Over a month ago I wrote the “Theory of Everything for Dummies”, which has been read quite a few times. However, back when I wrote it, I hadn’t realized the geometrical simplicity of refraction. This means that while there was nothing wrong with the text, the description of light was a bit hard to follow.
You see, I didn’t really explain why helices (waves) of light (or more specifically electromagnetic radiation) are sometimes small and sometimes large. This simple question is actually the key to understanding how light and matter interact with each other and why there is matter and not just light.
In an infinitely large universe, all elementary particles of energy could be present as a solid wall of particles, all moving in one direction. But this would require that there was an initial state where there was this wall of particles looked identical to the current state. And as there is nothing else relative to this wall, any state before or after this one looks exactly the same. I.e. there is absolute order and no information, as expertly explain in this Veritasium video.
However, if we consider pretty much any initial state that isn’t completely ordered, there is no wall of particles all moving in one direction. In this case any particle of energy will move in one direction until it collides with another particle of energy. These collisions follow Newton’s laws of motion and behave like billiard balls in three dimensions, but without friction slowing them down.
As we’ve learned that light is a helix moving in matter, we can consider only a limited number of options for these helices. Either they propagate linearly through space, they are absorbed by matter or sometimes diffracted by matter. In absorption, the most basic thing that happens is that the elementary particles of energy are incorporated into the matter that absorbs them. As the particles don’t vanish anywhere in this process, this means that the double-helical entangled string that makes up the supramolecular shell that absorbs this light gets longer. I don’t quite have the words to explain it simply, but this extra relativistic mass causes the supramolecular shell to rotate faster than before. There really isn’t a case where the supramolecular shell would not be rotating before absorption of electromagnetic radiation, as this would require a temperature of 0 Kelvin, which isn’t observed anywhere.
But we’re not that interested in actual light, but the shorter wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, or infrared, microwaves and radio waves. Infrared light is what is emitted by objects that are, pretty much by definition, not glowing hot. Microwave radiation can be generated by a magnetron in most of our kitchens. It is also a found all over the universe as the cosmic microwave background and if ChatGPT hasn’t hallucinated this for me, there more energy in the universe in this form than there is energy in all common (baryonic) matter.
The thing about electromagnetic radiation is that when it gets really wide, it loses its ability to be absorbed by most matter. With radio waves, they can be picked up by antennae and if you put enough mass in front of them, they will be absorbed.
I had already toyed around with the concept of dark matter before. The last time in May. Dark matter must be hydrogen, whose supramolecular shell has grown so large that it can no longer absorb electromagnetic radiation. This means that the electromagnetic radiation either goes past this shell or will scattered by it. Based on the cosmic microwave background, I would hazard a guess that it’s a bit of both, as measurements don’t show that this radiation is uniform throughout the universe.
Following from this simple logic of dark matter being very large supramolecular shells of hydrogen, then dark energy must be something as simple as that. If the lowest energy density observed is with radio waves, then by this logic dark energy must be electromagnetic radiation with a longer wavelength than anything that we can use to detect it. Apparently, the longest wavelength ever detected is the longest Schumann resonance. The longest distinct peak is 7.83 Hz, or about 33 million meters, or about 0.13 light-seconds.
So, without any other knowledge, I’ll hazard a guess that dark energy is something like Schumann resonance. That most energy in the universe exists as extremely large helices of electromagnetic radiation that are otherwise quite inert, but their scattering from mostly dark matter causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Could dark energy be something else? Yes, I guess, but any other option seems much less likely. Will I talk about this in my “Theory of Everything” paper? Probably not. But if I do, I’ll have to be very careful about this. At this point the danger of being badly wrong is still high. And what about the image at the beginning of the post? That’s mostly for the clicks. The number of elementary particles of energy in the helix is mind-numbingly large. Much, much larger than the already mind-numbingly large number of particles in visible light. And why do I use black spheres instead of yellow? Just for symbolism: the particles obviously have no color. And how about the shape? The helices move in the relative vacuum of space, filled mostly with hydrogen, so a ring instead of a stretched helix is pretty accurate. If this ring of dark energy is interacting with matter, it is conceivable that in the process of the impact that causes the acceleration of the expansion of the universe this ring can at least momentarily be a stretched helix.
An interesting question is, whether this refraction with matter can cause the formation of the same quasi-spherical shape that I’ve shown for electrons and protons, but where instead of the strings being entangled into double-helices, the strings making the up the spherical shell of the universe are instead moving at the speed of light perpendicular to the alignment of the strings.
It seems that while I thought I was writing a post about the Theory of Light for dummies, I ended up writing the first ideas of the Theory of Dark Energy. Whether these ideas are clear enough to be understood by dummies is an open question
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