REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (11/29/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> This morning I came up with a rather fancifal theory about "high-energy physics" and I'd like to put it up for you-all to shoot down. Send your reasons why this idea can't possibly be right to me directly because I'm not on the PHYSICS mailing list (ok to send CC to whole list if your flame would be of interest to others). There's a quantum number of free quarks that I'll call "clique". It might be the same as some property we already know about (color, strangenss etc.) or it might be a new one we haven't yet found. In any case, (1) in bound quarks (both doublets of opposite type such as up + anti-up, and triplets such as protons) and also in black holes clique is hidden from the outside world, (2) two isolated quarks exhibit a force on each other which is zero if the quarks are of the same clique and repulsive inverse-square if of different clique. Immediately after the big bang there were enough isolated quarks of two or more cliques that the repulsive force of the quarks was stronger than the gravitational force and so the big-bang expansion was actually fueled by this force. Later after a few early stars had gone supernova and turned into black holes the free quarks started getting eaten by those black holes, causing a net redution in the number of free quarks exerting this force. After a long time the clique force became or will become less than the gravitational force on the large scale and the Universe started or will start to decellerate in preparation for contraction. Note that the very instant of the big bang was a mere quantum event, an improbable event that however does happen from time to time, a momentarily creation of a virtual photon or somesuch which usually dissappears before the quantum limit (Planck constant) is exceeded, but this time (18E9 years ago) it happened to cause two quarks of different clique to become free from each other and from other quarks, and thus rather than dissappearing again because it didn't have any net mass-energy, this Universe expanded because the repulsive force of the two (or more) free quarks fed energy into system to pay back the original "mass-energy loan" that was the original quantum event. If the Universe had always (since the Big Bang) been expanding at its present rate, it would be about 8E9 years old, but since some long-lived stars we've already observed are older than that we know the Universe has to be older. When we get better telescopes we'll find stars much older even than that, black dwarfs that are emitting in the infrared and microwave even now after 15E9 years of burning their hydrogen very very slowly by solar standards. The very early Big Bang (the first microsecond or so) things were so hot that many quarks of various cliques were created in random places where not all could find compatible mates with which to form bound pairs or triples. Each free quark of different clique from its neighbors kept apart from them, but the vast majority of quarks were bound, and this ordinary matter condensed to form stars, many containing one free quark or two of the same clique that had not yet become bound because they weren't each other's antiparticles [question to physics experts about current QCD theory, what is the maximum number of Risk cards, oops quarks, that can exist such that no subset of them can combine to form a bound pair or triple? I think the answer is two, because any quark and anti-quark can become a bound pair while any three quarks or three anti-quarks can become a bound triple, thus any set of three either is all quarks or all anti-quarks (bound triple) or has at least one quark-anti-quark pair. Is that right?] and the rest of the stars containing only ordinary matter. Most of these early stars were very massive and went supernova and black-hole rather quickly. The early start were NOT in galaxies, they were free in the Universe. Later after the number of free quarks was decreased by all these large black holes (which form a vast majority of the mass of the Universe, explaining the "hidden mass" needed to contract), gravity became less dominated by clique-repulsion on the large scale, and largescale contractions started to happen, resulting in the formation of galaxies. Those which were lucky enough to get lots of heavy elements (carbon et al) from early supernovas became early spiral galaxies, the rest became spherical galaxies initially but could later become spiral galaxies if they had enough mass to spawn lots of small supernovas after they had formed as galaxies. During the original Big Bang, gravity was trying to impede expansion, and clique repulsion (with a slight assist from photon-matter coupling only during the first thousand years) beat it by less than a factor of 2. The final contraction of the Universe will be considerably more rapid. Most of the mass of the Universe will be in galaxy-sized blackholes, which implies (1) most of the free quarks will have fallen into black holes and thus become invisible qua clique to outside particles including other black holes (2) the radiation temperature will be very very cold even after the Universe has almost totally collapsed. As a result, there'll be neither clique repulsion nor photon-matter coupling to impede the gravitationally-driven contraction, and it'll proceed at the full rate of free-falling particles (black holes in this case) under the force of gravity alone. Only time diliation as the black holes approach each other will make the final collapse seem to take forever from the view of the last free particle orbiting the one final black hole.