The Evolution of Matter Through Cosmological Time

Scientific Paper
Title	The Evolution of Matter Through Cosmological Time
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	James Carter
Keywords	evolution, matter, time, Hubble constant, plate tectonics
Published	2010
Journal	Proceedings of the NPA
Volume	7
No. of pages	12
Pages	68-79

Read the full paper here

Abstract

This history of the universe is based on the single assumption that the mass of the electron gradually decreases over time. Except for the exceptions produced by this assumption, all of the other well established physical laws and constants of the standard model of physics remain intact. Near the beginning of the universe, the proton and the electron had identical masses and were a Primordial Matter/ Antimatter Pair. After a chain annihilation of about 256 cycles, the electron's mass had decreased to the point where it could no longer annihilate with the proton. This left the 2256 electrons and protons that we have in the universe today. At this stage, protons and electrons could combine to form neutrons but not atoms. Long after, at the point where the electron became small enough to couple with a proton into a hydrogen atom, the neutrons began to decay and hydrogen atoms began to emit large quantities of photons. This initial burst of photons had the same wavelengths as the 2.7˚ Cosmic Blackbody Radiation spectrum of today. Since this very cold time, the temperature for hydrogen radiation has increased from 2.7˚ K to about 3000˚ K. The rate of the electron's gradual mass decrease can be determined by measuring the Hubble Constant. In the past, when the electron had more mass, the atomic spectra from distant galaxies had longer wavelengths and thus appears red shifted to us today. As the electron loses mass, and the atomic spectra heats up, the volume of atoms decreases. Heavy elements at the earth's center lose volume more slowly than the light elements in the earth's crust. It is this effect that drives plate tectonics and causes the continents to separate.

Overview

This paper, presented at the 2010 Long Beach meeting of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, sets out the cosmological half of James Carter's "Living Universe" — the framework he also calls circlon-shaped mechanical physics. It is a complete alternative history of the cosmos, running from a single primordial atom of antihydrogen to the present day, and it turns on one postulate: that the mass of the electron has been slowly and continuously decreasing relative to the mass of the proton throughout cosmic history. Carter calls this the Principle of Electron Transformation, and insists the rest of physics is left alone — "as long as you can accept the assumption that the mass of the electron can change, then the standard models of physics and quantum mechanics will work equally well".

The departures from the mainstream account are sweeping. There is no big bang singularity and no expansion of space. The cosmological redshift is not a recession velocity but an artefact of atomic evolution: distant galaxies emitted longer wavelengths because their electrons were heavier, so, as Carter puts it, "starlight from distant galaxies has not become red shifted — what has happened is that the starlight within the Milky Way has become blue shifted." The 2.7 K cosmic blackbody radiation is not a cooled relic of a hot early state but the unchanged, never-cooled hydrogen emission spectrum of an epoch when the universe was genuinely that cold. Gravity is not a field but the mechanical consequence of matter expanding: "the earth falls up." There is no aether, no fields, no zero point energy, no dark energy, and no action at a distance — only "the common sense event of one body touching another."

The argument

The founding principles

Six principles are laid out before the history begins. Under Electron Transformation, the electron's mass falls while its Compton wavelength grows inversely, changing the fine structure constant and the Bohr radius with it. Under Particle/Antiparticle Pairs, the universe is made exclusively of such pairs, with protons the particles and electrons the antiparticles; the neutron and the hydrogen atom are simply two configurations of the same pair. Under Absolute Photon Rest, all photons move at exactly c relative to one universal frame, so all motion is absolute and Doppler shift arises at measurement, not at emission: "Red and Blue shifting does not occur at emission."

Under Pure Quantum Mechanical Interactions, the four interactions are "all bogus, because they are all mechanical in nature" — the strong force is a "nuts and bolts" phenomenon, the weak force is how electrons and neutrinos are held inside protons, electromagnetism is the touching of expanding charge coils, and gravity is expansion. Under the sixth principle, mass is "the positive reality" and space "the negative reality"; time has "no reality outside of a consciousness that is actively perceiving inertial motion", and clocks measure momentum rather than time. Crucially, Carter denies mass–energy conversion: E = Mc² means energy has mass, not that mass becomes energy, and the two photons from positron annihilation carry away exactly the mass that went in. Under Gravitational Expansion, gravity is "the mirror image" of general relativity — not curvature of space and time but "curvature of mass and time."

