Imagining Our Universe: An Ocean of Light
by Mark Thomas (T.E. Mark)
Staff Writer
VENTURING OUT INTO THE COSMOS: AS A PHOTON
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” (W.H. Auden)
For you there was more purpose in this journey than the excitement. You didn’t volunteer for the mission driven by some capricious urge to run off to V762 Cassiopeia, 2,800 light-years from Earth for kicks, the thrill or for something to boast about at parties.
As a member of (EARA), the Earth Astronomical Research Academy, you’ve been looking for a way to demonstrate your resolve. And maybe be the one to discover life out there.
Creatures pouring the foundation of a technological world. A culture already expanding – reaching out into the cosmos. Or a single microbe – something organic confirming assumptions while extending the academy’s funding for future research.
2,800 light-years. The farthest visible star to the naked eye with the hint of a rocky exoplanet having formed together within a spacetime distortion of the Universal Photonic Matter.
Could this be the one, you ask yourself climbing from your cab in front of EARA’s Madrid Acceleration Port? The discovery of an electromagnetic anomaly mirroring Earth’s?
Where light, the substance of the universe fell into a deformation – a fold and started spinning, clumping into a gas like disk of massless light energy. Later changing state, forming our sun and planets.
One, with that primordial energy clumping further into liquid oceans, mountains, river valleys, forests, dry plateaus – and life.
The possibility of what you could and will see in mere moments is breathtaking. But for now, composure. You’re an explorer. You’ll release the child within you tonight at dinner – filling your boyfriend’s ears until he surrenders restraint and gags you.
OUR NATURE TO BE CURIOUS: WHY WE WONDER, WANDER AND LOOK UP
“We shall not cease from exploration.” (T.S. Eliot – From Little Gidding)
Image by StockCake
Now across the plaza, you meet your flight controller Mara. A woman who through some quantum mechanical quirk landed here at EARA rather than at the local primary school where her disturbing use of plurals, either an indication of a Dissociative Identity Disorder or an attempt at making this an inclusive event, is more concerning to you than it is a comfort.
‘Well… finally our day. Are we ready?’
Smiling respectfully, you start together through the doors to the Acceleration Launch Theatre.
‘To have my neurons phase-translated into photons and shot out into deep space?’
Mara turns when you reach the lifts. ‘Only those in our visual cortex, my dear, and besides…’
‘…I know. There’s nothing else out there. We are the light.’
Now pleased with us, she holds when the doors part releasing a pair of starry-eyed explorers returning from similar journeys – both with that glazed, faraway look in their eyes.
‘Shall we?’
You smile, follow Mara in and wait for the doors to close.
REIMAGINING OUR UNIVERSE: AN INFINITE OCEAN OF LIGHT
“Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.” (Vincent van Gogh)
Image by StockCake
“Photonic matter, also photonic molecules, is a theoretical state of matter where photons bind together to form molecules that act as though they have mass” (Ginzburg 1987, Lifshitz 2013)
Imagine our universe as an ocean of light. Vast and deep – static regions and violent ones with diving troughs and rising columns. Temperature differences creating convective folds.
Currents and here-and-there whirlpools of liquid light energy forming swirls like funnels in a pond or a gaseous disc spinning in primordial space. A forming proto galaxy. One day stars and planets – rocky and icy balls. Billowing, gas-filled giants.
THE INCOHERENCY OF EMPTINESS: THUS THE AETHER
“There is no space without the aether, and no aether which does not occupy space.” (Sir Arthur Eddington)
Image by StockCake
Our earliest star gazers from places like Babylon, Egypt and Greece, found the concept of emptiness incoherent. It challenged their intellects and incited imaginative leaps. On a world devoid of a void where a vacuum was incompatible with physics, they looked up at the night sky and filled it with a substance they called the Aether.
It solved puzzles and satisfied a curiosity – one that not ironically still exists. What is up there? What lies in the gaps between the stars, nebulae, galaxies of stars and vast regions of hydrogen gas? We called it a vacuum not long ago, and understandably so. It functions like one. It has its characteristics.
But science still rejects the idea of emptiness here and when modelling the cosmos. No longer because of our inability to conceptualise a vacuum. We’ve conquered that locally with modern tools.
