The Cosmological Implications of Mass Distribution

Scientific Paper
Title	The Cosmological Implications of Mass Distribution
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Arnold G Gulko
Keywords	Cosmology, Mass, Universe Cycle theory, gamma-ray bursts, large scale structure, Dark Energy
Published	2008
No. of pages	27

Read the full paper here

Abstract

The distribution of mass and its motion in the cosmos are reviewed from the perspective of the Big Bang theory and this writer's Universe Cycle theory to determine the extent to which these theories are consistent with the observations.  Particular consideration is given to the low density of the cosmos, the expected product of a primordial explosion, the homogeneous and isotropic distribution suggested by the Cosmological Principal, the clustering of galaxies and the bottom-up scenario for the formation of large cosmological structures.  The expansion of the universe, its age, the theory of inflation and the existence and character of dark energy are also considered.  Lastly, the large scale structure of the universe suggested by the tri-modal distribution of gamma-ray bursts is discussed.

Overview

Arnold G. Gulko's 2008 paper sets two cosmologies side by side and asks which one the observed distribution of matter actually supports. The first is the Big Bang. The second is his own Universe Cycle theory, developed over earlier writings and summarised here: the visible universe was not produced by one primordial explosion but by the separate explosions of many black holes of galactic mass, each formed in a previous universe. On an immense scale these holes are uniformly spread through an endless space; on the scale of the visible universe they are not, because they were already concentrated by gravity while embedded in earlier universes. The cycle closes because the galaxies we see will in time be swallowed by the holes growing at their centres, setting the stage for the next universe.

The paper's method is comparative rather than mathematical. Gulko takes a series of published observational results — mostly from Scientific American and Science News — quotes the authors at length, and argues in each case that the observation embarrasses the standard model while following naturally from a plurality of primordial explosions distributed over unbounded time. The recurring complaint is methodological: astrophysics, he says, responds to a failed prediction by adding a parameter rather than by returning to the assumption that generated the error. "Stubborn adherence to pre-conceived notions shown to be inconsistent with observation is the opposite of science."

The argument

What a primordial explosion should produce

Gulko begins from laboratory experience with rapid energy release from a small source: the gamma photons produced interact with each other and with nearby particles, so that "almost all of the particles formed are concentrated into a single small region," while the surviving photons escape without making much more matter. Extrapolated to a release equivalent to a galaxy's mass, this predicts a compact residue, not many widely separated concentrations. He notes that the standard defence — that a primordial explosion so far exceeds anything in our experience that experience need not apply — cuts both ways: it removes the basis for any projection at all.

Applied instead to gamma-ray bursts, which Gulko takes to be primordial explosions, the same reasoning gives a dense particulate mass initially little larger than the hole that exploded, and therefore still a black hole. He points out that NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory programme also concluded that the product of a burst is a black hole, and that this particular conclusion rests on observation — the failure to find any new object at the burst site.

Against the supernova origin of gamma-ray bursts

Gulko rejects the attribution of bursts to the collapse of very massive stars on several grounds. A supernova leaves a persistent zone of intense radiation and a long-lived visual remnant, which a burst does not. If gamma richness tracked stellar mass, the longer bursts should be the more gamma-rich; the observed relation was the reverse, and was reported as a surprise. He adds that when an exceptionally massive supernova was observed in September 2006 at 240 million light-years, it showed nine months of strong visual luminosity and no accompanying strong burst, the absence being explained away by beaming not directed at us.

The Cosmological Principle and fractal clustering

The longest thread in the paper concerns homogeneity. Quoting Stephen D. Landy's 1999 survey article, Gulko emphasises three admissions: that "the clumpiness of galaxies runs contrary to one of the essential tenets of modern cosmology"; that up to 100 million light-years "galaxies are distributed as a fractal," and that "a fractal distribution is never homogeneous and isotropic"; and that a later high-resolution survey found a Great Wall 750 million light-years long, which "a noise process could not readily explain." He notes Landy's finding that the Las Campanas power spectrum deviates beyond 600 million light-years in a way a dark-matter model does not reproduce, with a chance probability of one in several thousand.

