It’s Tuesday, now‒the first Tuesday of the new year.  This is not anything particularly interesting, of course.  It’s really just another day.  But it is also the last day of the first week of the new year, the 7th day of the year, as indicated by the fact that it is January 7th.

“Brilliant, Holmes!” I hear you say.

In this case, though, it truly is elementary.  It’s also pretty boring, so I’m sorry to go on about it.

There have been troubling things in national news, of course:  the terroristic suicide attack-by-vehicle in New Orleans; the guy who blew up his cyber truck; severe cold weather striking large swaths of the eastern US; and, of course, no one has yet yelled “Psych!!” regarding Donald Trump’s election for a second term as president.

I’m not as rabidly anti-Trump as many; he’s just a man, of soft and squishy flesh and blood, like everyone else.  He’s also just one more incompetent government official on a world stage that might as well be a collection of (poor quality) Three Stooges clones.

It would be remarkable and praiseworthy if humans actually elected smart, calm, intellectually honest government officials with personal integrity.  Alas, when holding elections, humans seem unable to be as rigorous in their evaluation of candidates as they would be when screening babysitters or even gardeners.  And, of course, since few people are in the habit of reflecting on themselves in any way to improve on their own flaws in judgment, it seems unlikely that things will change very quickly.

This is all nothing new, of course.  The modern shape of cyberspace and the borderline-antisocial media add little twists and peculiarities, introducing new dynamics to the system.  But the dominating principles of primate social and sexual dominance hierarchies and displays have not changed much, if at all.

The only really interesting thing I’ve found in the news is the statement about a new study‒an elaboration of a first theoretical paper from some years ago‒that proposes a potential alternative explanation for the fact that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating that doesn’t require “dark energy”.

The cosmological principle, which underlies the usefulness of standard model, lambda-CDM cosmology, states that, on the largest of scales, the universe is uniform and homogeneous.  However, on anything other than the largest scales, the universe is decidedly clumpy.  This is because of gravity, of course, pulling things together in regions where things are more dense (making them still denser) and making the spaces in between ever more rarefied and so on.

But, of course, gravity is not just a simple attractive force; it works its effects through the warping of spacetime, and in ordinary circumstances (so to speak) its effect on time is far more significant than those on space.  This is a very real effect, one for which we have to adjust when using GPS satellites for instance, so while general understanding of it may be relatively rare, it is not an esoteric bit of physics.  It’s textbook stuff.

The point being made by this new hypothesis is that perhaps there is no real dark energy, but instead, in regions where more mass exists, time slows down.  This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s quite true, and indeed, to a large extent, all the apparent physical effects of gravity are produced by the differential flow of time between places where the manifold is more vs. less curved.

So, in the places where matter/energy is relatively scarce, time moves “more quickly”.  So, since the universe is definitely expanding (due to the Big Bang), those regions are going forward through their expansion more quickly than regions with more matter, and so the space between galaxies and clusters appears to expand more quickly, and as the comparative difference, the contrast, in energy concentration increases, the difference in passage of time will tend to increase, too, producing an apparent accelerated expansion.

[Note to self:  how would this model be expected to affect the extreme measured uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background?  Is this going to be a point of evidence against it?]

This is not a definitive, tested hypothesis, but it rests on sound principles.  It probably won’t supersede lambda-CDM, but it has the potential to do so.  This is no crank, RFK Jr. style hypothesis by any means.  I haven’t read the papers involved yet; rather I read articles and watched some videos about it; I will try to learn more.

But, since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe in the late ‘90s was the single most exciting (non-personal) event in my life, the idea that there is a new approach that might change that again is also truly exciting.

It makes me wish I had just gone into physics as I had originally intended.  However, post-open heart surgery, transient cognitive impairment, and an exacerbation of depression triggered by the same thing, made it too difficult, in the short term, to keep up with my physics and math classes in the semester after my heart surgery, so to English I went.

But as I picture the large-scale universe differentially flowing through time and thus expanding at relatively different seeming rates, producing this wonderful, higher-dimensional twisty-bulgy-filamentous shape, I can at least feel a little twinge of the joy of contemplating science.  My only real contribution to science was in studying the effects of gliotoxin on naked DNA in vitro, and though that’s quite interesting, it’s not exactly cosmology.

Oh, I also wrote a pretty decent review article about the various effects on cognition and other neurological functions of heart-lung bypass as done during open-heart surgery.  Clearly, that was motivated by personal experience.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  Tomorrow begins the second week of the year, but I don’t expect to write again before Thursday.