THE MALTA COSMOLOGY TEMPLATE

Explanatory Notes 

The Blue Book

ON THE ORIGIN AND STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE

PREFACE

Because the first copies of this paper were bound with blue card, I have always referred to it as The Blue Book.

The Blue Book is a summary of the cosmological ideas I put together during the period 1988 to 1994. I began writing it in February 1995, immediately following my retirement from the Civil Service. It took about a year to write with the definitive copies being run-off in February of 1996. I had a large number bound and sent the to a range of British Universities. I had three replies which were all dismissive. Dismayed, disappointed and depressed, I set the work aside for a while and played with other things.

I took up the work again in 2002. Recent discoveries showed that the Blue Book needed refining although none of the new discoveries upset the general thrust of the book. What was needed most was that its explanations needed a lot of clarification. Clarifying things is what I have been doing ever since. The Malta Template is very different from the Blue Book, not least because it is vastly more detailed. Nevertheless, the Template's conclusions are not far removed from those of the Blue Book - although there are a lot more of them.

Notwithstanding the dismissive comments I received in 1996, as a description of the large scale Universe, The Blue Book stands up well against the Standard Models of the time, especially given that it was put together by a self-educated amateur with limited resources and almost no access to an uptodate knowledgebase. However, its real importance today lies in it being a piece of history - the first steps on the way to the fully formed Malta Template. As such, I have decided that it deserves a place inside the Malta Template - if only to show that out of little acorns, mighty oaks really do grow.

The original Blue Book was written on an Amstrad computer that used a word processor unique to itself. Likewise, the disks onto which it was saved were non-standard. Both the computer and the disks it produced has long-since gone to the tip. Consequently, the only accessible copies of the Blue Book are the few remaining copies from the binding of 1996. For that reason, what you have here is a copy-type rather than a facsimile. However, apart from correcting the occasional old spelling error and a few punctuation adjustments, what you have here is what was printed out in 1996.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE – TEELS

1.1     The properties of the fundamental particle

    Gravity
    Rejectivity

1.2     Speed
1.3     Spin
1.4     Energy
1.5     Bonding

    Metal Bonding
    Fluid Bonding
    Gas Bonding

1.6     Onward

CHAPTER TWO – THE BIG BANG

2.1     Before the Big Bang
2.2     The pre-Big Bang Universe
2.3     The self-regulating Universe
2.4     Outside influences
2.5     The main event – The Big Bang
2.6     Onward

CHAPTER THREE – PHOTONS

3.1     Basics
3.2     Early moments
3.3     Clumps
3.4     Spin
3.5     Photon-hood
3.6     The structure of a photon
3.7     Different types of photons
3.8     The atmosphere of a photon
3.9     Photon self-regulation
3.10   How to change the wavelength of a photon
3.11   Red and Blue shifting
3.12   Big Bang photons
3.13   Onward

CHAPTER FOUR – NUCLEONS

4.1     Quarks
4.2     Neutrons
4.3     An unstable particle
4.4     Protons
4.5     The matter universe
4.6     Charge
4.7     Slow neutrons
4.8     Destroying a neutron
4.9     Destroying a proton
4.10   Photon and electron production
4.11   Creating a neutron
4.12   Big Bang electrons
4.13   Onward

CHAPTER FIVE – PROTOGALAXIES

5.1     A third skin
5.2     Protostars
5.3     Making a structure
5.4     Skin number four
5.5     Differences
5.6     Protogalaxies
5.7     Protostar dumping
5.8     Quasars
5.9     Clearer terms – heartstars and galaxies
5.10   Onward

CHAPTER SIX – GALAXIES

6.1     Inside a heartstar
6.2     Inside a galaxy
6.3     The atmosphere of a galaxy

    Mass
    ATS
    EV

6.4     Development – one
6.5     Development – two

    The no-decay (ND) zone
    The light atom (LA) zone
    The heavy atom (HA) zone
    The radioactive atom (RA) zone

6.6     Galaxy types

    Irregular galaxies
    Dwarf elliptical galaxies
    Spiral galaxies
    Large elliptical galaxies

6.7     Growth
6.8     Onward

CHAPTER SEVEN – SUPERGALAXIES

7.1     The ongoing process
7.2     Walls and bridges
7.3     Clusters
7.4     Superclusters
7.5     Supergalaxies
7.6     The development of supergalaxies
7.7     Supergalactic atmospheres.
7.8     The uniflux
7.9     The end?
7.10   Onward

CHAPTER EIGHT – STARS AND PLANETS

8.1     Trash-u-like
8.2     Debris, detritus, and junk
8.3     Coming together again
8.4     Atmospheres
8.5     A star is born
8.6     A planet is born
8.7     Alternatively …..
8.8     The gas theory
8.9     A certain future
8.10   Perspective
8.11   Onward

CHAPTER NINE – ATOMS, FUSION AND FISSION

9.1     Types of atoms
9.2     Fraud
9.3     The proton-proton chain
9.4     Basic fusion
9.5     Consequences
9.6     Helium
9.7     Carbon – the stuff of life
9.8     Likelihoods
9.9     Other fusions, other halls
9.10   Fusion in stars – specifics
9.11   The energy balance
9.12   The neutron heart
9.13   Crisis
9.14   Radioactivity
9.15   Fission
9.16   The end and the beginning
9.17   Supernova
9.18   Neutron Star
9.19   Onward

CHAPTER TEN – VISION IN THE UNIVERSE

10.1     “Facts”
10.2     The doors of perception
10.3     Effect number one: photon creation
10.4     Effect number two: the uniflux
10.5     Effect number three: gravity
10.6     Effect number four: the doppler effect
10.7     Colour blinded
10.8     The rules of the game
10.9     Specific case one: Big Bang photons
10.10   Specific case two: nuclear photons
10.11   Specific case three: quasar photons
10.12   Specific case four: the centre and the edge of the Universe
10.13   Specific case five: Andromeda photons
10.14   Onward

CHAPTER ELEVEN – THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

11.1     Our place in space
11.2     The hypergalaxy
11.3     Kings and Queens
11.4     Shrinkage and growth
11.5     The one and only – The Kingstar
11.6     Internal processes
11.7     Internal structures
11.8     A wider perspective
11.9     The end

CHAPTER TWELVE – BEYOND THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

12.1     Decay and stability
12.2     One among millions
12.3     Onward again?

GLOSSARY

CHAPTER ONE

TEELS

At the heart of this chapter is the supposition that there is a fundamental “particle” from groups of which everything else in the Universe is constructed.

The current view is that the raw material of the Universe is not a particle at all – it is energy. That energy can, in some circumstances, be formed into particles thus creating the Universe we know today.

Energy comes in little packets known as photons about which we know almost nothing. Because of their unusual characteristics – their constant speed and their insubstantiality – we are unable to capture photons in any manner that allows a proper analysis. This means that almost everything we know about them comes from observing their affect on particles.

Isaac Newton supposed that photons were a type of particle since this would explain their ability to travel in straight lines and cast shadows. However, when groups of photons interact, they do not behave as particles are supposed to and this led Christiaan Huygens to suggest that they were actually waves. The resulting modern view is an unsatisfactory compromise. Individually, photons continue to be regarded as Newtonian particles. En masse, they are regarded as Huygens waves.

However, notwithstanding the unusual behaviour of photons en masse, it is reasonable to suppose that photons are particles. Everything else in the Universe, other than empty space, is either a particle in its own right or is made of particles. In the absence of any positive evidence to the contrary, it is actually unreasonable to suppose that photons are different from anything else.

This raises the question of whether the photon is the fundamental particle. Logic suggests that it is not. We don’t know much about photons but we do know that they come in a wide range of sizes and energy levels. This suggests that there must be an internal mechanism or structure – without one, the size and energy level of an individual photon could not be controlled. Mechanisms and structures, of course, suggest construction – and this leads to the inevitable conclusion that photons are made from something else.

1.1     THE PROPERTIES OF THE FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLE

The fundamental particle is called a “teel”.

Compared with any particle that we can currently identify, a teel must be an extremely insubstantial object, one that we are unlikely ever to be able to identify directly. Nevertheless, by extending the properties of known particles, it is possible to specify with some certainty what some of the properties of a teel might be.

Every type of particle has a different range of properties. However, there are two properties which are present in all other particles (some would dispute that they are present in photons but then, some would dispute that photons are particles anyway). It is therefore reasonable to suppose that they are also present in teels. The properties are gravity (or attractivity) and rejectivity.

Gravity:

This is the force which attracts one particle to another. Each particle attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of their distance from each other.

No-one knows what gravity is. To Isaac Newton it was a “force at a distance” and the Albert Einstein it was a “property of space itself”. It may be either of these, or both, or something else entirely. We simply do not know.

For convenience, and because there is no evidence to the contrary, this paper presumes that each teel harbours exactly the same amount of gravity. This means that the mass of a particle is a measure of how many teels it contains. The gravitational strength of a particle is the sum total of the gravity of all the teels that it contains, modified by the density with which the teels are packed.

Rejectivity:

This is expressed in the simple rule: one particle cannot occupy a place in space and time that is already occupied by another. This is borne out by our personal experience and no comprehensively explained exception to the rule has ever been discovered.

One consequence of the rejectivity rule is that teels must have dimensions. For a place in space to be occupied, that place must have dimensions – height, width, and depth. For something to occupy that space it must therefore, likewise, have dimensions. Having said that, we have no way of knowing what the dimensions of a teel might be – other than that they are rather small.

If teels have dimensions, this suggests that they MAY also have a structure and this, in turn, may suggest that the teel is not the fundamental particle. This may be so, but we have to stop somewhere and I have stopped at teels.

1.2     SPEED

The presence of gravity and rejectivity in teels produces a third, very variable property – speed. This property is a direct consequence of gravity and rejectivity and cannot exist independently.

This is best explained in the following example. If there were only two teels in the Universe and they were placed, stationary, one billion kilometres apart, they would be unable to maintain those positions for long. Even at that great distance, and even with their puny gravitational strength, their mutual gravity would begin to pull them towards each other. At first, the movement would be slow but it would accelerate. Eventually, they would be rushing toward each other at high speed.

Since there is nothing else in this imaginary Universe but these two teels, there is nothing that can prevent them crashing into each other and this they would eventually do. Now, the rejectivity would come into play. Since neither teel can occupy the same space at the same time as the other, and since they have no other means of dissipating their speed, they have no choice but to bounce off each other.

The two teels retreat from each other, their courses and speeds being an exact mirror image of their advance. Ultimately, each will return to the precise point from which they started their journey. There, once more, the attractivity of their mutual gravity reasserts itself and they begin to move towards each other again.

Provided there is no change in circumstances, this process will continue, in exactly the same way, in, out, in, out, forever. However, the real Universe is not like the one in our example. Space is not empty. It is filled with many, many teels and this means that a SIMPLE gravitational attraction over billions of kilometres is impossible. Every teel is being influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, by every other teel in the Universe with the result that distant attractions are cancelled out. Close attractions, on the other hand, are often felt individually which means that the course of each teel, as it makes its way through the Universe, is not a simple straight line.

Speed is entirely a product of the attractive and rejective properties of teels and all the movement in the Universe stems from this. A universe composed of teels could only be at rest if all the teels were stationary and lying next to each other. Were there to be a gap between any of the teels, their attractivity and rejectivity would induce speed and ensure that the Universe was in motion.

And it would continue to be in motion. Speed is always conserved. It can be suppressed but it cannot be destroyed. The amount of speed that the Universe started out with is the amount that it will end with. There will never be any more and there will never be any less.

Speed may be conserved in the Universe as a whole, but a given amount of speed need not remain with one teel through the whole of its existence. Any collision between teels which are not moving at precisely the same velocity will result in an exchange of speed. The sum of the speeds of two teels will always be the same after a collision as it was before. However, the distribution will change according to the manner in which the two teels struck each other.

1.3     SPIN

One property found in almost everything is “spin”. In one form or another, everything spins: galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, are all spinning. The only thing commonly thought not to spin is the photon but again, logically, there is no sensible reason to deny photons a property given to everything else just because we do not have a technology capable of detecting it.

To be precise, spin is not really a property at all. It is actually speed that has been diverted to follow a circular or elliptical path. The rotation of Planet Earth is really the curving of the path of all the Earth’s particles by their mutual gravity to follow a circular form. Spin is speed confined by gravity.

Spin provides a kind of speed “store”. Inducing a particle to spin will reduce its velocity by an amount that equates to the amount of the spin. However, the velocity converted to spin is not permanently stored and can be released. The commonest form of release is by collision. This leads to the following conservation law:

One unit of spin can be converted by collision into one unit of speed.
By a further collision it can be converted back into one unit of spin.
As a result of a collision, one unit of spin or speed can be
transformed into any ratio of spin and speed
but the combined spin and speed can never be
more or less than the value of the original unit.
Hence the equation:

1 unit of spin = 1 unit of speed

Do teels spin? Logically, if everything else in the Universe can, a teel should also be so capable. However, the ability to spin would imply that it has a structure. A structure would imply construction which, in turn, would imply that teels are not the fundamental particle.

The best that can be said is that it makes little difference to what follows whether they spin or not. It merely means that if they do spin, it MAY be necessary to look for a particle that is even less substantial.

1.4     ENERGY

The dictionary definition of energy is “a capacity to do work”. Actually, energy is speed.

The energy of particles is nothing more than the harnessing, by gravity and rejectivity, of the speed of their constituent teels. Energy is stored in particles as spin and it is released, primarily, by collision although it can also be released by pressure caused by the dense packing of particles.

The difference between animate and inanimate objects, between life and non-life, lies in the ability to capture speed and to store it for use at a time advantageous to the object.

The vehicle of energy, in the current canon, is the photon. However, as we have already seen, this is probably not an accurate picture. So, to avoid confusion, this paper will use the word energy very sparingly.

1.5     BONDING

In order to create particles, a number of teels must be joined together. This is called bonding and is the most important process in the Universe. Actually, it is the only process in the Universe since all other processes rely, fundamentally, on the bond-forming or bond-breaking of their constituent teels.

To bond a number of teels into an accretion requires a balance between their mutual gravity and their speed. Inside an accretion, the teels will be moving, colliding with each other and transferring amounts of speed from one to another. For a bonding to hold, no transfers of speed must ever give one or more teels so much velocity that the gravity of the accretion is not strong enough to retain it.

Inside a teel accretion, the highest velocity achievable by any single teel depends upon the average speed of all the teels in it. The higher the average teel speed (ATS) the higher is the top possible velocity.

The mutual gravity of the teels in an accretion furnishes its Escape Velocity (EV). The EV is the sum of the gravity of each teel, abated by the density wit which they are packed together. The more densely they are packed together, the higher the EV.

The density of the teels in an accretion is conditioned by the ATS. The higher the ATS, the less densely packed are the teels and therefore the lower the EV. And conversely.

Stability in a teel accretion is reached when its ATS and its EV are in balance. Outside that state, any increase in ATS will be counterbalanced by a reduction in EV: this will lead to some teels travelling faster than EV and escaping: in turn, this will reduce the ATS and the EV of the accretion – although it will proportionately reduce the ATS more than the EV so balance is restored.

Conversely, any reduction in ATS will increase the EV which will allow the capture of further teels. These will increase both the ATS and the EV but will increase the ATS more thus restoring the balance.

There are three types of teel bonding: metal, fluid and gas.

Metal Bonding:

This is where the mutual gravity of pairs of teels is sufficiently strong that they are “locked” together. In a large accretion, this means the interlinking of vast numbers of teels, each being prevented by the dense packing from rotating around their neighbours. Such an accretion is a “solid”. Typically, the ATS of such an accretion is low when compared to the EV but it is by no means nil. The velocity of the teels is not killed but “ordered” and appears as the velocity and/or spin of the entire accretion.

Fluid bonding:

This occurs when the ATS of the accretion is sufficiently high that the teels cannot be prevented from rotating about their partners – and from moving from one partner to another. Free of any other gravitational influences, such an accretion will adopt a spherical shape but the random movement of its teels will prevent it from spinning. There is, however, room for variations and, if the ATS is sufficiently low, some ordering will occur and the teels will form streams and currents.

Gas bonding:

This occurs when the mutual gravity of pairs of teels is insufficient to hold them together although the gravity of the whole accretion is sufficient to prevent their escape.

These bonding types cannot be considered in isolation. A low ATS/High EV accretion could well have a metal bonded core surrounded by a fluid bonded “ocean” which is in turn surrounded by a gas bonded “atmosphere”.

Indeed, it could well be that gas and fluid bonded accretions are unsustainable without the massive gravity concentration provided by a metal bonded core. If they are not able to reduce their ATS sufficiently to form a metal bonded core they may inevitably evaporate. It may even be, that fluid and gas bonding can only take place around an already formed metal bonded core.

1.6     ONWARD

The teel is the basic building block of the Universe. We know almost nothing about it other than that it has gravity, rejectivity and speed. Yet, as we will see, those three properties are all we need to build a Universe that looks exactly like the one we see around us.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BIG BANG

It is generally accepted nowadays that the Universe began at a specific point in time, many billions of years ago, in a high-temperature, high-density state. This was, in effect, an explosion which has resulted in the Universe expanding ever since. The moment of the beginning is known as the Big Bang.

The evidence for the Big Bang is, however, this, circumstantial and inconclusive. The Hubble Law would seem to indicate a Universe in expansion which implies that it once occupied a much smaller area. The discovery of the Gamow-predicted background radiation would seem to indicate that the Universe was once extremely hot. And that is all. The rest is just theory and inference. Quite a lot of theories, actually, and quite a lot of inference.

To assess the chances of whether or not the Big Bang really did happen, we are forced back into extrapolation. Because of a lack of any viable alternative, we can only look at what we know for certain and project that onto what we don’t know at all.

The best evidence for the Big Bang come from our own instincts. In all areas, the arts and the sciences, we tend to give greater approval to subject which have a beginning, a middle, and an end, in one form or another.

It is, of course, possible that the Universe is truly eternal, that it has always been and always will be. However, this conflicts with what is inside the Universe. All around us, thing are created, they develop and change and are ultimately destroyed. All structures inside the Universe seem to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is reasonable, therefore to presume that the Universe has as well.

The currently favoured notion fits well with this. It says that the Universe began with a Big Bang and is currently working its way through its develop and change phase. It will eventually end although exactly how this will happen depends upon the mass of the Universe. If there is not enough mass, the Universe will gradually evaporate away to nothing, as do explosions here on Earth.

2.1     BEFORE THE BIG BANG

There is not a lot of speculation underway about the state of the Universe before the Big Bang. In part, this is because of the dominance of Albert Einstein’s Relativity theories which suggest that the Universe is all there is – there is nothing outside the Universe and there was nothing before it. Thus, if the Universe did not exist before the Big Bang, there is little point in speculating about it.

Such thinking is also conditioned by the thought that the Universe once comprised nothing but energy. There are problems in compressing matter which do not apply to energy. If the Universe, at the moment of the Big Bang, was an “energy universe” it would have been highly compressible and thus extremely, and probably, infinitely small.

Nevertheless, there are some conjectures and the commonest of these suggests a repeating cycle of big bang, big crunch, big bang, big crunch, and so on. This concept does have some attractions but, due to a complete absence of any known facts, the arguments for it are rather insubstantial.

That said, we can make some progress with it by returning to the idea that the Universe is ultimately made of teels. This is because there are two reasonable conjectures that we can draw from the properties of the teels themselves. The first concerns the size of the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang.

Teels have three known properties; gravity, rejectivity, and speed. In the moment before the Big Bang, the smallest possible size of the Universe would have been conditioned by the rejectivity of its teels. If one teel cannot occupy the same point in space and time as another, there is a size below which a Universe composed of teels cannot go. What that size may have been is difficult to judge but it could not have been “infinitely” small.

The second conjecture concerns whether anything existed before the Big Bang. For the teel to be the fundamental particle, it must be structureless. If teels have no structure, they cannot have been constructed. If they were not constructed, they were not made and therefore cannot be destroyed. In effect, teels are eternal.

These conjectures fit well with the idea of a continuously recycling universe. We should instinctively recoil from the idea of an eternal teel – a particle with no beginning, no end, and only a long, long, middle. Yet, if the teel is not eternal, we once again have the question: what was there before and what will come after. For the moment, there is no answer.

2.2     THE PRE-BIG BANG UNIVERSE

If the pre-Big Bang Universe had an ATS of zero, all of its teels would have been metal bonded to each other, packed as closely as is physically possible. The Universe would have been round and have had a small volume. The gravity at the surface would have been hideously strong and EV extraordinarily high.

That said, it is actually unlikely that the pre-Big Bang Universe had a zero ATS. The amount of speed in the Universe today is very high and since speed cannot be “killed”, any more than it can be “created”, we are left with two options: either the speed was injected into the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang or it was in the Universe all along.

Speed, confined in a pre-Big Bang Universe, would show itself as velocity, spin, or as a mix of the two. Spinning the Universe would affect its volume, increasing it by lowering the Universe’s density. If the spin was fast enough, the teels on the surface of the Universe would become fluid bonded. Higher yet and an atmosphere of gas bonded teels would form above the fluid bonded layer.

The idea that the pre-Big Bang Universe may have had fluid and gas bonded layers leads to the thought that it may also have had a stable, self-regulating and, therefore, long-lasting structure.

2.3     THE SELF-REGULATING UNIVERSE

Fluid and gas bonded teels, held by gravity as layers on the top of a spinning metal bonded core, are automatically conditioned by collision mechanics so the at the fastest are at the equator and the slowest are at the poles. The faster the spin, the faster the speed of the equatorial teels.

One consequence of increasing the spin, assuming no change in mass, is that the EV is reduced – the extra spin increases volume while leaving the total amount of gravity unchanged. Continuously increasing the spin will continuously reduce the EV.

If the increase in spin were to be extended far enough, the equatorial teels would eventually be moving faster than the EV. Such teels could not be prevented from escaping, permanently, from the Universe.

These escapes would alter the balance between the mass and the ATS. Each escaping teel would only take with it the mass of one teel – the same no matter which teel it was – but it would take the very fastest of speed. Thus, while both the mass and the ATS of the Universe would be reduced, the speed loss would be greater.

This puts a limit on both the mass and the volume of the Universe. For a given ATS, there is a volume/mass beyond which the Universe cannot go without ejecting teels. If that ATS varies, so too does the maximum volume and mass that the Universe can attain.

If fast teels can escape, it follows that slow teels can be captured. As long as the new intake is faster than the ATS of the Universe and less than its EV, they will raise its ATS. However, since they will also increase its mass, the Universe will contract. This will increase the EV sufficiently to counteract the increase in the rate of spin.

As long as slow teels are available for capture, the Universe will achieve a balance between its mass and its ATS which it will continually, and automatically, adjust – ejecting and absorbing teels as necessary.

2.4     OUTSIDE INFLUENCES

If the pre-Big Bang Universe was not “everything”. If it was a finite body with a specific mass, volume, diameter, and ATS, what might there have been outside it.

The best answer, at the moment, is teels. Since the pre-Big Bang Universe had an internal mechanism which regulated its dimensions by ejecting fast teels and absorbing slow teels, the ejected teels must have gone somewhere and the absorbed teels must have come from somewhere.

It would appear, therefore, that the pre-Big Bang Universe moved through a soup of free teels. Further questions now arise. What was the density of those teels? Were they streamed at all? Had they come from a specific place and were they going to one?

The answers are beyond us at the moment but there is one thing we can infer by considering the ATS of the pre-Big Bang Universe. Far from being conditioned by the Universe’s own internal processes, the ATS is actually dictated by the average speed of the teels in the surround soup. If the average speed of the soup teels is higher than the EV of the Universe, the ATS of the Universe will be raised faster than its EV and it will lose mass. If it is lower, the converse will apply and the Universe will gain mass.

Thus, we have a Universe that is surrounded by a soup of teels, the average speed of which equates to the Universe’s escape velocity. The EV of the Universe is entirely variable and must adapt itself, adjusting ATS, mass and volume, to the speed of the soup.

2.5     THE MAIN EVENT – THE BIG BANG

Suddenly, the Universe “exploded”. In an instant, an incredible amount of speed was turned into velocity and all the teels started moving outwards. Collision mechanics ensured that the greatest speed was transmitted rapidly to the outermost teels. The innermost teels may have barely moved at all.

Initially, the outermost teels moved away at many, many, times the speed of light. They were quickly slowed by the gravity pull of the Universe behind them but, even today, they were still travelling much faster than the speed of light.

Exactly how small the Universe was in those last moments before the Big Bang is more interesting than it is important. It may have been the size of the Moon or the size of the Sun. It might have been the size of a galaxy or even vastly larger than that.

However, no matter what its original size, the rate of expansion was enormous. Given that photons under normal conditions travel at a shade under 300,000 kilometres a second and that the very fastest of teels were then travelling at many, many times that, the diameter of the Universe must have extended by a million or more kilometres in the first second.

2.6     ONWARD

The description of the Universe that you have just read is not strictly correct. The Universe prior to the Big Bang was not a simple ball of teels.

The description is based upon the extrapolation of a few simple factors – the likely properties of the teel. As is often the case with such models, however, the result is something that feels right but which is divorced from reality by some distance.

It is presented here, notwithstanding its inaccuracy, because it illustrates the underlying principles upon which the Universe is founded, providing a solid foundation for what is to come. On that foundation we will erect a building and it is only when that building is complete that we will be able to see the whole.

By the end of the paper, we will see what the pre-Big Bang Universe really looked like and we will have found it to be firmly rooted in the simple principles illustrated here. Likewise, we will find the cause of the Big Bang and see, what may well be, the fate of the Universe.

CHAPTER THREE

PHOTONS

With Big Bang, suddenly, all the teels in the Universe were rushing outwards at a tremendous speed.

The conditions at that time were like nothing in the Universe today. Notwithstanding the enormous speed given to the teels, the entire matter of the Universe was still packed into an area so small that the density has to be incomprehensible. Such conditions were ideal for the creation of photons.

Photons are made in areas of extreme teel density but no such areas today can equal the density of the Universe in those first few moments after the Big Bang. Consequently, the photons created then were like nothing in our experience.

3.1     BASICS

Photons are commonly regarded as “energy” and not “matter” and, although they are seen to exhibit some particulate characteristics, they are not normally thought of as “particles”.

In some circumstances, photons will convert themselves into particles. In others, particles will convert to photons. These actions would appear to confirm e=mc² but the reality is somewhat different. What is really happening is that one particle is being converted to another. Photons are particles.

A photon is an accretion of billions and billions of teels, all locked together by their mutual gravity. A photon has a structure, albeit a relatively simple one, which is governed by balancing its mass against its ATS. A key factor in this is the way that balance is only achieved when the photon has a velocity of a shade under 300,000 kilometres per second.

