Thomas Aquinas, Explorer of the galaxy
Part one in the Thomas Aquinas series
Tommaso d'Aquino, Esploratore della galassia
Copyright
Juan Luis Rico
[email protected]
This thing, like all things. For Ann.
Questa cosa, come tutte le cose. Per Ann.
Table of Contents
Chapter One:
Brother Lewis, Introduction to Modern Space Time Physics
Chapter Two:
Sister Jones
Chapter Three:
Abbess Joan Van Der Nehh, History and Economics of Space Flight
Chapter Four:
Hakham Katz, the Drake Equation
Chapter Five:
Brother Sebastian, Brown Dwarves
Chapter Six:
Beautiful Mind
Chapter Seven:
The Great Leap
Chapter Eight:
Intelligence
Chapter Nine:
Tommaso d'Aquino
Chapter Ten:
Azire and Nine steps
Chapter Eleven:
Everywhere You Look
Chapter Twelve:
Apocalypse
Chapter Thirteen:
Expansion and Control
Chapter Fourteen:
Rebellion, False Pope
Chapter Fifteen:
Clevern
Chapter Sixteen:
Pope Anacletus the Third
Chapter Seventeen:
Damned Machines
Author’s notes
Chapter One
Brother Lewis, Introduction to Modern Physics
The year 2432, Catholic University, the Vatican
Franciscan Brother Lewis begins from the lectern.
“The odds of something popping into existence out of nothing are not zero. They are nearly zero. But given enough time, the near uncertainty eventually becomes a certainty. In much the same way that the vacuum energy virtual particles pop into then out of existence. This is described famously in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.”
“13.854318 Billion years ago, the universe did not exist.”
“Then, it did.”
“There are no photons. No Electrons. No Gluons. No life. No energy, at least not as we would understand it. Nothing but a super homogenous and isotropic soup of super dense and super-hot nothingness. Normal physics is not much use to adequately describe the first moments of our new universe. It simply existed. We know this because it had too. We don’t have adequate math or science to describe what it looked like at this moment. There is no surviving clues or evidence of the first moments of the universe.”
“Then, it inflates. The universe has a shape. At 10 to the minus 37 seconds. Time means nothing as yet to the early universe. This is but a modern estimate of the time taken from our modeling and supercomputer simulations. The universe goes from super-hot and super-dense, but incalculably small, to having a shape. The universe is completely uniform in all directions. It is homogenous. Look any direction, and everything is the same. There are no structures. There are no patterns. The universe grows faster than modern physics can be used as a tool to describe. Modern physics can take a hike and come back in a bit when things settle down.” Brother Lewis smiles so large his teeth are clearly visible.
A few of the students’ chuckle.
“The universe, at 10 to the minus 37 seconds, is a sea of rapidly expanding isotropic mass and energy… Faster than the speed of light. Photons haven’t been created yet. After all, the universe is uniformly super hot and super dense material.
If it helps, visualize something the size of the solar system. Our sun, our eight planets… Mercury, Venus, Earth, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. Then, add Pluto, Zena, Xeres, and the rest of the OORT cloud family of planetoids and objects. The cloud of comets and other debris that extends from our Sun almost but not entirely out into space far enough to reach our nearest neighbor solar system, Alpha Centauri.”
“Imagine that the solar system reaches almost but not quite to our next neighbor. Past the Solar termination shock and the Heliopause… out into what is essentially empty space no longer under the direct influence of our sun. Out to the edge of the extended Oort cloud with its random icy comets and unattached objects collected from the vastness of mostly empty space.”
“You should be imagining something that is over three light years in length. Closer to four light years in length. That is the size of the universe at 10 to the minus 37 seconds. Normal rules don’t apply. Inflation of the early universe is fast. Faster than anything that has ever happened since. Faster than light. Billion and billions of times faster than light. Fast. Hot. Dense. That’s the early universe. Scientists like to call this exponential growth. Really, it is significantly more than that. Its growth on a scale never before seen or since.”
“The first of our modern rules of physics sneaks a peak at the early universe right around this time. Uniformity is not natural. Chaos is the normal state of things. Out of the absolute homogeneous nature of the early universe, some small but significant changes start to happen.”
“Quantum vacuum fluctuations pop incredibly small and incredibly short-lived sub atomic particles here, and there in the mix of isotopic mass. Well, it’s not mass yet – let’s just call it stuff. Symmetry starts to break. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle makes its appearance in the early super inflation of the universe. The Uniformity of the universe is challenged by small differences in the temperature gradient among the super-dense, super-hot inflation of space and time. These differences are caused by random extremely small differences in the spin of particles jammed densely into each other’s orbit. The differences created by randomly created virtual particles that pop out of nothingness from the zero point energy of the vacuum. Particles that disappear into nothingness as fast as they are created.”
