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Page 12.
Chapter 4. Meme Juice, Part I: the Cosmos
 In the 1920s, a young astronomer named Edwin Hubble, using the 100 inch Hooker Telescope, announced that the Milky Way was not the entire universe. It was one of several major discoveries of his generation that would change history. A short while earlier, a Swiss patent office clerk had published his Theory of Relativity, which made the Newtonian universe obsolete as a complete explanation of the universe. Hubble also demonstrated that the incredibly vast universe, in which the Milky Way galaxy was barely a pinprick, was expanding.
By the close of the century, cosmology—the study of the universe—was once again in disarray because of three great enigmas. Science was shocked to discover that not only was the universe expanding, but the rate of expansion was increasing. It was speeding up. How could that be? It seemed a violation of basic laws of science.
Had the extra energy (so-called dark energy) required to accelerate the expansion been hidden somewhere all along? Or was it coming from outside?
But astronomers had not yet officially begun to speak of 'outside.' That would imply that, just as the Milky Way was but a molecule in vast cosmic ocean of stars, now the universe itself was just a molecule in an infinite and eternal ocean of universes.
Beyond 'dark energy' and the accelerating expansion was a third mystery—dark matter. By the end of Hubble's century, scientists had discovered that the mass of the universe was only a few per cent visible. Most of the universe consisted of a previously unknown substance that was unseen and unknowable, which gained the nickname called ‘dark matter’.
As science reeled in disarray at these enigmas, the solution was revealed to be astoundingly simple. The force causing the expansion of the universe to constantly accelerate was none other than gravity, and this gravity was coming from outside the universe.
That—the existence of a larger structure, the realization that our universe is not the whole thing but only a tiny part of it—caused the next revolution in cosmology. It was the understanding, finally, that there exists an infinite and eternal motherverse containing endless universes that are born, live, and die in an endless cycle.
The existence of a larger structure has immediate implications. Since its gravity is pulling our universe apart, and since the dead cinders of our universe will spill out there, the motherverse must contain something that generates gravity. That something is a neither a particle of matter nor energy, but a platelet of pure gravity—the godot. The godot is the irreducible bottom floor of elementary substances. It is so tiny that, if it were a grain of sand, a hydrogen atom next to it would seem as large as the solar system.
Our universe is being pulled apart by the ambient gravity of the motherverse. As the universe expands, pushing its edge (the cosmopause) ever farther and more rapidly outward, the universe decays back into its elemental gravity platelets.
In the motherverse, itself, there are no light or matter—just infinitely many of these platelets (which someone had compared to the black stones in a game of Go, hence 'godots') drifting around in a random Brownian motion. Their drifting is the kinetic energy mentioned. If there is any visible energy, it is the distant glow from stars and galaxies inside universes.
As the godots drift in the motherverse, they gradually gather into clumps. Drifting clumps join other clumps, slowly gathering into a larger and larger gravity locus. A clump of godots grows, slowly at first, then faster and faster, becoming an accretion sphere. Faster and faster, the accretion sphere vacuums more platelets or godots to itself, until it reaches Critical Mass 1 or C-1.
At that point, the overwhelming gravity (still its only property, except all that kinetic energy has become potential energy, a vast amount at C-1) causes the sphere to implode.
At the low point of this inflection, C-2, the pent up energy is so vast that the sphere goes Bang, as in Big Bang. Only it does not quite just explode, based on the evidence of what comes next.
It fragments like a grenade (C-3), throwing out three kinds of debris that can be detected.
The first kind of C-3 (Free) debris are enormous quantities of free godots or platelets that make up 80% of the universe and are the so-called dark matter, except there is no matter there, just raw gravity, which, in a dark room, seems just like mass. These could poetically be called star dust.
The second kind of C-3 (Heavy) debris are fragments of the accretion sphere that have not yet come apart. They become free-flying, spinning black holes of violent energy and enormous gravity.
The third, and rarest, kind of C-3 (Visible) debris is visible matter. Constituting about 4% of the whole, this is matter whose godot platelets are more loosely stuck together than in the black holes, but they are far more adhesive than the free godots. One could say that, in the Heavy, godots are jammed together, while in the Visible the platelets merely stick to each other.
Seventy-five percent of this intermediate visible matter is hydrogen, 24% is helium, and the remaining 1% is everything else, including people, cats, dogs, planets, and stars. Much of it is captured around the C-3-Heavy black holes. Much of that is energetic and luminous, and gives most galaxies that characteristic shape as multi-armed, whirling pancakes of luminosity. But only a tiny part of a galaxy is thus visible. Looming around the visible stars is a much greater cloud of C-3 Dark, and at the core of the galaxy a great attractor, the C-3 Heavy black hole.
At the bottom floor of 'stuff,' way below baryons and mesons, the terminally small unit is the godot, and both C-3-Heavy and C-3-Visible are ultimately composed of pure gravity (godots) platelets jammed together.
The universe has a transient lifetime that must eventually end (thirty billion years out, perhaps) as the pent up energy from C-1, C-2, and C-3 dissipates. Matter sticks around for a while, but not forever. The great destructor is the ambient gravity of the motherverse, the most powerful force in nature.
Within a universe, visible matter in itself has gravity and tends to lump together. Beyond 80 Jupiters in size, it starts to become a full-fledged star. Between 20 and 80 Jupiters, it forms a brown dwarf. There are smaller and larger animals in the menagerie, including the heavy elements that form earthlike planets, while others form very large, very violent stars like novae and supernovae.
The initial C-3 fragmentation issues a push that geometrically slows down because of the aggregate gravity of the local universe. But the ambient gravity of the motherverse is the most powerful force in nature, and it starts accelerating the process of pulling the universe apart in all directions. (The problem of colliding or even proximate universes is another matter not covered in Mack's meme soup this day).
As the cosmopause rushes ever faster outward in all directions, the architecture of the universe starts to attenuate. Structures fall apart, and the pieces evaporate. Technically, this ultimately becomes about the same thing as entropy. First, the visible stuff disappears. The free godots roam about as star dust. Gradually, what's left of the black holes drifts away and becomes seed material for new universes out in the motherverse. Some of the dark matter platelets of pure gravity thrown out by C-3 may even rejoin those black holes in making a new universe.
This is the whole enchilada. It's an eternal cycle that forms and destroys infinitely many universes in infinitely many places in eternal amounts of time. That is the motherverse.
Mack was about one third done with his breakfast. He continued eating with relish, and could almost feel those powerful memes and tiny Rules popping out of their packages and populating his brain with more information. Now that he understood the universe and the motherverse, he could understand the Temporale.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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