by James Peck

I thought Kim Burtnyk’s Feb. 11^th talk was fascinating and it got me thinking about the nature of the universe. These are just some musings from an amateur scientist that may seem batty, but some ideas from theoretical physicists seem batty to me, so I guess we are even.

Black holes, billions of light years away from us accelerate and cause gravitational waves that we can pick up here on earth at the two LIGOs. So I’ll extrapolate that every object with mass that accelerates anywhere in the universe creates gravitational waves. Although their effects are tiny and we can only measure the ones that fall within the sensitivity of our instruments they are nonetheless there, and everywhere, at all times.

So I’ll agree with people like John Muir and Leonardo da Vinci who, along with others, said basically that if you try to pick out anything by itself you find it’s connected to everything else. So space-time is not an empty void with some objects randomly spread around in it, but more like a clear jello vibrating from all the invisible activity of the myriad of waves passing through it and affecting everything in it.

Since there are so many of these waves moving randomly everywhere, that because of the mathematical law of large numbers, they converge into a standing wave that constantly jiggles the entire universe. Kind of like the experiment when you put sand on a tabletop and then vibrate the table and watch the sand move around and eventually settle into a fixed vibrating pattern; like a visual representation of sound called cymatics.

Maybe that vibrating energy is what causes the quantum effect of objects coming into existence and then disappearing all throughout space. Maybe it helps cause Brownian motion in particles, and it’s why particles don’t lose their energy. Maybe it’s what causes the strings in string theory to vibrate. So the universe would have some kind of a vibrating hum that might, through random variations, change slowly over the millennium, causing some unexplained things like the acceleration of the universe’s expansion, or eventually a collapse into a big crunch.

Just as a final comment I would like to say that one of my joys in life, besides the normal human ones like love, family, work, kindness etc. (and the astronomy club), is to ponder the wonder of what’s all around us. I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, ” The world (universe) is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.”