Preface: While this may be destined for the "speculation" bin... I am trying to learn ... not teach. I am trying to validate my understanding, or lack there of, by paraphrasing, using colloquialisms, and analogy. It’s extremely likely the ideas here have already been thoroughly discussed, but I wasn’t able to find them because I didn’t use the same words.
Everyone who has idly played with an empty Masson jar will understand. The jar is empty and presumably has no pressure or vacuum within. If you push down on the middle of the lid it buckles down. When you remove your finger it pops back up with a pleasant metallic pop. (well… pleasant until your three year old does it for an hour strait). I had found a new element to this distraction while the sun, shinning through a window, reflected off the surface of the lid onto the ceiling. The reflection had a definite shape. Now applying pressure to the lid(making it buckle) gives the reflection a whole new configuration. Watching the reflection on the ceiling you can watch as the energy imparted by the push to the lid gets redistributed until the lids is able to pop back up. Well I get my cosmology from Masson jars.
The universe, or the ether that holds the universe, is flat (the neutral state of the jar lid). Then there is a quantum flux… though in my minds eye it’s a large enough “area” simultaneously quantum fluxes to impart the energy needed for our Universe (the finger imparts enough energy to buckle the lid and is then removed as near to simultaneously as can be conceived). Now that the energy is imparted the universe begins to redistribute the energy by making matter and such (the universe is cooling). Once the energy imparted is spread out enough that the thresh-hold can be achieved it will “pop” back into place as a smooth plane once again.
For the longest time I had assumed the universe would end in a giant black hole. As I understand it now, it may very well expand until the “potential” drops below a certain point and then just collapse into nothingness.
Death by entropy.
The roles gravity plays haunts my mind in this. I know gravity to be an illusionary force, a curve in space-time created by mass. The fact that it is both attractive and repulsive nags at my mind… It makes local matter clump together then push everything else away. Clump and push… it seems rather ideal if your goal isn’t to get to 100% entropy (everything spread as much as possible). It would be great/efficient at gathering mass in “clumps” that are less than a certain thresh-hold, and then push everything else away until the energy in anyone one area isn’t enough to stop “the lid from popping back to its original flat plane”.
Questions that still come up in my mind are:
What level of universal expansion will make our lid “pop up”?
Does it have to be the whole universe in one big “pop”? or can some regions “pop” when they are sufficiently empty?
(This one is a stretch!) Is it possible that regions space so full of dark matter/energy are in fact regions of space that already “popped”?
