.
It was almost midnight and thanks to the embarrassing nap at Gina’s I was nowhere near to being sleepy. So, I started surfing the web for information regarding dark matter.
I found out the term refers to a hypothetical substance that scientists have never been able to detect but believe should exist to account for the gravitational forces prevalent in the universe. They estimate that 80% of the mass of the universe is composed of dark matter. In other words, for gravity to make sense across the universe we would need 80% more matter.
In the Timekeeper’s dream at Gina’s, he mentioned that once materialized, the past stays there for anyone to visit. Like a museum with every instant of existence frozen in an endless stream. “Its mass affecting the present from an unseen source.” And went on to postulate that the theoretical dark matter is in fact the mass of the past. Could this be possible? Can the mass of the past account for that 80% of missing matter in the universe? An image of Marty McFly in Back to the Future saying “Whoa, this is heavy Doc” came to my mind. I found myself smiling at the unintended pun.
Einstein’s theory of relativity stated, among other things, that gravity was so powerful that it could bend the fabric of the space-time continuum. This included bending light and in extreme cases, like in the equally theoretical black holes, not allowing it to escape the enormous forces of gravity present. My research took me to territory reserved for knowledgeable physicists and I started to get lost.
The bottom line was that everything regarding dark matter was hypothetical. Nothing has been found, and physicists’ opinions are split up with some of them feeling uncomfortable with the concept. They are divided in their visions of what accounts for the missing mass in the universe.
Some say it has to do with dim brown dwarfs, white dwarfs and neutrino stars. Others add the hypothetical supermassive black holes to that mix. And there are some who go fully theoretical with exotic particles such as WIMPS (I’m not making this up), an acronym for ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particle’. These have ten to a hundred times the mass of a proton, but have such weak interactions with “normal” matter that they are difficult, and so far impossible, to detect. For some, the foremost candidates are the neutralinos, massive hypothetical particles heavier and slower than neutrinos, although like all other hypothetical particles none have been spotted.
My feeling at the time was that for such a proof-based scientific community, they relied way too much on unproven concepts. I thought for a moment that if that was the case, then the hypothesis of the mass of the past accounting for the missing mass in the universe was as good a concept as all the others. And since some physicists have been able to both date the universe and calculate its overall mass then maybe it would be possible to determine the mass of the past.
Satisfied at the moment with the information on dark matter, I then switched my attention to the concept of dark energy. As was the case with dark matter, dark energy is a term used to describe an unknown force. One that causes the universe to increase its expansion rate. In layman’s terms, a mysterious force that makes the universe expand more rapidly. Physicists estimate that the universe is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% normal matter. In other words, everything we have observed on Earth and throughout the cosmos is only 5% of the universe. The nature of everything else is up for grabs.
The numbers caught my attention and I wondered… What if the 27% corresponding to dark matter was the mass of the past? Couldn’t the 68% of dark energy be the energy of the future? Energy that, as we sit here, is fueling the materializing process that is the present.
“Could that be what’s accelerating the expansion of the universe? The ever increasing area of the present?” I said out loud. “The present is like a factory that keeps expanding, the more it creates the larger it becomes. The larger it becomes the more it produces. And the rate of expansion increases because the manufacturing footprint keeps on growing.”
“Zat’s a bold schtatement Ray.”
I jumped when I heard his voice.
“Don’t you ever knock? You scared the shit out of me.”
“Zorry, but I understand you’re now dealing vith ein specific topic fery dear to me. I zought zat maybe I could be of help.”
“Are you going to stay around this time? Because you fled a while ago after directing me to Stephen Hawking’s time travel experiment. Which reminds me, did you take down the information wall?”
“It dizipaded becauze you nein longer needed it. It vas alvays meant to be zomething of ein vizual aid. To help you master zee ability of accezing zee Akaschic records. You’re perfectly capable of doing zat on your own now.”
“I wish I shared your confidence in me,” I said and then proceeded to share with him my thoughts on dark matter and dark energy, and their relationship to the past, present and future.
“I must zay, I like zee vay you zink Raymond Young. A hypothezis like zis has countless ramifications.”
“I know! Just listening to myself telling you all this I realized a couple of those ramifications. For example, what if your wormholes were just points in the universe untouched by time? Places completely devoid of matter. Areas of pure energy through which one could instantaneously travel long distances outside of time. And at the other end of the spectrum, what if black holes were very old areas of the universe. Places where the mass of the past was such that its gravitational forces go off the scale?”
‘Einstein’ looked at me blankly and started talking in the language of physicists. This time I couldn’t understand a single word he was uttering, not because of his accent but because I had no idea what he was talking about. I heard terms I didn’t know existed in the English language, and names I had no idea how to spell. He was just thinking out loud but I felt like a little kid who had just told a grownup that he had learned to tie his shoes.
At one point he addressed me by name and just said:
“Ray, can I uze your compuder?”