Photons can vary enormously in size, from the inconceivably minute to a hundred or more kilometres in diameter. Talking in simple sizes, however, can be deceptive. The structure of a photon comprises a metal bonded core surrounded by a gas bonded atmosphere. No matter what the diameter of the whole photon might be, the core is always extremely tiny – it is the atmosphere which can extend over enormous distances.

3.2     EARLY MOMENTS

In expanding outwards after the Big Bang, all the teels were going in roughly the same direction and speed as their near neighbours. Their original density had been so great (and although now lessening, would continue to be great for some time to come) that only the minutest course divergence was possible. This meant that, even though the average teel speed was enormous, their speed relative to each other was almost stationary. As a consequence, they remained metal-bonded to each other.

An inevitable consequence of the explosion of the Universe was that the teels must draw farther apart. This sets up a conflict between the “drawing apart” and the metal-bonding. If the Universe was to expand, the courses of each teel must diverge. Yet the metal bonding must resist this divergence.

For the outermost teels, this was not a problem. They picked up so much speed so quickly that they exceeded their EV’s with their neighbours and broke their bondings easily.

Less far out, however, where the teel speed was lower and teel density was greater, the balance between gravity and speed was closer. Since the metal bonding of the teels at this point was strong enough to prevent them breaking apart, the expansion of the Universe had to slow down.

The Universe had come to resemble a balloon – where the surrounding skin of metal bonded teels enclosed a densely packed ball of teels which were all trying to surge outwards. Something had to give.

3.3     CLUMPS

The weakest link breaks first. In the skin, a teel found itself, perhaps through collision, to have more close teels on one side than on the other. All the teels were still metal bonded but there was not a gravitational imbalance. The closest teels were drawn towards each other and a noticeable gap appeared between them and the others. As the Universe continued to try to expand, the small gap rapidly developed into a tear. Moments later, within the tear, the metal bonding was broken.

Soon there was not just one tear but a myriad, spreading across the skin, in much the same way that a mud-flat cracks as it dries out. A moment later, the skin burst into pieces, into clumps of teels which were still metal bonded together. Now, with the slowing effect of the skin removed, the clumps were free to fly outwards as fast as they were able.

The balloon skin analogy is good but it is not perfect. The skin has to be thought of in three dimensions. As clumps broke away, yet more skin was being formed as the teels below surged outwards, which in turn broke into yet more clumps. And so on.

Not all of the clumps were the same. Because of collision mechanics, the fastest teels were inevitably at the outside of the Universe and the slowest were in the middle. Each successive formation of teel-clumps, therefore, had a lower ATS than its predecessors and, thus, less velocity.

3.4     SPIN

Within the clumps, movement of the teels relative to each other, was soon rationalised. Collision mechanics and the democratic principle rapidly ensured that all the teels came to follow an helical path around the axis of the clump. The clump had begun to spin.

Gravity, collision mechanics, and the democratic principle now combined to give the teel-clumps a structure. The very fastest teels were inevitably driven to the equator and the slowest to the axis. The clump assumed a ball shape. A spinning ball.

3.5     PHOTON-HOOD

Each teel-clump had a mass dictated by the number of teels it contained. It also had an ATS dictated by the speeds of each individual teel. The mass and the ATS dictated the volume and the EV of the clump.

If any of the equatorial teels were moving faster than the EV of the clump, they escaped and this reduced both its ATS and mass. This, in turn, induced further spin due to contraction.

Provided their mass was great enough, all the clumps would have shed teels until they reached equilibrium – the same kind of equilibrium that applied to the Universe, operating by the same rules but on a smaller scale.

Equilibrium in a teel-clump is that state whereby the mass and the ATS are in balance. Should any newly captured teels upset this balance, the further capture and ejection of teels will automatically continue until such time as balance is restored. A teel-clump in equilibrium is a photon.

Our principle measurement of a photon, the wavelength, is its diameter. The diameter of a photon is dictated by its mass and by its ATS, tempered by a constant – the speed of light. Thus:

Light speed/Mass/Diameter = ATS
Light speed/Mass/ATS = Diameter
Light speed/ATS/Diameter = Mass
Mass/Diameter/ATS = Light speed

3.6     THE STRUCTURE OF A PHOTON

At the centre of each photon is a core of metal bonded teels, solidly packed together like metal or rock. Surrounding this, there may be a layer of fluid bonded teels which equate to its oceans. Finally, on the outside, is a layer of gas bonded teels which is its atmosphere.

While the nature of the three layers is dictated by their bonding type, within the layers there is considerable variation. At the centre of the metal bonded zone, for instance, teels are much more densely packed than they are at the edge. Teels at the inner edge of the fluid zone have much less speed than do teels at the outer edge which means that movement in the zone will increase with distance from the centre. The gas bonded zone is likely to be turbulent with many jetstreams and vortices.

3.7     DIFFERENT TYPES OF PHOTONS

There are many different types of photons, ranging from the extremely diffuse radio photons to the compact gamma photons. These differences are conditioned by the mass and the ATS of the photon.

The most damaging photon we know of is a gamma photon. It has a low ATS which results in a densely packed metal bonded core. The dense packing concentrates the gravity of the core into a very small area and, because of this, gravitational strength declines rapidly with distance from the centre. Consequently, the fluid and gas bonded layers are themselves densely packed but very thin. It is quite possible that an ultra high energy gamma photon might have no fluid or gaseous layer at all.

By contrast, although a very low frequency (VLF) radio photon also has a metal bonded core, the high ATS ensures that it is loosely packed. There is likely to be a deep fluid bonded layer surrounding the core but the most impressive part of a VLF radio photon is its extensive atmosphere of gas bonded teels. Because the metal and fluid layers are so loosely packed, the gravitational strength declines slowly with distance from the centre and this means that teels can still be bound to the photon fully fifty kilometres out.

The way that we perceive radio photons on Earth is probably deceptive. They are travelling at a high velocity through a densely packed atmosphere of teels. Consequently, much of their atmosphere, especially the outer regions, comprises teels which are being ejected. It is, fundamentally, the same process that produces the plume that accompanies a spacecraft returning to Earth. Both the spacecraft and the photon are dumping speed. The difference is that the spacecraft is dumping velocity while the photon, being conditioned by light speed, can only dump spin.

The smaller volume of a gamma photon means that it sweeps teel from a much smaller area and therefore does not have to dump teels to the same degree. That said, in the dense teel atmosphere of the Earth there is still a lot of dumping to take place. Much of it is probably done, however, by way of polar jets than simple equatorial dumping – and this, now doubt, contributes to their lethality.

3.8     THE ATMOSPHERE OF A PHOTON

Although the atmospheres of some photons can be very diffuse, they are still able to act as a defence for the core – much as does the atmosphere of our own planet Earth. They ensure that a photon can only be destroyed in certain specific conditions and that, when photons are travelling in groups, they will travel at fixed distances apart from each other.

While there are many similarities between a photon atmosphere and a planetary atmosphere, the parallel should be treated with caution. The Earth’s atmosphere provides a defence against small meteors and other bodies but it is useless against planet-sized bodies. The photon atmosphere, on the other hand, is a good defence against other photons, even at its most diffuse.

A photon atmosphere has a formal structure which is powered by the photon’s spin. The fastest of the gas bonded teels will gravitate towards the equator where they are thrown outwards. Those moving at less than EV will collide with the other teels and be directed towards the north or south poles. At the poles, the teels will crush together and fall to the surface from where they will journey back to the equator.

The process is akin to the circulating weather systems here on Earth. Like those, no doubt, the process is not particularly orderly and will contain many turbulent subsystems.

3.9     PHOTON SELF-REGULATION

Photons travel at a constant speed, no matter what their wavelength. This speed is a balance point, the point of equilibrium, between the mass and the ATS of any particular photon.

Space is filled with teels. For every teel that is locked into a photon there are billions flying free – in much the same way that for every hydrogen atom that is locked into a star, there are billions flying free.

As it moves through space, a photon is continually colliding with, and capturing teels. Some of these will have a speed potential that is higher than the photon’s EV while others will have one that is lower.

If the photon absorbs a large quantity of fast teels, its ATS will be raised and this, in turn, will raise the spin rate. An increase in spin will push some teels at the equator to move faster than the EV which will result in their ejection. Since the amount of “speed” ejected would be the same as the amount absorbed, the wavelength of the photon is unchanged.

Conversely, if the photon absorbs a large dose of slow teels, the ATS is lowered and the mass is raised. The photon contracts and this raises the spin rate, causing equatorial teels to exceed EV and be ejected. The process continues until the photon returns to equilibrium and regains its original wavelength.

3.10     HOW TO CHANGE THE WAVELENGTH OF A PHOTON

The atmosphere of a photon is very good at soaking up any bombardment by open space teels. Few will ever penetrate through to the metal bonded layers and even if they do, their speed will have been so reduced by collisions that they will do no damage. Most photon self-regulation is carried on in the atmosphere, manifesting itself in the photon equivalent of storms and typhoons and hurricanes.

Notwithstanding the efficiency of the photon in regulating itself, the wavelength of a photon can be changed. If the photon is subjected to an intense and sustained bombardment of high or low speed teels, it is possible for the balance processes to be unable to keep up.

If the average teel speed of a photon’s atmosphere is sped up or slowed down for any length of time, the new speed will begin to transfer itself to the fluid layer (if there is one) and then into the metal bonded core. The ATS of the photon will be raised or lowered with a consequent change in wavelength.

There is a relationship between the wavelength of a photon and the ATS of the teel flux through which it is moving. Over time, no matter whether the bombardment is heavy or light, the ATS/mass balance of a photon will come to reflect the ATS of the space through which it is travelling.

3.11     RED AND BLUE SHIFTING

When a photon travels out of a star, the gravitational effects of each will be felt by the other. The gravity of the photon will drag the star along behind it – although the amount of gravity possessed by the photon is so small that the effect is imperceptible by us. Similarly the gravity of the star will attempt to slow down the rushing away of the photon but, in this, it will fail.

The attempt to pull the photon back to the star fails because photons cannot “slow down”. The self-regulating process that maintains the equilibrium of the photon ensures that the photon will also keep moving at the speed of light. If the speed cannot vary, something else must – the wavelength.

What happens is that the ATS of the photon is reduced (you must think of the gravity of the star acting, not on the photon, but upon each individual teel in the photon – teels, unlike photons, can speed up and slow down). This contracts the photon, increasing its EV. Equilibrium is broken and the photon will absorb more open-space teels than it can eject.

As long as the photon is travelling out from the star, it is taking in and keeping more teels. Its mass is increasing and its ATS is decreasing. It is getting smaller but heavier. Its wavelength is decreasing. In physics parlance, its wavelength is being blue-shifted.

The reverse happens when a photon is going towards a star. Their mutual gravity attempts to accelerate the photon – something that cannot happen. The ATS rises and more teels are dumped than are absorbed. The photon’s wavelength increases as it becomes more diffuse and less massive. It is being red-shifted.

In the Universe, the mass of a photon is never constant for long. As they voyage through space, they are continually moving into and out of gravity fields as they pass near to galaxies, stars, and planets. Each time they do, their wavelength will change a little. If they get too close, their wavelength can change a lot.

For that matter, we don’t even have to think on the scale of galaxies, stars and planets. Atoms have “gravity” and the mass of a photon will change even with the act of moving between one atom and another. It has to be said, however, that our ability to measure such things will have to get better before we are able to take meaningful measurements.

At the other end of the scale, the Universe itself affects the mass/ATS balance of photons in exactly the same way. If the Universe has a centre and an edge, there must be a gravitational locus. Photons will be red or blue shifted depending on whether they are going towards or away from the centre.

A note of caution: according to this description, photons are blue shifted when climbing out of a star and red shifted when falling in. This is entirely contrary to what is observed. Nevertheless, the description is correct. Our observations do not take account of the way that the wavelength of a photon is altered by the ATS of the teel flux through which it is moving (see 3.10) and by Doppler effects. The effect of these factors is enough to reverse the shifting. A more comprehensive discussion of this and the consequent problems is in Chapter Ten – Vision in the Universe, particularly Section 10.7.

3.12     BIG BANG PHOTONS

When the first photons formed after the Big Bang, they did so out of teels which, although they were moving much faster than light, all did so at roughly the same speed as their near neighbours. This meant that when the proto-photons began to rotate, stratifying the teels according to their speed, the difference between the fastest teels and the slowest was not great.

The proto-photons were, however, extremely unstable. Not only was their velocity much faster than light, their ATS and mass were grossly out of equilibrium. Very rapidly, they spun up, dumping teels in prodigious numbers. By the time the proto-photons had slowed their velocity to light speed and become photons, they had whittled themselves away to an extremely low mass and an extremely long wavelength.

As the photons moved out from the site of the Big Bang, they moved through a hyperactive soup of extremely fast teels. However, as the Universe expanded, the ATS of the soup declined quickly, as did its density. Adjusting themselves to this, the photons dumped fast teels and picked up slow ones. Very gradually, their wavelength blue shifted as their mass increased.

A further contributor to the blue shift was the gravitational pull of the Universe trying to pull them back – although, as the Universe has dissipated, the strength of this pull has declined.

It has been suggested that the microwave background radiation is the remains of this initial burst of photon creation. The concept is that the Universe was originally composed of high energy, short wavelength photons and that these have been red shifted over the years to reach their present longer wavelengths. Actually, it is the other way round. The photons equilibrated at a low energy and long wavelength and have been blue shifting themselves ever since, for around 15 billion years.

3.13     ONWARD

Photons are particles, pure and simple. This has not been readily apparent to us in the past because their insubstantiality has made detection and analysis difficult. Nevertheless, particles is what they are and it is this which makes it possible for us to move to the next stage, the creation of nucleons.

CHAPTER FOUR

NUCLEONS

According to conventional wisdom:

The Universe has two components: energy and matter. The energy we see as photons and the matter as nucleons (there are particles that can be thought of as matter, such as electrons and neutrinos but these are in the nature of sub-assemblies and are of secondary importance).

Energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. One can be turned into the other and vice versa. A nucleon can be thought of as energy that is contained. Thus, a nucleon contains a specific amount of energy that is packed into a specific volume. Destroy a nucleon and you liberate a specific amount of energy. Capture a specific amount of energy and contain it in a specific volume and you have created a nucleon.

In the Big Bang theory, the Universe began as photons of energy. The density with which these photons were packed together was intense – much higher than the density with which energy is packed into a nucleon. As the Universe expanded, the photons did not move apart smoothly. They broke up into clumps which then adjusted themselves to the energy level of a nucleon. Very rapidly the overall density of the Universe fell below the energy density of nucleons and from that point on, no more nucleons could be formed. This point was reached just 0.0001 seconds – that is one ten thousandth of a second – after the Big Bang.

This is not so much a wrong picture of what happened as an unclear one. Starting, as it does, with photons rather than teels, it suffers by being unsure about what photons are. This in turn means that the mechanism whereby photons become nucleons cannot be properly described. The outline is there but the detail is missing. It is as though the Mona Lisa were painted only in grey and yellow.

4.1     QUARKS

As the Universe expanded, the original teel ball broke up into teel clumps which then evolved into photons. The photons, however, were not free in the way that photons are free nowadays. The density of the Universe, at that time, was so great that many of the photons remained metal bonded to each other, even as they were forming, and after. As with the teel skin, described in the last chapter, a skin of metal bonded photons now formed around the Universe.

The skin photons, however, were not ordinary photons. To be precise, they were not photons at all in that they had not equilibrated with the surround teel flux. Consequently, they still had a huge mass and a low ATS which made for an extremely tiny volume – condition compounded by the slowing effects of the skin which further blue shifted them. These were, in fact, quarks.

As the quarks raced outwards and the “potential” gap between them got bigger, the skin became stressed. Inevitably, it began to break up into quark clumps. Under their mutual gravity, the clumps rapidly became ball-shaped, adopting the form of least resistance, and began to spin. The balls were inherently unstable and the more quarks they contained, the more unstable they were.

The key factors, as ever, were mass, ATS and EV. As the quark balls flew outwards from the Big Bang site, their ATS fell, their mass grew, and they contracted. This increased the rate of spin so that the velocity of equatorial quarks soon exceeded the EV and they were ejected. Once free of the quark ball, the ejected quarks soon whittled themselves down until they were in equilibrium with the surrounding teel flux. They had become stable photons.

The process of ejecting quarks continued until there was equilibrium between the mass and ATS – at which point there were just three quarks left.

4.2     NEUTRONS

Our clumps now comprised three quarks held together by an extremely close and strong fluid bond that allowed them to move around each other but not to break free. They could be broken apart but by only the most energetic of collisions and even that would have failed more often than not because the intruding object would first have had to penetrate the surrounding deep, dense, and highly active atmosphere of teels.

The quarks moved around each other without touching but they were not in ballistic orbits. As well as the overall atmosphere surrounding the clump, each quark had its own dense and almost impenetrable atmosphere upon which, in effect, they each floated.

The clump now had all the right ingredients but it was not yet a nucleon. To achieve that, it had to put itself into order. Floating around each other, like sticks on a river, was an uncomfortable experience for the quarks. Each had velocity and this meant that they were constantly colliding with each other, a situation further complicated by the way that their atmospheres were not consistently repulsive in all places – around the poles the teel flow was inwards wile at the equator it was outward.

The key to the new order was the density and speed of the surrounding teel streams, both of which were falling rapidly as the Universe expanded. Responding to this, the ATS of the clump also fell and this reduced the extent of the atmospheres, allowing the quarks to move closer together. The discomfort was becoming ever more pronounced.

There is a more comfortable way for the quarks to live together and they found it very quickly. What happened was that one quark changed its orientation. Instead of atmospheric teels entering at the poles and leaving at the equator, they now entered at one pole and left at the other. It became a stratified, or “charged” quark. This enabled it to take up a position at the head of the trio, spinning but stationary within the group, while the other two rotated around its rear, rather like a propeller.

This had an interesting effect upon the atmospheres of the three quarks. Now, instead of working against each other, they were working together. The teels streamed from one quark to the other and back again along easy and relatively stressless routes. This cohesion allowed the quarks to get much closer together and the bonding grew even stronger. The clump had become a neutron.

4.3     AN UNSTABLE PARTICLE

It is possible for a neutron to remain a neutron forever – but it is not easy. To keep its neutron form, a nucleon must keep its charged quarks engorged with teels and it can only do this if it stays permanently in an area of high teel density.

A few moments after the Big Bang, all neutrons were awash with ultra high speed teels rushing out from the Bang site. As long as the teels kept coming, the neutrons could stay as neutrons.

A crisis point, however, was not going to be long in coming. As the Universe continued to expand, its density continued to fall. Only a few moments after the neutrons had formed, the teel density of the Universe fell below that needed for neutronhood.

4.4     PROTONS

To maintain the neutron structure, the charged quark must be continuously engorged with teels so that its ATS remains high and its potential velocity is higher than that of the uncharged quarks. However, throughout most of the Universe today, the teel density is not high enough to maintain this engorgement and this is why free neutrons decay.

When too few fresh teels are taken in by the charged quark, its ATS, and therefore its velocity, begins to fall. The uncharged quarks, having a photon structure, lose neither mass, ATS or velocity.

If this process goes far enough, the uncharged quarks will be moving faster than the charged one and move forward to the head of the neutron. This is, however, and extremely unstable arrangement. So awkward are the teel flows between the quarks that the situation cannot continue. In a mean time of 914 seconds, the quarks reconstitute themselves so that there are two charged quarks at the head and one uncharged quark at the tail. The neutron has “decayed” into a proton.

4.5     THE MATTER UNIVERSE

According to the Big Bang theory, all the nucleons in the Universe today were created by the time the Universe was just 0.0001 of a second old. This may or may not be accurate but it is certainly true that they were created when the Universe was very young.

The Universe is composed ultimately of teels. Teels are then constructed into photons which we perceive as energy. In turn photons are constructed into protons and neutrons which we perceive as matter.

Neutrons are present in the nucleus of all atoms except hydrogen-1. Each is chargeless and has a mass of 1.00867 RAM. The neutron is unstable in that it will, under Earth surface conditions and when “free” (that is: not part of an atom), decay into a proton after a mean lifetime of 914 seconds.

Protons are present in the nucleus of all atoms. They have charge and a mass of 1.00734 RAM. Under Earth surface conditions a proton is stable.

Nucleons are far more complicated than teels or photons and they have a number of properties and characteristics that are important to what happens subsequently to the Universe. So, before we carry on with the story, we should detour and consider these.

4.6     CHARGE

It is not only quarks that have “charge”. Nucleons do as well. Having said that, however, the charge of a nucleon is dictated by the charge of its constituent quarks. A neutron has two uncharged quarks to one charged and is therefore said to be uncharged. A proton has two charged quarks to one uncharged and is therefore charged.

The charge of a neutron could be more correctly described as “neutral” in that the teel streams in the atmosphere which are its cause have no dominant direction. Inside a neutron, the quarks will always orientate themselves so that the head is in the prevailing “direction” of the teel flux that surrounds it but the repulsiveness of the teel atmosphere is essentially directionless.

The quarks inside a proton also orientate themselves according to the direction of the surrounding teel flux and this produces an atmosphere with a marked “direction” – hence the charge of a proton.

Although protons and neutrons will always orient themselves to the prevailing teel stream in order to provide the least resistance, this can take time to achieve. A nucleon leaping from a teel stream moving in one direction to a stream moving in another, may not be able to alter its orientation immediately. Until such time as it does, it is “antimatter”: that is, a particle with an opposite charge to the normal charge of those surrounding it. Should a particle and an antiparticle collide there is a good chance that they will destroy each other.

4.7     SLOW NEUTRONS

If a neutron or a proton, travelling at a normal speed, hits an atom, it will bounce off it, so efficient are the teel atmospheres at rejecting any kind of merger. However, if a neutron is moving slowly it will be able to penetrate an atom easily and without stress. This phenomenon has been often observed and made use of, most notably in promoting controlled nuclear fission in nuclear power stations.

Surrounding every complex atom is an atmosphere that is many times as deep and far more sophisticated than that of a neutron. When a slow neutron approaches the atmosphere of an atom, the teels in both their atmospheres will not collide. Rather they will cohere themselves into joint streams.

Because this takes place over a period, the quarks in the neutron have time to orientate themselves to the prevailing teel wind in the atom atmosphere and this also helps the neutron to submerge into the atom.

The atmosphere of a slow proton will not allow any such submergence. It is extremely thin, dense and directional. At any speed, the atmosphere of a proton will “collide” with the atmosphere of anything else.

4.8     DESTROYING A NEUTRON

Apart from allowing a neutron to decay into a proton, there are only three ways to destroy a neutron. Each requires that the quarks be driven so far apart that their mutual gravity is no longer strong enough to counter the rejective effects of their individual atmospheres. Their fluid bonding has to be broken.

This achieved by giving extra speed to the teels inside the neutron. One way to do this is to submerge the neutron in an area of extreme teel density AND speed. The number of teels absorbed by the charged quark has to be greater than the amount that the uncharged quarks can efficiently dump.

This will lead to the atmospheres of all three quarks becoming filled with fast, and therefore potently rejective, teels. At the same time, the ATS of the charged quark will rise, making it move faster than the uncharged ones at a time when all three atmospheres are pushing each quark away from the others. If the teels are dense enough and fast enough, the quarks will be pushed out beyond the fluid bonding point, beyond the point of no return.

The problem with this scenario is that there are not many places in the Universe today where the teel population is both dense enough and fast enough. The two conditions tend to be mutually exclusive. Where teels are densely packed, the average speed tends to be slow. Where teels can move fast, they tend to be thinly spread.

The second way is to hit the neutron with something that is going very fast. For preference, the something should be very massive and very small. It would be even better if the something could be lobbed directly into the intake pole of the charged quark.

Again, nowadays, there are not many “somethings” that qualify – gamma photons and electrons are the best we have. It is possible to achieve the objective without using exactly the right particle or hitting exactly the right spot but luck is involved. For this exposition, let us consider the ideal:

An ultra-massive gamma photon is pitched into the intake pole of the charged quark. On its way through the neutron atmosphere and into the body of the charged quark, the photon is progressively redshifted to nothing. It eventually becomes a clump of very high speed teels (the ATS of a photon is higher than light speed, which means that the speed of many of the now released teels is also higher than light speed).

The charged quark is organised to process teels quickly but it cannot cope with this many and with this much extra speed. It reverts to its uncharged state as the only way to get rid of the excess. The depth and density of its atmosphere increases suddenly as a consequence. The other quarks absorb teels from this discharge and their atmospheres likewise expand. The quarks are forced apart.

What happens next depends entirely upon the amount of new mass and new speed that has been absorbed. If it is enough, the quarks will push themselves beyond the fluid bonding point and the neutron will cease to be. If it is not enough, the quarks will dump the extra speed and mass and become a normal neutron again.

The last way of destroying a neutron also requires that it be struck by another particle. In this instance, however, the particle is an antineutron.

Since neutrons automatically orientate themselves to the prevailing teel wind, it is normal to find that all neutrons in a given area have their quarks orientated in the same direction. An antineutron is not a different type of particle. It is just a disorientated neutron – one which has the opposite quark orientation to those around it. This is a state which rarely occurs in nature although it can be achieved in the laboratory.

In a head-on collision between a neutron and an antineutron, the antineutron must spend the shortest possible time in this particular teel wind or it will reorientate its quarks and become a neutron. When the two come together, the exhaust poles of their charged quarks will be to the fore. Long before they touch, they have clogged each other’s exhausts with colliding teels. Teels are still being absorbed through the intake poles of the charged quarks but they cannot escape through the exhausts. The charged quarks become so bloated with teels that they do the only thing possible – they revert to uncharged quarks, exhausting teels equatorially. The exhausted teels flood into the uncharged quarks, expanding their atmospheres and pushing all the quarks apart.

A second factor in this scenario is that when the neutron and antineutron hit each other head-on, they stop. The forward speed of the quarks is transferred to the atmospheric teel streams which violently push the quarks apart from each other, way beyond the fluid bonding point.

What happens to quarks when they are pushed beyond the fluid bonding point? The form of a charged quark is unsustainable anywhere other than inside a nucleon. It therefore converts immediately into an uncharged quark. Uncharged quarks, of course, are nothing but bloated photons. They are able to maintain their mass when inside a neutron because they are bonded inside a gravity field that is many times that of a single photon. Once free of this massive gravity field, a quark no longer has sufficient gravity to retain its fastest teels and these promptly escape. The mass loss is dramatic and the quark shrinks to the smallest sustainable mass. The mass is that of a gamma photon. Thus, when a neutron is broken up, the freed quarks will promptly decay into gamma photons. If any quarks remain bonded as pairs, a not infrequent occurrence, they will decay into electrons.