Our rejection now is based on a firmer understanding of physics and how energy fields propagate – filling everything – and how gravity, a mysterious, action at a distance pushes and pulls and binds vast structures into spirals and ellipses and globular monstrosities we creatively liken to Earth creatures and mythical gods.
But still those seemingly empty regions between the stars and galaxies exist. The distances beyond convenient measurement units we use the speed of light over time to contextualise them. But empty? Surely, there’s something.
“Quantum Field Theory revolutionises our understanding of empty space by treating it as a vibrant medium filled with light fields rather than an inert vacuum.” Writes Quantum News, adding: “Empty space is far from empty. It teems with virtual particles and fields.”
A vibrant medium filled with virtual particles and light fields. What picture does that draw in your mind? Allow your imagination to create a simulation from that description. Paint it into something consumable. A balloon or box perhaps – filled and bursting with light. Or a great sea. Infinite and unbound.
Maybe the Greeks, with their unrelenting ingenuity and forward thinking, weren’t too far off with their fanciful Aether.
While Democritus was making his claim for atoms, was he or some forgotten contemporary also laying the foundation for Quantum Field Theory with a creative vision of a substance he’d call the Aether? Did they as we might today intend their depiction of this ubiquitous substance a creative metaphor for something they presciently assumed we would name?
EINSTEIN’S COSMOLOGICAL BLUNDER
“Einstein’s Cosmological Constant is a name without any meaning. We have, in fact, not the slightest inkling of what its real significance is.” (Jim Peebles)
Image by StockCake
In 1917, Albert Einstein presented the world his General Theory of Relativity. In it, along with his theory of gravity describing space as a fabric – not empty, he gave us something called a Cosmological Constant. A type of negative or vacuum energy that pervades all of space counteracting the force of gravity rendering the universe static or stable.
Though he would later discard this concept due to Hubble’s 1929 observations that the universe was not static but expanding, modern physicists and cosmologists would revive and relabel Einstein’s Cosmological Constant calling it Dark Energy.
An energy field only identified by its observed effects on those galaxies and stars – nebulae and interstellar gasses. Something – some ‘mass-energy’ had to be filling our universe - pushing it outwards. Thus, a new mystery took the stage. Coming from somewhere, there had to be something new pouring in.
To many this sounded like a repackaging of the Aether. And in a way it was. Another attempt to fill space with a substance – and again, not ironically, a substance we couldn’t identify. A mystery mass-energy revealed only by its push and pull – its effects on those objects out there we can directly image.
This certainly seems reasonable. And science regularly leans on abductive reasoning when clear evidence is for the moment unavailable.
But in revisiting those energy fields and virtual particles filling and pervading all of space - pushing, stretching, conceivably driving its expansion, we can, if so inclined, draw a new, speculative image. One of space as a great sea of photonic matter. A plasma like ocean of phonon and plasmon quasiparticles – massless and at times not.
FROM THE BEGINNING WE QUESTIONED: THE COSMOS AND LIGHT
“And God said: Let there be light.” (Genesis 1:3)
Image by StockCake
Imagine our universe like a vast, light-filled balloon. The electromagnetic light waves so densely packed they form something like a soup or plasma.
If we filled a balloon with light (visualising photons or energy waves) then continually decreased the size of the balloon, we would reach a point where we could no longer decrease it. We would have a container of light. Not solid or gaseous – more like a liquid.
And if we envision our universe as this ocean of either compressed energy waves or particles or both, we find ourselves with three physical / cosmological quandaries: 1. Why, according to Einstein’s other relativity theory – the Theory of Special Relativity, nothing in our universe can travel faster than light.
I would posit: If our universe is comprised of nothing but light all moving at its own special speed, anything entering it would be like oxygen atoms entering a stream of air. Or water molecules slipping into a current in a sea or river. How could it travel faster? The medium itself would be both the propelling and the limiting force.
Nothing could move beyond the speed of the current.
2. The Hot Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. An eruption of rapidly expanding radiation with conflicting theories for the source of the matter and antimatter that would ultimately form into our celestial bodies.