From these he draws two conclusions. First, the retreat to a "noise process" at larger scales rested on biased and poorly done surveys, and the only reason to expect the non-random arrangement to stop is adherence to the principle itself. Second, the ordering of scales kills the bottom-up scenario: if gravity assembled structure, clustering should have started small and grown, whereas the deviations appear first at the largest scales. "The bottom-up scenario makes sense until you compare it with the observations."

Gravity as a low-pressure field

To explain how his own scheme produces walls and voids, Gulko sets out the mechanism he has developed elsewhere. A particle is energy in continuous motion at light speed; the motion slows imperceptibly, so energy must be continuously absorbed from the surrounding continuum to keep the particle's mass constant. That cumulative absorption creates a low energy pressure in and around any mass, propagating outward as a wave, so that "the gravitational field is constituted by a pressure gradient" and bodies are pushed toward the low-pressure source. Because the slowing is so slight, gravity is necessarily minute compared with charge.

Two consequences do work in the paper. A black hole's interior lacks the energy density needed to propagate a photon out, though particle jets, which do not require propagation, can escape. And because the low-pressure region resists penetration by a weak external field, black holes of galactic mass "generate gravity, but the matter of the hole will resist responding to an external gravity," the resistance increasing with mass. Inertia, meanwhile, is defined as motion with respect to the energy continuum: the fast outer stars of a rotating galaxy drag the nearby continuum along with them, and subtracting that dragged motion from their absolute motion gives an inertial motion small enough for them to remain bound — Gulko's replacement for Dark Matter in galaxy rotation.

Given these, cluster and void formation is the work of many successive universes rather than one. Galaxies respond to gravity and draw together; galactic black holes keep their inertial motion but respond poorly to gravity, so they drift apart along their existing directions. Repeated over cycles, this both concentrates clusters and strings galaxies around voids.

The bimodal clustering of galaxies

Gulko treats Ron Cowen's 2003 report of a two-million-galaxy survey as a decisive test. Standard theory "permits a continuum, from very tight to very loose clustering"; the survey "denies the middle ground," showing old tightly clustered and young loosely clustered galaxies and nothing between. His account: in densely clustered regions the central holes exhaust the surrounding energy sooner, age faster and explode earlier, leaving less time for inertial drift, so dense regions regenerate dense old clusters and sparse regions regenerate loose young ones, with the intermediate case "intrinsically avoided."

Age, inflation and expansion

Several sections press the age problem. Light from an object 13 billion light-years away took 13 billion years to arrive, and the matter took at least that long to get there, giving objects of order 26 billion years in a 13.7-billion-year universe. He works through two inflationary variants and finds the first still gives 20-billion-year galaxies, while the second — instantaneous inflation to nearly the present radius — alone yields the right age but requires particles moving near light speed to be halted by gravity almost at once. He cites the Abell 851 cluster at 4 billion light-years, argues from Hubble's size–flatness relation that ellipticals are younger than spirals and from the cluster's high density that it is older than ours, and points to the Hubble Deep Field South results of Franx and Labbé showing large mature spiral-structured galaxies when the universe was 2 billion years old — with the further point that Deep Field North shows no such population, so two very remote dense regions differ in age, which a single explosion cannot deliver.

On Redshift he takes a middle position: recessional motion is real but partial, and he endorses Hubble's own reluctance and the photon energy-loss idea for which "the phrase 'tired light' was coined to scorn him." He notes the irony that to save the Doppler interpretation cosmology adopted expanding space, "a concept which has traditionally been considered ridiculous," having earlier scorned the ether for exactly the property now demanded — and asks why, if space grasps galaxies as it expands, it does not slow the Earth in its orbit.

In his own scheme expansion is gravitational: the visible universe has radiated away mass-energy, so its density is lower than that of the unexploded holes outside it, and matter accelerates outward toward the denser exterior, the effect compounding as expansion further lowers the density. This predicts maximum recession at intermediate distance, minimal near the centre where we sit and small near the periphery where acceleration has just begun.

Dark energy and the tri-modal burst distribution

Dark Energy is dismissed as "an unidentified substance" acting in an undescribed manner: something spread perfectly smoothly cannot accelerate anything, since in ordinary experience motion requires a pressure difference or a coordinated flow. He also objects that it is asked to push galaxies together into clusters in one argument and apart in another, and that remote superclusters have been found to be contracting.