4.9     DESTROYING A PROTON

The best way to destroy a proton is to bloat it with fast teels so that it will undecay into a neutron. The neutron can then be destroyed in the ways described in the previous section.

In Earth surface conditions, we will not normally witness the undecay of a solo proton. The most likely occasion will be the human-engineered collision between a proton and an antiproton.

At the centre of large stars, however, conditions are much more rigorous. There, the teel density is such that any proton will rapidly become a neutron – although this will not happen as often as might be supposed for such areas are difficult for solo protons to enter. The teel atmosphere is tight, dense, and highly directional, exactly the kind of conditions that a proton, with its tight and highly rejective atmosphere, would find difficult to move into.

4.10     PHOTON AND ELECTRON PRODUCTION

During the decay of a neutron into a proton, as the uncharged quarks overtake the charged quark to take the lead, there is a moment when the teel dumping regions of each quark are in opposition to each other. Teels being ejected from the charged quark are thrown between the efficient and dense dump zones of the uncharged quarks. The pressure is so great that the teel stream is squeezed into a fine jet.

Inside the jet, teels are forced so close together that they bond into photons and since the photons are moving away from the gravitational centre, they accrete mass rapidly.

Within this burst of photon production, some photons are forced so close together that they form bonded photon pairs. Inside the high pressure jet, these accrete teels at a rapid rate although, since the number of teels is limited and space inside the jet is small, only one pair can triumph at any one time.

The victorious pair grows quickly until it can balance its mass with its ATS – at which point the photons have become uncharged quarks (although their mass is tiny compared with the quarks in a neutron or a proton.

Two uncharged quarks, bonded together, is an unstable arrangement. Utilising the weak and strong points in each others teel atmosphere, the pair lock together with the equator of one exhausting into the pole of the other. There is then a further rearrangement as the rearward quark becomes charged. The pair has become an electron.

Electrons form remarkably quickly. The crucial point is the moment when the photons bond. From then on everything is automatic with what happens next depending upon the ATS of the teels in the jet (which in turn depends upon the density/speed of the teel flux surrounding the neutron/proton).

If the ATS is high, then the ATS of the electron will be also and this will show itself in a high forward speed. If the forward speed is higher than the EV of the neutron/proton, it will escape. If it is too low, the electron will crash back to the surface, the increasing teel density forcing the quarks apart so that they unbond, revert to photons and dissipate away to nothing.

In Earth surface conditions, a neutron decaying into a proton will begin by firing electrons with insufficient ATS. As the decay progresses, electrons will be fired with increasing amounts of ATS until one has sufficient forward speed to reach orbit. Once it has achieved orbit, the neutron has dumped enough matter to become a stable proton. It no longer has the ability, or the spare matter, to create any more electrons.

If a stable proton has a sudden intake of teels (for instance, if it is bombarded with photons, or if it is hit by an electron), it will become engorged. Protons, because they have two charged quarks, are unable to dump teels quickly. Beyond a certain level of engorgement, a proton will undecay back into a neutron. As the two leading quarks become uncharged and the following quark becomes charged, the ideal conditions for photon and electron production are recreated. The proton will produce photons and electrons until such time as its mass is reduced sufficiently to allow the quarks to revert to their proton form.

Keeping a proton in a continuous state of engorgement (by, for instance, passing an electric current through it) will produce a constant stream of photons and/or electrons as it attempts to reduce its mass.

An electron is positively charged. Its quarks will always orient themselves so that the intake of the charged quark always faces into the prevailing teel stream. This means that an orbiting electron will always have an opposite charge to its home proton. And since, for its size/mass, an electron is capable of dumping prodigious amounts of teels, its effect on the atmosphere of the proton is to create a large belt around it in which the teels move in the opposite direction. This is how the presence of an electron will “neutralise” the charge of a proton.

An electron in orbit around a proton is in a teel-engorged state. Should it be ejected from the proton into an area of low teel density, it will immediately dump the teel excess until it becomes balanced. The electron also has a funnel in which teels can be tightly streamed. During the dumping process, the electron will produce extremely massive photons which we know as neutrinos.

4.11     CREATING A NEUTRON

It is not easy to create a neutron from scratch today because the necessary conditions are rarely found. These conditions are: that photons must be being produced in prodigious numbers: that the photons should be tightly streamed – as for instance, in a laser, and: the photon density should be enormous.

The atmosphere of a photon is an extremely effective defence system. Any other photon coming near will ordinarily be repulsed. Yet, to create a neutron it is necessary to force photons so close to one another that they will fluid bond. This can only be done by packing photons so tightly together that they have nowhere else to go but nearer to the neighbour.

There are places in the Universe today which get close to this state (certain parts of a proton will produce photons at a density sufficient to create electrons – an easier task, admittedly, but one which follows the same principles). There may even be places that achieve a high enough density for neutron production. However, there is only one place that is known to have provided exactly the right conditions. The Universe, a moment or so after the Big Bang, was creating photons of great mass that were packed so tightly that they were fluid bonded even as they were being formed.

The expansion of the Universe broke these photon sheets into clumps which then collapsed under their own mutual gravity. The clumps were unstable and so whittled themselves down to just three massive photons/quarks. The clash of the teel streams surrounding the quarks then forced the final stage, the alteration of the structure of the leading quark from uncharged to charged.

There is no place in the Universe today that mirrors those original circumstances exactly. The equator of a black hole (if such things exist) just inside the event horizon, might be a suitable site for neutron production. Here, photons would be streamed, travelling in a curved path at light speed and under considerable pressure. If the hole was massive enough, there might be enough pressure to fluid bond the photons. Teel density would certainly be considerable and would ensure that the photons were very massive. The one factor missing is the “expansion” that would enable the bonded photons to break up into clumps – although this might be provided by an “escape” from the hole.

Another, and perhaps a more likely, place for neutron production could be in the “jets” that are seen to spring from the poles of galaxies and neutron stars. These locations would fulfill all the requirements, it would just be a matter of whether there is enough pressure, whether there is a small enough level of expansion, and whether the photons have enough mass.

4.12     BIG BANG ELECTRONS

After the Big Bang, the density and ATS of the Universe fell rapidly so that the time when three photons could remain bonded to each other long enough to form nucleons passed quickly. There was a brief period after this, however, when pairs of photons were still sufficiently massive that they could bond. Like the nucleon trios before them, these also whittled themselves down until they reached equilibrium. At equilibrium, one of the uncharged quarks converted to a charged one and the pairs became electrons.

According to Big Bang theory, by the time four minutes had passed, the density of the Universe had fallen so far that even electrons could not form in this manner.

4.13     ONWARD

It is important that we do not see protons and neutrons as separate entities. It is true that they have different characteristics but these are superficial. A proton and a neutron (and for that matter, the proto-neutron with 3 uncharged quarks) are simply nucleons in a different phase. During its lifetime, a nucleon may have made the transition from one phase to another and back again many times (although changing conditions in the Universe mean that it will probably not have made the transition to proto-neutron for a long time).

A very exact parallel can be drawn with water which, in different conditions, appears in gaseous, liquid, or frozen phases. The reason for the phase transitions in water is temperature. Temperature is just another manifestation of ATS. Water will adopt a particular phase according to its ATS. As will a nucleon.

The phase transition from neutron to proton plays a large part in our existence. Were there no protons in the Universe, we could not exist. Consequently we tend, instinctively, to think of the proton as more important. Yet the next step in the development of the Universe belongs to the neutron – with the proton acting only as a spoiler, as a bad tempered bit player.

CHAPTER FIVE

PROTOGALAXIES

We have seen how teels group themselves into photons and how photons group themselves (as quarks) into neutrons. We have also seen that, although photons and neutrons occupy different places in the scale of the Universe, they were created by the same processes and obeyed the same laws.

One most important process was the forming of gravity bonded skins around the Universe. First there was the teel skin which precipitated the creation of photons. Then there was the photon skin which triggered the creation of neutrons.

Skin formation is a major component in the formation of ever more massive particles and we will soon see it happening again.

5.1     A THIRD SKIN

We are now at the stage in the development of the Universe where neutrons are being made in prodigious numbers. These neutrons, however, are not independent particles for even as they are being created, they are each bonded to the other neutrons that are being formed around them. The bonds are extremely tight – even though the atmosphere of each neutron is rejecting as hard as it can, they are unable to escape their mutual gravity.

This is an extremely turbulent place. As the neutrons form by the whittling-down of photon clumps, they eject photons and teels in vast numbers. Because most neutrons are forming with their equator at 90 degrees to the Bang site, they are ejecting their excess photons and teels laterally across the face of the Universe. Photons, thrown out of one clump, almost inevitably crash into another.

A photon crashing into a neutron will normally be absorbed by it (as opposed to a crash into a proton which will often result in it bouncing off). On its journey down through the atmosphere of the neutron, it will be redshifted, possibly even right down to nothing. It may, or may not, reach the quark “surface” but even if it does it is unlikely to do any lasting damage.

A consequence of this turbulence is that the neutrons cannot decay into protons. We therefore have a skin inside the Universe, an expanding skin, of highly active neutrons which, notwithstanding the turbulence, are tightly fluid-bonded to each other.

5.2     PROTOSTARS

There is a widening “potential” gap between the neutrons, due to the expansion of the Universe. There is also a strong gravitational bonding between the neutrons. The conflict between the gap and the bond grows and grows until the overstressed skin can do nothing else but break up into clumps – a shattering made all the easier by the extreme turbulence of the teel and photon streams in between the neutrons.

The neutron clumps rapidly adopt a ball shape and begin to spin. They have become protostars.

Although protostars are made of neutrons, they bear little resemblance to the neutron stars we know today. What we currently identify as neutron stars (or pulsars) are composed, predominantly, of metal bonded neutrons. Those that we can detect have a high ATS which, because it is grossly out of balance with their mass, is rapidly declining as they dump speed (which we see as photons).

If the ATS of a modern neutron star is high, that of a protostar is staggeringly so and this is why its neutrons are fluid and not metal bonded. The turbulence within the protostar is such that it is quite diffuse, something aided by it beginning to spin and by the close proximity of equally turbulent neighbours.

As we have seen with previous structures, when the ATS and the mass are out of balance the protostar begins to dump both although, as always, it dumps more speed than mass. This leads to a reduction in size and the consequent addition of contraction spin.

5.3     MAKING A STRUCTURE

As speed is dumped, the protostar begins to take on a structure. Speed percolates out from the centre while mass percolates in. The turbulence at the centre of the protostar begins to decline as the region is protected from the worst of the battering that the outer reaches are receiving.

The neutrons at the centre settle closer to one another. The reduction in turbulence allows gravity to become ever more dominant. Soon, the neutrons at the very heart are not only being pulled closer to each other by their mutual gravity, they are being pushed closer together by the neutrons outside the centre which are in turn being pulled in by the strong gravity of the centre.

This doesn’t happen rapidly, and even when the core reaches its highest density, it is quite possible that the central neutrons are not metal bonded. The ATS of the protostar is conditioned by the ATS of the teel flux outside and, even though that is declining with the expansion of the Universe, it remains horrendously high, keeping the ATS of all the neutrons high also.

The structure that is forming inside the protostar is familiar – a gravity driven circulation of particles, out at the equator and back in at the poles. This circulation is given added impetus by the imbalance between ATS and mass. In its rush for equilibrium, the protostar is dumping prodigious quantities of teels, photons, and neutrons.

Ordinarily, the dumping would continue until the protostar’s mass and ATS were in balance with each other and with the surrounding teel flux. However, a new factor now intrudes.

5.4     SKIN NUMBER FOUR

The Universe, at this time, is still a very small place. At the very largest, it is still less than a 15 billionth the size of the Universe today, give or take a billionth or two, or ten or more – we are none of us very certain of anything – especially not sizes or ages). Yet everything, all the matter and all the teels that are part of the Universe today, was crammed into this relatively small area.

Deep inside the Universe is a skin of protostars, huge raging furious protostars, all of which are crammed so close to each other that they are fluid bonded. At best they are some light-days apart. They may, however, be much closer, kept apart only by their dense, violent atmospheres and by the furious flux of photons, teels and neutrons, coursing between them.

Processes repeat themselves. The gravitational bonding of the protostars in the skin slows down their outward progress and, speed being conserved, this leads to speed dumping which increases the pressure on the inside of the skin. The “potential” gap and gravity compete until they can compete no longer and the skin breaks up into clumps of protostars. The protostar clumps are protogalaxies.

5.5     DIFFERENCES

When the teels first flooded out from the site of the Big Bang, the speed, distribution and direction of neighbouring teels was so similar that the photons forming out of the teel clumps were likewise very similar to each other. However, the clumps of photons that were subsequently to become neutrons were less consistent. Presence of rogue photons, their courses altered by collisions, gravity, etc, meant that while most neutrons were heading in roughly the same direction, some were being contrary.

The neutron clumps that were to become protostars were an irregular lot. The number of rogues was enough to cause cracks and inconsistencies in the neutron skin which made it much less strong than previous skins. It was probably breaking up, even as it was forming.

By the time we get to the skin of protostars, the disruption caused by rogues has become its dominant feature. Even at its most complete, the skin has the texture of fishnet tights rather than sheer silk stockings. Worse, they are fishnet tights with holes and ladders in them.

The protogalaxies can only grow out of what raw material is available. In areas where protostars are densely packed, the protogalaxies became vast, massive things. In other areas there are barely enough to form misty nebulae. In many places there are no protostars at all and, to this day, those areas are devoid of galaxies.

5.6     PROTOGALAXIES

The development of protogalaxies follows much the same pattern as has everything before but it is modified by the great variety in their sizes. The density of the Universe is falling but inside the most massive protogalaxies the protostars are packed to a density that is possibly greater than was their density before the protogalaxies formed.

As the protogalaxies spin up, a structure begins to form in the usual way. Speed percolates out from the centre and mass percolates in, as the protostars in the heart of the protogalaxy are packed more and more tightly together, held apart only by the intensity of their atmospheres.

The density at the heart of a protogalaxy depends upon its mass. Since mass equates to gravity, the greater the mass, the greater is the crushing at the centre. However, this is not quite so simple. The greater the mass, the higher the EV which means the higher the speed of the teels that it can retain and therefore the higher the ATS of the protogalaxy. The higher the ATS of a galaxy, the higher its rate of spin which equates to a greater diffuseness.

The difference in mass shows itself in another way. With a high ATS comes, not only a higher rate of spin but a higher velocity. For the first time in the Universe, things have been created which are retreating from the site of the Big Bang at markedly different speeds.

5.7     PROTOSTAR DUMPING

Since protogalaxies have a wide range of mass, they take on many forms. At their least substantial, there is insufficient mass to pull them into a ball shape and start a proper rotation. At the other extreme, the mass is so high that the protostars at the centre are crushed to within light days of each other.

Most protogalaxies have no independent future. They can only look forward to being absorbed by their bigger cousins. The best they can hope for is a merger. For many billions of protogalaxies, this will take many billions of years to happen.

If a protogalaxy is massive enough to become ball shaped and start to spin, we see an old process coming into play. Speed begins to percolate out from the centre, mass percolates in, and the protogalaxy begins dumping any excess of mass and ATS from the equator as teels, photons, and neutrons.

Speed dumping allows the stars to settle closer to one another, causing the galaxy to contract. This in turn increases its spin rate which make it more diffuse – although the diffuseness never quite overcomes the contraction.

As the galaxy contracts, its mass (and therefore its gravity) is being concentrated. This increases the EV at the surface, although not at a rate sufficient to counteract the spin rate. Equatorial stars are circling the galaxy faster and faster – getting closer and closer to EV.

Eventually, it happens. A star on the equator finds itself travelling at a rate sufficiently close to EV that it breaks away from the galaxy to go into orbit around it. It has become a gas bonded companion.

The protostars in a large protogalaxy are in a state of equilibrium. However, remove them from the heart of the protogalaxy and the equilibrium is destroyed. It was only being maintained in the first place by the dense flux of teels and photons and neutrons that kept them in a constantly engorged state. The truth is that, not only are their ATS and mass not in balance with each other, these factors are far too high to be sustainable without the constant topping up that the flux provides. The protostars are nothing more than colossal versions of the quarks that form the heart of a neutron. And just like a quark when released from a neutron, a protostar released from a protogalaxy must decay.

The decay of a protostar is spectacular and relatively brief. The processes that go on inside it are complicated and will be dealt with in detail in Chapter Nine. Suffice to say that the protostar must balance its ATS and its mass. In doing so, it becomes what we know as a quasar.

5.8     QUASARS

A quasar dumps mass at an astonishing rate. It dumps it as teels and photons and consequently blazes so brightly that it easily outshines the protogalaxy from which it sprung. As ever, it is able to dump speed more quickly than it is able dump mass which means that it begins to contract.

There is another reason why it begins to contract. The pressure at the centre rapidly becomes so great that pairs of neutrons are forced to metal bond with each other. This produces an uncomfortable bond and so one neutron will change into a proton creating an atom of Hydrogen2 (or deuterium). An atom of Hydrogen2 takes up much less space than two neutrons do. Fusion has begun.

If the forming of deuterium represents a saving of space, it is also a concentration of gravity and this further increases the pressure. Before long, more nucleons are being fused together – Hydrogen3, Helium3, Helium4, and so on. And with each fusion, space is saved and gravity is concentrated.

The act of fusion causes a release of energy (that is: of speed and mass) in the form of teels, photons, electrons, and nucleons. This release disguises the contraction of the quasar, blowing up its outer edges as the energy seeks to escape. What is happening at the heart of the quasar, however, is that the contraction has begun to runaway. This is no longer a simple contraction. This is a collapse.

The core of the quasar forms ever more massive atoms, the density with which is soon so great that the atoms themselves are able to maintain cores of neutrons. With each heavier atom, the neutron core is just that little bit more massive.

The coup de grace comes when the quasar core has come to resemble a monstrous gobstopper. Shells of massive atoms surround other shells of ever more massive atoms until, right at the centre, there is a ball of exceedingly neutron-rich atoms.

Now the seeds of destruction are well and truly sown for among the shells surrounding the central ball are two, Uranium235 and Plutonium239 which are fissile. If fissile atoms are entered by a slow neutron they will split into two less massive atoms and, in the act of splitting, they will emit two or more additional slow neutrons. Thus the splitting of one atom in a shell of these particular isotopes of Uranium or Plutonium can set off a chain reaction.

For reasons which will be explained in Chapter Nine, the Uranium/Plutonium shells are unable to chain react as soon as they form, notwithstanding there are many slow neutrons in the region. This means that when the chain reaction does take place, the fissile shells have grown to be thick and densely packed.

The chain reaction does not quite blow the quasar apart. Rather, all the material that is outside the fissile shells is blown away in an outburst of astonishing violence. Everything inside the fissile shells is blown inward. The massive neutron-rich atoms are hit with a flux of speed so great that all protons are undecayed into neutrons. All the atoms are filled with so much flux that the nucleons are unbonded. Then the newly free neutrons are crushed together so closely that they metal bond with each other. The core of the quasars has become a small but extremely massive neutron star.

5.9     CLEARER TERMS – HEARTSTARS AND GALAXIES

What we know of today as galaxies are actually an intermediate stage in their development as they move towards equilibrium. In order not to upset the current terminology, I will hereafter apply the term protogalaxy to such bodies before, and until the completion of, the quasar dumping process. Only thereafter will they be known as galaxies. What happens to galaxies once they have reached equilibrium, we will deal with later.

The protostars that form the heart of protogalaxies and galaxies are not stars within the conventional meaning of the word. Unlike the Sun or any other disc stars that we have been able to study, they have no independent existence. They are no more able to exist outside the heart of a galaxy than a quark can survive outside a nucleon. Remove a quark from a nucleon and it will promptly decay to a photon. Remove a protostar from the heart of a galaxy and it will promptly decay into a neutron star. To differentiate them from stars and since they can only survive in the heart of a protogalaxy/galaxy, from hereon they will be referred to as “heartstars”.

Because of human self-interest, our observation of galaxies tends to focus upon the disc and the halo although their importance to the onward development of galaxies is quite small. The true galaxy is the central ball, the core of heartstars. The rest can be thought of, charitably, as the galactic atmosphere or, uncharitably, as the detritus, the rubbish that has been thrown away.

5.10     ONWARD

Dumping a single heartstar to become a quasar does not put the protogalaxy into equilibrium. The more massive the protogalaxy is, the more quasars it has to fire. The most massive of protogalaxies will eject a succession of them, perhaps even having two or more blazing away at the same time.

Yet, once the quasar firing is over and done, and the protogalaxy has become a galaxy, equilibrium is still not achieved. The protogalaxy has merely reached the point where it no longer has enough ATS over mass to dump a complete heartstar. It is still dumping speed and mass but now it can only manage it as teels and photons and nucleons.

The quasars have left their legacy. They have splashed vast quantities of atoms, of all masses up to Uranium, out into space. Some of this was given enough velocity to escape the protogalaxy of its birth. Still more of it went into orbit around the protogalaxy to form its disc and halo. Yet more was thrown down into the protogalaxy, perhaps to be dismembered or perhaps to find its way to the centre of the heartstars.

A lot of time has passed since the end of the quasar era. By now some, and perhaps many, galaxies have reached equilibrium: a state whereby their ATS and their mass are in such a balance that an increase or decrease in the one will result in a counterbalancing increase or decrease in the other.

Or perhaps, none have – yet.

CHAPTER SIX

GALAXIES

Our current understanding of galaxies is conditioned by what we can “see” – but appearances can be deceptive.

What we can see of a galaxy can be compared to the clothes on a human being. Clothes can tell us a lot about culture and technology, and give some superficial information about anatomy, but they tell us next to nothing about how a human being “works”.

Beneath the fine clothes, the real body of a galaxy is a densely packed aggregation of heartstars – and these we have never seen.

6.1     INSIDE A HEARTSTAR

The neutrons inside a heartstar are fluid bonded to each other – fluid rather than metal bonded because each heartstar retains within it prodigious quantities of teels and these act as a strong flux, continually recirculating through and around the neutrons.

The flux keeps the neutrons engorged with teels so that, even though the neutrons can successfully dump any excess teels, they are immediately replaced by teels from the surrounding flux.

The engorgement has two major consequences. Firstly, it prevents the neutrons from decaying into protons. Secondly, the teel dumping mechanisms provide a dense defensive atmosphere which prevents potentially destructive approaches by other heartstars.

It is possible that, within a heartstar, there might be a core of metal bonded neutrons. Alternately, it is possible that there might not.

6.2     INSIDE A GALAXY

The teel flux that prevents the neutrons from decaying into protons plays a similar role for the heartstars themselves. The heartstars are likewise engorged by the density of the surrounding flux which replaces any teels that are dumped. They too are fluid bonded and held apart from each other by the density of their teel atmospheres.

The heartstars are extremely massive but they are also very small – probably no more than tens of kilometres across and possibly much less. Their component neutrons may be much the same distance apart as they are in a conventional metal bonded neutron star but the density of their defensive atmospheres is such that they can maintain a fluid bond.

Like their own neutrons, the heartstars are packed tightly into their galaxies. Indeed, the tightness of the packing is extraordinary - although just how close and just how big the ball of heartstars is depends upon the mass and ATS of the galaxy. In the case of the Milky Way, a diameter of perhaps ten times that of the Sun, say 15 million kilometres, may be an overestimate but even an area as relatively small as this will contain thousands of heartstars.

As with the heartstars, it is possible that there might be a core of metal bonded heartstars at the centre of the galaxy, especially in the very massive galaxies. However, it is just as possible that there might not.

6.3     THE ATMOSPHERE OF A GALAXY

Surrounding the heartstar core is a gas bonded atmosphere of teels. This is not, however, like the atmosphere of gas atoms that surrounds a planet. There, a surface of heavy atoms will block the progress of the atmosphere in and out. In a galaxy, the teel atmosphere can flow with relatively little hindrance into the heartstar core, right to the centre and back out again.

The atmosphere flows are of the photon pattern, streaming into the galaxy at the poles and out at the equator. Any excess teels are dumped at the equator.

Three factors affect the density and extent of the atmosphere: the mass of the galaxy, its ATS and its EV:

Mass:

The higher the mass, the more tightly packed is the heartstar core. The tighter the packing, the more concentrated is the gravity. The more concentrated the gravity, the more tightly bound, the more dense and fast moving, is the atmosphere.

ATS:

The higher the ATS, the more diffuse and widespread is the atmosphere – faster teels can get farther out before gravity turns them around.

EV:

Escape velocity is not really an independent factor since it is a consequence of the mass and the ATS. Nevertheless, the effect of different EVs on the extent of the atmosphere is marked – the higher it is, the higher is the speed of the teels that the galaxy can retain.

The effect of each of the factors conflicts with the effects of the others. The net effect is therefore a mix of the three.

6.4     DEVELOPMENT – ONE

Galaxies formed when the skin of heartstars fragmented as the Universe expanded. At that time the skin was suffused with a dense and very fast teel flux which engorged the heartstars. By the time the galaxies had formed, the surrounding teel flux had fallen in both density and ATS. However, due to their concentrated gravity, the galaxies were able to maintain a sufficiently dense and fast teel flux within themselves to prevent the heartstars from decaying.

Heartstars adjust their mass and ATS to the ATS and density of the teel flux that surrounds them. So do galaxies but, since they are vastly more massive than heartstars, this process takes much longer. Most, and possibly all, galaxies have still not achieved equilibrium.

Equilibrium for a galaxy does not mean a fixed mass and a fixed ATS from which there can be no future deviation. It is equilibrium in the same sense that a photon is in equilibrium. For a specific mass, a galaxy will have a specific ATS. For a specific ATS, it will have specific mass. Both the ATS and the mass alter in response to a variation in the ATS and density of the surrounding teel flux.

6.5     DEVELOPMENT – TWO

A galactic core consists of a cluster of heartstars which, in all but the least massive of galaxies, will be ball shaped with a degree of oblateness that depends upon the rate of spin.

The “surface” of the galactic core is the point beyond which the velocity of a heartstar is too great for the gravity of the galaxy to maintain its fluid bond. Any heartstar beyond this point is either in a gas bonded orbit around the core or it is in the process of escaping altogether.

As the ATS of the surrounding teel flux falls due to the expansion of the Universe, so does the ATS of the galaxy. This is achieved by dumping fast teels, photons, and nucleons. Consequently, the galactic core contracts with the heartstars being pressed more closely together. This adds contraction spin to the core – a continuous although declining process.

Surrounding the galaxy is a Roche Zone which fulfills the same role as the Roche Zone surrounding a star or a planet. Any material structure, such as a star or a planet, straying into the Roche Zone will be torn apart by the “tidal” forces of the core.

The Roche Zone serves as a speed filter. Any slow remnant particles from wrecked bodies will fall into the core to lower its ATS and raise its mass. Fast ones will escape into the outer atmosphere of the galaxy – and possibly escape altogether.

