A PIN FOR THE BALLOON

The reader of the following is invited and encouraged first to examine 
a precedent forum library file, "Copernicus or Ptolemy: Cosmology 
Visualized," wherein a pioneering visualization of cosmological 
geometry is offered with an economy of distracting reference to the 
state of the frontier left behind.  This companion essay now looks 
back to that state in order to account for the defects in domestic 
cosmology which burden it with the largest discrepancy between 
theory and observation in the history of mankind's scientific 
endeavor.

The problem arises in a synthesis of general-relativistic cosmology 
and the "standard model" of particle physics, implying the origin and 
retention of the universe in a state of vacuum-energetic hyper-density 
such as is not within the experience of scientific observation.  
Relativistic cosmology, as presently interpreted, prevents a 
rationalization of this remarkable conflict, by attributing an essential 
isotropy to the whole of the cosmos which entitles any point therein 
to regard itself (as much as any other point) as the "center" of the 
universe.  Since the reader's left eyeball, for example, does not seem 
to enclose even so much as the material of a stellar galaxy, there must 
be something drastically wrong, hence the "mystery of the 
cosmological constant."

This isotropy is typically "depicted," by analogy rather than 
diagrammatic representation, as characteristic of the surface of an 
expandable balloon, which obviously knows no singular center 
thereupon.  No problem inheres in a "flat," Minkowskian universe, 
which easily sustains a three-dimensional image of the transferability 
of its familiar coordinates, but there are immediately evident pictorial 
and physical problems in reconciling an omnipresent and 
omnidirectional cosmological curvature, whether positive or negative 
in any degree.  Cosmology takes license, for now, from the apparent 
"paradoxes" of special relativity and from the "weirdness" of quantum 
mechanics to satisfy itself with mere "analogies," and so forsakes a 
needed rationalization for a faith in the doctrinal premise of the 
relativity or equivalence, hence centrality, of all observers, 
inadvertently and illegitimately imported from the otherwise valid 
Special Theory.

The "faith," it may be conceded however, is an unwitting victim of an 
understandable misunderstanding concerning the geometry of 
constant positive curvature.  Schwarzschild's interior solution, the 
classic Einstein line element, and the F-R-W spherical metric, all 
characterize an idealized body or space filled with a "perfect" fluid of 
uniform proper density.  Until there was "Copernicus," there had not 
been a recognition (to the knowledge of the author) that in the 
instance of a sufficiently mass-energetic sphere, uniform proper 
density and inwardly increasing absolute density needed to be 
reconciled by the imperfectly isotropic mesh system proposed in that 
essay.  It had been taken, quite naturally, that the homogeneity 
implied by the uniform density specified implied essential isotropy as 
well, so the "faith" and a degree of thoughtlessness have since 
conspired to produce the present insistence upon nonsense.

It should be emphasized, in summary, that the resort had by the 
balloon analogy, to what seem to be metaphysical coordinate 
dimensions, is not rigorously necessitated by empirical 
considerations, but is, rather, the dearly held implication of the failure 
to recognize that uniform proper density of sufficient mass/energy 
points to a singular center and not to the lack thereof.  If, therefore, 
the hyper-dense origin and center of our universe can be thought, 
legitimately, to be elsewhere than in our own neighborhood, then an 
apostasy has purchased a measure of progress that may be worth the 
price paid therefor.

MICHAEL LAURENCE
DECEMBER 13, 1994