David J. McKnight
with an inspired cosmological view
THE UNIVERSE GAVE US BEING AND WE GIVE IT MEANING
It’s the meaning we choose that matters
So here we are, intelligent beings living on a rocky planet, orbiting a dependable star, circling a spiral galaxy that’s one among trillions roaming a vast observable universe and much like we are immersed in our gargantuan galaxy, the Milky Way itself is embedded in a progressively larger network of galactic existence as the local group to which it belongs is pulled by a massive cluster of galaxies towards a giant supercluster of around 125,000 of them, all gravitationally formed from the bottom-up over time to create this brilliant stage. Our universe at its largest scale of supercluster supremacy is a big concept so let’s get it down-to-earth by imagining the Hawaiian islands as our own supercluster called Laniakea, but instead of sitting there all alone in the middle of the Pacific, picture the ocean populated by other Hawaiis as far as the eye can see - a seemingly infinite expanse of water filled by millions of these island chains that form a beautiful pattern when viewed from above.
Looking out from the Laniakea Supercluster in which the Earth is found, our ability to make sense of this astronomic archipelago is a major feat of intelligence which might seriously land us in the highest position around. Seems unfitting perhaps that human beings would hold such a high intellectual rank in the cosmos considering how foolish we are (in the way we treat the Earth, etc.) however our minds could very well be the most advanced anywhere in the entire observable universe at present. We cannot yet rule this out, but if there are altruistic aliens among us as some believe then perhaps they’re waiting for us to wake up, because one of the biggest problems here on Earth is the vast majority of us hardly recognize this cosmic intelligence at all; suggesting a large percentage of the population would feel incredibly lost when placed in the middle of this ocean of galactic existence and that is my intention to change. Why? Because I feel there’s a common ground we can find in our cosmos. The place where a new level of understanding in our humanity is just waiting to be discovered and if we are going to get serious about finding it, there are a couple of important tools we’ll need to navigate these universal waters - a map to show us where we are going and tell us where we’ve been along with a compass to provide direction. Universal Flow Theory has both of these to offer so let us begin with the compass and similar to its four cardinal points, UFT has four natural progressions that will keep us on course:
Natural Progressions in UFT (first 3):
ESSENCE OF TIME & SPACE:
Space*Time 1D → 2D → 3D → 4D Spacetime (proportionality constant)
CURRENTS OF EXISTENCE:
Eventful → Galactic → Stellar → Biologic → Technologic
LAYERS OF CREATION:
Universe → Galaxy → Star → Planet → Life
Why this course?
Well, any real approach to explaining our reality must respect its 14 billion year timeline and in my mind the simplest way to understand this evolving universe is to see it as a process of becoming itself over time with a life all its own. Similar to how we go through distinct stages of growth in the progression of our own lives (infancy, adolescence, old age, etc.) our universe has gone through stages in its lifetime as well - an unfolding of being that in both cases began embryonic. At least according to Big Bang theory founded on the idea of George Lemaître’s Primeval Atom, or what we can think of as an infinitesimal seed sprouting from the ground of its quantum creation and heading towards a knowable cosmic destiny we are watching unfold. I say knowable because an unbelievable amount of work has gone in to the understanding of this material universe we occupy and how the universal body has grown and will age over time has been made pretty clear by science. What’s really not understood is our ability to actually know this, to comprehend how our conscious capacity works in conjunction with these physical bodies (us and the universe) and that is one thing Universal Flow Theory is attempting to do - provide some direction as to how, when and where the centerpiece of our consciousness emerges and evolves in the field.
This physical field we observe is 46 billion light years out to its cosmic horizon which tells us the observable universe is currently 92 billion in diameter, with a light year being how far light travels in a single year equal to 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. Light’s fast and the space it reveals to our eyes is vast, and just like you were not born into adolescence the cosmos was not born into the stelliferous existence we witness either. You, me and everything we see is in a process of becoming what it will be tomorrow and so the universe needed to work itself up into these star-studded island chains of galactic structure, meaning there was a time when the seascape wasn’t as big and the islands were nowhere to be found; physical form in its infancy more like a seething ocean saturated with elementary ingredients driven by powerful currents swirling, churning, and pulling these building blocks together to form the galactic foundation upon which higher layers of creation would arise.
4 Pillars of the Big Bang
1 HUBBLE-LEMAÎTRE LAW 2 NUCLEOSYNTHESIS 3 MACRO STRUCTURE 4 COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND
Finding our bearings
Today we find ourselves in an observable patch of the seascape, meaning there is an unobservable part that lies beyond the horizon and as far as the 4 pillars above go, we’ve already got a handle on #3 with this island-chain analogy and to make the transition to #1, get your mind flying at paragliding height above this endless 360 degree archipelago when everything suddenly goes pitch black, and as you try to adjust to the smothering darkness all at once every island lights up in dazzling arrays. Looks like star creation, and putting aside the fact photons which carry starlight have to travel to reach our eyes, we assume immediate illumination of all islands here to understand the Hubble-Lemaître Law as the observation that every one of them is continuously moving away from us as water fills the gap, and the farther out we look the faster these structures are retreating within the volume of an ever-increasing global ocean.