Neutrons escaping outwards from the core will decay into protons. The point at which this happens, however, depends on the mass of the galaxy. Neutrons inside the core are prevented from decay by the density of the teel flux but with increasing mass, the non decay area will spread beyond the core. If the core is massive enough, it can extend well into the Roche Zone and in the most massive of galaxies, extends far beyond it.

The cores of the more massive galaxies are surrounded by heartstars, ejected during contraction, which are prevented from going through the full quasar decay because they were ejected with insufficient velocity to get far enough beyond the non-decay area.

That said, many of these heartstars will have undergone some decay. The area surrounding a galactic core can be divided into four zones typified by the extent to which a heartstar can decay:

The No-Decay (ND) Zone:

In the ND Zone, an ejected heartstar will stay a neutron heartstar. That said, if the velocity at ejection was not enough to carry the heartstar quickly through the Roche Zone, it will be broken up by tidal forces.

The Light Atom (LA) Zone:

In the LA Zone, an orbiting heartstar can have a limited decay. The neutrons in its outer atmosphere can decay to protons. The neutrons at its core can fuse to Hydrogen2, Hydrogen3, Helium3, and Helium4 – depending on the density of the surrounding teel flux. Such a heartstar will expand enormously, becoming a giant. Fusion, however, need not be a continuing process. Once it has built a light atom core, fusion can cease, the proton creation and emission being powered by the density of the surrounding teel flux and by emissions from the nearby core.

The Heavy Atom (HA) Zone:

With increasing distance from the core, and with the falling density of the surrounding teel flux, fusion can proceed farther, producing progressively more massive atoms up to Thallium205.

The Radioactive Atom (RA) Zone:

In the RA zone, the flux density falls to a level where heartstars would have fused radioactive atoms beyond Bismuth209. Such heartstars met a rapid and violent end. For a brief while, as a quasar, they burned as brightly as anything in the Universe. Then, in a dramatic explosion, they dumped most of their outer shells to become small, dense, and massive neutron stars.

6.6     GALAXY TYPES

The appearance of a galaxy is primarily due to its mass and its ATS. Its history can play a part: collisions and near misses can alter the mix of heavy and light atoms within it and can alter its shape for a while. However the key influences remain mass and ATS.

What follows is a broad description of the characteristics of the four main types of galaxies.

Irregular galaxies:

These are the galaxies with the least amount of mass. For the purpose of this classification, an irregular galaxy has insufficient mass to maintain a core of heartstars. Thus the classification is based on structure rather than appearance and this means that some galaxies currently catalogued as irregulars may not really be so.

Which is not to say that irregulars do not have a core. The central flux may not be dense enough to keep a heartstar engorged but it can be enough to maintain a healthy LA zone. The core of an irregular is often an aggregation of giant stars, their extensive envelopes swollen by the conversion of neutrons to protons and by the fusion of light atoms in their centres.

The low mass shows itself in low gravity. The gravity keeps enough flux within the core to keep the stars in an LA state but there is not enough gravity to bind the flux tightly. As a result, the core is diffuse and often widespread.

As time goes by, and nowadays very slowly, the galaxy’s faster teels are escaping to be replace by such slow teels as may be found – generally rather less than are necessary to maintain the mass level. The LA core is shrinking and this bestows some contraction spin – although nowhere near enough to motivate the whole galaxy.

Since there is no densely packed heartstar core, there is no Roche Zone – the LA zone goes right to the centre. Outside the LA zone, the HA zone is quite extensive because the lack of gravity concentration at the centre allows a more gradual decline of the strength of gravity with distance. Beyond this, the RA zone stretches a long way before merging into open space.

Irregulars formed from the heartstar skin and therefore began with the same ATS as all galaxies. As the ATS of the Universal flux fell, irregulars had too little mass/gravity to keep their internal flux up to heartstar level and there was a rapid dumping of fast teels. As the mass fell and the ATS fell, the heartstars decayed into giants. Any heartstars in the RA Zone decayed into supernovae, littering the galactic atmosphere with light and heavy atoms which, in turn, seeded bursts of star creation. Particularly in the outer reaches of many irregulars, there are numbers of young stars, some of which do go to supernova.

The primary visual characteristic of an irregular is that there is not enough mass in the core to marshal either itself of the atmosphere into a formal shape. Nevertheless, in all but the very lightest of irregulars, the core is identifiable and with increasing mass it becomes more and more defined.

A giant star cannot undecay into a heartstar. So, an irregular galaxy cannot become a galaxy with a heartstar core. Nevertheless, they can grow to be quite large, by accretion and merger with other irregulars and, because the greater mass bestows the ability to capture and retain higher speed teels, will show signs of quite complex form at their centre.

Dwarf elliptical galaxies:

A dwarf elliptical does not necessarily have more mass than an irregular (by accretion, etc, irregulars can grow to be quite big) but it did start off with more. In the beginning, dwarf ellipticals had mass enough to maintain a heartstar core.

Being composed of heartstars, the core of an elliptical is tiny. However, the gravity of the core is highly concentrated and very strong – although the fall-off with distance is much more rapid than is that of an irregular.

The concentration of gravity has a marked effect upon the atmosphere. Whereas the orbits of stars in irregulars are often extremely elliptical, contributing to its ragged and uncontrolled appearance, the orbits in an elliptical galaxy are all much nearer to circular and are pulled in tighter to the core giving the whole thing a ball shape.

The zones too are pulled in. Relative to the mass of the galaxy, the LA zone occupies less space although it is still extensive. The HA zone is likewise condensed. The inner boundary of the RA zone is much closer to the core although this is now somewhat academic since there are very few stars in the RA zone.

During the quasar period, dwarf ellipticals did not have enough mass to spur the rapid contraction needed to eject heartstars fast enough to get them out to the HA zone, or especially to the RA zone. Many heartstars were ejected but almost all of them ended up in the LA zone where they have burned brightly ever since.

A dwarf elliptical galaxy is a relatively small galaxy, tight and globular. Around the fringes, a few stars are able to decay into supernovae although there are many fewer than there once were. Most of the visible stars are in the Light Atom Zone and therefore appear to be “old” and with a low metal content.

Spiral galaxies:

Spirals look very different from any other type of galaxy. They have an extensive disc surrounding the equator which contains large quantities of the heavy atoms necessary to seed the clouds of light atoms and promote bursts of star formation. It is these young stars which give spirals their characteristic brightness.

Nevertheless, the different appearance is deceptive. The fundamental structure of a spiral galaxy is no different to that of an elliptical. The reason for the different appearance is that a spiral has more mass than a dwarf elliptical – and less than a large elliptical.

During the quasar period, the spirals had enough mass to spur the rapid contraction necessary to dump heartstars out into the RA zone. There, the heartstars quasared into their monstrous supernovae. The material blasted out during the explosions formed a disc around the galaxy, in time building the complex spirals such as are seen in Andromeda and the Milky Way.

Within the disc, the heavy atoms came together under their mutual gravity (or may never have come apart in the first place – the heavy atom inner shells of the collapsing quasars were tightly bonded and thick) to form larger and larger lumps until they were able to attract and retain light atoms and begin to form conventional stars.

When we look at a galaxy, we see only the dressing and not the body. In the case of a spiral, we see the central bulge and the disc. The central bulge is the LA zone and it is filled with ex-heartstars that were once ejected from the core. The disc is spectacular but it is nothing more than a ring of detritus. Because it is no longer being replenished with ejected heartstars, it will eventually burn itself out.

What we do not see is the real galaxy: the dense, tiny, spinning ball of heartstars that sits slap bang in the middle, slowing and growing, surround by its Roche Zone no-man’s land.

Large elliptical galaxies

A large elliptical is simply a spiral with more mass. Since there are more heartstars in the core, they are more compacted. Consequently, the gravity is greater and even more concentrated.

More gravity means that teels of higher speeds can be caught and retained which means that the density of the teel flux is greater. The large numbers of stars that surround the core of elliptical galaxies tend to be concentrated in the LA and HA zones with few, if any stars in the RA.

In the past, large ellipticals ejected heartstars in the same way that spirals did, probably many more of them, but their chances of getting out into the RA zone was much less. Thus most of the stars that surround the core of a large elliptical are massive and old ex-heartstars.

A large elliptical is merely a spiral which is too massive for a disc to form. The change from spiral to elliptical is not a sudden one however and there are many examples of intermediate galaxies. Lenticulars, in particular, display halfway house characteristics such as equatorial clouds of dust without star formation, a flattened saucer shape, the spectra of heavy atoms, and so on.

6.7     GROWTH

Galaxies grow bigger by dumping ATS and gathering mass. To do this, it helps to have been big to start with for the easiest way to grow big is to eat other galaxies. The bigger a galaxy is, the less likely it is to be eaten by another – and the more able it is to do the eating.

Galaxies appear to collide a lot although, in most cases, these are not true collisions. Galaxies may pass through each other’s atmosphere but the chances of the heartstar cores ever colliding are small. Even if the cores start out on a collision course, they are still unlikely to come into actual contact with each other because they will be fended off by the density of their teel fluxes which, close to the surface, are very dense indeed.

When galaxies “graze” each other, what develops is a battle for low speed teels. The more massive a galaxy is, the faster are the teels it can capture and retain. The low mass of a small galaxy equates to a low ATS since it only has enough gravity to retain low speed teels. Finding itself inside the atmosphere of a high mass, high ATS, galaxy the midget’s fastest teels are soon drawn off to become part of the giant.

When the battle is really unequal, the end result is often the total absorption of the small galaxy. If an irregular or a dwarf elliptical moves into the atmosphere of a spiral or a large elliptical, it can find itself captured and in orbit.

The captured small galaxy loses both ATS and mass. Whether or not its mass was previously enough to maintain heartstars, it now falls well below the line. It becomes a tight, low ATS, ball of giant LA stars. It has become a “globular cluster”.

The atmosphere of any large galaxy is littered with globular clusters, the desiccated remains of once independent small galaxies that have had much of their atmosphere and many of their outer stars leeched from them. Our own galaxy has many of them and larger galaxies have many more. Given time, globular clusters will equilibrate themselves to their surroundings – their ATS and mass become attuned to the density and ATS of the teel atmosphere in which they find themselves. They match their teel dumping with their teel absorption. Remove them from the atmosphere of their host galaxy and they would collapse dramatically as their giant LA stars decay.

Another way to produce a bigger galaxy is for similarly sized cores to go into a mutual orbit around each other. This would produce a large galaxy although not necessarily a giant. Many galaxies are oddly shaped and this could well be due to two or more cores swirling around each other. This is not, however, a sustainable relationship. No two galaxies are exactly equal and the greater galaxy will leech mass from the lesser one, eventually reducing it to a globular cluster or breaking it up altogether.

6.8     ONWARD

The unconscious objective of any galaxy is the achieving of equilibrium between mass and ATS. It seems likely that no galaxy has yet reached this state. Some just might have – certainly M87 and a few others have an enormous mass although there is no indication as to whether they have really equilibrated or are still happily dumping ATS and absorbing mass.

What form will this equilibrium take? Equilibrium in a photon is at a wide range of masses and ATS’s, the constant being its velocity. Equilibrium in a nucleon is at a wide range of ATS’s and velocities, the constant being a nucleon’s mass. Once a galaxy has balanced its mass and its ATS, will it also have a constant?

CHAPTER SEVEN

SUPERGALAXIES

This chapter is more speculative than previous chapters have been. Those involved logical extrapolations of what should happen, laid against what can be seen to happen in practice – and where logical extrapolation and reality diverged, precedence was given to reality.

However, we are now moving into an area which is beyond our observational capabilities. We are looking into the future and we can have no hard knowledge of that before it arrives. There can be nothing else but logical extrapolation.

7.1     THE ONGOING PROCESS

A photon is at equilibrium and so is a nucleon. They are, so to speak, the finished particle. In contrast, galaxies are building up to their equilibrium and, although a few MAY have already achieved it, for most there is still a long way to go.

When comparing the creation of a galaxy with the creation of a photon of a nucleon, it is important to remember that, although the making of a photon or a nucleon only takes the merest fraction of a second, the fundamental process involved are the same for them all.

It is a matter of scale. The nucleus of a photon is so tiny as to be almost unmeasurable. That of a galaxy is many billions of times larger. Inevitably, galaxies take many billions of times longer to develop.

7.2     WALLS AND BRIDGES

The standard model suggests that protogalaxies formed about one billion years after the Big Bang: that is perhaps 14 billion years ago. They did so from the skin of heartstars that surrounded the Universe.

The heartstar skin was different from the earlier photon and neutron skins in that it had holes and weaknesses and cracks. When it broke up, it did so into a wide variety of lumps. Some big. Some small. Some giants and some that were little more than insubstantial wisps.

Yet, despite this difference, much of the development of galaxies proceeded just as before. As the protogalaxies formed, they didn’t do so independently of each other. Just as with the creation of photons, neutrons and heartstars, all the protogalaxies were bonded to each other, creating a fifth skin around the Universe – albeit, an extremely ragged and incomplete one.

The skin of galaxies could not last. Quite apart from the Universal expansion, which would inevitably break it up, the variation in galactic sizes meant huge variations in gravity strength from point to point. At the same time, some galaxies were extremely fast moving while others had slowed to a comparative crawl and this meant that clashes and collisions were frequent.

The galaxy skin was varied, turbulent and incomplete. Some areas were crammed with activity. Others were empty, devoid of anything. Teels and photons traversed these areas but little else did. Over the years, the voids have grown and are now vast, apparently empty areas, like gigantic vacant bubbles in the froth of galaxies.

The skin of protogalaxies has broken up into clumps of galaxies. These clumps (known as galactic clusters) can be seen today, pulling together to become larger. The great voids between the clusters are still growing as the clusters group themselves together and the Universe expands. As clusters separate, and come together, great strands of galaxies can be seen stretching out between them like threads and veils – the walls and bridges.

7.3     CLUSTERS

There is a structure to a cluster of galaxies, just as there is a structure to everything else in the Universe. How much of a structure depends, as always, upon the ATS and the mass.

A good example of a small cluster is the one which contains our own Milky Way galaxy. It is known as the “local group” and appears to consist of around thirty galaxies – although there could be more since the gas and dust of the Milky Way obscures our vision in some areas. What we can see of the group indicates that it contains two large spiral galaxies, the Milky Way and Andromeda, one small spiral, and twenty or so dwarf ellipticals and irregulars.

The smaller galaxies are sub-grouped around the two large spirals, revolving around them as master and slaves. Some are in the relatively stable orbits necessary for long life. Others are following the eccentric elliptical paths that will probably lead to their being absorbed in the near future. Both large galaxies contain many globular clusters, evidence that they have absorbed and desiccated substantial numbers of their smaller brethren in the past.

The Milky Way and Andromeda seem to be fluid bonded to each other and their mutual gravity enables them to retain a teel flux around them that is denser and faster than they could retain individually.

Larger clusters differ from the local group, not so much in size as in mass. If more galaxies were to be added to the local group it would necessarily occupy a larger area although, since the greater mutual gravity would pull them all closer together, the increase in size would not be as much as the increase in mass.

The greater the mass of a cluster, the faster the speed of teels that it can capture and retain, raising its ATS. The constituent galaxies would move faster about each other while, at the heart of the cluster, the teel density would rise to a level that noticeably affected the internal processes of the individual galaxies.

A galaxy that is part of a high mass cluster will lose its fastest teels to the “atmosphere” of the cluster. The higher the cluster mass, the more likely the galaxy is to be a dense, tightly packed, high mass elliptical. The closer it is to the centre of the cluster, the lower is the speed of the teels that it can lose but, at the same time, there are more slow teels available to replace any losses. Thus it is even more likely to be a dense, tightly packed, high mass elliptical.

7.4     SUPERCLUSTERS

The term “supercluster” is used for groups of clusters which are gravitationally bound to each other. The Local Group is a small spur, bound to a much larger cluster called Canes Vanatici. C. Vanatici itself, however, does not live in glorious isolation. It is a part of a group of perhaps fifty or more clusters known as the Local Virgo Supercluster.

Our ability to see at great distances is limited but, so far as we can tell, the clusters in the Virgo Supercluster are grouped together in a rough, oblate sphere. The clusters themselves tend to be elongated and flattened so there is nothing like the tidy symmetry of a large elliptical galaxy. Yet there is order here for, at the centre of the supercluster, there is a cluster that is very different from all the others.

Whereas the other clusters are elongated and flattened and irregular, the one at the centre of the Virgo Supercluster is ball shaped. Within it, vast numbers of galaxies are densely packed together and this means that its gravity is concentrated and strong. It is functioning as does the heartstar core of a galaxy, controlling the irregular clusters and binding them to it.

Yet, if there is a truly fundamental difference between the central cluster and the irregulars that surround it, it is to be found right at its heart. There, at the centre, is a galaxy – but not an ordinary galaxy. It is a type of galaxy that is sometimes classified as a “cD galaxy” and sometimes as a “supergiant elliptical”. This is a supergalaxy.

7.5     SUPERGALAXIES

A supergalaxy is the same as an ordinary large elliptical galaxy but many, many, times more massive. It is so massive that its heartstar core is able to control, not just the stars that make up its own galactic atmosphere, but the less massive galaxies that make up its own cluster, and the irregular clusters that surround that.

At the centre of the Virgo Supercluster is a supergalaxy called M87.

7.6      THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUPERGALAXIES

When the galaxies first formed out of the heartstar skin, they were of many sizes. Thereafter, the only way forward for any of them was to grow. Those with the most mass had a considerable advantage. The more mass they had, the faster the teels they could capture and the quicker they could grow.

The protogalaxies formed as parts of clusters and the democratic principle soon ensured that the clumps began to rotate. Over time, the gravitation on slow teels to the centre and the fast teels to the equator meant that the galaxies at the centre would grow in mass at the expense of those farther out.

Where the mass differential between galaxies is small, the mass transfer between them is slow and it could take a very long time for any one galaxy to become dominant.

However, where one particular galaxy in a cluster has substantially more mass that the others, the mass transfer could take place quickly and, with growing mass, at an accelerating rate.

As the mass of the developing supergalaxy increases, its gravity is able to exert an ever greater control over the other galaxies in the cluster. At first, the cluster is irregular in shape but soon it is pulled into the classical ball.

In the beginning, the supergalaxy is only able to control the galaxies in its own cluster but soon its control is felt ever more strongly in nearby clusters. As the Universe expanded, notwithstanding the considerable gravity exerted by each cluster, the tendency would have been for the clusters to gradually move apart from each other. The gravitational strength of the Supercluster is such that it is able to slow and perhaps even to stop this.

The clusters are gas bonded to the supergalaxy cluster and rotate around it in a loose formation. Some, and perhaps all, of the slave clusters could have supergalaxies of their own but these are very much second division structures which have to defer to the monster in the middle.

7.7     SUPERGALACTIC ATMOSPHERES

Supergalaxies have teel atmospheres, just like anything else. It is a vast one, however, stretching way beyond the slave clusters. As ever, it has the classic photon form – ejection at the equator, absorption at the poles.

The slave clusters live within the teel streams of the supergalaxy. They are bathed in the fast moving teels leaving the equator of the supergalaxy. This raises their ATS and means that they are unable to keep anything but an irregular form, especially those farther out.

The atmosphere is a source of sustenance for the supergalaxy. Bathing the slave clusters in fast moving teels keeps them engorged and diffused which prevents their gravity from concentrating and lowers their EV. The slave clusters are having their fast teels leached from them to be captured by the supergalaxy with its far higher EV.

In time, the ATS of the slave clusters will fall sufficiently that they begin to condense. The loss of ATS will also mean a loss of velocity, so that they orbit ever closer to the supergalaxy. If the slave galaxies do not have a dominant supergalaxy of their own, a “sub-supergalaxy”, this continuous fall in ATS will accelerate the creation of one.

The supergalaxy will continue to feed on the surrounding clusters until they reach an equilibrium. That is, until they have balanced their mass and ATS with the density and ATS of the supergalaxy atmosphere. In this state, they may consist of a massive sub-supergalaxy surrounded by a swarm of elliptical galaxies that are engorged in the slow, dense, teel atmosphere.

The supergalaxy itself will echo this form, only on a larger scale. Ultimately, there is a single, supermassive, supergalaxy, surrounded by a swarm of engorged sub-supergalaxies.

7.8     THE UNIFLUX

Is there a limit to the size of a supergalaxy? Yes and No. In theory, the mass of a supergalaxy can keep going up and up. In practice it is limited by the ATS of the teel flux of the Universe (known hereafter as the “uniflux”).

As the Universe expands, the ATS of the uniflux gradually slows. At the same time, the uniflux thins out. It is being decelerated by the gravitational pull of the Universe that it is leaving behind. And it is thinning out by being spread over an ever greater area.

A supergalaxy at equilibrium automatically adjusts its mass to balance with its ATS and vice versa by purely internal processes. That said, it is the ATS of the uniflux which is the ultimate arbiter as to the ATS of the supergalaxy, thus:

If the ATS of the uniflux is lower than that of the supergalaxy, the supergalaxy will absorb slow teels from it, decreasing its ATS and increasing its mass. Since this will cause the EV of the supergalaxy to rise, it would be able to retain faster teels and this would raise further its capability of gathering the further mass. This process would continue until the mass and ATS of the supergalaxy is in balance with the ATS of the uniflux.

If the ATS of the uniflux is higher that that of the supergalaxy, the ATS of the supergalaxy will be raised, the EV will be lowered and mass will be dumped. Again, the process will continue until the mass and the ATS of the supergalaxy is in balance with the ATS of the uniflux.

If the Universe continues to expand, the ATS and the density of the uniflux will continue to fall. In such circumstances, the supergalaxy will continue to become more massive as its ATS falls and its EV rises.

The uniflux does not have a constant speed. Quite apart from it being slowed down by the mass/gravity behind it, teels closer to the centre travel outwards more slowly. The supergalaxy is being overtaken by teels which are travelling successively more slowly. Whichever way the supergalaxy is going, its growth is being reinforced by the progressively slower speed of the uniflux.

7.9     THE END?

Many billions of years from now, the Universe will consist of a number of supergalaxies, some dispersed matter in the form of solo galaxies, stars, gas, dust, and loose particles, and the vestiges of the uniflux. What will happen then depends upon what happened at the beginning.

The Big Bang was an explosion and the mechanics of explosions dictate that the fastest moving matter is always on the outside and that the rest moves progressively slower, all the way back to the locus. Such matter as remains at or near the locus must move extremely slowly.

The first teels out of the Big Bang trap were moving faster than the EV of the Universe and will never come back. A good many photons, too, could escape. At a specific distance from the Bang locus, the EV of the Universe will fall below 300,000 kilometres per second. Because of their need to move at a constant speed, any photon that finds itself beyond that point will escape so long as it is pointing in the right direction.

Of the rest of the particles in the Universe, some might escape but a high proportion will not. Most of the matter that we have direct contact with has so little velocity that it is unable to escape even the gravity of the Earth. It is therefore difficult to imagine that the Big Bang was sufficiently explosive to set every last smidgeon of matter moving faster than the Universal EV.

The rule is, the bigger you are, the slower you move. Teels can move faster than light, photons move at light speed, nucleons can go very fast but not as fast as photons. Constructions made of nucleons have no choice but to move substantially slower.

The reason why bigger things move slower is because they can only grow by shedding fast teels and absorbing slow ones. And, since it is the biggest things that have shed the most speed, it is highly unlikely that the supergalaxies can move fast enough to escape their mutual gravity. They may have sufficient velocity to escape from one or more of their neighbours but they cannot escape from them all. Thus, in effect, they cannot escape from any of them.

If the supergalaxies are moving at less than the Universal EV, they will eventually come together to form a clump of supergalaxies, not as a skin around the Universe but as the Universe itself. To do this, they must surrender mass and ATS in addition to that which the Universe has already lost. Thus, the new Universe will be less massive than the one before the Big Bang – and very differently constructed.

7.10     ONWARD

Actually, this is not the end at all. There is quite some way to go and, along the way, we will find clues that tell us why, and how, the Big Bang happened. But first – a diversion.

CHAPTER EIGHT

STARS AND PLANETS

It is easy to be impressed by what we can see of the Universe. A spiral galaxy with its great arcing arms will surely inspire awe in the least imaginative of us. The great spurts of matter, shooting up from the surface of the Sun for hundreds of thousands of kilometres are an unrivalled display of sheer power. The grand planet Jupiter with its multi-coloured swirling atmosphere, and the ice-maiden Saturn with its chilly rings, impress us as much with how insignificant they make the Earth seem as with their own unarguable beauty.

Yet it is as well to remember that these are nothing but different manifestations of the process that is driving the Universe on to its end. These are all part, directly or indirectly, of the need to dump, control or negate, speed.

8.1     TRASH-U-LIKE

The Big Bang gave vast amounts of speed to the teels of the Universe, causing them to rush outwards. Photons formed by filtering out the slowest teels and ejecting the rest.

Then nucleons formed more complex structures by doing the same thing but more rigorously. By the use of even more rigour, heartstars formed and groups of those, in turn became galaxies.

Photons and nucleons are stable. Their mass and their ATS are at equilibrium. Pump extra speed into them and they will adjust themselves: the photon by dumping mass and the nucleon by running its regulatory processes at a faster rate.

As yet, it is likely that nothing else in the Universe is stable. Protogalaxies were not stable and nor did they become stable by turning into today’s galaxies. For them, the hunt for stability is an ongoing process. A process which requires, because of their great size, mechanisms that work on a far larger and more sophisticated scale than those to be found in a photon or a nucleon.

The protogalaxies turned themselves into galaxies by dumping quasars, by the most spectacular form of speed control that the Universe has yet seen. Each quasar removed vast quantities of speed from the protogalaxy in one go, yet so huge were some of the protogalaxies that they may have needed to dump hundreds and maybe even thousands of them.

The Milky Way is an ordinary galaxy and it had its quasar dumping stage, just as did all the other similar galaxies. Right now, that process has been over and done with for a long time but that is not to say that its speed dumping days are over. It still has more speed than its mass can control and it is still ejecting it in the form of teels and photons and nucleons. The dump rate is slowing all the time and one day, assuming that the galaxy survives that long, it will stop. That day, however, is a long way away.

It is supremely ironic that everything we see, admire, and wonder at in a galaxy – the stars, the gas clouds, the glorious disc – are almost totally irrelevant. The really important part of a galaxy is the small heartstar core at the very centre that is almost entirely invisible to us.

8.2     DEBRIS, DETRITUS, AND JUNK

The quasar explosion imbued every teel and every particle outside the fission shell with enormous speed. At first the speed may have been distributed equally but rapidly the distribution became very unequal.

On the outside and going hell for leather, were the fastest teels. Following them were the photons and the slower teels. Then came the fast atoms and molecules, and finally the heavy atoms.