The paper closes with Gulko's own large-scale structure. Graphing burst number against duration gives a tri-modal curve: the many faint short bursts mature into globular clusters, the intermediate group into dwarf galaxies, the few longest into full-sized galaxies. The visible quasars concentrate in two zones at about 3 and 6 billion light-years, with roughly equal apparent brightness despite the fourfold flux difference expected. Beyond 6 billion light-years most galaxies should be small, because the process forming massive galaxies has not yet reached that far — which is why cluster formation there is rare, no "choking off" required. He offers as a check the untested prediction that the ratio of dwarf to full-sized galaxies near us should exceed the ratio between 3 and 6 billion light-years.

Assessment

The paper's real strength is that it holds mainstream cosmology to its own published statements. The quoted passages from Landy, Bucher and Spergel, Musser and Conselice are accurately reproduced and genuinely contain the concessions Gulko draws attention to, and his central methodological complaint has force: when a prediction fails, the discipline's standard response is to add a component rather than to re-examine the premise that generated the prediction. The demand that one identify the source of an error rather than merely patch its consequence is a real scientific virtue. The Universe Cycle theory is also unusually economical for a dissident cosmology — one mechanism, black holes exploding as gamma-ray bursts, is asked to produce galaxies, quasars, the burst duration distribution and the large-scale structure — and it makes a checkable prediction about dwarf-galaxy ratios that Gulko honestly flags as unverified. He is likewise honest about redshift, declining the all-or-nothing positions on either side.

The difficulties are substantial. Most of the observational material is a decade old at the time of writing and the state of play has moved. The fractal-clustering argument is the clearest case: the transition to homogeneity that Gulko treats as an artefact of biased surveys has since been measured directly in the SDSS and WiggleZ samples at scales above roughly 250–300 million light-years, and the baryon acoustic peak provides a standard ruler in the same correlation function. Any successor to this argument must engage those data rather than Las Campanas. The gamma-ray burst case has also been settled against him by observation he could not have had in full: long bursts have since been repeatedly caught with coincident Type Ic supernovae, GRB 030329/SN 2003dh being the textbook example, and burst afterglows show host galaxies at the measured redshifts. His 2006 counter-example — a bright, long-lived supernova with no accompanying burst — is not evidence, since the standard model predicts that only a small fraction of core collapses produce bursts at all.

The age arguments contain a definite error. Gulko computes an object's age by adding its light travel time to the time its matter took to reach that distance from a central point, obtaining 26 billion years. That double-counts, and it assumes what is at issue: in the standard model there is no centre, matter did not travel outward through static space from a point, and the emitting galaxy was much closer when the light left it. The "26 billion years" is a consequence of the explosion-in-pre-existing-space picture Gulko has substituted, not of the Big Bang. Relatedly, his inference that "we must be close to the center of the visible universe" because counts look the same in all directions is precisely the observation the standard account explains without a centre.

Elsewhere key steps are asserted rather than derived. The pressure-gradient theory of gravity is presented in prose with no field equation, no coupling constant and no calculation, so it cannot be checked against the classical tests — perihelion precession, light deflection, Shapiro delay — or against binary pulsar timing. The claim that massive black holes "respond poorly to gravity" is essential to the whole account of voids and stringing, yet no measure of that resistance is given and it conflicts with the observed orbital dynamics of the supermassive holes in merging galaxies and with the gravitational-wave inspirals since detected. The rotation-curve explanation by continuum drag makes no quantitative prediction and does not address the flat-rotation problem in low-surface-brightness galaxies or the lensing mass excess in clusters. And the argument against Dark Energy by analogy with air pressure assumes that a smooth medium must act like a fluid; the cosmological constant enters through negative pressure in the stress-energy tensor, which the paper never engages, and the supernova result it rejects rests on the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia light curves and the distance-modulus residuals, neither of which is discussed here.

The paper is best read as an observational brief for the prosecution, and a well-sourced one, rather than as the presentation of a competing quantitative model. Its criticisms of ad hoc rescue are worth taking seriously; its own theory, as given here, does not yet contain enough mathematics to be tested against the measurements it invokes.

See also

• Arnold G Gulko
• Big Bang
• Black Hole
• Quasar
• Dark Energy
• Dark Matter
• Redshift
• Tired Light
• Expanding Universe
• Steady State Theory
• Edwin Hubble
• Supernova
• Aether
• Halton C Arp