Image Credit: IllustrisTNG Galaxy Simulation - TNG COLLABORATION
Visualizing our universe on this macrocosmic level is powerful because at a bird’s-eye view like this we can get up overtop of the immense heaven our supercluster is called and look down on it like a supreme observer. The human imagination is incredible as we physically exist down on the shores of Laniakea, but can zoom out mentally to picture it belonging to what’s known as the cosmic web - a network structure (see image) built by galaxy clusters linked via filaments of hydrogen gas and separated by giant voids, or deep ocean in our seascape similarity.
Edwin Hubble’s observation of galaxy recession in 1929 told us our universe is in fact expanding, and then in the late 1990’s it was discovered unexpectedly to be accelerating in its expansion, so much so that galaxies at the edge will eventually be pushed one by one out of our field of information as their light is redshifted beyond sight; an accelerating expansion of space that began billions of years ago thought to be caused by an unseen dark energy that is perpetually increasing - this constant energy density accumulation that pushes the galaxies apart as it dominates the universe globally and when we step back and really look at it, the islands are shrinking.
Matter & Energy in an Increasing Volume
Mass/Energy Distribution
Dark is Unseen not Evil
ORDINARY & DARK MATTER
Constant mass/energy
Decreasing density
DARK ENERGY
Increasing energy/mass
Constant density
Energy Density = 1
Immersed in a Sea of Potentiality
One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of a whirlpool is: water moving rapidly in a circle so as to produce a depression in the center into which floating objects may be drawn and when we compare this description to our gargantuan galaxy it fits more than just the Milky Way’s spiral nature and swirling clockwise motion, as the depression in the center screams black hole and the floating objects suggest the many star systems our galaxy contains. Like the Galactic they belong to, these star systems look like currents of existence in their own right to which we belong - what we can see as the Stellar and by current I mean attractor, strange ones, at least for galaxies.
To some, Universal Flow Theory might sound a little fantastical with terminology it uses like layer of creation; new and symbolic vocabulary that isn’t just fancy window dressing, and the Galactic attractor is not strange because I’m presenting it here as a current of our existence either. More specifically, strange attractors are known to determine the long-term behavior of dynamical systems and they emerge naturally out of Chaos theory which seems to work itself nicely into the cosmology (see Quad #2).
To get a feel for the relevance of these attractive currents in the unfolding of our existence, let us take a quick trip to the core of our physical form to expose the atoms we are made of, the simplest and most abundant being hydrogen containing a single electron surrounding a nucleus of a solitary proton which itself is composed of three quarks - elemental material amounting to octillions of these fundamental quarks and electrons in the makeup of every human being with all of us carried on multiple currents. If you don’t believe this just think about our obvious addiction to technology because the Technologic is one too and in regards to the elementary ingredients that make you, they have never left the Milky Way; bound to the Galactic for over 13 billion years now and to the Stellar for the last 4.6 billion - two currents of existence determining the long-term behavior of physical systems they control and upon which our lives depend.
All things being equal, what if we physically escaped…Got ourselves out of this solar system? At that point we would be free of the Stellar and simply confined to the Galactic right? We could and we would, getting ourselves to interstellar space where we avoid being captured by other stellar objects floating around the whirlpool while steering clear of the central black hole at all costs. What about breaking the attraction of the galaxy, transcending interstellar space in favor of intergalactic space, would that give us freedom from all attractors? Nice thought but no, because we cannot get off the trolley tracks of the biggest current of them all, the eventful flow of the entire universe itself which is essentially the arrow of time - the foundational current of our existence called the Eventful.
There is a lot to discuss moving forward, but all we would achieve in getting off the island (exiting the Laniakea supercluster) is wind up in an ocean of dark energy and now would be a good time to present a new take on what’s been called the biggest unsolved problem in physics.
A SUPERCLUSTER SWIM
DARK ENERGY:
THINK OF IT AS THE DARK BLUE OCEAN
DARK MATTER:
THE BLUE-GREEN SEAFOAM & BEACH
BARYONIC MATTER:
THE ISLAND AND ITS OUTCROPPINGS WITH THE MILKY WAY A LARGE ROCK ON THE BEACH
Thinking back to the section that preceded this one with the chart showing the matter and energy distribution of the universe, physics presently has it down to three components known as dark energy, dark matter, and baryonic matter (ordinary matter making galaxies, stars, planets, human beings, etc.). If you’ve ever heard we only see about 5% of the universe, it is because baryonic matter makes up just 4.9% of the total mass/energy density as per the chart. The universe is pretty straightforward especially at the macrocosmic scale, however 95% is still technically unknown and sometimes simply changing the way we think about a problem can help us solve it.
