Spacetime Equivlence

With a new model of fundamental particles, Mills turned his attention to the problem of gravity on a quantum scale.

Mills’s first insight came from how, if his electron bubble is constricted down to a size of about 1/137th the size of the hydrogen atom, the energy stored in the electrical repulsion of its own charge would exactly equal its rest mass — its Newtonian mass. The electron must begin life at this size, with its antiparticle the positron, during a pair production event.

During pair production, a photon transforms into two particles that are orbiting one another in a circular bound state. Then, they launch apart on a parabolic arc. When the particle and antiparticle split, something interesting happens to space.

There is a relationship between the proper time (the reference frame in orbit) and coordinate time (the reference frame at the center of the orbit). When the two particles are moving at their Newtonian escape velocity, this relationship between proper time and coordinate time bends space and time around the particles, a special relativistic contraction of spacetime itself, creating a gravitational field.

Mills’s theory produced the following result:

When particles are born, spacetime contracts.

When particles die (by annihilating with an antiparticle, or any process in which matter is released as light), spacetime expands.

This creates a new conservation law: the conservation of spacetime: Spacetime pulls in and pushes out, and overall, it is conserved.

The math allowed Mills to do useful work, such as predict particle masses, particle classes, and solve the ratios of the masses of fundamental particles — something never before done. Everything matched incredibly well to experimental data, and Mills’s theory even predicted the top quark mass before its discovery.

And, it is an epiphany.

Look up at the night sky, and what do you see? Stars; small glimmering dots. Stars are the universe’s factories, enormous fusion engines that digest matter and produce light. To conserve spacetime, each fusion event pushes out space a very little bit.

Our Sun alone (a relatively modest star) fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen per second, refining it into helium or other heavier elements, and releasing the balance of mass as energy.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe .

In 1995, Mills hypothesized that universe is not simply coasting from a primordial bang, but actively pushing itself out. Stellar fusion, the most abundant physical process in nature, provides an explanation for the expanding universe.

It makes sense; and in retrospect, matter to energy conversion is the only physical process in nature that is up to the task of pushing out the universe on such an enormous scale.

Mills continued to extrapolate from this idea.

Over billions of years, the fires of the universe will burn, expanding space. Stars will grow old and die, perhaps explode as supernova, their remnants forming new stars (like ours), which will live out their lives, as their host galaxies slowly drift out on the spacetime wind.

This goes on. Matter becomes scarce, and dominated by heavier elements of the ash of stars. Neutron stars will cool, ancient supermassive black holes will grow fat (and annihilate, as allowed in Mills’s theory); galaxies will shrink, dim, and eventually go dark. The last stars will be outposts, wavering candles in a vast expanse of emptiness.

The expansion stops.

The universe will reach its maximum size: about 312 billion light years across, about 22 times larger than it is today.

The tide has turned; the radiation flowing through space courses through clouds of dust and gas to form new particles. Each spark of new matter contracts space and exerts gravity on its surroundings; the particles combine and into atoms and add to the gathering clouds, which will catch still more light. The shrinking universe will go slowly at first, but speed up and eventually reach a rapid clip. New fires will kindle as stars are born from fresh supplies of hydrogen gas.

The Universe — Present Day

The Universe — Billions of years in the future

Only after the murky unformed clouds of proto-galaxies begin to take shape as beautiful spirals; only after they are once again neighbors, near enough to occasionally collide, as they group into clusters and superclusters; only once they are fully ablaze and the heavens are filled with light, will the universe stop shrinking and pause.

Galaxies are now mature, dense, and hot. Millions of new stars are being born every day; and the universe starts to expand, slowly at first, then faster, beginning a new cycle in the history of the cosmos.