A Failed Hail-Mary: A Note On Cosmic Filament Genesis

by Steven Gussman

         In "The Cosmic Filament Structure As Seeded By Inflated Primordial Gravitational Wave Interference", I put forward the hypothesis that an interference pattern in microscopic gravitational waves in the early universe were inflated (including, crucially, in their amplitude) to seed the large-scale filament structure of the universe.¹  Soon after publication, I realized a fatal theoretical flaw in this hypothesis: the reason that it is typically thought that an expanding space-time flattens out is because the amplitude has an associated energy: my hypothesis would seem to break the first law of thermodynamics, that no matter-energy may be created nor destroyed.

        After publishing my paper, I read The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture Of The Universe by J. Richard Gott, and published a small review of the work on my Instagram account:²

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        The question a hail-Mary would have to answer is: how do you pay for all of that energy (namely the deep dark-matter wells, ribboned out into a filament structure, which everything now seems to sit in, and which makes up more of the universe than matter ordinary matter).  It occurs to me that it would be nice if inflating the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves could work, not only because it could explain the pattern of the large-scale structure, but also because it could explain what dark-matter is and why it is invisible.  There is only one source I can think of to get anywhere near the required amount of energy: from 'the greatest failure in all of physics': that theoretical predictions of the dark-energy density yield 5e93 g/cm³ but empirical measurements associated with the actual expansion rate yield 6.9e-30 g/cm³.³  Perhaps, then, the dark-energy is not only spent on the expansion of space-time in the lateral directions, but also in terms of the expansion of the amplitude of its divots (dark-matter gravity wells).  This would seem to predict that the density of dark-matter in the universe ought to be roughly equivalent to the theoretical dark-energy density (because the difference between the large theoretical prediction and the small value observed to be associated with lateral expansion is roughly equivalent to the large value itself).  But this does not work out because it is thought that the "small" observed density of dark-energy sums up to ~68% of the energy content of the universe, whereas dark matter only makes up ~27% of the energy content of the universe.⁴  If there is thought to be ~2.5 as much dark energy as dark matter, and we want to explain the dark matter as being dark-energy spent on gravitational-wave amplification, then the theoretical prediction for dark energy would need to be only ~40% larger than the size of the observed value: in fact, it is 10¹²³x larger.³  Interpreting the absurdly large predicted value as a slush fund to pay off the first law of thermodynamics would be cheap: it is only if it matched exactly that I would have considered the prediction provisionally verified.  As it stands, the entire mechanism is provisionally falsified, and remains only a curiosity.

Footnotes:

1. "The Cosmic Filament Structure As Seeded By Inflated Primordial Gravitational Wave Interference" by Steven Gussman (Footnote Physicist) (2021) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-cosmic-filament-structure-as-seeded.html).

2. See my December 3rd, 2021 Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CXAkKUbADno/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

3. The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture Of The Universe by J. Richard Gott (Princeton University Press) (2016) (pp. 199).

4. "Dark Matter" (Wikipedia) (accessed 1/29/23) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter) which further cites "Dark Energy, Dark Matter" by Dana Bolles (NASA) (accessed 1/29/23) (https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/) (though I have not to my knowledge read either article in its entirety).