Thought Experiment

A Thought Experiment for Dark Energy and Dark Matter in an Evaporating Universe

Benjamin Reed Brown

September, 26, 2023

The Thought Experiment

Imagine one day in the future science invents a way to create a stable encapsulated spacetime bubble. This is big news! Nobel prizes all around. But due to the very nature of spacetime bubbles, observers can not see inside them when the machine runs, because of nasty little things like bent light rays and all that. Later, they decide to send two brave explorers into the bubble.

Preparations are made and environmental suits created. The big day comes, they step onto the platform and turn on the machine. The first thing the observers notice is that they are inside a vast empty space much like our universe but very dark.

Then an alarming thing happens! The two explorers are repelled away from each other. "Oh crap we forgot to tether ourselves together!" says one of them. The repulsion starts off very rapidly then slowly tapers off and then rapidly looks to have stopped completely.

The other explorer yells into their mic, "I think it's an ionic charge!" The first one says "No, we know how to look for that and there's nothing on my electromagnetic spectrum analyzer, maybe spacetime expanded between us!".

They both float in the vast emptiness each alone, then just like the repulsion that happened earlier, an attractive force now looks to have begun. Slowly at first and becoming more and more rapid over time. Until.. "Oh no!" cries one explorer "we're going to crash into each other!" "Brace yourself!!!".

But just at the last moment before impact, both explorers have found themselves back in the laboratory surrounded by cheering yelling scientist. Hands get shook and backs get pats and everyone goes home.

Science moves very fast in the future, the next day someone comes up with a way to install a viewport on the machine so they can look inside AND a very sensitive gravitonic sensor. Everyone is excited to send explorers back into the spacetime bubble. The explorers ask about a tether this time, the scientist disagree, they want to study the spacetime expansion again like the first exploration.

The same thing happens to the explorers just as before, an initial repulsion force and then an apparent attractive force, just as the first time. Only this time when they emerge from the machine, the scientist don't look happy. There was no indication gravity was at work and no spacetime expansion detected between the two explorers.

And the video recording of the experiment is even worse. As the explorers are watching a video recording of their journey. One says "That's odd, it looks like we are shrinking", "Yeah!" says the other, "Really fast at first and then slowly tapering off until it looks as we have stopped shrinking all together. And then we look like we start to grow! slow at first and then rapidly until we emerge from the machine"

Scientist theorized that there was a fifth dimension at play, instead of the usual four. An unaccounted one that changes the volume and mass of any object inside this fifth dimension. And this machine must manifest this new dimension by chance and this may explain what has happened.

Because it seems the point of view for the explorers inside the bubble there was a type of attractive and repulsive force. But for the observers outside the bubble it looks like the explorers shrank inside the machine and as the scientist ramped the machine back down, the two explorers appeared to grow and return to their original sizes.

To add to this, I would even postulate, that had the explorers been tethered together in the thought experiment, they would have indeed felt an acceleration pulling them apart as they shrank due to the change in thier position and inertia. Also a type of attraction when they grew back in size smashing into one another.

If we replace the explorers with galaxies and the tether with gravity, what would the effect be on the trajectories that shape them over time?

Preprint

Preprint

Thought Experiment