The Perfect Cosmological Principle.

Copernicus overturned the Ptolemaic astronomical assumption that the earth lay at the centre of the universe, and did, like the other planets of the solar system, orbit the sun. Newton considered that the stars also consisted of distant suns similar to our own, because they emitted the same sort of light.

Long after the death of Copernicus we began to speak of The Copernican Principle which states that the earth, or indeed the solar system, does not occupy any sort of special or privileged position within the universe.

With the development of telescopes able to collect light and other forms of radiation from galaxies enormously distant from the Milky Way galaxy in which our solar system resides, it became apparent that the universe appeared more or less isotropic (the same in every direction) and homogenous (made of the same material with the same sort of distribution everywhere).

This led to the assertion of the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks more or less the same everywhere on the large scale. To see this homogeneity you have to look on the scale not of galaxies, but on the scale where the clusters of galaxies and the voids between then begin to look like a fairly uniform sponge cake.

Now the contemporary conventional Cosmological Principle does have one imperfection, most cosmologists currently believe the universe has Anisotropy in Time. They interpret the galactic redshifts and the cosmic microwave background radiation and the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium, to mean that the universe must have expanded from a much smaller and denser version in the distant past. Thus they hypothesise that  about 13.4 billion years ago the universe erupted out of a tiny, probably subatomic sized, condition of almost infinite density and that ever since it has continued to expand and cool and increase in entropy, exhibiting large scale homogeneity at all stages as it does so.

A Perfect Cosmological Principle on the other hand states that the universe will have the same large scale general characteristics not just everywhere, but also everywhen; it has always looked and will always look like it does now on the large scale, giving it spatial and temporal isotropy.

As the expanding-universe hypothesis began to take hold, the Perfect Cosmological Principle became associated with various steady-state theories which attempted to reconcile the idea of expansion with spatial and temporal isotropy. Inevitably this led to awkward ‘fixes’ like the hypothesis of continuous spontaneous creation of matter to fill the expanding space, and gradually the idea got dropped.

However the Perfect Cosmological Principle has recently re-appeared in the Multiverse hypothesis. Partly because current theory cannot address what happened before the big bang, partly because it cannot address how the extraordinary starting conditions of the big bang with its staggering density and miniscule entropy arose, and partly because it cannot address the question of how the universe comes to have its particular fundamental constants; theorists have hypothesizes that all possible universes must exist. Just ‘where’ or indeed ‘when’ these other universes exist and what separates them from this one remains an open question but the presumption exists that universes can maybe multiply by creating black holes or singularities that somehow burst out as new ‘white holes’ or big bangs ‘elsewhere’ to create new universes with perhaps a different set of physical laws and constants.

Thus in some ways the Multiverse hypothesis restores the Perfect Cosmological Principle, as a sufficiently vast multiverse consisting of zillions of universes would presumably exhibit spatial and temporal homogeneity and isotropy on an unimaginably vast scale.

The multiverse idea does begin to look like an unnecessarily extravagant hypothesis, particularly when a simpler one exists to solve many of the questions to which it supposedly supplies an answer.

Consider the Vorticitating Hypersphere Cosmology (VHC) as elucidated in The Apophenion and The Octavo. In this we inhabit a universe which has finite and unbounded extent in space and time and complete spatial and temporal homogeneity and isotropy. Thus it contains all of the space and time which exists and this space and time curves back round on itself under the influence of all the gravity (spacetime curvature) of all the mass and energy within it.

In VHCosmology the universe does not expand, the redshift of distant galaxies arises purely from the spacetime curvature of the hypersphere and remains proportional to distance.

In VHCosmology the apparent acceleration of the apparent expansion of the universe arises as an optical illusion caused by the large scale lensing effect of the small spacetime curvature of the hypersphere of the universe.

In VHCosmology the CMBR consists of trans-antipodal light in thermodynamic equilibrium with the interstellar medium, and thus it represents the universe’s overall (rather chilly) constant temperature.

In VHCosmology the entropy of the universe remains constant on the large scale because neutrinos act as their own antiparticles and so do neutrons according to the supplementary HD8* hypothesis of 3-dimensional time which describes the quanta. Thus the universe has no single lowest energy state into which it can decay and neutronium annihilates to energy rather than imploding into singularities.

In VHCosmology the cosmic hydrogen-helium ratio merely represents an equilibrium established an un-specifiable time ago by the mechanisms of stellar nucleosynthesis and neutron annihilation.

In VHCosmology the universe does not have a beginning or an end, it just goes round and round in its own spacetime without the constraint of having to do exactly the same things in detail each time. The universe did not come from nothingness, we have no reason to consider nothingness as somehow more fundamental than something-ness. On the contrary, everything we can observe has become created from something else.

Phew. So why spend 20 years working on this unpopular set of ideas which may yet become falsified?

Well, the quest to develop a mechanism to explain magic led to questions about the conventional view of one-dimensional, one directional time. This led to a quest to interpret quantum physics in a 3-dimensional time framework which resulted in the HD8 hypothesis, and this in turn led to a questioning of conventional standard cosmology.

Finally the quantum and cosmological hypotheses came together in one single simple equation:

W = (2piGM/Vh)^1/2

This describes the ‘spins’ of all the hyperspherical fundamental quantum particles which make up the universe and the spin (vorticitation) of the entire hyperspherical universe.

Does that look like a Perfect Cosmological Principle? I dunno, but it reminds me of what Hermes Trismegistus said, ‘As above, so below’. Plus geometricating the quanta seems like a better idea than trying to quantize gravity.

So having reconciled my scientific beliefs with my magical beliefs without doing fatal damage to either, I feel that I can proceed with the magic.

Peter J Carroll.