A Universe From Nothing
And Other Revelations

This web page is the closest I've come to answering my life's questions about the universe. It is from almost 60 years of following Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, George Gamow, Peter Higgs, Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, countless other physicists, PLANCK, and the LHC.

We know the universe is expanding from Einstein's equations, from galaxy red shifts, and from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is first light of the universe stretched into microwaves, and the same in all directions. This means the universe was once a single point.

How did the universe come from nothing? We know the universe is "flat" (in cosmology-speak) from measurements of the CMB. This means there are equal amounts of gravity and matter. Gravity is negative energy, and matter is positive energy. When you add up all the energy of the universe, you get zero. That means nothing came from nothing. It's like saying "nothing" was split into a positive half and a negative half to become "something". It happened from exponential inflation of a single point of negative vacuum, and had unimaginable energy and density. There was no "before" because time and space was zero. Sorry, but so far I can't describe a negative (false) vacuum in a couple of sentences.

Matter at first was weightless dimensionless points travelling at the speed of light. The Higgs field gave them mass, they slowed down, and then atoms could form.

An atom is made up of pointlike quarks and electrons, so it is actually empty space. It seems like a hard ball because of electrical charge and the particles inside whizzing around like crazy, not letting anything compress it.

Why is the speed of light 186,282 miles per second and not infinite? If it was infinite, we wouldn't be here (E=mc² or m=E/c²). Light does indeed have infinite speed in an empty vacuum, but space is NOT an empty vacuum! At very small (Planck) scales, smaller than a proton, space is filled with quantum foam (quantum granules of energy). This slows the speed of light. Quantum foam sets the speed limit for the universe.

In E=mc², why does energy versus mass depend on the speed of light? It is well established in relativity that energy and mass are interchangeable. But, you cannot say E = m because they are not in the same units of measure. There needs to be a conversion factor. This factor needs to be distance²/time², which is a speed constant squared, e.g. (meters/second)². Through various theoretical approaches this constant worked out to be 299,792,458 meters per second (186,282 miles per second), which is the speed of light. This says to me that mass and energy that we know are what they are BECAUSE the speed of light is what it is.

In 2010 I had the biggest revelation of my life. I wondered if the expansion of the universe began accelerating some five billion years ago because the repulsive force of dark energy finally overtook the mutual gravitational attraction of galaxies. I had not read anything about this in the scientific literature. But my breakthrough idea was three years too late.