What if the universe were getting warmer?
When we seek to pursue a prevailing theory, we often forget to ask all of the questions because we are too quick to deem so many of them irrelevant in the favored context. This is a function of logic that serves us well in reality where we don’t have to spend time pondering why fish don’t climb mountains because we have observed and set clear boundary conditions n both fish and mountains alike.
This same function however can present a problem once we begin dealing in the abstract, because we go from dealing in observable reality to dealing in assumptions. Which in truth is a very normal process of logic, but when we deal in abstract theories like the Big Bang we treat the assumptions like observable reality because in the mind of some people they are reality due to the nature of scientific process and are thus all but proven observable.
It is this quality of being we can assign to abstract assumptions that allows us to then disregard entire avenues of inquiry when we are pursuing questions in fields such as science because it’s rigor and meticulous methods mean, we often assume, it has arrived at the best provable assumptions already. Therefore asking other questions which may run counter to given assumptions is tantamount to asking why can’t a fish out run a gazelle.
It’s not as simple as that though, and everyone knows it. Take the temperature of the universe for example, right now it’s about 3 degrees above absolute drop dead zero, or 2.73 degrees Kelvin to be more precise.
How did it get to that temperature, and which way is it going?
Good question, there are basically two paths to take, right, it’s getting warmer or it’s getting cooler, a very binary kind of question. In one scenario the universe is getting cooler, which means it goes from infinity Kelvin, literally infinite hot, down to just 2.73 degrees K in the space of about 13.7 billion years.
In the other the universe is getting warmer, you don’t start at infinity cold however which is an interesting and relevant distinction, you start at absolute zero, -459 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Kelvin, the coldest thermodynamic temperature matter can have after which there is no measurable heat from a system, and go north from there. So from zero K to 2.73 K over that same space of 13.7 billion years.
.Which one seems the most likely? Intuitively the most likely scenario would appear to be the universe is getting warmer because that’s the scenario that doesn’t involve starting from infinity, and therefore most easily fits within our timescale. As well that would make sense in the context of observable quasars and stellar formations, all of which are massive heat sources pumping endless quantities of heat energy into the space. We here on Earth bath in it and depend on it every day so we know that’s happening, arguably we exist to ask the question because that’s happening.
Would the universe still expand if it were getting warmer? Again the intuitive answer would be yes, because everything we can see, all the matter around us expands as it gets warm, arguably the space between atoms increases even as the system responds to an increase in thermal load. We have no evidence to say the universe wouldn’t expand as it got warmer and at least anecdotal evidence to suggest that it would.
So to warm a thermally expanding universe all the stars, and the quasars, all the black holes which have ever collapsed or giant blue stars that have gone hyper nova in unimaginably hot flashes of light which have ever existed across all of time and space have managed to heat the entire universe by exactly 2.73 degrees while causing it to expand. That doesn’t seem like a leap of logic, to me it seems reasonable, even symmetrical, and fits well within the Standard Model. Intuitively it would seem to make sense.
Yet according to the Big Bang, it would also be wrong.
The Big Bang starts at infinitely hot and says the universe is getting cooler. In that scenario the Universe starts at infinite degrees Kelvin and works it’s way south to our current temperature of 2.73, literally the last fraction of a fraction of an instant before the universe freezes completely on a linear temperature gradient. Obviously this gradient trend to cooler hasn’t been linear in the Big Bang history of the universe, it has to go really, really fast and then slow way, way down to give us the temp we have now.
Just like in the warming universe, the cooling universe of the Big Bang, the one we live in now, is also expanding but getting cooler as it does. In fact the mechanism of cooling the hot universe is tied to the expansion itself, making room for heat energy to become more diffuse. Yet the heat itself doesn’t drive the expansion, in a cooling universe you don’t get use that energy your trying to lose it, that means you have to use magic to expand the universe while it cools because nothing else, no other system we can observe, works that way.
Not only do you have to use magic to expand the space because you can’t use the thermal energy, you have to comprise most of the space of magic energy just to hold it all together and keep it going. In the case of the Big Bang that magic is called Dark Energy, which is the unknown and undescribed force that drives the expansion of the universe as it cools according to conventional accepted scientific theory.
In the cooling scenario the universe has to not only shed the infinite heat of the Big Bang, but also shed all the heat from every heat source which has ever existed in the entire universe since the beginning of time itself, and get rid of it all over the space of just the 13 billion years, and then inexplicably stop, or slow down long enough for us to exist to look at it.
In a warming universe, the warmer it gets the more it expands, every new thermal system adding it’s energy to the void, the further an object the greater the thermal energy would make the universe expand. In a cooling universe every new thermal system means the universe has to become spontaneously more efficient at shedding heat to maintain the pattern of expansion and universal temperature we observe, we need an ever increasing fraction of magic dark energy to drive the system.
Between the two it would seem on the intuitive level the warming universe is the most likely scenario, so it’s easy to assume that science has already ruled this out through rigorous experiment and observation since all we ever hear or see from science is Big Bang, but that would also be wrong. We can’t actually tell if the universe was previously warmer or colder than it is right now, there is anecdotal evidence in both directions, the idea that it was once infinitely hot is an assumption in accordance to the theory of the Big Bang.
It is because of that assumption we rarely if ever ask questions whose answers could run counter to it with any seriousness, they become a form of entropy, the waste heat from our intellectual probing of the universe. This is a disservice to the universe because we must ask all the questions when the observable crosses over into the assumptive. When we don’t ask all the questions we fail in our task because our answer, though ostensibly theoretically correct, is also incomplete. Has to be incomplete because we are working with assumptions and treating them like observable reality.
I’m saying the Big Bang is wrong and the universe is getting warmer, I’m saying when solving a puzzle as significant and complex as how did we get this universe and where did it come from we need to ask the all questions, all the questions, when we go from the observable to the assumptive. Let the answers define our path forward rather than only ask the questions we think we need answers to because that is an assumption based on another assumption and now we are getting way out into left field in terms of what we can prove even when it looks like we are proving it.
I’m saying we should not stop asking all the questions, and it’s okay to want to know we asked them all and had them satisfactorily answered before we get to say we understand the mysteries and the origins of the universe that surrounds us. Even questions like this one which would seem so easy to dismiss.
The only really stupid question is the one we fail to ask…