“Differences as small as .00000000000000000000000001 Kelvin between different locations in the early inflation cause ripples in the homogeneity of inflation. These small differences in inflation lead to change which causes other and more pronounced changes in inflation. Change creates more change.”
“Simple and insignificant differences in the inflation of space time lead to the early universe expanding into inflation unevenly. The universe has a shape now, and it is misshapen and getting more so. It is no longer a perfect sphere. The sphere has bumps and nodules and protuberances. And it continues to expand, to inflate. It continues to be misshapen. Change begets change.”
“At 10 to the minus 6 seconds, universe inflation stops. By this I mean, it is no longer inflating past the bounds of modern accepted physics. In its first millionths of a second, the universe is nearly five light years across. At the 10 to the minus 6 seconds, the universe is approximately 5 light years across and still growing, but it is growing at a more acceptable speed. Something we can visualize. It slows. It is now something we can measure. The universe is expanding at the speed of light. Let’s stop a moment at 10 to the minus 6.”
Brother Lewis begins to walk the rows of the classroom. The hem of his rough spun robe barely touching the smooth granite floor of the school room. The tassel of his belt swinging awkwardly this way and that, like a metronome. It appears to time the cadence of his delivery. He is a large man. Intimidatingly large. His belly extends well below his crudely fashioned rope belt. He is light on his feet, though. The Franciscan University middle linebacker still hulks beneath the layer of fat and under the belly. He towers over most men at just over two meters in height. His unique mixture of premature balding and wildly unkempt hair makes for quite a sight. Dandruff cove
rs the shoulders of his robe.
“The universe is 5 light years across almost instantaneously. Inflation. Inflation of space, time, everything. Super inflation. Within millionths of a second. Imagine you are on the left of that 5 light years and someone you know is on the right of that 5 light years. Let’s wave at each other. Hi! The visual image of your waving travels towards your friend. You might think that they will see you in five years when the light, the photons from your image catches up to them. Photons still don’t exist, but bear with me, here. This is a thought experiment.
But remember, the universe is expanding in all directions at the speed of light. Your friend is moving away from you at the speed of light. Well, they really aren’t. But new universe is being created out of nothing in all directions at the speed of light. It is unrolling new universe if that visual helps you more. They are neither moving away from you nor you from them… but the universe is growing, or unrolling, and taking you both along with it. Every light minute the photons of your image travels toward your friend. The distance between you grows faster than the ground your photons can cover.
Your friend will spend the age of the universe looking for you and never see you. Your image. Your photons. Let that sink in. There is more universe every moment. The universe continues to grow, to unroll… my mental image is of a balloon… continuously inflating. The edge of the universe, if such a thing can be conceived in our mind's eye, is growing as you write and I speak.”
“One edge of the universe will never ever get to wave back to the other. This growth, this expanding… has been underway for the 13.8 billion years since the universe sprang out of the mathematical uncertainty of the incredibly long odds of ever being created.”
“One edge of the universe now is greater than 46 billion light years across its furthest point, plus the original 5 light years of Inflation from the far edge of one side to the other side. And the growth of the universe and the distances between the many trillions of galaxies has every indication of never slowing down.”
“Everything is moving farther and farther away from everything else. This is all residual energy from the initial inflation of the early universe. As it works out in practice, the further two things are away from each other in the universe, the faster they are moving apart from each other. This is measured today in the red shift of light from distant suns and galaxies.”
“Imagine the universe is similar to a balloon. The skin, or the outside of the balloon expands, and the balloon gets larger as the air is added. If you were on the skin of the balloon, you would move outward. Objects on the skin of the balloon on the other side would move outward as well. And they would appear to move away faster than objects nearer to you in balloon universe. This is as close an approximation as I can give you without involving complex math and science. Obviously, we will do this math later in the course.”
“Let’s return to 10 to the minus 6 again. The inflationary universe is releasing its grip to accepted physics. Some modern math will work for us here. Some modern interpretations of subatomic models will also work here. Out of the homogenous super-hot super dense materials of the early universe subatomic particles form.”
“Quarks and gluons leap into being and react with each other at relativistic speeds. Baryons like protons and neutrons form from the rapidly colliding and relativistic reacting quarks and gluons. It is an exciting time and many things are happening in the rapidly expanding super-hot super dense solid plasma. Before the first second of the age of the new universe passes… Nearly all of the new subatomic particles that were created are destroyed. All of the protons and neutrons are destroyed… and then the electrons and the anti-electrons almost all annihilate each other in a universe wide mass set of collisions and they lay waste to each other in numbers too large to visualize. Only one subatomic particle in 10 to the 10th power escapes this destruction. The universe continues to expand.”