YOU COULDN’T BE ANYMORE INSIDE THIS UNIVERSE THEN YOU ARE RIGHT NOW AND IT COULDN’T BE ANYMORE INSIDE OF YOU
It is important to note here that quantum physics tells us empty space is not actually empty, meaning there are fleeting particles this zero-point sea of darkness contains that pop into and out of existence all over the universe, in every cubic centimeter of empty space, and over this total distribution it has a massive effect - a constant flux everywhere in what is understood as the quantum vacuum. This is what the global ocean appears to be and in the places where matter takes up space, this mass/energy density is holding off a dark energy that cannot penetrate. Looking from above again we can imagine how mass density repels the increasing ocean of zero-point energy allowing islands to remain intact across a seascape that can be seen as a topology - what UFT describes as a playing field of possibility and human beings operate upon it at the highest level we know.
Getting outside the Milky Way and into intergalactic space lands us in our Local Group of about 50 galaxies where our own galaxy and its some 300 billion stars is not the biggest with supremacy going to Andromeda carrying about a trillion suns. Beyond this dominant pair of spirals it tapers off dramatically to the next largest being the Triangulum spiral carrying about 40 billion stars with the remainder predominantly dwarf galaxies that orbit the big two. We can picture the ocean as kind of shallower here with more stuff floating around the island-like spirals as compared to the deep abyss where dark energy dominates, and because of the heavy influence of mass density surrounding this 10 million light-year wide group of galaxies they will never be pulled apart from one another. In other words this association is bound with the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy sharing a common center of mass that will cause them to collide in billions of years time to become what is known as an elliptical galaxy - a roughly oval shaped conglomeration of stars that erases the beautiful whirlpool features of the spirals that make them. Our whole local group will one day become a single outcropping.
Mathematics in the Music of a Universal Swan Song
To get a visual of where I am headed with this dark energy hypothesis, imagine all twenty pieces in the painting getting pushed farther apart over time and shrinking slowly to their centers as the ocean of black grows around them incessantly - to a point in the far flung future where the whole cosmic system begins to look quantum again as tiny bits of mass density remain floating in a sea of near-infinite potentiality (dark energy).
“Twenty Pieces” courtesy Peter Robertson: westcoastartgroup.com
In today’s universe powerful currents of mass density flow against the increasing volume of dark energy whose relentless nature will eventually pull Laniakea apart. Imagine the eight Hawaiian islands getting pushed away from each other over time as the dominant ocean grows causing galaxies to separate and shrink, and by shrinking I don’t mean diminishing in terms of getting lighter because matter is constant in mass. In other words, the dark energy proliferation is not reducing the mass of matter, rather the increase in energy is decreasing the overall portion of the total universe said matter takes up and maybe this relentless dark energy acceleration is just expansion in disguise, meaning what if the universe is taking on energy from its surroundings? What I am hypothesizing here as per the infographic below is that our physical reality flows full circle and returns to the infinite potentiality from which it came (see Quad View #1) - a discrete universe returning to a continuous multiverse or infinite plane. In other words, at this stage in our universe’s dark energy dominant determinism all material form is swimming in a sea of pure potentiality as the universe takes on dark energy but holds its matter tight within a closed system. Density is Destiny and the system we are in will endure as long as it can, holding off the inevitable as the universe evolves over a seemingly endless amount of time before flowing out in a Big Release.
Ultimate Fate of the Universe
The physical capacity of our cosmos is finite and once it reaches zero the mathematical proportionality in UFT’s equation cannot hold.
POSSIBILITY (y) = SPACETIME (k) × CAPACITY (x)
Capacity (x) ≠ 0 causing proportionality constant of Spacetime (k) to release as universe returns to an infinite Potentiality.
Cosmic Expanse to Quantum Root
Imagine a measureless expanse with the cosmos winding down to its final breaths, long past the last stars turning off where any mass density is reduced to miniscule quantities flowing out to equilibrium and given its homogenous past, tiny bits of matter here are tiny bits of matter everywhere as the infinitesimal seeds are in position to be planted. However long it takes Capacity (the ability to become or do work) in the universe to eventually reach zero-point, its last breath is taken as the proportionality constant of Spacetime vanishes (Capacity ≠ 0). Our Cosmic expanse is returning to the Quantum root from which it came and any matter shared is an injection of energy with new universes born across the estuary in what looks like a fractal cosmology. Maybe it’s a kaleidoscope of intelligence we are witnessing here and thinking from the end can help us find a new beginning - the universe a treasure trove to explore and digging through perhaps we’ll find ourselves in the realization that with our place understood there is nothing we can’t do.
Copyright © David J. McKnight 2020