As a general rule, the more massive an atom is, the more speed it must absorb to get it moving forward. If you pump a given amount of speed into a Hydrogen1 atom, it will move much faster than if you pump the same amount of speed into an atom of Iron56. This is why the light atoms like Hydrogen and Helium were able to leave the heavier atoms far behind and why the real heavyweights, Iron, Gold, Lead, etc, could barely get into the race.

Immediately before the explosion, the quasar was like an overblown gobstopper, a succession of shells, from the centre to the edge, with each shell being made of a different type of atom and the majority of them metal bonded.

The amount of speed pumped into those shells after the explosion was enormous and it is possible that there was so much of it that the metal bonding of every atom outside the fission shell was broken to create a rapidly expanding ball of gas.

However, just as it takes more speed to accelerate a heavy atom than it does to accelerate a light one, it takes more speed to break the metal bonding of heavy atoms than it does to break the metal bonding of light ones. It is also possible that, among the heavy atoms, some bonds were not broken completely. Within this expanding ball of gas there may have been lumps of metal or fluid bonded atoms. Some of them may have been very big lumps.

Yet, the possible presence of unbroken heavy atom lumps notwithstanding, the heavy atom gases would still reform rapidly into metal bonded lumps. In the first moments of the explosion, events would pass extremely quickly. The atoms of the inner shells would have been gasified before those farther out. The gas would have been constricted by the still-solid outer shells, crashing into them and dumping a high proportion of the speed onward.

In effect, the speed passed through the heavy atom shells like a hideously strong wave. Or rather, most of it did. Enough was retained by the heavy atoms to prevent the shells reforming completely. Instead, they formed into clumps and chunks, flying outwards at high speed.

8.3     COMING TOGETHER AGAIN

Any atom will metal bond with any other atom. It all depends on temperature – and “temperature” is another way of measuring speed. When speed is injected into an atom, it raises the atom’s velocity and increases the rejectivity of its atmosphere.

Metal bonding occurs when the velocity of an atom, relative to its neighbours, is zero and their proximity is such that the mutual gravity is stronger than the rejectivity of their atmospheres.

The least massive of all atoms, Hydrogen1, has a weak gravity and a relatively extensive rejective atmosphere. The addition or subtraction of small amounts of speed will produce large changes in velocity and rejectivity. To get two hydrogen atoms to metal bond requires that a very high proportion of its speed must be removed.

The freezing point of Hydrogen1 (the point at which two hydrogen atoms are suppressed to the extent that they will metal bond without external pressure) is -259°C. This is, of course, incredibly cold being only 14°C above absolute zero.

Above freezing point, the metal bonded hydrogen will liquefy: that is, it will become fluid bonded with each atom still bonded to its neighbours but being able to slip from one neighbour to another. However, this state lasts for just 7°. At -252°C, Hydrogen1 will boil, breaking its bonds to become a gas.

To show how frisky hydrogen is, compare it with the atom Tungsten184, the metal bonding of which cannot be broken until its temperature has been raised to 3410°. At that point, it will become fluid bonded but it can then stay in this state over a huge temperature range. Tungsten184 cannot be persuaded to boil into gas until another 2520°C of speed has been injected to bring its temperature up to 5930°C.

The more massive an atom is, the less is the disparity between its gravity and its rejectivity. Tungsten184 contains 184 nucleons and therefore has roughly 184 times the gravity of a Hydrogen1 atom. These nucleons are tightly packed together and this gives Tungsten184 a small diameter for its mass and a high escape velocity. Consequently, its teel atmosphere is dense and strong but not particularly extensive. This means that an awful lot of tungsten atoms can be metal bonded into a very small area and that their mutual gravity holds them together extremely tightly.

There is a saying in boxing: “a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un”. This also applies in the accretion of atoms. A large lump of metal bonded heavy atoms will find it much easier to attract and capture other lumps than will a small metal bonded lump of light atoms.

Thus it was that, after the quasar explosion, the heavy atom lumps began joining together again. And the light atoms didn’t.

8.4     ATMOSPHERES

The heavy atom lumps grew as fast as they could with the larger ones hoovering up the smaller ones. Eventually, the very largest of the lumps would become stars but, before that could happen, they would have to capture substantial quantities of the lightest of all atoms, hydrogen, and that was not going to be so easy.

The key to the capture of hydrogen is escape velocity. If the velocity of a hydrogen atom is absolute zero, it can be captured and retained by absolutely anything. However, since the boiling point of Hydrogen1 is -252°C, hydrogen atoms tend to be fast moving, even at low temperatures. And since any capture of hydrogen by the lumps would have to be done with the atoms in their gaseous form, an awful lot of gravity was going to be needed.

Gravity stems from mass. The least massive object we know of that can retain a substantial atmosphere of gas bonded atoms is Titan, one of the satellites of the planet Saturn. Titan is big, over a third bigger than our own Moon, and, uniquely for a satellite, its surface is covered by a thick, opaque, atmosphere.

Because of its distance from us, most of the hard information we have on Titan has been gathered by robot spacecraft and is therefore rather sketchy. However, it appears that Titan’s atmosphere is almost entirely composed of the relatively heavy gas molecule Nitrogen14/2 which, with 28 nucleons, is roughly 28 times as massive as Hydrogen1. Titan falls a long way short of being massive enough to hold onto the lighter gases.

Actually, Titan is only able to hold on to a gas as massive as Nitrogen14/2 because of its distance from the Sun. This makes for an extremely low surface temperature and since low temperatures equate to a low ATS in the gas, its velocity is held below the relatively low EV of the satellite.

The next smallest body with an atmosphere is Mars which, unlike Titan, is a full-fledged planet orbiting directly around the Sun. The diameter of Mars is about a third greater but its mass is five times more. In theory, therefore, it should be able to hold onto much lighter gases. That it cannot is due to Mars being only one sixth of Titan’s distance from the Sun. The extra heat it gets adds to the ATS of its gas atoms, making them move faster and be much more rejective. As a result, Mars can only retain a thin atmosphere of atoms which actually have to be heavier than those Titan can retain. The atmosphere of Mars is made of molecules of carbon dioxide – combinations of Carbon12 and Oxygen16/2 containing 44 nucleons.

Planet Earth is nine times more massive than Mars but it is a third closer to the Sun. The extra heat it receives means that, for all that extra mass, its atmosphere is similar to that of Titan. Our atmosphere is also predominantly Nitrogen14/2 (28 nucleons) albeit with a markedly higher ATS. (There is also, thankfully, a substantial quantity of Oxygen16/2, manufactured by local vegetation, which at 32 nucleons is even heavier than the nitrogen.)

Titan, Mars, and the Earth, have far too little mass, and far too much ATS, to be able to hold onto free, gaseous, hydrogen. The only planets with the ability to do this are the four giant outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Yet, of these, only Jupiter, the greatest of the four with a mass of over 300 times that of the Earth is heavy enough to retain Hydrogen1 – and even then only as a tenuous layer on the edge of the outer atmosphere.

Deeper down, Jupiter has plenty of hydrogen but it is in the more massive form of the molecule Hydrogen1/2 which contains two nucleons. The other three giants also retain large quantities of Hydrogen1/2 but make do with virtually no Hydrogen1 at all.

A good general description of a star is that it is a body in which the fusion of atoms is taking place. So far as we can tell, fusion is not taking place inside Jupiter and this makes it the most massive object we know of that is not a star, or which does not contain stars. This gives us some idea as to what might be needed to convert it into one.

In the aftermath of the quasar explosion, the lumps of heavy atoms grew and grew. Eventually, some of them grew sufficiently massive that their gravity could retain any hydrogen atoms that they could capture. Exactly how massive these lumps had to be is not easy to judge but they would need to have been many times more massive than Jupiter.

The hydrogen atoms of the time would have been highly resistant to capture in any case. Pumped up, as they were, with huge quantities of speed, they would have been travelling vastly too fast to have been captured by anything as puny as a mere lump.

Yet, as in many other conflicts, time is a great reconciler. As the distances from the explosion site grew greater, the mutual gravity of the debris gradually reduced the velocity, both of the hydrogen atoms and the lumps, until eventually the conditions were right for the lumps to build themselves an atmosphere.

8.5     A STAR IS BORN

Jupiter is often referred to as a gas-giant. This is a deceptive title, however, for it unjustly bolsters the importance of the planet’s atmosphere. To find the real Jupiter, you have to strip away the clouds of hydrogen and helium to find the metal bonded core hidden underneath.

The atmosphere of a planet or a star is a minor subsystem. It contributes to the ongoing development of its parent but it is not crucial to it. That we humans tend to think of atmospheres as important is just another example of our self-centredness.

The atmosphere of the Earth is important to us in that we cannot survive without it and indeed, would never have existed without it. For this reason we think atmospheres are important but, in truth, the atmosphere is a no more important feature in the Earth’s development than we are. Had the Earth never had an atmosphere and had we never happened, it is doubtful that the real history of the Earth would ultimately have been very different.

So far as triggering fusion in a star is concerned, the possession of an atmosphere of hydrogen is best thought of as a halfway house. The fusion of hydrogen atoms can only take place if those atoms are under extreme pressure. And for that, the atoms to be fused must have an enormous mass below to provide the gravity, and a very heavy mass of fluid and gas bonded atoms above to provide the pressure.

This means that our potential star must not only capture hydrogen as a gas, it must keep on doing so until the atoms at the bottom are squashed so tightly together that they first metal bond into molecules of Hydrogen1/2 and then fuse into Hydrogen2.

Once fusion starts, the star is born. What happens next, however, depends on how massive the heavy atom core has become. It is this which dictates how much hydrogen the star is able to capture and hold on to. It also dictates the pace at which fusion proceeds. In a very massive star, the fusion will proceed at a frantic pace. Less mass, and fusion is a more leisurely activity.

8.6     A PLANET IS BORN

Accretion is an important process in the onward development of the Universe but it is not always as easy to achieve as it might at first seem to be. For accretion to be successful, the conditions have to be right.

Take our own Moon as an example. Even as you read this, the moon is accreting. Every hour, millions of grains of dust are raining down onto its surface. In bulk terms, the amount is small and a million years of it will make little difference to the Moon’s total mass.

Nevertheless, this is real, live, ongoing, accretion in which the conditions are exactly right. The Moon is big and the grains of dust are small. The gravity of the Moon is extremely high compared to that of the dust grains so the Moon wins every time.

The conditions are not quite so right when the Moon is hit by a large meteor, a comet or an asteroid. The surface of the Moon is covered with craters, each of which marks the grave of a once independent object that got itself into the wrong place at the wrong time. In each instance, the Moon won the competition but with many of the larger craters the victory was not complete. The violence of the collisions was such that a fireball of matter boiled high above the surface and a good proportion of this escaped the Moon’s gravity. The Moon won some extra mass but it lost some too.

Accretion becomes really problematic when both of the parties involved have a mass too large for one to be absorbed easily by the other. If the Moon was to be struck by another body even half its size, the result could well be the shattering of them both.

Accretion, like war, is over more quickly if one side is more powerful than the other. In the situation that would have prevailed after the blowing up of a quasar, it would have been the lumps that got to be biggest first that won the race. In a remarkably short time, almost all of the small fry, the dust and the pebbles, would have been hovered up to leave a number of large lumps.

The period immediately after a quasar explosion would have found a large number of heavy atom lumps heading out from the explosion site. This would have meant that those neighbouring each other would have been travelling in roughly the same direction at roughly the same velocity. Some of these would move into helical orbits around each other.

Inevitably, there would have been considerable variation in the sizes of the lumps in orbit around each other – some were big, some were bigger and some were very big and this would show in the different types of orbital systems that developed.

In some instances, two or more large lumps would co-orbit with neither being dominant. In others, one lump would be more massive and would dominate to the extent that one or more smaller lumps rotated around it.

These are stellar systems, just like our own Solar System, in the making. It is likely that they formed long before any of the lumps were able to start a fusion career. In a quasar explosion, the very light hydrogen atoms would have made the most use of the available speed and accelerated to very high speeds. By the time the lumps had managed to acquire enough mass to hold onto any passing hydrogen, most of it would have been long, long, gone.

Not that it was lost forever. The loss of a small amount of speed will slow a hydrogen atom dramatically and so, as the gas voyaged out from the explosion site it decelerated until it formed, with the gravitational help of grains of dust, into vast and very cold clouds.

As a slower pace, the new stellar systems followed the hydrogen out from the explosion site. Travelling for years, perhaps for millions and millions of years, they would pick up such gas as they could find until, eventually, the lucky ones would pass through a gas cloud. The would-be stars and planets would take in all the hydrogen that their mass/gravity could hold on to and, if it was enough, fusion would start.

This was how our solar system began.

8.7     ALTERNATIVELY …..

Actually, hydrogen gas is not essential for the commencement of fusion. If an accretion is massive enough, fusion will start anyway. The more massive the accretion, the more massive the atoms that it can fuse.

It is entirely conceivable that fusion commenced in some stars before they acquired any hydrogen at all. It is also conceivable that they then acquired hydrogen subsequently although, in some cases, a fusing star might never acquire any appreciable quantities of hydrogen at all.

8.8     THE GAS THEORY

The standard version of events is that stars and planets condensed out of the vast clouds of hydrogen gas that are to be found littered about the galactic atmospheres. However, there are problems with this.

The first concerns the ATS of these clouds. Any gas bonded structure that is not bound to a fluid or metal bonded core is unlikely to last. Any of these clouds that is truly composed of nothing more than hydrogen gas is likely to be in the process of dissipating itself.

Accretion could be taking place if any of the gas has a sufficiently low temperature that it can fluid or metal bond without pressure. Unfortunately, the act of bonding would accelerate the particles and raise their ATS, possibly by enough to break the pair apart again.

Certainly, any cloud that is accreting in this way would begin to heat up in the centre as the hydrogen particles were made to go faster and faster by their mutual gravity. Without a core of more heat resistant heavy atoms, it is difficult to see how such an accretion would not fritter itself away.

Some gas theories postulate that the clouds are littered with heavy atom dust. This is very likely and it makes a great difference in that accretion could take place by the cold gas condensing upon this, in the same way that atmospheric water condenses around dust to form clouds and rain.

Yet this is deceptive. The real accretion here is being done by the dust and not by the hydrogen. The dust particles are drawn together by their mutual gravity. The hydrogen helps, adding a little to the mass of the dust but its role is really only secondary at this stage.

Using dust as a trigger, it is perfectly feasible that stars are formed inside gas clouds. Even more so if, among the dust, there is a litter of pebbles and lumps and chunks.

8.9     A CERTAIN FUTURE

Quasars exploded because their ATS and their mass were not in equilibrium. By ejecting vast quantities of mass and speed, they brought themselves nearer to stability in the form of a tightly packed ball of neutrons.

Because the matter ejected by the quasars was richer in speed than it was in mass, any bodies that formed from that matter would also be out of equilibrium and would have to find some way to cope with it. The Earth and the Sun formed from such matter and are still out of equilibrium.

The mass of the Earth is low, far too low to have ever triggered fusion as a way of speed dumping. Yet its centre is hot, due to the combined effects of radioactive decay and contraction. Somehow this heat/speed must be got rid of. The Earth does it by radiating photons and teels out into space. Because the imbalance is not a great one, the radiation rate is low and it will be many billions of years before the Earth reaches stability.

The mass of the Sun is more than enough to trigger fusion in its hydrogen atoms. This enables it to dump mass in prodigious quantities as nucleons, photons and teels. Great though the mass is, however, it is not enough to force that fusion through to its logical end.

Eventually, fusion will cease and the flames will die out. The Sun will have become a more massive version of the eventual Earth. It will still be hot but it will gradually cool down as it continues to radiate photons and teels. In the end, if the Sun is left to its own devices, it will dump all its excess speed and become a massive cold ball with a surface of frozen hydrogen and a heart of solid metal.

The Sun is not an unusual star. There are billions of others like it in the Milky Way just as there are billions like it in other galaxies. Stars more massive than the Sun are rarer, however, and stars that are a lot more massive are rarer still.

The more massive a star is, the farther it can push the fusion process. It is currently believed that a star with a mass more than three times that of the Sun can push it all the way. Fusion in such stars proceeds quickly and ends in violence as a supernova explosion.

Progress towards a supernova is much the same as progress towards the explosion in a quasar. It involves the fusion of heavier atoms into ever heavier atoms until a shell of fissionable atoms is formed. The penetration of this shell by slow neutrons causes a fission explosion which blasts away the outer part of the star, leaving a more stable neutron star to radiate away the last of its excess speed.

This can be a continuing process. The outer part of the star that is blasted away comprises a mix of atoms, some of them light atoms like hydrogen and helium and others, the heavy atoms necessary to build major accretions. And so the process goes on. Out of the ashes of one supernova will grow more stars, a few of which will be sufficiently massive to become supernovae, out of the ashes of which …..

8.10     PERSPECTIVE

The energy released by a stellar supernova bears little comparison with that released by a quasar supernova. The differences in mass ensure that the stellar version is a veritable pygmy. Yet both are part of the same continuing process. They are both cogs in the mechanism by which the galaxy gets rid of its excess speed.

The galaxy dumps a heartstar to get rid of speed. The quasar explodes in order to dump speed. The massive stars which formed from the quasar detritus go through a supernova explosion to dump speed. The supernova detritus forms into new stars, more of which go through the supernova process, and so on.

All the while, speed is being radiated out of the galaxies – out of our Milky Way. As the burned out cinders, the neutron stars, and the stars that didn’t make it to fission weight, and the planets that didn’t even make it to fusion weight, are radiating away the last of their speed, their velocities are already slowing. Their orbits are decaying and they are falling back into the heartstar core from which they sprang. Only now, when they have been stripped of their speed, can the galaxy make real use of them to build up its own mass.

8.11     ONWARD

The existence of the human race is entirely temporary. The pace of our evolution is such that we are recognisably different from ancestors who lived only 100,000 years ago. The chances of our race, even in a much evolved form, surviving to see all the speed squeezed out of the disc of the Milky Way are slight. However, if we should make it, we will have had to work out how to live in the space BETWEEN the galaxies. There will be no safe haven for us inside them.

CHAPTER NINE

ATOMS, FUSION, AND FISSION

An atom is a gravitationally bonded “system” of nucleons. The simplest atom of all, Hydrogen1, consists of just two particles – a single proton with an electron in a “pseudo-orbit” around it.

Atoms are important to us in that different types of atoms can be joined together like Lego bricks to make sophisticated complexes of matter.

9.1     TYPES OF ATOMS

There are more than a hundred types of atom, each displaying a character that makes it different from all the other atoms. Each type is differentiated by the number of protons it contains. Thus a hydrogen atom contains one proton, helium contains two, lithium three, and so on all the way up to the most complex atom occurring naturally on Earth – uranium with 92. There are atoms with even more protons but these are artificial in that we have had to manufacture them in laboratories.

Each atom type is further divided into sub-types according to the number of neutrons it contains. Within each type there can be quite a wide variation in the number of neutrons. For example, the commonest iron sub-type is Iron56 (26 protons and 30 neutrons) but Iron54 (26/28), Iron57 (26/31), and Iron58 (26/32) can be found without too much difficulty.

Every atom is surrounded by one or more electrons and it is these which dictate its “charge” – positive, neutral, or negative. In a neutrally charged atom, the number of electrons is the same as the number of protons. Where an atom has less electrons, the charge becomes positive. Where it has more, the charge is negative.

A positively charged atom is known as an ion. A negatively charged atom is known as an anion. When it is unclear (or not necessary to know) whether a particle is an atom, an ion, or an anion, it is known as an element.

9.2     FRAUD

Hydrogen is the commonest element in the Universe. If current estimates are right, 91% of all atoms are hydrogen and these constitute 70% of the mass of the Universe. This makes hydrogen a very important particle – for which reason we should be very clear about its true nature.

A valid case can be made that Hydrogen1 is not an atom at all. All other atoms contain at least one proton, one neutron, and one electron. Hydrogen1 stands alone in containing just one proton and one electron.

In all the other atoms, two or more nucleons have been fused together in extremely arduous conditions. Hydrogen1 has undergone no fusion at all. In truth, far from being an atom in its own right, Hydrogen1 is just a variation in the raw material from which other atoms are made.

A Hydrogen1 atom has an electron to neutralise its charge. Without that electron, it becomes a hydrogen ion which is nothing more or less than a proton. It is common in astrophysics to talk of “clouds of ionised hydrogen” when what is really meant is “clouds of protons”.

9.3     THE PROTON-PROTON CHAIN

The most basic of fusions is that which bonds two nucleons together to form Hydrogen2, a particle made of one proton and one neutron. The fact that the two nucleons are different is important. It is not possible to permanently bond two similar nucleons together, that is: two protons or two neutrons, without one of the nucleons changing into its opposite form.

The currently favoured model for the most basic of fusions postulates that two protons merge to become Hydrogen2 and that, in the act of fusion, one proton undecays into a neutron. This model is known as the Proton-Proton Chain, which continues thereafter to fuse the Hydrogen2 with a further proton to produce Helium3 and then fusing two Helium3 to produce a single Helium4 and two protons.

The Proton-Proton Chain reaction is thought to be the primary energy source of stars like the Sun. However, there are problems with it that concern the structure of protons.

The atmosphere of a proton is shallow and this allows other protons to approach closely. However, it is also extremely dense, extremely regimented, and extremely difficult to penetrate. Because it is highly directional, most attempts at fusion result in the protons being flung violently away from each other.

Fusion by way of the Proton-Proton chain is possible and it probably does occur from time to time. However, the requirements are so exacting that it is unlikely to be the main form of basic fusion.

This is confirmed, obliquely, by the low detection rate on Earth of solar neutrinos. The model suggests that a consequence of proton-proton fusion is the emission of a large number of neutrinos and that a good proportion of these should reach the Earth. Yet, even though a number of different methods of neutrino capture are in use, the number detected is barely a third of that predicted.

9.4     BASIC FUSION

To show how stars can form and start their fusion career, let us take the example of a cloud of Hydrogen1 with a mass many times that of the Sun. This is not a realistic example because star formation normally requires that such clouds should be seeded with heavy atoms but it will keep things simple.

At the beginning, none of the hydrogen in the cloud is ionised which means that it is moving, on average, relatively slowly. Slow moving atoms allow dense packing and it is this that enables the cloud to be small enough for the atoms to bond to each other gravitationally – literally, gas bonding.

With bonding comes order as the democratic principle takes effect and control. The gas at the heart of the cloud begins to rotate around the central point and with rotation comes filtration as speed is cast out towards the edge.

Soon the hydrogen, and the teel flux in which the hydrogen swims, is moving more slowly at the centre than at the edge. This allows the particles to be packed ever more densely. The cloud is contracting.

As speed is filtered out of the centre, the pace of contraction increases with the hydrogen atoms at the centre being packed ever more closely. The density of the teel flux is also increasing and the central atoms are becoming progressively more engorged. This inflates their atmospheres, forcing the electrons further and further out. Soon the electrons are moving so fast and so high that they breach the escape velocity of their atoms and become free. The Hydrogen1 atoms at the centre have been ionised. They are now simple protons.

The contraction continues. Now, the engorgement of the protons reaches the stage where they begin to undecay into neutrons. They fire electrons and photons at an increasing rate as they attempt to dump mass and stave off the change but soon the teel density is so great that it cannot be resisted. At the heart of the cloud there is now a rotating core of neutrons, surrounded by a shell of protons, surrounded by an outer shell of Hydrogen1.

It is at the interface between the neutron core and the proton shell that the first fusion occurs. Here, due to the rotation, the particles are moving quite fast although, relative to each other, they are barely moving at all.

Protons have a shallow defensive atmosphere which allows other particles to approach closely – and slow neutrons are able to negate much of the defensiveness of the proton atmosphere. At the interface these particles, which have already lost much of their natural resistance to each other, are forced so close together that they have no choice but to metal bond to each other.

At the interface, protons and neutrons fuse together to form ions of Hydrogen2.

9.5     CONSEQUENCES

The mass of a proton and neutron, when fused into Hydrogen2, is less than their mass when apart. To achieve stability they must dump some of their mass and they do this in the form of photons. It is this emission of photons that is the energy of fusion, the energy of stars. Our gas cloud has become a star.

What happens next depends upon two factors. Firstly, although the new ions each contain a proton and a neutron, they together occupy less space than they did when they were apart. Secondly, notwithstanding it is “smaller”, the new particle is nearly twice as massive as any other particle in the star. As a result, the ions of Hydrogen2 fall down from the proton/neutron interface where they were formed to the centre of the star – and once there, they take up much less room. The act of fusion speeds up the contraction of the star.

The contraction is not very apparent, however. Because the Hydrogen2 ions are highly engorged by the surrounding teel flux, they are constantly dumping excess mass in the form of teels, photons, and electrons. The ejection streams are slow moving but dense and extremely strong and this forces the ions apart from each other, masking the underlying contraction.

9.6     HELIUM

This situation cannot go on forever – although it can go on for a very long time. Through the circulation of teels and photons, speed is carried away from the centre so that, over time, the turbulence begins to subside and the ions can resume the process of getting closer together.

The star now consists of a core of Hydrogen2 surrounded by successive shells of neutrons, of protons, and of Hydrogen1. There is now a new interface between the Hydrogen2 core and the neutron shell and this allows the fusion of ions of Hydrogen3, each containing one proton and two neutrons.

Hydrogen3, in Earth surface conditions, is unstable. The teel flows between one proton and two neutrons are impossibly complex but, because the nucleons are metal bonded, they cannot escape each other. They can find a better way of living with each other, however, by forcing one of the neutrons to decay into a proton. The new particle is Helium3 (two protons and one neutron) and this is stable.

On Earth, Hydrogen3 has a half-life of about 12 years – that is it takes about 12 years for 50% of any quantity of Hydrogen3 particles to decay into Helium3. In the middle of the star, however, the density of the teel flux enforces the engorgement of the neutrons and this could well extend the half-life although the decay will still happen in time.

The fusion of Hydrogen/Helium3 causes yet further contraction at the centre of the star and this increases the pressure in the inside edge of the Hydrogen2 shell, for the first time forcing like-to-like fusion. Two Hydrogen2 ions fuse together to form Helium4.

Helium4 is extremely important in the fusion of the heavier atoms and ions that is to come. It is important because it is so remarkably stable. Indeed, it is so strong that, even when heliums subsequently become part of larger atoms, they retain their integrity as heliums. From henceforth, all atoms are made of a combination of heliums, protons, and neutrons.

9.7     CARBON – THE STUFF OF LIFE

Whether or not there is any fusion beyond the creation of Hydrogen2 depends upon the mass of the star. If the star has a low mass, there is a limit to the amount of contraction it can undergo.

A star might light up and have only enough mass to run the fusion engine for a short while. Then, once it has dumped the excess speed from its centre, the fires will die. On the other hand, a really massive star can go all the way, collapsing continually, creating new shells and new interfaces to create new ions, one after the other.

