This page contains excerpts from articles that I found on the web that were written about BLP and Mills’s theory.
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The Accelerating Universe
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this year to three astronomers, Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, for discovering that the universe is accelerating as it expands.Accelerating? That is a possibility that big bang theorists considered highly unlikely. After all, if the expansion was due to the big bang, then you expect the universe to decelerate over time as the gravitational pull of the universe weighed in. In fact, Einstein’s General Relativity can only predict two kinds of universes — a universe that is either shrinking, or decelerating in its expansion. But in 1998, these teams independently conducted a series of observations and found to their great surprise that the universe was indeed accelerating. The physics establishment was taken aback. No one, except an almost unheard of theoretical physicist named Randell Mills, had predicted an accelerating universe.
To understand how he did this, we have to take a step back to particle physics. By 1995 Mills had created a theory of fundamental particles so successful that it allows us to predict the classes and masses of fundamental particles, an achievement unmatched by other theories. Part of Mills’ theory is that when a fundamental particle (together with its antiparticle) are created from a photon, in an event called pair production, the particle relativistically contracts spacetime around it, producing a gravitational field. You might say that the particle is “sucking in” space as it is created. The reverse process, the annihilation of particles into energy, does the opposite, “pushing out” spacetime around it.
This was the moment of illumination. Look up at the night sky, and what do you see? Stars, burning in the night. These stars are enormous engines that digest matter and produce light. Our sun transforms hydrogen into helium, pushing together atomic nuclei and releasing some of their mass as energy. Whenever this happens, space is pushed out a little bit. Every second, the sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen. There are hundreds of billions of suns in our galaxy, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Mills realized that the universe is not simply coasting on the energy from a primordial event, it is actively pushing itself out. He had found the reason why the universe is expanding.
He continued to extrapolate from this idea. Suppose the universe digested matter and produced light for billions of years. Eventually, most of the stars would die out, and most of the matter in the universe would be extinguished. The expansion of the universe would slow down and stop.
When the universe reaches its maximum size, it is filled primarily with light. Since the stars have mostly died out, the natural rate of particle production events would dominate. Over time, matter would start to build up again, contracting space and producing gravitational fields, both of which will cause the universe to shrink, slowly at first, then faster as the cumulative result of all this new matter had its impact.
Now new stars are beginning to form, feeding on fresh supplies of matter. Even while the universe is still shrinking, they are starting to release matter as light, pushing out space and releasing gravitational fields, and therefore slowing down the rate at which the universe is shrinking.
Eventually the universe will stop shrinking and begin to expand. The universe is once again young, dense, and hot; new stars are being born every day; and the universe starts to accelerate in its outward expansion as star formation catches up to the amount of matter available in the universe. It will continue to expand, and then contract, in a cycle that lasts some twenty billion years; and it will do this for all time — forever — like the rise and fall of the tides in an eternal ocean of time.
Judging by the density of our present universe, and its rate of expansion, Mills concludes that we exist at a relatively early point in the expansion phase, and that the universe at this very moment should be accelerating in its outward expansion. Mills predicted this acceleration in his book in 1995, and even predicted the expansion rate and the Hubble constant.
And now, three teams of astronomers have won Nobel Prizes because they confirmed this little-known prediction. But not yet being aware of Mills’ work, the physics community doesn’t understand the mechanism driving this universal acceleration. So they call it “dark energy.” Dark, of course, is an imaginative way of saying that it is mysterious. What is more mysterious to me is why they continue to ignore Mills’ important work in this area.
Learn more about the Nobel Prize winners at:
http://www2.bupipedream.com/news/american-astronomers-win-nobel-prize-for-physics-1.2641312#.TppZyFYweXU
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