“For several more minutes the universe expands and subatomic particles collide with and destroy each other. The universe continues to be super-hot and super dense. The density of the universe is approximately the same now as the density of lead. That’s a computer simulation swag. Lead, of course, does not exist yet. Nothing on the periodic table exists just yet. Just the building blocks that will be used in the periodic table. However, every particle of everything that currently exists has been created. Not only have they been created they have survived the largest mass destruction of matter ever. Every particle that makes up your finger-nail survived a one in 10 to the 10th lottery to avoid destruction in the early moments of the universe.”
“Several more minutes’ pass. The universe is 8 or 9 minutes old now. The universe is a near homogenous billion degrees Kelvin. Neutrons form with protons to form our first elements. Deuterium and Helium form, but the overwhelmingly greatest numbers combine into hydrogen. This period takes 380,000 years. Expansion and continually forming Hydrogen and a little bit of Deuterium and Helium. 380,000 years of element creation. 380,000 years of growth through expansion of the edge of the universe in all directions at the speed of light.”
“Radiation decouples from the expanding elements explosively at the end of 380,000 years. This is the echo of the creation of the universe. The hard background radiation created in the early universe expansion after the period of Inflation. This is the cosmic background radiation… and you can hear it today. That’s right. If you tune an analog radio or a primitive television tuner, you will get static between transmitting channels. That static is a byproduct of the early expansion of the universe. That static was created as hard radiation in the early universe expansion and it has taken every bit of the 13.8 billion years since expansion to reach you and your ancient television or radio. Cosmic background radiation is the universe waving back.”
“Back to 10 to the minus 6 seconds for a moment. The rapidly expanding universe has long since lost its homogenous uniformity. Differences in temperature and density of the rapidly expanding plasma solid results in more matter and energy in this direction or that… These differences in the makeup of the early plasma solid and the amount of energy and matter sent in different directions in the early expansion lead directly to the creation of galaxies as we know them.”
“Huge clumps of material and energy will combine out of the uneven distribution of this early universe plasma solid material. Fractures in the amount of energy and material evident here in the expansion will dominate the Universe's structure at all times. If we look at the sky with a radio telescope and measure the amounts of cosmic background radiation today, we can map the amount of matter created by the early expansion and see the resulting non-homogeneous distribution of matter across the known universe. Remember, we can only see a portion of the universe. Far more than half of it will never be visible to us. As the universe expands, we can wave and watch… but we will never see the other half wave back. The photons will never reach us.”
“But the parts we can see… we can measure and produce maps, and the maps and the math show us the differences in temperature in the early expanding universe in the structures we see today. Differences as slight as .00000000000000000000000001 Kelvin back then dominates the massive structures of the universe we observe today. Structures as massive as hundreds of thousands of light years across, and with masses greater than quintillions of our sun’s mass were created by an almost immeasurable difference in temperature 13.8 billion years ago. This is caused by subtle Heisenberg differences in the orbits of particles that existed only in the first millionths of a second of the early universe.”
“Back at ten to the minus 6 tremendous forces in the expansion and radiation followed by the rapid creation of subatomic particles followed by their overwhelming destruction lead to rips in the actual fabric of space itself. Energies and forces that are so large they are only possible in the earliest moments of the Universes inflation occur. And there are quintillions of tears in the fabric of space. And after a fashion tears in time, space folds in upon itself t
ime and again. Gravity doesn’t exist yet, but after a while, it begins to show its nose under the curtain of creation.”
“Where the boundary of space cannot bear the force of element creation and inflation, the growth of space itself is forced to adapt. Space grows into mathematical absurdities. Branches and bubbles of expansion of the inflationary universe collapse upon themselves or form loops that cancel out. The space of the universe continues to grow and expand, but it also has to accommodate incredibly complex situations that result in a divide by zero or even stranger mathematical paradoxes.”
“Black holes are forced into being. Space and pressure and inflation yield black holes immeasurable. Tremendously dense and so inescapable that even the laws of subatomic binding and gravity and photons bend to their will. Matter is destroyed in mass. Quintillions of black holes form and are flung in all of the directions of the early Universes compass.”
“Black holes collide and consume each other. Black holes gorge themselves on the super dense plasma solids of the early universe. Black holes orbit each other in pairs and triplets and even more complex relationships. The early universe black holes are scattered among the galaxies. Our own Milky Way galaxy is rich with archaic, early universe black holes. We have several dozen archaic black holes for study in containment here at the University. We use them to fuel our industries. A small, but steady, stream of matter into the event horizon of a black hole creates enough Hawking radiation to run secondary loop turbines with near 100 percent efficiency. This is on a scale large enough to power starships over a kilometer long or entire continents on a planetary scale.”
Thomas Aquinas, Explorer of the galaxy Page 1