Beyond Helium4, there are many routes towards ever heavier ions. The following fusions are possible – I don’t say they all happen but they are all possible:

Hydrogen3 and Hydrogen3 will form an extremely unstable Hydrogen6. However, this could stabilise itself by decaying a neutron into a proton to form Lithium6 (3 protons and 3 neutrons) – a particle which is essentially a Helium4 and a Hydrogen2 joined together.

Hydrogen3 and Helium3 will form Lithium6 (3 protons and 3 neutrons) directly, a very simple form of fusion which requires no subsequent decay to produce a stable particle.

Helium3 and Helium3 will form an extremely unstable Beryllium6. Actually, it is difficult to see how this pairing could even come together in that the atmosphere of each party is highly neutral. Neutral particles are very resistant to other neutral particles although they are very receptive to charged particles. That said, if this pairing were able to happen, the rapid decay of a proton to a neutron would produce the nicely stable Lithium 6 (3 protons and 3 neutrons).

Hydrogen3 and Helium4 will form Lithium7 (3 protons and 4 neutrons), a simple fusion requiring no subsequent decay.

Helium4 and Helium4 could fuse to form Beryllium8 (4 protons and 4 neutrons) but the structure of this particle is such that it would almost immediately break up again. Certainly, it is unlikely that any particles would last long enough to form a shell.

Helium4 and Helium5 will form Beryllium9 (4 protons and 5 neutrons), however, Helium5 is not a stable particle so any fusion would have to take place quickly. Beryllium9 is not common in the Universe – hardly surprising under the circumstances.

Helium5 and Helium5 would form Beryllium10. However, this isotope is unknown which indicates that, if it can form at all, it must decay very rapidly, possibly to Boron10 (5 protons and 5 neutrons).

Helium5 and Lithium6 will form Boron11 (5 protons and 6 neutrons). The comments about the instability of Helium5 apply here as well. Boron11, however, is present in some quantity in the Universe. Therefore, either this fusion does occur or Boron11 is made by some other means (possibly by fusing two Helium4 and one Hydrogen3).

Lithium6 and Lithium6 will form Carbon12 (6 protons and 6 neutrons) which will structure itself as three Helium4.

After Helium4, Carbon12 is the next most important element. It has one spinning Helium4 at its head with a pair of Helium4 co-orbiting each other and bringing up the rear. It is shaped rather like a hollow cone and it is this that makes Carbon12 important in the creating of molecules.

The cone shape offers opportunities for other atoms to attach themselves, either on the “surface” of the cone or in the hollow of it. This allows the building of chains of molecules far more easily than with other atoms with the consequence that Carbon12 is a key component in the building of structures, from simple hydrocarbons up to the complexities of the human body.

9.8     LIKELIHOODS

Given the remarkable conditions at the centre of a star, any of the above fusions are possible. Whether they are all likely is another matter. The truth, probably, is that while all these fusions do happen, some are easy to achieve and thus happen a lot, while others are difficult and hardly happen at all.

The most likely fusions are the simplest and it is these which produce the most stable particles. By contrast, any particle that needs a Helium5 ion as a component is starting with a major handicap – which is not to say it cannot happen, merely that it is not easy.

The main fusion pathways follow two separate lines.

Line one: Proton + Neutron = Hydrogen2
Hydrogen2 + Hydrogen2 = Helium4

Line two: Proton + Neutron = Hydrogen2
Hydrogen2 + Neutron + Hydrogen3/Helium3
Hydrogen3 + Helium3 = Lithium6
Lithium6 + Lithium6 = Carbon12

The advantages of these lines is that, Hydrogen3 to Helium3 apart, none of the fused particles requires the decay of a neutron to a proton or vice versa in order to achieve stability. Furthermore, the resulting particles: Hydrogen2, Helium3, Helium4, Lithium6, and Carbon12, are all stable.

There is one other route to the creation of heavier elements that should not be forgotten. The structure of a neutron is such that it can pass through a shell of complex ions while a proton cannot. At this stage, fusion involving single neutrons is not especially important. However, as elements get ever more massive, it will become much more so.

9.9     OTHER FUSIONS – OTHER HALLS

So far we have concentrated on the likelihood of pairs of ions fusing. We have not touched on the possibility that three or more ions might fuse together. This is particularly relevant when we consider fusions involving Helium4, a very strongly made ion.

Carbon12 is made of three tightly bonded Helium4 ions. The question is whether they bonded directly, three into one, or less directly by the bonding of two Lithium-6.

Theoretically, the direct bonding of three heliums presents no difficulties. Practically and mechanically, however, there are problems. In reality, no such fusion could ever be truly “direct”. What would actually happen is that two heliums would form a Beryllium8 and would then be joined by a further helium.

It is the terrible instability of Beryllium8 that causes the doubts. The subsequent addition of the extra helium would have to be achieved extremely quickly or the beryllium would break up again. Probably, both types of fusion do occur but it is this need for speed which points to the Lithium6 route as being the more common – there is so much less to go wrong.

The beryllium problem comes well to the fore with the creation of Oxygen16, an element that is particularly important to us. The easiest way to make Oxygen16 is to fuse two Beryllium8. Is it possible, however, in the hostile conditions inside a star, that enough Beryllium8 particles could remain stable long enough to form the thick shell necessary to fuse into large quantities of one of the Universe’s most common elements?

Other routes are possible. The most attractive involves the fusing of stable ions with “slow” neutrons. Normal, quick neutrons occupy their own shell, inside the proton shell and outside the Hydrogen2 shell. However, neutrons don’t have to stay normal and quick all the time. Collisions do happen and speed is exchanged. From the lower interface of the neutron shell, a steady smattering of slow neutrons trickles down into the interior of the star.

Once there, the ability of a slow neutron to penetrate the atmosphere of an ion, combined with intense pressure, enables fusion to take place. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that, while Carbon12 will fuse with Boron11 to form Sodium23, beyond this point all fusion is by the addition of slow neutrons.

Certainly, the addition of slow neutrons, one after the other, to Carbon12 to create Oxygen16 looks a more attractive idea than does the fusing of two Beryllium8.

9.10     FUSION IN STARS – SPECIFICS

“Energy” is speed. Humans need speed for their very existence. We receive our speed from the Sun in a number of forms but the most important of these is as photons. Photons provide us with large amounts of speed in easily assimilable packets.

While photons can be produced during the fusion process, most are not. Mainly, they are the result of the engorgement of ions at the centre of stars. This engorgement is such that protons in the ions are always being pushed to undecay back into neutrons. Any protons, suffering this level of engorgement, will emit photons continuously in order to stay as protons.

Most of the photons emitted in this way have a short lifetime. The crush at the centre of a star is enormous and most photons have no choice but to crash into another ion almost immediately. This raises the ATS of the new ion causing it, in turn, to emit a photon to regain its stability.

Inside a star, photons are being continually recycled as they are emitted, absorbed, dismantled, rebuilt, emitted, absorbed, and so on. However, this is not a closed cycle. It is part of the star’s speed dumping process. Gradually, speed filters its way up to the outer shells of the star where escape is possible. Most of the photons we receive on Earth are emitted by ions and atoms on the surface of the Sun, not from the fusion regions deep inside.

When a star ceases to fuse ions because its mass is not enough to force the process any further, its light does not immediately go out. Not does it immediately collapse in on itself under the weight of its own gravity. The teel flux is still dense and circulating, forcing the ions to keep on producing their photons. The light will eventually go out, and the collapse will eventually come, but getting rid of all that excess speed can take a very long time.

9.11     THE ENERGY BALANCE

During the fusion of ions into more massive ions, a quantity of mass and a quantity of speed is ejected. However, the amount of each will vary from ion to ion. As a general rule, the greater the mass of the new ion, the smaller is the amount of mass and ATS that is released.

The reason is that the addition of each new nucleon to an ion will increase both its mass and its gravity concentration which, in turn, will increase its EV. As a consequence, the ATS of the ion will also increase and it is this which ensures that mass and speed are dumped during the fusion process.

However, each rise in mass is not matched by a corresponding rise in ATS. The Mass and thus the EV rises quicker which means that eventually the point is reached where the increase in EV and the increase in ATS cancel each other out.

In such a fusion, there is no ejection of excess mass or speed. The addition of the extra nucleon has no effect other than to increase the mass and ATS of the nucleon. This point is the creation of Iron56 (26 protons and thirty neutrons).

Going beyond Iron56, the situation reverses itself. The addition of additional nucleons still raises the mass and the ATS of the ion but the new ATS falls short of the new EV. The ion is thus able to suck in and retain extra slow teels until the ATS and the EV are in balance once more.

Beyond Iron56, each succeeding element is increasingly more massive than the addition of one extra nucleon suggests it should be.

9.12     THE NEUTRON HEART

Low mass elements tend, very roughly, to balance the number of neutrons with the number of protons. There can be small imbalances due to the need to accommodate odd numbers of nucleons, for example Lithium7 has three neutrons and four protons, but the variation is always small.

However, by the time we reach neon (10 protons), the imbalances show signs of growing. Neon22, for example, has 10 protons and 12 neutrons, which is 54% neutrons by number. And as masses increase, so does the imbalance – and it is always in the favour of neutrons. Calcium46, for instance, has 56%, Zinc70 has 57%, Zirconium96 has 58%, Tin124 has 59%, and so on up to the most massive stable element, Bismuth209 which has 60%.

Sometimes, when neutrons are added to an ion, they will fuse with other nucleons to form sub-assemblies of Hydrogen2, Hydrogen/Helium3, or Helium4. At other times, however, and especially in the more massive ions, a new arrival will remain a neutron.

The core of an ion is a place of extreme teel density. In the more massive ions, this density is more than enough to prevent the decay of a neutron into a proton. Thus it is that with increasing mass, the central area of an ion becomes increasingly a core of neutrons, strapped in by the interlinked teel streams of the hydrogen and helium sub-assemblies that surround them.

The neutron core can grow to considerable proportions. In Iron56, for example, it comprises just four neutrons. Cadmium112 doubles the number of nucleons but, of these, the core now comprises sixteen neutrons. Add half as many nucleons again to produce Erbium168 and the number of neutrons in the core has doubled to thirty two. Uranium238 has 54 neutrons in its core.

9.13     CRISIS

As long as the most massive ions being created in our star are less massive than Iron56, progress is straightforward. Each additional fusion decreases the space required by the ions. This concentrates the gravity and increases the pressure so that further fusion ensues.

Once it begins fusing Iron56 and beyond, however, things have to change. Before each act of fusion dumped quantities of fast moving teels out into the flux to maintain the pressure that kept the ions apart, allowing the contraction to be orderly and slow. After Iron56, there is no more dumping of teels into the flux. Now, each act of fusion sucks in teels from the flux and the shrinkage at the centre of the star begins to accelerate.

Slow neutrons could once sail through the core of the star and stand a very good chance of avoiding fusion. Now they stand no chance. Any slow neutron which enters the area, cannot avoid collision and absorption. Very rapidly, new shells are being formed of ever heavier ions, ions with ever larger neutron cores. If the mass of the star is great enough, it will push on and on until it breeds ions which are fundamentally unstable. These ions are “radioactive”.

9.14     RADIOACTIVITY

There are many radioactive atoms found in the crust of the Earth. They are characterised by a regular emission of particles, sometimes heliums, sometimes electrons, often photons. This is caused by their structure being unstable. The emission of particles is their way of attempting to regain stability.

The most massive stable element is Bismuth209 (83 protons and 126 neutrons). An element with more than 209 nucleons is unstable and will decay over time, usually into bismuth or lead.

The key to understanding radioactivity lies in the neutron core of an unstable element. Here the teel flux is dense and fierce, engorging and bloating the neutrons. Neutrons always have an extended atmosphere but, as elements get more massive and the teel flux surrounding and infusing them gets denser, the atmosphere extends further and further outwards.

The hydrogen and helium subassemblies on the outside of the particle are circling it, although not in a true orbit. They have velocity and this keeps them moving but it doesn’t keep them up. They are actually floating on the atmospheres of the nucleons below them. This is a quasi-orbit, like that of captive electrons.

With successively more massive elements the neutron core gets bigger, not only because there are more neutrons there but because the neutrons themselves are getting bigger. And as the core gets bigger, it forces the surrounding helium and hydrogen sub-structures outwards. This expansion reduces the escape velocity.

Above Bismuth209, the expansion is such that the outer atmosphere at the equator is moving faster than escape velocity and so there is a bleeding away of fast teels. However, because the particle is more massive than iron and is therefore ATS-deficient, it will lose more mass than ATS. The consequence of the loss of atmosphere is that the helium subassemblies at the equator are themselves pushed closer to escape velocity.

The process continues until, sooner or later, a substructure (almost always a helium) on the equator is forced out to such a distance that it is moving at escape velocity – a situation that is amplified by the substructure absorbing the faster teels it finds farther out and thus itself accelerating. A helium or hydrogen will thus escape.

This process is all about dumping mass. A secondary method comes from the dumping of electrons, which are emitted when neutrons decay into protons. How many heliums or electrons are dumped depends upon the original mass of the unstable particle. For instance, Uranium238 ejects 8 heliums and 6 electrons before it becomes stable at Lead206. This takes a half-life of around 5 million years.

Radioactive decay is a familiar phenomenon on Earth but in the centre of stars it is rare. There, the ions are submerged in a dense teel flux which is flowing into and out of them in prodigious amounts and giving them a higher mass and a lower ATS than their earthbound equivalents. The ions are bloated in the way that quarks are bloated and, like quarks, as long as they stay where they are they are stable.

Not only are these ions able to remain stable, they can continue to fuse. They will capture more and more slow neutrons, so that they become ever more massive, with larger and larger cores of neutrons.

This situation could continue forever except for one thing. Some of these very heavy ions are not only potentially unstable. They are also fissionable.

9.14     FISSION

On Earth, all elements more massive than Bismuth209 are unstable in that they will ultimately decay into particles which are less massive. However, some elements, particularly Uranium235 and Plutonium239 have another characteristic. Their structure is such that if they absorb a slow neutron, they become unbalanced and split into two.

This would not be so important were it not that, in the act of splitting, they also emit two or more slow neutrons from their core. If a Uranium235 splits sufficiently close to another Uranium235, it could split that as well. And the neutrons from that splitting could split yet other Uranium235s. This is a “chain reaction”.

The crucial factor is proximity. If the neutrons emitted by one Uranium235 are to be reasonably sure of splitting another, the two must be close to each other. For the process to continue for any length of time, there must be lots of Uranium235 or the chain reaction will stutter to a halt. To sustain a chain reaction requires that the uranium must be packed to a particular density. This is the “critical mass”.

The combined mass of the results of the split, two elements and the slow neutrons, is less than the mass of the original Uranium235. The rest of the mass is emitted as teels and photons. If the amount of “energy” released is multiplied by a chain reaction, the potential for destruction is enormous. This is the power of the atom bomb.

9.16     THE END OF THE BEGINNING

There is a difference between what happens here on Earth and what happens at the centre of a very massive star. At the centre of the star there are no atoms, only positively charged ions. Each of these is engorged by the dense flux of teels, photons, and electrons in which they move. Every ion has a higher mass and a lower ATS than would be possible here. Most particularly, ions which would be radioactive in London or New York, do not decay.

At a prodigious rate, the centre of the star is producing a succession of ever more massive ions, with larger and larger neutron cores. Elements far more massive than uranium are now being produced, elements which are only theoretical here. Indeed, it is possible that some of them have not even been theorised yet.

The speed at which new elements are being made, together with the enormous range of isotopes possible for each one, means that the centre of the star is no longer composed of discrete shells. It has become a violent melting pot with each ion pursuing its own course, picking up neutrons wherever it finds them.

It is only farther out that shells become apparent as the priority of mass reasserts itself. Surrounding the violent core are successive shells of ions but these are not simple shells, each containing one particular element.

Each element is subdivided into isotopes which depend for their classification on the number of neutrons they contain. Uranium, for example, will always contain 92 protons but, here on Earth, uranium isotopes can be found with a total of 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, or 239 nucleons. Inside a star, many more isotopes may be possible.

The shells are ordered by mass. These heavyweight shells are composed of alloys of different elements, all typified by a similar mass. Thus it is that one shell might contain a mix of Thorium235, Protactinium235, Uranium235, Neptunium235, and so on.

Each of these isotopes has a slightly different mass but the turbulence and the relatively small number of each will delay their ability to form single isotope shells. Eventually, however, this will happen. When there are enough particles of each isotope, they will begin to form shells of their own. The last act is almost with us.

Almost but not quite. Shells of fissile Uranium235 and Plutonium239 form but they are not able to chain react. The ions are kept sufficiently far apart by the dense flux that flows through them so that they cannot reach critical mass. Slow neutrons are passing through their shells continuously and splits occur again and again but they cannot develop into a chain reaction.

All the time, the pressure inside the star is rising. Neutrons falling in from the outskirts continue to bond with the heavy ions at the centre, creating ever heavier ions and concentrating the mass of the star ever more at the core. This tremendous concentration of gravity is dragging the whole star inwards.

Even the outer atmosphere of Hydrogen1 that surrounds the star is being pulled in by the gravity, ionised, and undecayed into neutrons which are then working to build ever heavier ions. As the pressure builds up from the outside of the star, the shells are compressed more and more.

The crisis point is reached when one of the fissionable shells, be it Uranium235 or Plutonium239 or something we don’t yet know of, is compressed sufficiently for its ions to exceed the critical mass. When that happens, just one split will set off a chain reaction. In moments, the shell will have turned into a huge atomic bomb and the star will explode.

9.17     SUPERNOVA

The seat of the explosion that tears the star apart is not at its centre. It is in a shell. This means that the huge outburst of teels, photons, neutrons, and ions heads both inwards and outwards. Whether it was the Uranium235 shell, the Plutonium239 shell, or any other fissile shell, does not matter. The fissile shells which didn’t split are now subjected to an intense shock wave of teels and photons, followed by a barrage of slow neutrons. They promptly go critical and blow as well, adding yet further mayhem to the business.

Everything outside the exploding shells is blasted away as the star erupts into a supernova. The outer shells are smashed and broken. Vast quantities of all possible elements, from hydrogen up to uranium, are thrown out into space to provide the seed corn for future stars.

Inside the exploding shell, a dense barrage of teels and photons is fired inwards with enormous force. They plunge into the heavy ions in the core, engorging them and undecaying their protons into neutrons. In moments, the ions are nothing but neutrons. A fraction of a second later, the pressure is such that the neutrons are forced together to fuse. The core of the star has become a small, metal bonded, ball of neutrons. It has become a neutron star.

9.18     NEUTRON STAR

A neutron star is an extraordinary object. It has an enormous mass which is crammed into an incredibly small area, perhaps only a few kilometres across. Its gravity is highly concentrated and its EV is extremely high.

In its early days, the ATS of a neutron star is also extremely high. The explosion injected vast amounts of speed, a high proportion of which was locked up in the metal bonded neutrons. The neutron star has no choice but to spin rapidly.

The ATS is wildly out of balance with the mass and the high spin rate is part of the process of speed dumping. Photons and teels are dumped in prodigious quantities.

The structure of a neutron star is interesting. Because the atmosphere of a neutron is uncharged, so too is the atmosphere of the star. However, underneath the atmosphere, the lack of charge means that there is outwards pressure in all directions, not just at the equator. This results in a throat at the poles where teels are squirted outwards in a fine jet. The jet is “lasered” and consequently there is much photon production. If the axis of the neutron star is tilted, these photon emissions are seen by us in pulses.

Over time, once the excess speed has been got rid of, the ATS of the neutron star will have fallen to a level whereby teels can only escape when new teels are captured that raise the ATS out of equilibrium. The neutron star has become a stable particle.

The mass of neutron stars is fairly consistent, from one to another. The key factor in determining their mass is the point at which the star began to produce its shells of fissionable ions. The dimensions of these shells, at the moment they achieve critical mass, will be much the same, no matter what the original mass of the star. Supernovae do not form black holes.

Some suggest that neutron stars are nothing but the cinders, the ash, the trash, the remains of stars. Actually, they are what the processes inside stars are all working towards. They are the final, perfect, stable, star particle.

9.19     ONWARD

The first fusion took place a short while after the Big Bang in the expanding shells that surrounded the bang site. As the density grew less with expansion, neutrons were able to form by bonding photons. A little less density and neutrons were able to decay into protons, forming a shell outside that of the neutrons.

There was now an interface between neutrons and protons in which Hydrogen2 was formed. Since, on average, the Hydrogen2 ions travelled more slowly than the neutrons, they now fell back through the expanding neutron shell, fusing along the way to form Hydrogen3. At the same time, Hydrogen2 pairs were fusing to form Helium4 – and Hydrogen3 and Helium4 were fusing to make Lithium7. It is currently thought that fusion after the Big Bang was unable to proceed much beyond Lithium7, if at all. This may be so.

The second burst of fusion took place when the protogalaxies sought to stabilise themselves by ejecting quasars. Quasars were heartstars which, having been ejected from the galactic core, went rapidly through the full collapse process to explode in a violent supernovae and litter huge quantities of atomic matter into the space surrounding galaxies.

The third phase of fusion was a direct result of the quasar explosions. The heavy atoms thrown out from the exploding quasars were pulled together by their mutual gravity to form pebbles and rocks and asteroids. If they could gather enough mass together, these bodies could attract and hold atmospheres of light atoms. And if they could get to be really big, they could force the undecay of protons to neutrons and start their fusion engines.

The third phase is still underway right now. Even though the quasars have long since finished exploding, the atomic matter scattered by them is still forming into stars, some of which go on to become supernovae in their own right, spilling yet more atomic matter out into space, which in turn goes on to form yet more stars and yet more supernovae.

The process continues.

CHAPTER TEN

VISION IN THE UNIVERSE

Beyond the Solar System, we know nothing for certain. Within the Solar System we are able to send out spacecraft to investigate and confirm the existence of what we can see through out telescopes. Closer to home, we are even able to send human beings to do the confirming for us.

Yet, only a little way beyond the orbit of Pluto, any form of physical investigation becomes impractical. The distances are so great that time becomes critical. Scientists naturally want to be in at the end as well as at the beginning of their experiments and getting to interstellar space currently takes around 10 to 15 years. Getting to anywhere meaningful, like the nearest star, could well take 40 or 50 or more.

To find out about objects outside the Solar System, we have no choice but to rely almost entirely on photon detectors of one sort or another – and this is far from perfect. If photons from a particular object to not reach us, we cannot know that the object exists. We may be able to infer it from the behaviour of other objects but if we are not receiving photons from them either, we are completely lost.

Without photons, we are blind and deaf in the Universe. It is important, therefore, to know how much we can rely on them. It is important to know if they are telling us the truth or if they are lying. And if they are lying, it is important to know just how big or how small the lie is.

Photons have only two differentiating characteristics that we can measure – they have a wavelength and a direction of travel. Other than that, nothing. They don’t have a memory that we can read. They don’t carry pictures of the places they have been to. All the information we glean from photons comes from our interpretations of those two characteristics.

Unfortunately, those characteristics can be altered. In effect, photons can be made to lie and, if the lie goes undetected, our interpretations will be wrong. Many photons are indeed lying to us and the lies are currently going undetected.

10.1     “FACTS”

Photons are chargeless particles in which mass and ATS are in equilibrium. They consist of a core of metal bonded teels surrounded by an atmosphere of gas bonded teels. The extend of the atmosphere increases with any decrease in mass. With a very low mass photon, the atmosphere can extend over many kilometres while that of a high mass photon may be the merest fraction of a millimetre in diameter. The extent of the atmosphere equates to the wavelength of a photon.

Photons come from two sources. The first photons were created a few moments after the Big Bang by the breaking up of the expanding teel skin into clumps. Such photons are now very old and there are not many left. They are detected as a pan-directional radiation with a temperature of approximately 3 degrees K. All other photons are created by nucleons or electrons as part of their equilibration processes.

The mass of a photon is sufficiently small that it cannot be detected by any current instrumentation. Nevertheless, the mass does exist and, therefore, photons do have gravity. The escape velocity of a photon depends upon its mass and diameter. In open space, a photon travels at a shade under 300,000 kilometres per second, the speed at which its mass and its ATS are equilibrated.

Photons respond to their surroundings. Having mass, they are attracted towards other particles and, in turn, they attract other particles towards them. In passing by another particle, both the course and the wavelength of a photon will be changed.

Photons are also affected by the Universal Teel Flux (the uniflux). The density and speed of the uniflux varies throughout the Universe and photons must respond to this. If the ATS of the uniflux is rising at a particular point, the ATS of any photons at that point must also rise, reducing its mass and increasing its wavelength. If the ATS of the uniflux is falling, the mass of the photons will rise and their wavelengths will fall.

10.12     THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit, it was found that the main mirror had been incorrectly ground and that this was distorting the images that the telescope was collecting. The problem was eventually (and expensively) put right by attaching a secondary lens to correct the distortion and by using computer programs to clean up the pictures.

Sending the telescope into space without first checking that it was working properly is not the sort of mistake of which anyone should be proud. There is room for pride, however, in the way that the original error was corrected – a far more difficult task than would have been getting the telescope right in the first place. It was only possible at all because the scientists and engineers back on Earth were able to analyse, to the tiniest micro-degree, the precise and exact nature of the aberrations in the telescope mirror.

In the same way, it is not possible to know what the Universe really looks like without knowing exactly what distortions have been wrought upon the photons that come to us from beyond the solar system. Without that knowledge, everything is guesswork.

At any particular moment and at any particular place, the wavelength of a photon and the direction in which it is travelling depends on four things:

the wavelength at which the photon was created.

the sum of all the wavelength and course changes the photon has experienced due to the gravity of other particles.

the ATS of the uniflux through which a photon is passing at the time that our instruments record it.

the sum of the wavelength changes it has experienced due to the doppler effect of advancing on and retreating from a moving object.

Let us look at each of these in turn:

10.3     EFFECT NUMBER ONE: PHOTON CREATION

The wavelength of a photon can vary enormously during its lifetime as it moves from one set of circumstances to another. Yet one factor, above all others, dictates the wavelength of a photon at any particular moment – the wavelength at which the photon first equilibrated.

Big Bang photons formed in the first moments of the Universe out of clumps of teels held together by their mutual gravity. They equilibrated at a low mass, high ATS, and a long wavelength. In a very short time, mega-billions of near-identical photons were created.

Today, some 15 billion years later, most of those photons have been destroyed and those that remain are no longer identical. Their wavelengths have been varied and scattered into a “black body radiation” pattern while the underlying wavelength has been substantially redshifted. That said, however, their new wavelengths are still nothing more than a variation on the wavelength at which they were created.