Accepting there was no matter at that primordial event - nothing but energy in the form of light, all matter would then have been the subsequent transformation - clumping of light into our universe’s naturally occurring deformations.
Troughs like whirlpools in a sea or our enigmatic Black Holes in space where light would cluster – reform and undergo a state change or phase transition.
AS WE LOOK FARTHER: WE SPECULATE AND SEE
“At about 10,000 years after the Hot Big Bang, the temperature had fallen to such an extent that the energy density of the universe began to be dominated by massive particles such a protons, neutrons and electrons rather than the light and other radiation which had predominated earlier.” (The Centre for Theoretical Cosmology)
Image by StockCake
Stars, galaxies, planets, mountains, seas, plant and animal life. Carl Sagan once called us Star Stuff. In his eloquence, was he saying we and the stars are all clumps of light energy? That there is, in a way nothing else?
3. There’s one more puzzle our universe as a light filled balloon model solves. As I stated above, Special Relativity says nothing locally (not counting the expansion rate of our universe) can travel faster than the speed of light. Yet there’s something in this that has always bothered me.
The speed of light (wave or particle) is generally accepted to be 300,000 km/sec. Thus, from an astronaut’s vantage point in space, it will take a light beam (or photon) leaving the sun 8.33 minutes to reach the Earth. But, if you were riding on that photon as Einstein once fancied, you would experience no time dilation.
You would leave the sun and be on the Earth at the same moment. This sounds a lot like the instantaneous travel Ole Roemer disproved in 1676 with his measurements of light reflected to us from Jupiter’s moon IO.
It gets more challenging when imagining greater distances. If a photon experiences no time dilation while travelling in space, yielding instantaneous travel between our sun and Earth – then a photon leaving Alnilam in the constellation of Orion 1300 light years away, will leave that star and be on Earth without any time elapsing.
How can something be 1300 light years away and here at the same time? How can a photon that travels at a recordable velocity not experience time dilation?
Unless, when it enters that photonic light ‘soup’ it becomes part of it. Thus, upon entrance, it’s everywhere. As are we. As is everything in our visible universe.
RELENTLESS IN OUR SEARCH: WE WERE BORN TRAVELLERS
“Life is travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.” (DH Lawrence)
Image by StockCake
Now comfortable in the translational acceleration chair, not strapped in like those early astronauts once were readying to be rocketed into space, you gaze at the opening observatory like dome above you.
Stars and star clusters. Paralysing beauty. Mars, Saturn – Venus rising to the east. Those light points the ancients named for their deities sparkling in the blackness like fireflies or phosphorescent glitter.
Soon, you think, you’ll be among them. Attached to and merged with that electromagnetic energy. Travelling like a photon within the vastness of space. But for today with only one destination.
Mara and the operator are ready to attach you to the Spectrum via an EM interface. Instantaneity. Like a photon stream heading into that energy sea.
A part of you, your visual and thought processing mechanisms, will soon be here in the Madrid theatre and there in orbit, staring down at V762 Cassiopeia gathering spectral information about the star – the temperature of its surface and outer corona.
And hopefully in that precious, timeless moment validating through direct imaging the existence of V762 Cassiopeia b. A rocky exoplanet with carbon compounds in its atmosphere. The possible indicator of life below.
“We’re ready here, Alicia. Engagement in 10 seconds.”
READY TO LEAP: LIKE AN OLYMPIC SWIMMER
Image by StockCake
You want to respond, to form words, but for the moment, anticipation and terror have overwhelmed your abilities to think of anything other than what lies ahead for you out there while picturing horrid things happening to the career counsellor who sparked your enthusiasm for a life in astronomical exploration.
“Remain focussed on our mission. Our observations are all we’re after.”
“Our observations Mara?! Ours?!! Are we entirely insane?!” You hear the words that escaped your lips as if delayed. Thinking – wondering. “My God, she has me doing it now!”
Mara gazes out through the observation glass. “Breathe normally Love. Lower our heartrate. We’re counting down – now at 3 – 2 – “
And with her voice fading – your brain no longer able to interpret the soundwaves or perceive terror, you squint at the momentary flash. Light. You’ve entered the immersive universal photonic realm.
