III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet Incubator Lifescape

1. Quantum Cosmology Theoretic Unity

McGaugh, Stacy, et al. Dynamical Regularities in Galaxies. arXiv:1090.02011. Case Western Reserve University, European Southern Observatory, Munich, and University of Oregon astrophysicists post a chapter to appear in the IAU Symposium 353 (Shanghai, June 2019) volume Galactic Dynamics in the Era of Large Surveys.

Galaxies are observed to obey a strict set of dynamical scaling relations. We review these relations for rotationally supported disk galaxies spanning many decades in mass, surface brightness, and gas content. The behavior of these widely varied systems can be summarized with a handful of empirical laws connected by a common acceleration scale. (Abstract)

Mekjian, Aram. Generalized Statistical Models of Voids and Hierarchical Structure in Cosmology. Astrophysical Journal. 655/1, 2007. Wherein the presence of scale-free, power-law geometries for distributions of galaxies is described.

Montani, Giovanni, et al. Primordial Cosmology. Singapore: World Scientific, 2011. A 600 page comprehensive volume by University of Rome, Centre of Theoretical Physics, Marseille, and University of London, physicists that courses from Historical Notions to the latest Physical, Mathematical, and Quantum Cosmologies. A 2009 book with the same title by Patrick Peter and Jean-Philippe Uzan (Oxford) covers similar material in a more technical way.

Primordial Cosmology deals with one of the most puzzling and fascinating topics debated in modern physics — the nature of the Big Bang singularity. The authors provide a self-consistent and complete treatment of the very early Universe dynamics, passing through a concise discussion of the Standard Cosmological Model, a precise characterization of the role played by the theory of inflation, up to a detailed analysis of the anisotropic and inhomogeneous cosmological models. The most peculiar feature of this book is its uniqueness in treating advanced topics of quantum cosmology with a well-traced link to more canonical and pedagogical notions of fundamental cosmology. (Publisher)

Nadis, Steve. Making Multiverses. Astronomy. October, 2005. From a special cosmology issue, the latest vistas of inflation, strings, constants, and so on, amidst a proliferation of bubbling universes.

Nobbenhuis, Stefan. Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem. Foundations of Physics. 36/5, 2006. A lengthy paper from Gerard ‘t Hooft’s Institute for Theoretical Physics at Utrecht University which we cite as an example of deep angst at the conceptual foundations of the materialist paradigm. This “constant” is widely noted as a cosmic fudge factor.

In this paper we categorized the different approaches to the cosmological constant problem. The many different ways in which it can be phrased often blurs the road to a possible solution. So far we can only conclude that in fact none of the approaches described above is a real outstanding candidate for a solution of the “old cosmological constant problem. Most effort nowadays is in finding a physical mechanism that drives the Universe’s acceleration, but as we have seen these approaches, be it by modifying general relativity in the far infrared, or by studying higher dimensional braneworlds, generally do not convincingly attack the old and most basic problem.

Since even the sometimes very drastic modifications advocated in the proposals we discussed do not lead to a satisfactory answer, this seems to imply that the ultimate theory of quantum gravity might very well be based on very different grounds that imagined so far. The only way out could be the discovery of a symmetry that forbids a cosmological constant term to appear. (669)

Overbye, Dennis. All Signs Point to Higgs, But Scientific Certainty is a Waiting Game. New York Times. March 5,, 2013. An article in a special Science Tuesday edition “Chasing the Higgs,” written by Overbye, as a succinct entry to the Large Hadron Collider project to detect at extreme depths and energies this theoretically crucial particle and force field. A grand story of dedicated personalities who by fits and starts build, repair, operate, and fine tune huge machinery, instrumentation, computer support, along with wonderment what does it all mean? Yet, per the second quote, is it an experiment too far? Are physicists placing too much emphasis on this approach, because it is what they have and can do? Should we bet that such reductions are the window to reality, or might something wholly else be going on, that Colliders miss and exclude, say an immaterial mathematical code which serves a genesis procreation visible more by its emergent progeny?

In December 2011, shortly after CERN teams first declared that they had seen signs of the famous boson with a mass of 125 billion electron volts, Gian Giudice, a CERN theorist, and his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future. (E6) The calculations also depend crucially on the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, as well as the Higgs, neither of which have been weighed precisely enough yet to determine the fate of the universe. If the top quark were just a little lighter or the Higgs a little heavier, 130 billion electron volts, Dr. Giudice said, the vacuum would in fact be stable. (E6)

It’s a puzzle, he said, why the universe exists in such a critical state. In an e-mail, Dr. Giudice wrote, “Why do we happen to live at the edge of collapse?” He went on, “In my view, the message about near-criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.” Guido Tonelli of CERN and the University of Pisa, said, “If true, it is somehow magic.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion, he said, if there hadn’t been enough time already for this universe to produce galaxies, stars, planets and “human beings who are attempting to produce a vision of the world,” he said. “So, in some sense, we are here, because we have been lucky, because for this particular universe the lottery produced a certain set of numbers, which allow the universe to have an evolution, which is very long.” (E6)

Overbye, Dennis. Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our UniVerse. New York Times. October 10, 2022. Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? Just maybe, a holographic cosmos. A succinct review of attempts by quantum and astro physicists to appreciate that their fields have a deep commonality to an extent as being one and the same. A main player is Stanford’s Leonard Susskind (arxiv:1708.03040) along with many colleagues.