So far as nuclear photons are concerned, their original wavelengths depend on where the “mother” nucleon was at the time of the birth. If, for example, it was part of an electron, it would have produced a photon of one particular wavelength. As part of a field of hydrogen being heated by a nearby star, it would have produced another. And if it were part of a multi-nucleon atom, it would have produced yet another.

Notwithstanding the very different circumstance of their birth, there is no way of distinguishing between an individual Big Bang photon and an individual nuclear photon. It is only when protons are considered “en masse” that we can make inferences and draw conclusions.

Nuclear photons can be traced back to their source – a large number of photons coming from one particular spot in the sky can indicate the existence of a star or galaxy. In contrast, Big Bang photons have no identifiable source. They are seen as a low density, low temperature, radiation coming to us from all parts of the sky. No matter where we look, it is coming straight at us with only the very slightest of variations in density and temperature.

10.4     EFFECT NUMBER TWO: THE UNIFLUX

The uniflux only acts on photons after they have equilibrated. However, since the uniflux pervades the Universe, its ATS affects the wavelengths of photons directly and constantly. It is therefore a most important effect.

Actually, it is more accurate to think of the uniflux as being the Universe. Planets and stars and galaxies might look to be substantial objects but the reality is that they are only groups of teels, sections of the uniflux, configured in a more complex and densely packed manner.

The Big Bang gave the Universe its shape and form, casting the teels outwards from the Bang site at stupendous speeds. The very fastest teels were at the edge of the Universe with the slowest at the centre and so it remains to this day.

This is deceptive, however, for when the gravity of the Universe is taken into account, the reverse appears to be true. The outermost teels have the fastest speed “potential” (ie: if they were to fall back to the centre, they would actually become the fastest teels) but are in reality the slowest.

This presents an elegant picture of the Universe as a teel flux that is graduated in an orderly manner by speed, from the fastest in the middle to the slowest at the edge. Unfortunately, however, this elegance is disturbed by the presence of particles, everything from photons up to supergalaxies.

If teels are the carriers of speed, particles are speed filters. Each particle is being continuously coursed through by a wash of teels from the uniflux. All the time, moment after moment, it is taking some teels in and throwing others out. In particular, it is keeping the slow ones and ejecting the fast ones. The speed of the fastest teels that can be retained by any particle are always slower than the speed of the uniflux through which it is passing.

Logically, particles should not exist. The teels in a particle should equalise their speed with those of the uniflux and the particle should dissipate away to nothing. The reason they do not is because particles, that is groups of teels held together by their mutual gravity, can do something that an individual teel cannot do. They can lock up speed into spin and, effectively, neutralise it.

Because of this ability to spin, particles reverse the pattern seen in the uniflux universe at large. The centre of a particle is where the slowest teels are. Farther out the teels go faster and faster until they eventually become one with the uniflux.

The key to this ability to lock up speed into spin is the difference between metal and gas bonding. The uniflux Universe is, effectively, a gas bonded particle in which its constituent teels are bonded by mutual gravity, not to other individual teels but to the Universe as a whole. By contrast, the teels at the heart of a particle are bonded directly to the teels next to them – they are metal bonded.

The wavelength of a photon is that of its birth, amended by the speed of the uniflux at the place where the photon happens to be. Thus, a photon travelling from the centre of the Universe to the edge will do so through a uniflux that is slowing down. Consequently, the ATS of the photon will also slow down, shortening its wavelength. It will be being blueshifted. On the return journey, the situation will reverse with the photon redshifting as the wavelength gets longer.

A photon journeying out from the centre of a star will find the ATS of the surrounding teels is rising and, as a consequence, its mass will fall and its wavelength will increase. It will be being redshifted, just as a photon moving into a star will be blueshifted.

10.5     EFFECT NUMBER THREE: GRAVITY

Every particle in the Universe, be it a humble photon or a mighty galaxy, has gravity. The gravity of every particle in the Universe influences every other particle in the Universe to a greater or lesser degree. The amount of influence that a particle can wield depends on:

its mass,

its volume (the greater the volume for a given mass, the lower is the average gravitational pull per teel at a given distance and hence the lower is its EV) and

its distance.

If one particle is moving away from another particle, their mutual gravity will attempt to slow down the speed of separation – and it will succeed with all particles except photons. An atom or a star or a galaxy can be slowed down by the gravitational pull of another particle but photons cannot. A photon at equilibrium must travel at light speed.

A photon cannot slow down – but its teels can. When a photon moves out of a gravity field, the average speed of its teels is progressively slowed. The reduced ATS allows the teels to move closer to each other, decreasing the diameter of the photon and increasing its EV. The increased EV allows the capture of extra teels, increasing the photon’s mass and lowering the wavelength. The photon is maintaining its equilibrium by blueshifting itself.

The reverse happens when a photon is travelling towards a gravity field. Its teels speed up and this increase in ATS lowers the EV and causes a fall in mass. The photon’s wavelength is increased – it is redshifted.

A photon travelling through our solar system will be affected by the gravity of the Sun, planets, asteroids, comets, and meteors, all at the same time, by amounts depending on their mass, volume, and distance. As it moves from one side of the system to the other, its wavelength will be constantly changing. The greatest changes, naturally, will be wrought by the gravity of the Sun but even flying past a small meteor will have some effect.

While it is in the solar system, the photon is not protected from the gravity of bodies outside. Distance may well have reduced the influence of all but the largest of the other stars to negligibility but when all those gravities are put together the effect will still be felt. Certainly, the gravity of the Milky Way as a whole is a strong influence and, while it is doubtful that any distant galaxy will have much effect, groups of galaxies such as the local group and the Virgo supercluster most certainly will.

The most important influence of all is the Universe itself. Unless a photon happens to be at the exact centre of the Universe, where gravity would be equally balanced to all sides, the gravity of the Universe must act unequally with a greater mass to one side than to the other.

Gravity has an impressive effect upon photons, constantly changing their wavelengths over even quite short distances. A photon which has one wavelength on the surface of the Earth will have another at a height of a mile and another at a height of ten miles, and so on. Yet there is another effect that gravity has on photons which distorts our vision to an even greater degree. Gravity changes their courses.

Two photons, initially travelling on parallel and non-convergent courses will find themselves being pulled towards each other by their mutual gravity. If the situation goes on long enough, they will eventually collide with each other.

In the same way, a photon flying by a star will find its course changed (and the course of the star will be changed also although the gravity of a photon is so small that the change will be imperceptible). A photon flying by a galaxy will find its course changed by an even greater amount.

The ultimate changer of courses is the Universe itself. No photon can travel straight while it is inside the Universe. No matter where it might be, there will always be a greater gravity pulling at it from one side than the other (even if the photon is at the exact centre of the universe – because the photon has to keep moving, it would not be there for more than a fraction of a second). There are no straight lines in the universe.

Our vision of the Universe is a distorted vision. The photons that fly down our telescopes have wavelengths that have been in a state of constant alteration by changes in the speed of the uniflux and by the different gravities that have been playing on them.

Similarly, the inability of any photon to fly in a straight line has an effect upon our ability to exactly pinpoint the place of its birth. Within the Solar System, the distances involved are sufficiently short that the curved courses are barely noticeable. Beyond the orbit of Pluto, however, nothing, absolutely nothing, is where it seems to be.

10.6     EFFECT NUMBER FOUR: THE DOPPLER EFFECT

The doppler effect, in photons, occurs when they are leaving or approaching a particle which is moving – and since everything in the Universe is moving, every photon is being doppler shifted during every moment of its existence.

Since all photons travel at light speed, a photon leaving a stationary star at right angles to the surface will take one year to get one light year away from it. It will take the same time to achieve that distance, no matter in which direction the photon leaves.

There is, however, no such thing as a stationary star and if we suppose that the star is moving at half the speed of light (150,000 kmps, roughly) we find that the outcome is markedly different. If the photon leaves from the front of the star, it will take two years to reach a point that is one light year away from the stars surface and, conversely, if it leaves from the rear of the star it will only take six months.

The strength of gravity is not affected by speed, only by distance. At a distance of one light year from its surface, no matter whether the star is moving or still, no matter whether we are at the front or at the back, the strength of the gravity at that point will be the same.

Whichever way a photon leaves a moving star, its wavelength will be blueshifted by the gravity trying to pull it back. However, if it escapes from the front it will take four times as long (2 years) to reach the one light year line as it will if it escapes from the back (6 months). Leaving by the front door means that you get a lot more blueshift than you get when leaving by the rear.

The situation can be reversed. A photon, catching up with a star that is going in the same direction, will take a longer time to do so and will consequently be more redshifted than would be a photon that is set for a head-on crash.

Doppler shifting is not just concerned with the birth and death of photons. It also happens when a photon flies-by a moving star or galaxy. Such an event will always end with the wavelength of the photon being shifted to the red or to the blue. It is possible, in theory, when the track of a photon and the track of a star intersect at exactly 90˚, for the doppler shift to be exactly zero. However, in practice, the chances of this happening are slight and, almost every time, the end result will be a wavelength change.

The shifting of wavelengths due to the uniflux and to gravity sets us a problem that is, in theory at least, surmountable. Given time, we could compensate for the shifts so that we could learn about the birthplaces of photons. Doppler shifting, however, throws all this into touch. It introduces a variability into the wavelengths of the photons that is impossible for us to interpret.

10.7     COLOUR BLINDED

For many years now, it has been supposed that a photon is redshifted when climbing out of a gravity field and blueshifted when falling into one. Furthermore, it has been supposed that, due to doppler shifting, a photon emitted by something coming towards us is blueshifted and by something going away is redshifted.

Our sharpest eyes, our best brains, and our quickest computers have all confirmed this to be so. We can detect the reddening of photons coming from distant quasars. We can detect it in photons coming out of the Sun. We can even (although only just) detect it in photon climbing up from the surface of the Earth – in 1965, physicists at Harvard measured the shifting in gamma photons fired upwards through a 74 foot shaft and found that there was a small but measurable reddening.

It is, however, one thing to detect a red shift. It is another thing to interpret it correctly. The truth is that wavelength changing in photons is a far more complex process than we thought. Consequently, we have not been seeing what we thought we were seeing.

The wavelength change detected by the Harvard physicists was not a simple redshifting. It was actually a combination of red and blue. As the photons zipped up the shaft, the gravity of the Earth was trying to pull them back. In order to keep moving at light speed, the photons put on mass and shortened their wavelengths. They were blueshifting.

At the same time, even though the shaft was only 74 feet long, the photons were moving from a region where the teels of the uniflux were slow, to one where they were faster. The height difference may have been small but it was enough to raise the ATS of the photons and redshift them.

The gamma photons were being redshifted and blueshifted at the same time but they were getting more red than blue. This is why a photon, when it is moving away from a gravity source, will appear to be reddened, most of the time.

The Harvard physicists were only just able to detect the red shift. They stood little chance of disentangling the red from the blue, even if they had realised that what they were observing was a mixture.

Especially, they stood no chance of detecting any doppler shifting but that was there too. As those gamma photons zipped up the tube they were being blueshifted by the movement of the Earth. If the tube was point in the same direction as the Earth was moving, they spent longer in it than they would have if the tube had been pointed to the rear and would have had a greater blueshift.

10.8     THE RULES OF THE GAME

In attempting to make some sense of what photons can tell us, we must first take account of our own position within the Milky Way. The Earth is situated a long way out from the heartstar core of the Milky Way and is orbiting a smallish star (to extend the point further – the Milky Way is a smallish galaxy on the outside edge of the Virgo supercluster). Thus, any photons we pick up from outside the galaxy will have less blueshift that they would if we were nearer to the centre of the Milky Way. A distant galaxy of the same mass as the Milky Way will, excluding doppler effects, always appear redshifted to us.

Then we must take into account the mass of the distant galaxy, always assuming that we are able to assess it properly. Galaxies that are more massive than the Milky Way will, again excluding any doppler effects, appear to be redshifted. Those that are less massive will appear to be blueshifted.

We don’t see all that many blueshifted galaxies. Visibility decreases rapidly with distance and since, broadly, the more massive a galaxy is, the brighter it is, we don’t have to look too far out into the Universe for the smaller galaxies to become invisible to us. From then on, because we can only see galaxies more massive than the Milky Way, they are all redshifted.

The next factor to be considered is doppler shifting. Correcting this requires us to know the condition in which the photon was born, travelled, and died. Considering that the lifetime of many photons is measured in billions of years, this is a rather tall order. Mapping the behaviour of photons “en masse” can help us to produce crude approximations but real accuracy is unlikely to ever be possible.

Another potential cause of doppler shifting should not be forgotten. There is no logical reason why the Universe itself should not be moving and this will affect every photon within it. The effect will be subtle and possibly undetectable by us – but it will be there.

Beside the colour distortion of photons, we must also take account of the way that gravity fields bend the path taken by photons so that they can never travel in a straight line. Over short distances, the high speed at which photons travel and their tiny mass means that deviations from straight line flight are acceptably small. As the distance increases, however, the accurate locating of any galaxy becomes progressively more difficult.

With distance, the gravitational pull of the Universe itself comes increasingly into play. Through this, the track of all photons is cast into long ellipses which can take photons right round the Universe from one side to the other and back again. Thus, when we look at very distant galaxies, we have no way of knowing where they really are. Many could well be a full 180˚ across the heavens from where they appear to be. Indeed, many could well be the same galaxies, seen at a different time and in a different place. The most interesting thought of all is that some of those galaxies out there could actually be the Milky Way itself.

10.9     SPECIFIC CASE ONE: BIG BANG PHOTONS

At the moment of the Big Bang, all the speed locked up in the Universe was released. Suddenly, every teel possessed enormous amounts of speed and set off outwards. Since then, the Universe has continued to expand while, at the same time, locking up its speed again into particles. Eventually, all teels which have not escaped from the Universe will be brought together again.

The wavelength of the Big Bang photons when they equilibrated was very long. Since then, as the ATS of the uniflux has slowed, and the gravity strength of the Universe has declined with its increasing volume, the wavelength of the Big Bang photons has progressively shortened.

Not that we perceive this shortening in full measure. Our planet is inside the gravity fields of the Sun and the Milky Way which means that on Earth, the speed of the uniflux is substantially slowed. By the time the Big Bang photons reach our telescopes they have been redshifted by our gravity and even more blueshifted by our lower uniflux ATS so that their wavelengths are far shorter than they would be in intergalactic space

Big Bang photons come to us from all directions because the gravity of the Universe has turned their courses from straight lines into random ellipses. Similarly, although all Big Bang photons were created at roughly the same wavelength, they come to us at all wavelengths in a pattern that conforms to a black body radiation. This is because for fifteen billion years these photons have been suffering continuous doppler shifting as they have flown by stars and galaxies, etc. The doppler shifting history of every photon is different from every other photon and that is why the wavelengths are so varied.

There are not many Big Bang photons left and they are not easy to detect. They were created in prodigious quantities but that was a long time ago. Since then, the Universe has become many billion times bigger and those photons that do survive are spread much more thinly. Most have not survived at all. They have been absorbed by the nucleons inside galaxies and stars, to be dismembered back into their constituent teels.

10.10     SPECIFIC CASE TWO: NUCLEAR PHOTONS

The wavelength of a nuclear photon is set by a number of factors: the type of nucleon in which it is born; the whereabouts in the nucleon that the birth takes place; whether the nucleon is part of a multi-nucleon element and; what is the element type.

Within the nucleon, other factors come into play: the density and ATS of the teels at the bonding point; the length of the throat along which the forming photon has to travel; the distribution and the motion of the nucleons surrounding the throat; etc. All these combine to produce a photon that has a specific wavelength for a specific set of circumstances.

Once a nuclear photon has equilibrated, that is not the end of it. There is lots more wavelength shifting to come. Travelling from a distant galaxy to the Earth, a photon will be blueshifted by gravity, and redshifted by the uniflux, as it races away from the birthplace. Then, as it plunges into the Milky Way, it will be redshifted by gravity and blueshifted by the uniflux. At the same time, it will be doppler shifted by the movement of the sending galaxy and of the receiving Milky Way. It will be further doppler shifted by passing by other galaxies and stars – while at the same time its course will be curved by their gravity. It will be red or blueshifted depending on whether, during its journey it moves closer or farther away from the centre of the Universe – and the gravity of the Universe will turn its track into an ellipse.

10.11     SPECIFIC CASE THREE: QUASAR PHOTONS

Quasars can be seen at all points of the sky and our instruments produce no evidence that they are not evenly distributed everywhere. They all date from an early stage in the development of galaxies and the current supposition is that they were all done with two billion or more years ago. This, however, sets us a paradox.

If quasars date from an earlier stage in the development of the Universe, they should all be nearer to its centre than is the Milky Way. This would put them all to one side of us – and this is clearly not the case.

The reason for this is that quasar photons are the oldest that we receive apart from those generated in the Big Bang itself and, just like the Big Bang photons, their tracks have been bent by the gravity of the Universe so that they come to us from all angles. Many of the quasars we can see are actually the same ones, being seen again and again at different angles and different ages.

Quasar photons have a pronounced redshift – often many times that of anything else in the sky. This is usually interpreted as being a doppler shift due to the expansion of the Universe but it is not. It is due to the extreme massiveness of the galaxies from which the quasars sprang.

The early galaxies were a long way out of equilibrium. Their mass and ATS were so far out of balance that they were dumping prodigious quantities of teels in the attempt to stabilise themselves. The quasars were part of this dumping process, high mass heartstars that went supernova very rapidly after being thrown into orbit.

Even though they were no longer part of their galactic heartstar core, the quasars were still deep within its enormously powerful gravity field. Any photon born in such circumstances had to be enormously redshifted as it climbed away. So far redshifted indeed that even the very considerable blueshifting that came subsequently as it rose out from the centre of the Universe and then fell into the Milky Way was not enough to counteract it.

Quasar photons display enormous variety in the amount of their redshifts. This could be caused by a wide variation in the masses of their home galaxies but it is just likely to be caused by variations in doppler shifting as photons leave quasars from different angles – or as a combination of the two.

Age contributes in that the older a galaxy is when it makes the photon, the more mass it will have already dumped, thus reducing redshift. Distance also matters in that the nearer the galaxy was to the centre of the Universe, the greater would have been the blueshift due to the slowing of the uniflux.

The wavelength shifting in quasar photons is due to many reasons and, since photons do not carry their history with them, it is going to be very difficult for us to disentangle one reason from another. Likewise, by the time the course shifting of their photons due to gravity has been taken into account, finding the real position of any quasar is likely to be well-nigh impossible.

10.12     SPECIFIC CASE FOUR: THE CENTRE AND THE EDGE

Currently, the uniflux is fast at the centre of the Universe and slow at the edge. Likewise, the gravity of the Universe is strong at the centre and weak at the edge. Photons must respond to the uniflux and the gravity strength by adjusting their mass and wavelength accordingly.

Nuclear photons produced in a specific fashion, in a specific atom, will always equilibrate at the same wavelength, no matter where the atom may be in the Universe. Thus, a 21cm hydrogen photon will be a 21cm hydrogen photon whether it is born at the centre of the Universe or at the edge.

Immediately after equilibration, however, a photon must respond to the uniflux speed and the gravity strength in which it finds itself. At the centre of the Universe, where the uniflux is fast and the gravity is strong, it will be redshifted. At the edge of the Universe, where the uniflux is slow and the gravity weak, it will be blueshifted.

In theory, therefore, we should be able to work out where the centre and the edge of the Universe is by analysing the wavelength shift. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Although a 21cm hydrogen photon at the centre of the Universe is heavily redshifted, by the time it reaches the Earth (which is neither at the centre, nor at the edge of the Universe), the slowing of the uniflux and the lessening of the gravity will have reduced the redshift considerably.

Conversely, a 21cm hydrogen photon at the edge of the Universe will be heavily blueshifted but, by the time it gets to the Earth, the blueshift will have been reduced to such a level that it is indistinguishable from a 21cm hydrogen photon that originated in the centre.

21cm hydrogen photons are very common in the Universe. They are to be found everywhere and this is a tremendous source of knowledge for us. Yet they are of little help in making large scale maps of the Universe. Since all 21cm hydrogen photons (and all other photons, for that matter) look the same as each other (always discounting the effects of doppler shifting) by the time they get to us, we have no way of knowing where the hell we are.

10.13     SPECIFIC CASE FIVE: ANDROMEDA PHOTONS

Andromeda is the largest large galaxy to us. So far as we can tell, it is about 2.2 million light years distant and could well have twice the mass of the Milky Way. Notwithstanding the extra mass, however, the overall shift of its photons is blue. This, in the current wisdom, would indicate that Andromeda is moving toward us.

If Andromeda is, indeed, of greater mass than the Milky Way, the mass differential should produce a redshift in the photons we receive, especially since the Earth is some distance from the centre of our galaxy. The difference, therefore, must lie in the doppler shifting of its photons.

Given the supposed mass differential between Andromeda and the Milky Way, the amount of movement required to convert the resulting redshift into a blueshift is considerable. The greatest blueshift would come if Andromeda is moving towards the Milky Way and if the Milky Way, at the same time is racing towards Andromeda. This would result in the photons spending the longest time possible in the gravity field of Andromeda and the shortest time possible in the gravity field of the Milky Way. The faster the closing speed, the greater the blueshift.

10.14     ONWARD

The wavelength changes and the course curving described in this chapter are entirely consistent with the Universe as described elsewhere in the paper. Sadly, they mean that the farther out we look from the Milky Way the more distorted our vision becomes.

Accurate maps are not currently possible. We can plot the apparent positions of galaxies but the more distant they are, the farther they are from where they appear to be. To compound the problem, we cannot even plot distance accurately. In the past we have used the redshift of an object as a distance guide but, in truth, redshifts can have many causes and distance is one of them only indirectly.

We are not blind in the Universe but we cannot see at all clearly. Given time and application, however, there is no reason why we should not be able to correct many of the distortions, just as we were able to correct the aberrations in the Hubble space telescope. All it requires is the will.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

What follows is speculation. In earlier chapters, there was always the possibility of confirmation by observation or experiment. This time, however – not a chance.

That said, this is not idle speculation. It is fired by logic but logic does not automatically lead to a single answer. There are many ways to skin a cat. This chapter illustrates one possible way to end a universe.

11.1     OUR PLACE IN SPACE

The word “universe”, by common usage, means “everything”. The picture presented by General Relativity and accepted by most today is that there is nothing outside the Universe. Even those bizarre cosmological ideas which postulate multiple universes tend to treat all of them as different aspects of the same thing.

Yet the path we have been following suggests otherwise and so, for the sake of clarity, let us define what “universe” will mean for the rest of this paper.

A universe is a type of structure, like a photon, a nucleon, or a galaxy. It is an amount of matter that is gravitationally bound together. In the case of our own universe, it is the amount of matter which was bound together immediately before, and which subsequently became part of, the Big Bang.

Before the Big Bang, our Universe comprised a specific amount of matter. The Big Bang caused some of that matter to be expelled at higher than EV which means that at some point that matter will cease, or will have already have ceased, to be part of our Universe.

11.2     THE HYPERGALAXY

By the end of chapter 7, we had built a Universe of supergalaxies, held together by the mutual gravity.

Supergalaxies move which means that they have to orbit each other. Sooner or later, the democratic principle comes into play so that the cluster of supergalaxies has no choice but to adopt the classic, tightly bonded, and swiftly rotating ball shape.

Inside the ball, flowing between the supergalaxies, is a dense teel flux which grows denser and slower, the nearer it is to the centre. All the supergalaxies are engorged by the flux and the nearer the centre they are, the greater the engorgement is. Inevitably, engorgement is at its most extreme in the supergalaxy at the middle.

The central supergalaxy enjoys conditions rather different from the others and consequently takes on a different character. Relative to the others, the central supergalaxy has no forward movement. Such ATS as it has shows itself as spin only, which makes this particular supergalaxy into a most efficient speed filter – retaining the slowest teels and dumping the fastest.

Once the speed filtering really gets underway, the central supergalaxy puts on mass rapidly so that the ball of supergalaxies is no longer held together by its mutual gravity – it is held together by the gravity of the supergalaxy at the centre.

The central supergalaxy has become a hypergalaxy and the supergalaxies have become its slaves.

11.3     KINGS AND QUEENS

The way that the hypergalaxy comes to dominate the universe is mirrored, within the hypergalaxy and the supergalaxies, by what is happening to their heartstars.

Even in the days of simple galaxies, even quite small ones, because the teel flux was denser and slower at the centre, the heartstars at the centre would be more engorged than those at the edge. Later, as the galaxies grew into supergalaxies, this became more pronounced although, in the early stages, the ATS was still too great to allow too much extra mass to focus on one specific heartstar. Thus it was that at the centre of each of the supergalaxies, there was a clump of giants.

As the development of the supergalaxies continued, mass began to focus on a single heartstar. It only required one to retain a little more mass than the others for a little while for runaway growth to be triggered. Very rapidly, a moment of chance was turned into an unassailable position with the newly supermassive heartstar taking up position as the gravitational focus of the entire supergalaxy. It had become a queenheartstar – or “queenstar”.

At the same time, in the hypergalaxy, because the available mass was that much greater, the development of the queenstar moved into overdrive. Right at the centre of the Universe, at the centre of the cluster of queenstar dominated supergalaxies, is a hypergalaxy which is dominated by a massive, monstrous, kingheartstar – the “kingstar”.

11.4     SHRINKAGE AND GROWTH

We are now looking at a period that is many billions of years into the future and at a structure that is ridiculously small. Notwithstanding it contains a good proportion of all the matter that the Universe ever had, it is perhaps only a few thousand light years across.

By comparison, the queenstars, even the kingstar, are inconceivably small. These are bodies which are monstrously massive and yet which may be only tens of kilometres in diameter, possibly less. We are talking of hundreds of kilometres – tops.

Things have still not reached their end however for this is a period of accretion on a grand scale. Inside the supergalaxies, the growing queenstars are leeching teels from the heartstars that surround them. The hypergalaxy is leeching teels from the supergalaxies that surround it. And the kingstar is, ultimately, leeching teels from everything else.

Simple leeching, however, is not the only way of acquiring extra mass. There is another and quicker method which comes increasingly into play as time passes.

In a supergalaxy, between the queenstar and its slaves, is a Roche Zone. The surrounding heartstars are having their teels leached from them by the queenstar and this removes ATS from them more quickly that it does mass. This means that the velocity of the heartstars is falling and their orbit is decaying. Every circuit draws them a little bit closer to their queen.

It is the Roche Zone that provides a limit as to how close they can get to the queenstar. Once beyond that limit, inside the Zone, tidal forces begin to tear the heartstars apart. They are broken up into their constituent nucleons and atoms which form a mist around the queen. As the orbit of this mist decays, the queenstar is nurtured by a gentle rain falling from the Roche Zone.

