Contents
Poem
Abstract
Introduction
01 My Career Gone
02 A Point of View
03 The Vital Key
04 A Futile Chore
05 Staying Alive
06 Poverty Sticks
07 Relative Heaven
08 The Family Estate
09 The History Line
10 The Capital Men
11 How They Govern
12 Ruling Ourselves
Epilogue
As I understood it, the age of the Universe was generally thought to be between 10 and 20 billion years. The figure generally given was 15 billion years. This was the figure I quoted up until early in the year 2000. However, at about that time, I heard that during 1999, astronomers had obtained a more accurate estimate for the age of the Universe.
Using the Hubbell space telescope, they had made accurate measurements on pulsating stars which enabled them to state the age of the Universe as 13·7 x 109 years.
I do not personally understand how they can say this. What reason is there to suppose that time is in any sense a linear measure? Would the period of a hypothetical caesium clock have remained constant had it existed from the 'time' of the Big Bang unto this day? Would not the intense gravitational fields and accelerations have caused it to fibrillate unevenly? Indeed, is the measure of time in any way linear in different places relatively close at hand? Would a caesium clock on the surface of the sun or a neutron star measure time the way it does on Earth or in interstellar space? I feel not. How, therefore, can an age in years be attributed to something like the Universe? If anybody can explain it please email me.
As I understand the reports, when the Hubbell telescope was trained on a hitherto black patch in the sky to look into the very distant past (close to the purported age of the Universe) it saw very faint versions of fully formed galaxies; not embryonic matter. It seems to me that, by looking that far back in time, the Hubbell astronomers may have been looking at 'local' galaxies after the light from them had already made several repeat trips round the Universe. Were they looking through some kind of space-time manifold?
A space-time manifold is like a room with perfectly parallel mirrors on opposite walls — except you can walk through them! Perhaps a better analogy is a room with two doors in a spooky house. You leave the room through one door and immediately 'another you' walks in through the other door. Meanwhile the 'actual you' finds 'yourself' in an identical room having walked in through the opposite door from the one you walked through to leave the previous room. If the two doors in the room are opposite each other, what do you see through them when they are both open? — a manifold universe.