Overbye, Dennis. Laws of Nature: Source Unknown. New York Times. December 18, 2007. Tuesday’s great Science Times section is a clearing-house for the leading edges of cosmological speculation. But its almost totally male pursuit seems to flounder on its basic premises, as this article widely reviews. Agreement eludes on whether the universe has intrinsic, eternal laws, as Plato long ago avered, or, for example, be finally unpredictable re Anton Zeilinger, with malleable parameters per Paul Davies, or is, as Holger Bech Nielsen likens, a random machine. With such tossing around of multidimensional strings, contorted landscapes, and so on, one cannot avoid the notion of a “Ptolemaic physics” trying to shore up an ultimately untenable model of a cosmos that is essentially organic in kind.

Overbye, Dennis. Physicists’ Dreams and Worries in Era of the Big Collider. New York Times. January 26, 2010. A news item on a “Physics of the Universe Summit” held at Caltech to mostly access the state and future of particulate theories, now that the LHC was online, to a degree. But with open issues such as dark matter and energy, quantum gravity, along with many other quandaries and entanglements, it was hard for attendees to avoid a malaise that their physics paradigm was in bankruptcy, and in need of revolutionary revision. And on the facing page is a note: “Slime Mold Proves to be a Brainy Blob” by Japanese researchers about how these microbes form a viable network similar to the Toyko metro system (see A. Tero, et al). Such disparate phases are said to spring from common mathematical principles, but such real emergent phenomena which will not be found in atom smashers. (see Brian Josephson for an attempt to open a window)

Overduin, James and Paul Wesson. The Light/Dark Universe: Light from Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Singapore: World Scientific, 2008. Astronomers from Stanford University and the University of Waterloo, Manitoba, provide the latest explanation as to why, if filled with stars and galaxies, space remains black when viewed. This is old chestnut is now seen to involve the age of the universe, its various wave length backgrounds, tendencies to clumpiness, along with elusive darknesses of matter and energy.

The Universe appears to consist of roughly three parts vacuum-like dark energy and one part pressureless cold dark matter, with a sprinkling of how dark matter (neutrinos) that is almost certainly much less important that cold dark matter. Baryons – the stuff of which we are made – turn out to be mere trace elements in comparison. This marks a fundamental shift in cosmological thinking: our composition is special, even if our location in space is not. (197) At present it simply seems that we have stumbled onto the cosmic stage at an unusual moment. (197) More universally, the development of physics is akin to the activity of a fisherman, in the sense that we only recover from the sea of knowledge those “discoveries” which are larger than the mesh-size of our mental net. (201)

Palmer, Tim. Lorenz, Gödel and Penrose: New Perspectives on Geometry and Determinism in Fundamental Physics. Contemporary Physics. Online April, 2014. The text of the 9th Dennis Sciama Memorial Lecture by the Oxford University Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics. The paper continues Palmer’s project, search here and arXiv, to explain with novel theoretical credence a 21st century cosmic development by way of invariant nonlinear complex systems: "the universe as a dynamical system." With 20th century relativity and quantum theories in place, these new perceptions of nature’s universal iteration presage a revolutionary self-emergent cosmos. Palmer took his doctorate with Sciama at Oxford in the 1970s so is well versed to do so. In regard, Dennis Sciama was scientist-in-resident in 1979 at near by Mount Holyoke College where he ran a premier lecture series with speakers from Max Delbruck to Virginia Trimble. Some decades later this endeavor to engage and comprehend an inherently self-creating genesis universe continues forth.

Meteorologist Ed Lorenz, pioneer of chaos theory, is well known for his demonstration of `the butterfly effect'. More fundamentally, however, Lorenz's research established a profound link between space-time calculus and state-space fractal geometry. Amazingly, properties of Lorenz's fractal invariant set can be shown to relate space-time calculus to deep areas of mathematics associated with Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and G\"{o}del's Incompleteness Theorem. Motivated by this, it is proposed that our theories of fundamental physics should also be framed in terms of state-space geometry rather than the traditional space-time calculus. To develop these ideas more concretely, it is supposed that the universe U is itself a deterministic dynamical system evolving on a fractal invariant set I_U in its state space. (Abstract)

The Universe as a Dynamical System. There is nothing especially new about considering the universe as a gravitationally closed relativistic dynamical system. But what is the evidence that the universe can be considered a dynamical system evolving on a fractal invariant set? If p denotes the state of the universe at some time and if the universe is evolving on a compact fractal invariant set IU in state space, then after a finite period of time the state of the universe should return to a state arbitrarily close to p. In other words, the universe must be quasi-cyclic. In recent years the notion of a cyclic universe is re-gaining popularity and bothstring theory and loop quantum gravity support cyclic cosmological models. Whilst a strictly cyclic universe is periodic, implying that its trajectory in state space is a closed loop, there is no reason from these models strict periodicity. Viewed in this way, the notion of the universe evolving on a fractal invariant set implies a rather novel perspective on the multiverse, a concept so prevalent in modern cosmology. That is to say, the ‘parallel universes’ in the neighbourhood of p do not represent ‘other worlds’ but rather represent states of our own world at future aeons. (13)

Peacock, John. Cosmological Physics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A large textbook presents the realms of relativity theory, quantum fields, galaxy formation, and an embryonic, developing cosmos.

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