And when your vision adjusts – a star. Yellow orange. Explosive. Violent coronal mass ejections sending plasma out through its million-degree corona.
V762 Cas. You’ve arrived. Without any time elapsing, you’re here and back in Madrid. And having returned to thinking of yourself, your very existence with singular pronouns, it’s time for you to get to work.
NOTHING BUT LIGHT: CHANGING STATES AND CREATING WORLDS
“All the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” (Leo Tolstoy)
Image by StockCake
A radical concept? Maybe. But let me summarise what I’ve presented here with stated theories in physics and cosmology. And maybe posit an idea or two of my own.
1. Though light carries energy and momentum, it’s considered to be massless in the sense of having no “rest mass.” However, due to its energy and momentum, light can exert pressure and is affected by gravity giving it the appearance of having mass.
Energy and momentum with the ability to exert pressure? Besides filling space, answering that lingering question about the missing matter, could this be the force driving the expansion of the universe?
Could light change states? Become that theoretical photonic matter? Exhibit properties that lie for the moment outside the standard model of particle physics? Could it be the dark energy, dark matter – and all the matter and energy in our universe?
Could there be nothing but the light?
2. In General Relativity, Einstein described gravity as a curvature of the four-dimensional spacetime “fabric” caused by mass and energy. Like a stretched sheet.
But what if, instead of a sheet comprised of a mysterious substance we can’t identify directly, Aether, dark energy or gravity and an opposing cosmological constant, it’s just the light? And our planets and stars are merely clusters of these photons like balls of lint stuck in a wool quilt after stretching it out from the dryer.
Only light. But light able to bunch and change and morph into different densities with different properties.
3. Our visible universe began as energy. A violent expansion of radiation 13.8 billion years ago spreading out in what cosmologists have called a Hot Big Bang. There’s no mention of matter slipping in from some unknown, outside source. Everything from this depiction indicates a state change or phase transition. Energy to matter. E = MC2, another of Einstein’s leaps satisfies that one.
Again: Nothing but light?
4. We and everything around us are made of atoms and subatomic particles. Electrons all zipping along at the speed of light. Isn’t that, in a way, describing us and our world as part of the electromagnetic soup out there? The same as the sun, stars and galaxies and all that energy-filled seemingly dark space in between? And that we too are moving at the speed of light?
Once more: Just the light?
5. Relativistic Mass – Dark Photons – Photonic Quasiparticles – Effective Mass: I’ll give one more before moving on to your return from your instantaneous, cosmological voyage.
Effective Mass: A box of light would weigh more than an empty box. Einstein’s E = MC2: Energy is equivalent to mass. The light energy inside would interact with gravity increasing the box’s weight.
Now, just imagine that box as a universe with those photons gathering and clumping in swirling black hole deformations – forming all the matter and energy we see - and that elusive matter and energy we can’t.
HOW WE’LL TRAVEL THE VASTNESS: LIKE DIVERS ONCE DID THE SEAS
“We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean.” (Carl Sagan)
Image by StockCake
Now starry eyed, glazed, unable to speak or form thoughts, you watch the Madrid theatre form above and around you. The sky out through the dome is black again. The stars are back to pinpoints. The clusters – those beasts and gods our ancestors named.
But now you know the truth.
You swam in and became part of it. A light sea – an expansive ocean of energy. What you witnessed – what you observed out there could take an eternity to describe. Magical. Mystical. Fantasy. Your mind is suddenly beginning to work. Breath-taking – wonder – magnificent.
More words are filling in, but not the right ones. Perhaps there are no words.
“Well now. Did we survive?”
You turn your eyes to Mara – standing at your side with that kind, maternal smile. And for the moment, unable to share what you saw – of V762 Cas b with its blue-green oceans and forested mountains and rivers and waterfalls and oxygen-rich atmosphere and gentle breezes – certain of the life that is if not there now mere geologic moments away - and nod.
“We did, Mara.” And now you turn back – and stare out through the dome thinking ahead to your next journey. And the next. And the next after. Ready and willing and humble and anxious… anxious to see more. “We certainly did.”