The history in eras

The universe begins, arbitrarily rather than at a beginning of time, as a single atom of antihydrogen whose mass equals the mass of the whole present universe. Its negative constituent expands gravitationally slightly faster than its positive one, loses mass relative to it, and the pair becomes an antineutron. When the two masses become identical the object is a true particle–antiparticle pair, and it annihilates — but, being bound as a neutron, it annihilates into two neutrons rather than two photons. The Era of Matter Bifurcation is then a chain of synchronised doublings: 2², 2³, … through roughly 256 cycles. Carter is candid that "there is nothing special about the number 2²⁵⁶", choosing it as "the most beautiful number that is quite close to Eddington's durable estimate for the mass of the universe of 10⁸⁰ proton masses"; the substantive claim is only that the particle count must be a power of two.

In the Cosmic Ray Era, crowding causes some neutron pairs to annihilate into four photons each; these survive as the most energetic cosmic rays. Carter argues their spectrum has no upper limit, each energy decade contributing equally to the total, and speculates that the 1908 Tunguska explosion — 10¹⁶ J, no crater, no impactor debris — was a single photon of about 110 g mass and 10⁻⁴¹ m wavelength, emitted 86 cycles before the last bifurcation; gamma-ray bursts would be still rarer photons of order 10⁴ kg.

Bifurcation halts when the negative particle's mass falls below the positive one's; the attempted 257th cycle produces instead 2²⁵⁶ stable neutrons (the Neutron Cloud Era). Much later, continued electron mass loss makes the neutrons unstable and they decay all at once (the Neutrino Era — without neutrino emission, since these proto-neutrons were not formed by electron capture). In the Era of Nuclear Synthesis the resulting fast protons and electrons collide and build "small samples of all the known elements", which Carter offers as an answer to the observation of heavy-element spectra in the most distant galaxies.

In the Era of the Great Frozen Fire, hydrogen atoms form for the first time and flood the universe with photons matching a 2.7 K blackbody curve. These photons "have not changed in wavelength or intensity" since. The 2.7 K value "is not a random number" but the hydrogen radiation temperature at the moment atom formation first became possible. Later eras give the Hubble redshift as atomic evolution, the supernova dimming discovered by the High-Z team in 1998 as genuinely weaker ancient supernovae rather than dark energy, quasars as very large nearby stars whose near-c surface velocities raise the kinetic mass of surface electrons and hence redden their spectra, and the Dinosaur Era as a time of a larger, less dense Earth and weaker surface gravity in which sauropods could "romp and play". Today's Shrinking Earth Era has light elements in the crust shrinking faster than heavy elements in the core, cracking the surface apart and driving what geologists interpret as plate tectonics. In the Era of Zero Entropy, cooling by radiation is exactly offset by the hardening of atomic emission, so total entropy is zero. In the Era of Conscious Thought, consciousness resides in the hydrogen atom; a human and a 100 kg rock have the same 10²⁹ "basic connections" and hence the same bulk consciousness, differing only in the intricacy of the pattern.

The mechanical atom

Carter's models of the particles are offered as aids rather than requirements. The hydrogen atom is a nested set of seven "circlon" links, each larger than the last by 1/√α ≈ 11.7, so that the outermost is (11.7)⁷ ≈ 3×10⁷ times the innermost — his explanation of why the atom "seems to be almost entirely empty space, even though it is actually a solid physical structure". The electron has primary coils at the classical electron radius, secondary and tertiary coils each 11.7 times larger, plus a fourth charge coil that expands until it meets another particle's. When electron and proton charge coils intertwine they form a "stationary photon" that splits, one half emitted at c and one half remaining to bind the atom, each emission removing one unit of angular momentum; this is Carter's account of the hydrogen series. A photon is a bound matterbody–antimatterbody pair, half from the electron and half from the proton, splitting the photon's energy equally between rectilinear motion at c and the rotational energy of the two counter-spinning coils.

Two claimed paradoxes for the Big Bang

The Time Paradox: the most distant galaxies and quasars have z < 10, yet the CBR is assigned z ≈ 2000. Carter asks how photons emitted "less than a billion years earlier" than those galaxies could be redshifted two hundred times more, and holds that inflation cannot help since it ended long before recombination. The Space Paradox: nobody predicted the background would have a perfect blackbody curve, and starlight, though blackbody in shape, is thousands of times weaker in intensity; a mixture of sources should not reproduce a single precise temperature. Carter also notes the dipole anisotropy, which he reads not as a defect in the spectrum but as the solar system's absolute motion at about 375 km/s toward Leo relative to photon rest.

