the Cosmological Principle, to be similar to the mechanisms probably still occurring now in the Universe. 

Surely, we must speculate that the Universe as a whole has aged, and evolved in its development over the structure of the long run and the large. If our line of thinking is even remotely accurate, from a systems standpoint, then we can speculate that there was probably a very early period when the Universe was far less dense in concentration of hydrogen than now, and that ultimately, there was a very early time that it was effectively devoid of any hydrogen or higher states of matter. If we had a super-huge and super-precise telescope, perhaps we could look back in time deep enough to find such a relative absence of galaxies--surely we couldn't see individual stars that deep in space-time. 

If my thinking is correct, we would at that limit begin to see as well a relative absence of light, as light as we know it is in the main produced by stars, and no stars would be found. Perhaps then we might explain Obler's Paradox in this way--the dark of the night between the stars is the silent and empty background from which the stars themselves were molded, long, long ago, and, apparently, very far away.

If this kind of model has any hope of success, we must ultimately be able to account for the original formation of hydrogen (i.e. protons) in otherwise empty space-time, in terms of mechanisms that would be available in such a context. Again, I go back down to basics. Hydrogen gas in the observable sphere of our universe does not appear completely uniform or random in its distribution, though this distribution is relatively random over all. This patterning of distribution belies a meta-systems "structure" that hints at the operation of some "subsurface" system that we might not directly see and have not yet sufficiently accounted for in our explanations. I suspect this has something to do with the inherent dynamics and turbulence of space-time itself, even hypothetically in "empty" space without the influence of objects of matter embedded in that space, as we commonly observe now. It's of course not what we are seeing, but what we do not see, and possibly cannot see, that may be critical.

Just as we have assumed that protons may be relatively uniform and in a sense homogenous in structure, we have I think also implicitly presumed that empty space-time must also be somewhat homogeneous and uniform in structure, even if apparently convoluted. Space-time is not static, but flows like water in a vessel. It appears to flow in a non-isotrope way when there are no gravitational objects to focus its direction or rate of movement. It is possible in this vast sea of the universe therefore, at this basic level, that the otherwise random flow of the tides and currents of space-time coalesce into things like space-time hurricanes or "fronts." 

But this explanation, as yet does not go far enough. We would need to be able to explain how things work on a fundamental level, but this must wait for another Newsletter.