You would think that with a Big Bang initial stating point, followed by a series of supernovae a little later, that everything would be flying apart, and along roughly radial paths from their “explosion points”. And it is not at all clear how such a “dispersive” set of circumstances could erect such clouds of something or other, light years wide, so that they should end up as relatively stable, and long lasting structures.
There is, of course, the usually proffered “explanation”, which has “quantum fluctuations” present from the very first instant, which therefore, would “build-in” an unavoidable unevenness, and hence lead to many local concentrations. But, lets face it, such is a groundless dream, totally lacking in any concrete evidence – some sort of backwards extrapolation to explain the inexplicable in terms of the current, established Copenhagen prejudices. But that certainly isn’t it!
Now, the very fact that the clouds are opaque to light indicates that they must include particles of Matter (i.e. dust of solid elements) that are much larger than Hydrogen or Helium atoms, and hence could only have been produced from matter building stars in supernovae. For, current theories have all elements above H and He, produced by fusion in a series of sequential star forms, and finally dispersed, far and wide, by Supernovae.
Yet though that may explain our clouds’ contents, it really doesn’t explain their seemingly static state, which can be confirmed by that other consensus theory, that put down the demise of such stability to the shockwaves of subsequent supernovae, that break the “balancing stability”, and start a gravity-based concentration around local centres. For, with that theory, it is admitted that Gravity-caused aggregation alone is insufficient to end that state.
So, how did these clouds come to be in such a state originally?
Let us initially take some of the usual ideas and where it seems appropriate, add a few more.
The concept of a Big Bang of Pure Energy alone surely has to bite the dust? It is an internally contradictory idea that has been patched up with various speculative add-ons – the most significant one being that it didn’t expand into a pre-existing and totally Empty Space, but actually created Space itself as part of the same Big Bang process.
So, from a vanishingly tiny dot (the Physical Singularity) we have Energy, sufficient to construct a whole Universe, which, nevertheless, was full(?) of “quantum fluctuations”, and created Matter as it also created its own, required Space.
NOTE: In a nutshell this has Energy from Nothing making all Space also out of Nothing, and producing Matter as it went: an interesting Origin, don’t you think?
It was certainly NOT, we are assured, any sort of explosion, for that would require both pre-existing Matter and Space. Instead, we are told, it was a kind of emanation(?) of Pure Energy, creating Space and Matter as it went: a whole Universe, its actual Space and absolutely all of its contents, had spewed out of Nothing! But, surely creating-Matter is NOT merely the reverse of creating-Energy-from-Matter as in Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs? The pre-requisites for both of these are both Matter and Space.
So, just how does disembodied, Pure Energy condense(?) into Matter? And what is the Form of that Matter when it is first produced?
The problem is that Fusion needs Matter to work!
Indeed, it fuses smaller units together to make larger units, but with a necessary loss of some of the matter involved into Energy. You cannot reverse that to get Matter out of Energy alone! And what do they mean by “concentrate” or “condense”? How do you squeeze Energy until it produces Matter? Or is it somehow self-squeezing? Do they mean that after a certain, threshold density of Energy it becomes stable Matter?
But surely as all this energy was originally in “zero” Space, and then continuously had more and more Space as the process progressed, doesn’t that mean that the energy-density MUST be getting less and less, and will never again reach those earliest levels?
The received wisdom (if we allow a temporary slipping into “explosive” ideas) is that Hydrogen and Maybe Helium were produced by the Big Bang, though clearly some even smaller “bits” would have had to have been produced first, as both Hydrogen and Helium are combined entities.
So, in spite of these clear anomalies, let us initially stick with the consensus scenario, and have unevenness from the start, and as soon as Matter was created, it started to pull together in the more dense parts of the density spread. The idea is that these would very rapidly grow into stars of truly immense size, and as that volume increased, accelerate through the stars history, so that they would very quickly (in cosmological terms) exhaust all the matter-growing phases producing Helium, Carbon, Oxygen, and so on all the way to Iron, before really exploding in a truly giant Supernova.
Of course several of these would go through these stages more or less simultaneously, so even the explosion-less Big Bang soon produces massive actual explosions, which according to current theory are the ONLY situations in which all the higher elements are produced (remember, our Cosmic Clouds are of dust).
We now have, therefore a cataclysm of Supernovae – all exploding outwards, but as yet still in a relatively tiny Universe (compared to now). Clearly, these explosions would “bump into” one another, and in certain areas “cancel out”. Perhaps this was the actual source of our vast, light-years-across, dust clouds, which, in consequence become relatively stable: They might, as whole “clouds”, still be moving, but internally the individual movements of the components from both involved Supernovae may approach a “random mix”, and thus produce a stable overall state within the cloud [Both gravity pulls and collisions could in time achieve such a state].
This, I’m afraid, is the best that I can do with current theories, though I must admit that I cannot really agree with the majority of their “standing-ground” – their founding assumptions. For, they are clearly purely formal and abstract, indeed mathematical bases.
By abandoning “old-fashioned” “Physical Explanations”, and instead relying exclusively upon Equations, as the true essences driving Reality, they have abandoned a materialist standpoint for a completely idealist one.
All their bases are purely formal abstractions, which they develop in solely mathematical ways.
The trick of turning multi-dimensions as used to cope with multi-variable relations, into a many dimensional Universe, and thereafter develop from their Equations and formal extensions, purely formal “explanations” for everything, places them squarely in Ideality – where mathematicians dwell, turning their backs upon Reality, which is the only land for real physicists.
The turning point was, without any doubt, the victory of the Copenhagen standpoint of Bohr and Heisenberg at Solvay in 1927, as an almost inevitable development of the mathematical achievements of Planck with his Quantum, and Einstein with his purely formal Relativity.
The slope became so steep it was impossible to stop the slide, without directly questioning the enormous formal (mathematical) inroads into Physics, which the vast majority depended so vitally upon, and the whole Sub Atomic Community began the slide, headlong down to Idealism.
To those who disagree with this standpoint, may I mention String Theory, the Higgs’ Boson, Theories of Everything, involving 11 (or more) dimensions, Branes, Parallel Universes to name only a few...
Are these not purely formal speculations without any real Physics whatsoever? Of course, they are!
Mathematics, as a discipline itself, deals in the purest of Forms, which they get from glimpses in Reality, and which are increasingly “nailed down” by the most careful construction and maintenance of Domains to eliminate almost everything but a final, formal relation. What crucifies such methods is that these “farmed” results are then believed to be the eternal, underlying truths of Reality.
They aren’t!
So, the current theoretical position is an amalgam of constantly new facts, due entirely to mammothly developed technology, and the farming of the Domains studied, and the purely formal relations thus extracted, though, of course, always related to those supplied by the mathematicians, who have been studying such Forms, in their own pure terms alone, for millennia.
Indeed, the new legitimacy inverts the established Scientific Method, by expecting to find essences and even new entities, hidden in their beloved Equations, rather than in Reality. While, at the same time, constraining experimental work into the ever narrower, and higher energy area of forced collisions as THE only experiments worth pursuing. And all that is founded upon the assumption (which has become a Principle) of Plurality – where found relations are presumed to be independent of their contexts, and hence actually eternal, additive components, capable of producing any complex situation.
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