The process continues and continues. One by one, the surrounding heartstars fall into the Roche Zone until, in the end, there are none left. What was once a mighty supergalaxy has been reduced to one quite small but very massive queenstar.

The same thing is happening to the hypergalaxy. The kingstar is leeching mass and ATS from its own heartstars, steadily decaying their orbits until they too fall into the deadly Roche Zone and are dismembered and absorbed. The only difference here is one of scale.

One “day”, all that will be left is a mighty kingstar, ringed by a harem of queens.

11.5     THE ONE AND ONLY: THE KINGSTAR

What the king and the queens did to their companion heartstars, the king now does to the queens.

As the kingstar takes in low speed teels, it contracts. This induces contraction spin. The fastest teels are thrown out at the equator and these serve to raise the ATS of the surrounding queens, diffusing them and robbing them of their fastest teels which go to join the circulating atmosphere of the King. The King always gets back a little bit more mass than it throws out.

Over time, the falling ATS of the queens causes their orbits to decay. Sooner or later, one after the other, they breach the Roche Zone surrounding the king and are broken up.

Eventually, there will be no queens left at all. Just one supermassive, superdense, kingstar. All that is left of the Universe will be crammed into that small ball.

11.6     INTERNAL PROCESSES

When the galaxies were forming, heartstars were flung from the core to go quasar and decay. The decay process involved the fusion of neutrons, firstly into light ions, then into heavy ions, and then into radioactive ions. Eventually, when the conditions were right, the quasars exploded in gigantic fission explosions.

The explosions distributed vast numbers of nucleons and atoms around the galactic atmosphere where some recondensed into stars. In the stars, more fusion took place to create yet more atoms. In turn, some of these stars exploded to distribute yet more nucleons and atoms throughout the atmosphere which seeded further star creation and further explosions. And so the process went on and on.

Eventually, the quasar period came to its end and the heartstar cores became more stable. Less and less new matter found its way into the galactic atmospheres and the rate of star formation fell. Over time the heartstar cores leeches mass and ATS from the remains of the planets and stars and pulsars so that their orbits decay and they fall into the Roche Zone and are broken up. A gentle mist of heavy ions falls onto the heartstars and is absorbed. Gradually, the heartstars build themselves cores of heavy ions.

Why don’t the heavy ions break up. The teel flux at the centre is considerable and should break the atom up into their individual nucleons and then undecaying them all into neutrons. The heart of queen/kingstars should be a neutron heart.

For the answer, look at the case of metallic hydrogen. Hydrogen, under intense pressure, becomes metallic (check out web). It does not undecay into a neutron. Jupiter, apparently, has lots of it. If hydrogen can go metallic (which is not the same as turning into metal) so can more complex particles.

It should be worth checking out the way that “metallic” particles become very good conductors of electricity.

Progress in the Universe means big galaxies eating smaller galaxies. The heavy ions created, either directly or indirectly, by the quasars are thus passed from the dwarfs to the spirals to the large ellipticals. Then the supergalaxies consume their surrounding clusters as the chick in an egg consumes the yolk. Then, they are themselves consumed until there is nothing left but the kingstar.

A kingstar of nucleons with a heavy ion heart.

11.7     INTERNAL STRUCTURES

Long ago, a couple of billion years after the Big Bang, the kingstar was an ordinary heartstar with a simple nucleon structure. Now, in its maturity, its structure is much more complex. It is not dissimilar to that of a quasar but it is many times more massive.

At the heart of the kingstar is a core of heavy ions surrounded by shells of successively lighter ions. Everything is suffused with a teel flux of the most incredible density which just about manages to keep everything apart and it is this which marks the major difference between a quasar and a kingstar (and for that matter between the heartstars and queenstars before the kingstar).

Quasars decayed rapidly and explosively because their ATS and mass were out of balance and the density of the surrounding teel flux was not enough to compensate for this by keeping them engorged. The ATS and the mass of the kingstar are in equilibrium. Decay may be taking place but only within the bounds of that equilibrium.

Since decay is barely taking place, there are few, if any, radioactive ions in the core of the kingstar. Quasars and supernovae produced radioactive ions in quantity but, since then, none have been made. The teel density at the centre of a heartstar is enough to stop it so that, by the time the heartstars have become the kingstar, most and quite possibly all of the radioactive ions in the Universe have decayed into non-radioactive ions such as bismuth or lead.

Since the kingstar is at equilibrium, all processes have stopped and will remain stopped unless there is a change in circumstances. One such circumstance would be the capture of mass with a sufficiently low ATS that the kingstar would not immediately dump an equal amount of compensatory mass.

Were this to happen, the ions would be pressed that little bit closer together. If enough extra mass could be added, ions would be forced to fuse.

11.8     A WIDER PERSPECTIVE

All the matter of the Universe is now contained in one kingstar. This is not, however, all the matter that the Universe has ever contained. In the moment of the Big Bang, some teels were sped faster than the Universal EV and they escaped.

If teels can escape from this Universe, where would they go? A clue may come from considering what happens to the particles that do not escape. No matter whether they are very small like gamma photons, or very big like elliptical galaxies, sooner or later, every particle hits another one. Logically, therefore, any particle that escapes from this universe should eventually hit another one.

There is no evidence to suggest that ours is the only universe/kingstar. And since we know of no particle in the Universe of which there is only one, there is no reason to suppose that kingstars (which are, after all, nothing but very massive particles) be any different.

If our universe/kingstar is just one among many, and if it can dump mass as a result of a big bang, so can the others. This would mean that the space between the universes should contain teels. In other words, between the universes there is a teel flux – and the ATS of any teel flux will affect the ATS and mass of any particle that is in it.

The kingstar is an extremely dense, extremely massive object. All the remaining matter of the universe is crammed into an object that could be substantially less than a light year in diameter. Being so concentrated, its gravitational pull is immense. If there are slow teels in the flux between the universes, the kingstar should have no difficulty in capturing some.

11.9     THE END

Just suppose that the equilibrium of the kingstar is out of kilter with the surrounding teel flux and that the ATS of the flux is lower than that of the kingstar. What would happen is that the kingstar would capture slow teels and put on mass as it tried to re-equilibrate itself – and with the rising mass would come the ability to fuse ever heavier atoms.

As long as the kingstar can keep capturing new mass, the fusion will continue, steadily making ever more massive, ever more neutron-rich, ions. It will eventually produce radioactive ions, some of which will be fissile. Once fissile ions are present in a quantity and density sufficient to sustain a chain reaction, the fate of the kingstar is sealed.

A fission chain reaction in a kingstar does not proceed in the same manner as that in an atom bomb, a quasar, or a supernova. It may start in the same way – with the splitting of a fissile ion like Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 by a slow neutron – but what follows is conditioned and intensified by the surroundings.

The gravity of a kingstar is incredibly strong. A kingstar is the ultimate black hole in that its EV is far above light speed. Not only can photons not escape from the kingstar, the ATS is so high that the teels in the atmosphere can’t go fast enough either. And if the gravity throughout the kingstar is incredibly strong, that at its heart, where the fission first takes place, is incomprehensibly so.

In a fission reaction there is a release of particles: heavy ions, heliums, nucleons, photons, and teels. The most important release of all, however, is less tangible than a particle. It is speed.

When the kingstar’s chain reaction starts, the released particles find themselves trapped in a gravity field from which they are unable to escape. Instead of being able to rush outwards, they career about through the excited teel flux, crashing into ions. Rapidly every ion in the vicinity is engorged. Teels flood the nucleons building dense, extensive and extremely vigorous defensive screens. The bonding between the nucleons cannot help but be broken so that fission is now taking place in ions which are not “fissile”, adding further to the melee.

The density of the flux is now such that even the separated nucleons cannot remain stable. Inside them, their quarks become engorged to such a degree that their bonding is broken. Suddenly, the centre of the kingstar becomes a furnace of ex-quarks, of ultra massive photons.

Photons, no matter how massive they might be, can no more survive in such hostile conditions than can anything else. Engorged by ultra high speed teels, they decay rapidly through the wavelengths, evaporating away to nothing.

In a mater of moments, the centre of the kingstar has been turned back into teels which flood outwards, engorging any surrounding ions and atoms as they go, reducing them to teels as well. Just a few moments more and the whole of the kingstar has become a rapidly expanding ball of its most basic components – teels.

This is the second Big Bang.

CHAPTER TWELVE

BEYOND THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

It appears that our universe, and presumably all the other Universes, are in a cycle that consists of contraction, explosion, expansion, contraction, explosion, expansion, and so on. The question is – why?

12.1     DECAY AND STABILITY

Every particle in our universe, apart from the teel, is engaged in an unconscious hunt for stability, for an internal balance, for an equilibrium with itself and with its surroundings. If they find it, they survive. If they don’t, they are disassembled into their component particles. These, in time, join with other particles in a new hunt.

That said, the quest for stability is ultimately a futile one. Even when stability is achieved, the state is only temporary. No stability lasts forever. Every particle in the universe will be absorbed, eventually, by another. Only the Universe itself, once it becomes the might kingstar, would seem to be proof against being eaten by another. Yet even this triumph is pyrrhic if the kingstar has, eventually, to blow itself up again.

There are two types of particle. There are those which are stable, for a time at least, in open space: photons, protons, galaxies. And there are particles which are not: quarks, neutrons, heartstars. The latter can have a long life as long as they remain part of a larger particle and are kept engorged with teels. What if the kingstar were to belong to the latter category?

Extending this thought: if the kingstar were to be situated in an area of high teel density, it would become engorged, just as quarks are engorged inside nucleons, and heartstars are engorged inside galaxies. Such a universe need not decay at all and there would be no Big Bang.

12.2     ONE AMONG MILLIONS

If the kingstar was not “the one and only” but just one among millions or billions of kingstars, it is highly likely that they would clump together under their mutual gravity. And since all kingstars would have a dense protective shield of teels, they would have in between them a teel flux more than dense enough to keep themselves engorged and free from decay.

Yet this doesn’t fit with what we know. Our universe did once decay. There was once a Big Bang and it looks possible that there might one day be another. If there is a cluster of kingstars, held together by their mutual gravity and engorged by their mutual teel flux, our universe would not appear to be part of it.

Could it be that our Universe has become detached from the main cluster, in the same way that quasars became detached from the heartstar cores, and is engaged in some kind of rapid decay cycle.

The parallels are there. Quasars, ejected from the cores of galaxies, rapidly decayed and exploded, scattering matter all around. Some of the matter came together under its own gravity and formed into small stars – pale echoes of the mighty quasars.

If the stars had enough mass, they too would decay and explode and their scattered remnants could further reform into stars, and so on. In the end, when enough speed had been dumped, the remaining matter was sucked by gravity back into the heartstar core from which it sprung in the first place.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this is what is happening to our universe. It has exploded and it will, in time, reform. Once reformed, however, it will be a pale echo of its previous magnificence.

Then, if it can attract enough mass, enough teels, from the space around it, it will explode again. If it cannot, it will gradually burn out, as our sun will burn out, to become a desiccated cinder, awaiting the time when orbital decay eventually pulls it back into the cluster of kingstars once more.

12.3     ONWARD AGAIN?

And what happens after that? What happens to the cluster of kingstars? Is the kingstar cluster, in its turn, merely part of something even bigger? Is there an edge and a middle? Is there a beginning and an end?

Good questions, all of them. Blessed if I know the answer.

GLOSSARY

ATOM

An atom is a complex of nucleons and electrons. The simplest is Hydrogen1 which comprises one proton and one electron. All other atoms are combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

If additional nucleons can be persuaded to bond with the nucleons in an atom, the atom will change its type. This is fusion and in the process, there is an alteration in the mass and ATS that is inconsistent with merely adding an extra nucleon – if the atom created is Iron56 or below, some mass and speed is dumped – if the atom created is above Iron56, mass and ATS is absorbed.

The charge of an atom is neutral. A neutral atom has the same number of electrons as protons. An atom with more or less electrons than protons is known as an ion. Confusingly, an atom with less electrons, than protons, which is therefore positively charged, is also often called an ion whereas one which has more electrons than protons and which is negatively changed and is sometimes known as an anion.

Atoms will bond with other atoms to create molecules. In such cases, however, they retain their previous identity.

See also: ELEMENT, IONISATION

BONDING

Bonding takes place among all particles although it is most apparent to us today among teels, nucleons, and atoms.

TEEL BONDING occurs when the mutual gravity of two or more teels is sufficiently great to prevent their escape from each other. The ATS is an important factor in that the greater it is, the stronger the mutual gravity has to be to prevent any escape. There are three types of teel bonding: metal, fluid, and gas.

METAL BONDING is where the mutual gravity of pairs of teels is sufficiently strong that they are “locked” together. In a large accretion, this could mean the interlinking of vast numbers of teels and the preventing of individual teels from rotating around their partner(s). Such an accretion would be “solid”. Characteristically, the ATS of such an accretion is low BUT it is by no means nil. The forward speed of the teels is not killed but “ordered” and appears as the spin of the accretion.

FLUID BONDING is where the forward speed of teels is sufficiently high that they cannot be prevented from rotating about their partners – and from moving from one partner to another. Free of any other gravitational influences, such an accretion will adopt a spherical shape but the random movement of its teels will prevent it from spinning. There is, however, considerable room for variation and, if the ATS is sufficiently low, some ordering will occur and the teels will form streams and currents.

GAS BONDING occurs when the mutual gravity of pairs of teels is insufficient to hold them together although the gravity of the whole accretion is sufficient to prevent their escape. This, however, is an idealised description since such an accretion is unsustainable. A characteristic of a gas bonded accretion is that speed percolates out from the centre to the edge where, if a teel can be driven fast enough, it will escape. If the accretion is above a specific ATS, it will dissipate. If it is below a specific ATS, the teels at the centre will become fluid and then metal bonded. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the latter ATS is always higher than the former in a gas bonded teel accretion. The key factor, therefore, becomes the mass of the accretion. If an accretion is massive enough to prevent dissipation, it is too massive to prevent fluid and metal bonding at its centre.

Gas bonding is commonly found in the Universe but it cannot persist independently. Gas bonded teels are to be found as the “atmospheres” of metal and fluid bonded accretions such as photons, nucleons, and atoms. Here, the bonding is not to other gas bonded teels but to the whole accretion.

PHOTON BONDING could well be impossible in the current conditions in the Universe. Reducing their ATS will increase their mass and decrease their wavelength. If this could be carried far enough, the gravity of a pair of photons would become sufficiently great to overcome their rejectivity and allow them to bond. However, this would be at a mass considerably higher than that of gamma photons. In effect, they would have become quarks. Quarks are photons which are metal/fluid bonded into pairs and trios. Their formation, however, depended upon the unique conditions prevailing just after the Big Bang. Thus far we have not been able to “manufacture” quarks in the laboratory.

Note: the creation of electrons in the throat of an atom is actually the bonding of pairs of photons.

NUCLEON BONDING is also known as FUSION. Nucleons, be they protons or neutrons, can be forced sufficiently close together by a high packing density to the point where their attractivity exceeds their rejectivity. They will then bond permanently to each other. Nucleons equilibrate at a specific mass and ATS and will dump any additional mass/ATS. Because of this, once joined, nucleons are extremely difficult to separate. The bonding of nucleons in the lighter atoms tends to be fluid or fluid/metal. As the mass of the atom increases, it tends to be metal.

ATOM BONDING can take all three forms, depending upon ATS (which equates, very roughly, to temperature). A low ATS will allow metal bonding. Raising it somewhat will convert it to fluid and raising it higher still will make it into gas bonding. EG: at absolute zero all atoms will metal bond. However, raising the ATS steadily will see the first transition at -270˚ with helium converting to fluid bonding. Just one degree later, at 269˚, it converts again to gas bonding. Other atoms make the transition at higher temperatures.

MOLECULE BONDING is really just another form of atom bonding except that it produces a complex particle with different characteristics to each type of atom in the molecule.

DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE

The democratic principle says that where two groups are in opposition, the larger group will tend to dominate. The greater, the disparity in sizes, the more likely is the dominance of the larger group. The principle is greatly reinforced by confinement.

An example of the principle in operation would be two clouds of ball bearings, each moving at one hundred miles an hour on a collision course with each other. If one cloud contains a thousand bearings and the other contains a hundred, the end result of the collision will be that most of the large cloud will continue their journey unaffected while most, and perhaps all, of the small cloud will be deflected from their course.

If the clouds are confined, the effect becomes even more positive. By putting the bearings inside a tube, when the collision comes, sideways deflection is restricted. It could well be that, ultimately, all the bearings end up going in one direction.

The most common form of confinement is gravity.

ELECTRONS

An electron is produced by the teel dumping mechanism of an atom. If an atom becomes dis-equilibrated by have too high an ATS for its mass, it will automatically begin to dump teels. If the dis-equilibration is serious it will have to dump teels in large quantities and these, being closely constricted and streamed by the atom’s funnel, can bond together to form photons. In extreme cases, the photons themselves can be forced close enough together to bond and become electrons.

Unlike photons, the speed of an electron is not fixed and after being fired from the funnel is not necessarily above escape velocity. Some (perhaps all), however, are fired fast enough to get above most of the densely packed and polarised teel atmosphere.

The atmosphere of an atom is composed of densely packed and strongly polarised teels. Because of this, there is a sharp terminator so that the atmosphere acts not unlike an ocean of water. An electron, likewise, is surround by an atmosphere, a highly repulsive one, and this means that, notwithstanding it does not have enough velocity to maintain an orbit, it is prevented from falling back into the nucleus. In effect, the electrons float around the atom like a boat on a lake. Hence the term: quasi-orbit.

An electron consists of one charged and one uncharged quark. In its quasi-orbit it will orientate itself so that the intake of the charged quark faces the oncoming teel stream and exhausts into the pole of the uncharged quark. The uncharged quark then exhausts equatorially. In effect, the atmosphere of an electron resembles that of a neutron and is therefore strongly rejective at distance – it has a negative charge.

ELECTRON SHELLS

The rejectivity of the electron atmosphere not only works on the atmosphere of the atom, it also works on other electrons. Immediately ahead and immediately behind an electron, as it moves along its quasi-orbit, the chaos is such that any other electron will be ejected from the area. Thus, surrounding a low mass atom like Hydrogen1, there is not enough room on the surface of the atmosphere for more than one electron. Should a Hydrogen1 atom receive an injection of teels and, as a result, eject a second electron up into quasi-orbit, the subsequent buffeting and collisions will end in one electron being tipped above EV and escaping the atom altogether or in one reorientating itself as a positron and decaying into photons.

In more massive atoms, the atmosphere extends farther out and the extra “surface area” allows more electrons to coexist with each other. Thus it is that Helium4 is able to keep two electrons, both circulating at roughly the same distance from the surface.

Where atoms are more massive than Helium4, although the surface of the atmosphere is not much greater in area, the gravity is much stronger and extends its influence further out. In the case of Lithium6, there is still only enough area on the surface for two electrons to tolerate each other. However, the area of gravitational influence is greater and actually extends beyond the rejectivity spheres that surround the electrons. Thus a third electron is able to pursue a quasi-orbit by floating upon their atmospheres, while at the same time being close enough to the atom to be held by its gravity.

Electrons move in specific quasi-orbits around an atom which are called “shells”. Given the small diameter of the nucleus, the number of electrons that can get into any particular shell is limited by the “surface area” of the shell. Thus it is that, especially in very massive atoms, the atoms are encased in successive shells of electrons. In some cases the number of electrons can exceed 100 – albeit in atoms that are artificially created.

Lithium6 is stable and, given the surface area of its second shell, there should be enough room for a second electron on it. However, since the point at which an electron would be pushed above escape velocity is only marginally higher than the second shell, putting another electron there will increase the potential for collision and ejection/destruction beyond the safety level. Very rapidly, one of them will be ejected or destroyed. It actually requires the addition of another three nucleons, producing Beryllium9, before the gravity field of the atom has been extended far enough outwards, and the surface area of the shell has increased sufficiently, to permanently retain two electrons in the second shell.

If the atom absorbs a large quantity of high speed teels, its ATS will be raised and its teel dumping mechanisms will operate to return the atom to equilibrium. The excess speed will, on its way to being ejected, pass through the atmosphere and some will be absorbed by the circulating electrons. This will increase their ATS, and consequently their velocity. The increased velocity, combined with an increase in atmospheric pressure welling up from below, will force the electron shells away from the surface.

The teel dumping mechanisms of the electron will come into play to equilibrate them with the atmosphere. Their ATS, however, will not return to what it was until the atom has rid itself of the excess speed. If the excess speed in the electron is raised high enough, as part of the teel dumping mechanisms, photons will be produced.

ELEMENT

When it is not known, or it is not necessary to know, whether something is an atom, an ion, or an anion, it is known as an element.

In normal usage, the work element tends not to be used for a single particle. However, in the absence of another suitable word, I do sometimes use it in this way.

FUSION

If additional nucleons can be persuaded to bond with nucleons already inside an atom, this is fusion.

FUSION ENERGY

When elements less massive than Iron56 are created by fusion, there is an emission of energy in the form of fast teels (often as photons). When elements more massive than Iron56 are created, they absorb energy.

This occurs because the fusion of two ions produces an imbalance between the mass and ATS of the new ion. In order to regain equilibrium, for ions below Iron56 the excess mass must be dumped, for ions above Iron56, extra mass must be absorbed.

The cause of the problem is that adding a further nucleon to an ion will bring with it a specific amount of extra mass. This mass will raise the escape velocity and thus raise the ATS necessary to equilibrate the ion.

When Iron56 is formed, the extra mass brought by the additional nucleon will raise the EV just enough, given the new ATS, to ensure that there is no need for mass dumping/absorption.

Below Iron56, the extra mass will not raise the EV high enough, given the new ATS, to be able to retain it all and some will be dumped.

Above Iron56, the extra mass will raise the EV too high, given the new ATS, and some extra mass will be absorbed from the surrounding flux.

To show what I mean, the following is an example. It is not intended to represent actual values, merely to show how the progression can work. Assuming that at Iron56 the mass and the ATS counterbalance each other, for each other element one extra or one less nucleon will carry a mass value of 1.0 and an ATS of 0.999.

Element                    Post-fusion Mass                Post-fusion ATS                ATS excess

Hydrogen1                1.0                                        1.055                                 +0.055
Hydrogen2                2.0                                        2.054                                 +0.054
Helium3                    3.0                                         3.053                                 +0.053
Helium4                    4.0                                         4.052                                 +0.052

Vanadium51             51.0                                      51.005                                +0.005
Chromium52            52.0                                      52.004                                +0.004
Manganese 53          55.0                                     55.001                                +0.001
Iron56                       56.0                                     55.000                               +0.000
Cobalt59                   59.0                                      58.997                               -0.003
Nickel60                   60.0                                      59.996                                -0.004

Bismuth209               209.0                                    208.847                               -0.153

Thorium232              232.0                                     231.824                              -0.176
Uranium235              235.0                                     234.821                             -0.179
Plutonium239            239.0                                     238.817                             -0.183
Americium243           243.0                                     242.813                             -0.187

Where there is an excess of ATS over mass, mass will be dumped in the form of the fastest moving teels. Thus there will be a loss of both mass and ATS, although more of the latter. This is the energy emitted in sub-Iron56 fusion.

Where there is a deficiency of ATS over mass, mass will be absorbed in the form of teels. This will raise both the mass and the ATS.

The table gives an approximation of reality in that the mass loss in the formation of Hydrogen1 does equate to about 0.05%. However the real values for the other elements will vary considerably due to the different nucleon configurations of each element type.

IONISATION

The velocity of an atom and its ATS are two sides of the same coin. The faster an atom is moving, the faster is the average speed of the teels it contains. This extra speed will percolate through to the electrons in their quasi-orbits which will, in turn, move faster. If an atom is moving fast enough, its electrons will exceed EV and escape.

An atom with less that the proper number of electrons is positively charged. It lacks the strongly defensive atmosphere provided by a full complement of electrons. Consequently, two colliding ionised atoms can get much closer to each other than can two neutral atoms.

MOLECULE

A molecule is a complex of elements bonded together which display different characteristics than do the elements individually. For example: a water molecule comprises two elements (or atoms) of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

Molecules can bond together in the same way that atoms can. For example: water can be metal bonded into ice, fluid bonded into liquid water, and gas bonded into water vapour.

NUCLEON

This is a generic name for the particles which constitute the nucleus of an atom – protons and neutrons – whether they are bonded together in an atom or are moving freely. The key point, of course, is that protons and neutrons are the same thing in different circumstances.

PARTICLE

Any body which has mass and an internal structure. In effect, this means everything except the teel. The category includes everything from photons up to, in some circumstances, the Universe itself.

The teel could be regarded as THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLE in that everything is made of them but, so far as is known, it has no internal structure. Should it subsequently be discovered to have an internal structure it would then be correctly classified as a particle. However the possession of a structure would mean that it was almost certainly made up of numbers of an even smaller body and so it would not then be “elementary”.

POSITRONS

A positron, like an electron, consists of one charged and one uncharged quark. However, the orientation is different in that the intake of the charged quark is above the equator of the uncharged one. Any teels exhausted by the charged quark below EV will recirculate back into the poles of the uncharged quark.

The teel atmosphere is highly polarised and therefore not strongly rejective at a distance and thus has a positive charge. Due to the orientation of the two quarks, the bonding is not a strong one and passage through a dense teel stream will cause it to decay – the charged quark will be unable to cope with the increased amount of teels being ejected and will be forced away. Because a positron is positively charged and is going to be attracted to/by other particles, especially electrons, survival time is short.

PSEUDO-ORBIT

A conventional orbit is one whereby two or more bodies rotate about a common centre of gravity. The key factors involved are the mass and the velocity of each body. If the velocity is not great enough, the bodies will come together.

In a pseudo-orbit, there is insufficient velocity to keep the bodies apart but since each body is surrounded by a dense, defensive teel atmosphere, the bodies cannot come together. The height of the pseudo-orbit will depend upon the extensiveness of the atmosphere(s) and can change.

The principle particles to be found in pseudo-orbits are electrons moving around an atom and nucleons moving about each other and about the neutron core to be found in larger atoms.

REJECTIVITY

This takes two forms:

In teels, rejectivity is expressed in the rule “no one teel can occupy the same point in space and time as another”.

For all practical purposes, the rule also applies to particles as well, although in this instance there are calculable, mechanical reasons for it. All particles have teel atmospheres. The height of this atmosphere depends upon the ATS of the particle. If you raise the ATS you raise the height of the atmosphere and consequently its rejectivity.

SPEED

Speed is the motion of a teel or a particle.

In one sense this is an abstract term since it relates to a variable property. Speed has no “direction”. Speed allied to direction is “velocity”.

UNIFLUX

A simple term for the Universal Teel Flux.

VELOCITY

Velocity is the forward speed of an individual teel or a particle. It is speed allied to direction.