Assessment

The paper's attraction is its economy of premise. One postulate — a slowly falling electron mass — is asked to do the work that inflation, dark matter, dark energy and expanding space do in the standard account, and Carter is unusually frank about which parts of his own construction are decorative ("my conceptual mechanical models… are definitely not needed to validate the Living Universe model") and which are load-bearing. He is also frank where evidence is missing: on cosmological chemistry he writes plainly, "I do not have any evidence for the above statement but it seems that it must be true." Several of the checkable numbers do come out right. The Tunguska photon is computed correctly: 10¹⁶ J divided by c² is 111 g, and hc/E is 2×10⁻⁴¹ m. The geometric ratio 1/√α = 11.706 and its seventh power 3.0×10⁷ are right, and the resulting chain of scales does bridge the classical electron radius and the Bohr radius correctly (the Bohr radius is r_e/α², four factors of 11.7). The measured CMB dipole is 369.8 km/s toward Leo, close to his 375. The "one litre bottle from a second-story window" is a fair image for 50 J.

But a number of load-bearing figures do not survive checking, and several are inconsistent with each other. 2²⁵⁶ is 1.16×10⁷⁷, not "quite close to" 10⁸⁰; it is short by a factor of about 860, and 2²⁶⁶ would be the power of two that actually matches Eddington's figure. The gamma-ray-burst photon is given a wavelength of 2×10⁻⁴⁵ m for 10²¹ J, but the same formula that produced the correct Tunguska figure gives 2×10⁻⁴⁶ m — a factor of ten inconsistent with his own worked example. "10²¹ electron volts or about 50 joules" conflates two different numbers: 10²¹ eV is 160 J, while 50 J is 3×10²⁰ eV, the energy of the record "Oh-My-God" event. And 50 J is enough to make roughly 1.7×10¹¹ proton–antiproton pairs, not the stated 1,000,000,000. The kinetic-energy illustration fails by a larger margin still: at 375 km/s a 70 kg body carries 4.9×10¹² J, whereas the Trinity device released about 8.8×10¹³ J — the human is roughly one-eighteenth of the bomb, not "greater than" it. There is also a plain internal contradiction on the paper's headline number: the abstract says hydrogen radiation has warmed "from 2.7° K to about 3000° K", while section 14 states "Today that spectrum is about 6000°K."

The central mechanism has a deeper problem, and it bears directly on the claim that everything else in physics "remains intact". In standard atomic physics the Bohr radius is a₀ = ℏ/(m_ecα), so a lighter electron gives a larger atom, and the Rydberg energy scales as m_e, so a lighter electron gives a cooler spectrum — the opposite of what the paper needs at every step. Carter escapes this only by also letting α grow as the electron lightens; but he specifies α growing "at an inversely proportionate rate", i.e. α ∝ 1/m_e, which makes a₀ = ℏ/(m_ecα) constant rather than shrinking, and does not yield the stated cube-law scaling of the ionization energy either. So the two "constants" are not independently free, the quoted scalings do not follow from each other, and a varying fine structure constant is not a small concession — it changes every atomic, nuclear and chemical rate in the theory. (The extraction of this section drops Greek letters, so some formulae are reconstructed; the ionization wavelength 4πa₀/α does check out at 91.1 nm.)

The conflicts with measurement are specific. The proton-to-electron mass ratio μ is not observed to be drifting: comparisons of molecular hydrogen absorption lines in high-redshift quasar spectra with laboratory values constrain |Δμ/μ| to below about 10⁻⁷ over roughly ten billion years, and laboratory clock comparisons are tighter still — the paper's assertion that "recent measurements… indicate its value may be increasing with time" is not the current state of that measurement. The CBR is measured to have been hotter in the past, at T ∝ (1+z), both from the excitation of fine-structure and molecular levels in high-redshift absorbers and from the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect in clusters; a background whose photons "have not changed in wavelength or intensity" cannot reproduce that. Cosmic rays are not photons: air-shower muon content, the failure of arrival directions to point back to sources at low energy, and direct composition measurements all show charged nuclei, and the spectrum does not run to infinity but is suppressed above roughly 5×10¹⁹ eV as Greisen, Zatsepin and Kuzmin predicted, a cutoff observed by both HiRes and the Pierre Auger Observatory. The supernova argument omits the decisive discriminant: Type Ia light curves are observed to be stretched by exactly (1+z), which an intrinsic-luminosity evolution does not produce. And the "Time Paradox" dissolves once the scale factor is tracked rather than the elapsed time: between recombination and z = 10 the universe expands by a factor of about 100 while ageing from 0.4 Myr to 0.5 Gyr, which is precisely what a ∝ t^2/3 gives. Finally, the shrinking-Earth account of continental separation must contend with the palaeomagnetic and seafloor-spreading record, which measures plate motions directly and finds convergence and subduction as well as separation — a globally shrinking crust has nowhere to put the trenches.

See also

• James Carter
• Electron
• Proton
• Neutron
• Photon
• Hydrogen Atom
• Cosmic Microwave Background
• Redshift
• Big Bang
• Dark Energy
• Expanding Earth
• Fine Structure Constant
• Proceedings of the NPA