The Greatest Science Story Ever Told

There are many claims to this wonderous title.

The Geometry of the Universe is without doubt such a story.

It is something I have puzzled about as a child, looking up at the sky and asking mum does it just go on forever? What about time too?

I recall, around 7-8 years old, black holes were a thing that might not even exist. Friends at school passing on what they had picked up from a book, a paper or the BBC.

Later, I had a physics teacher who explained Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s special relativity.

This much of the story seemed to explain pretty much everything, or so I thought.

In the early 1980’s I found myself at Warwick University, listening to lectures from Colin Rourke. Real Analysis I. Calculus, but with curious nested sets, that he had developed as part of an Open University mathematics program.

The wellington boots and the gnome like beard more than compensated for the calculus. He was part of a great mathematics department that Christopher Zeeman had put together.

Christopher Zeeman had recently given the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, which I guess was in part why I ended up at Warwick.

Back to our story. By this time the expanding universe was general knowledge, red shift, the big bang, and cosmic microwave backgrounds too.

Everything in cosmology seemed to be explained down to the first tiny fraction of a second, although nobody is sure how it will end, or exactly how it started.

A Brief History of Time explored the mathematics of the big bang, and a seeming duality with the event horizons of black holes, but re-inforced the theory that observations had confirmed.

So, whilst there was still much debate and puzzlement as to the details, the broad story was fixed with a Big Bang some 13.7 million years ago.

Or so I thought.

In the intervening years I had always looked out for books by Ian Stewart, to find out what mathematicians were now puzzling about.

It was a comment from Professor Ian Stewart, that first drew my attention to Colin Rourke’s work on cosmology:

A new book by Colin Rourke.

A new model for the Universe that does not require dark matter, of
which no sign has been seen.

The timing was good, as I had recently re-discovered Fred Hoyle’s, The Nature of the Universe, which had re-awakened my interest, but I needed no encouragement to read the book.

When a professor who’s capabilities you were in awe of, back in the day, writes such a book, then you pay attention.

I had heard of his exploits with the Poincaré Conjecture in the intervening years.

Poincaré was also involved in the development of space time and his topological work was very much influenced by this problem.

It is quite natural that with the conjecture now a theorem to turn your attention to the models of the universe. Non Euclidean geometries and hyperbolic rotations.

There is no better person to guide us through this geometric delight than Colin Rourke. The book does not disappoint.

The Geometry of the Universe turns everything I thought I knew on its head as it takes you on a journey through the history of space-times.

I explains, in considerable detail, how we got where we are today from the astronomy of the ancient Greeks.

The people involved, their core beliefs and the geometric consequences.

It explains errors made along the way, and how to make a very logical adjustment to general relativity.

It explains why such an adjustment is philosophically compelling.

Simple assumptions about space time show that a static universe does not appear to be static, rather that the observed expansion is just what we might expect to see.

The core problem is that the Big Bang theory is a colossal mistake, the universe is likely very much older and very much larger than the Big Bang model suggests.

This creates a number of not in-considerable problems to be addressed: quasars, Cosmic Micro-wave Background, the mix of light elements and more.

The book carefully explains special and general relativity, a not insignificant task, in of itself.

de Sitter Space is introduced as a model for the Universe and it is shown that the expanding Universe we see is just part of this space.

We are ignoring a dual contracting space. In relativity, dimensions of space and time get intertwined, we see some sources of light speeded up by a significant factor, as they burst on the scene: we see a galaxy’s infinite past as it appears in a short burst of seconds or minutes.

Gamma-Ray bursts, thought to be incredibly distant, super energetic bodies from a previous time, nearer the Big Bang is what conventional theory says. These are just intrinsic features of the geometry of the universe, optical illusions caused by the arrival of a new galaxy at the edge of our visible universe, says Rourke, in joint work with Robert MacKay.

I believe it was Robert MacKay that described the whole thing as an extreme example of observer selection bias: each source of light we see blue-shifted for all but a relatively small, finite time and then see it increasingly red shifted for the rest of eternity.

The cosmic microwave background being the thermalised radiation from the less dramatic arrivals.

If you got this far, I think you will agree that this is a book making some fascinating and significant claims.

It is coming at a time that observational physics has never been stronger and I believe there is now considerable observational evidence to support Rourke’s model.

For example The Gaia Mission project has billions of observations of stars in our galaxy and local group. The data is freely available complete with a python library to query the database. It is generating a lot of interesting science.

I read recently that it includes some 60 baby galaxies within a million light years (I may have these numbers wrong!), with 1000 or so stars. The article noted that the babies seemed to have higher velocity than galaxies bound to us would have.

One goal of this project is to help act as a guide to the ideas in the book and to encourage people to go and read it.

Another goal is provide simple tools visualising some of the mathematics as well as exploring the latest astronomical data sets, and along the way, providing a guide to the universe.

WITS is just one question that I will be looking to answer, in particular, the relative positions of the Sun, Sgr A* and the galactic centre.

Returning to the title, this indeed is one of the greatest scientific stories ever told.

It is told by someone with an incredible insight into the topology of space time.

Caveat

Everything that is here is just my work and notes as I work through the book. I very much recommend, that if you have made it this far, go read the book, the first chapter at least. Check the World Scientific website for free chapters.

I am here for questions.

If anything here does not make sense, it is more than likely that I have got something spectacularly wrong. It happens a lot in this space.

Check the source first, it is well worth a read.

I should also add that I am really terrible at ackowledging the contributions of others to . There is such a cast of characters involved. The Geometry of the Universe does an excellent job of this.

Here’s just one that is involved in the story in many ways.

Later I hope to have a full cast of characters to explore.

Christopher Zeeman

Christopher Zeeman also proved a key result in our story: Causality implies the Lorentz Group.

It places some very significant restrictions on the geometry of Universe, restrictions that explain why de Sitter Space is a natural choice for the simplest possible space-time.