Energy Stew: A Cosmos From A Mixture of Energies
Imagine a cosmos not born of a bang, but humming quietly forever—a lattice of electromagnetic impedance, call it Z0, woven from μ0 and ε0, stretching infinite in all directions. Picture it still, silent, until energy stirs it awake. What if this lattice doesn’t bend spacetime like Einstein’s equations suggest, but ripples with gradients when charge dipoles—pairs of opposite charges spinning across an unseen barycenter—dot its fabric? Could these ripples, these shifts in the lattice’s texture, slow the speed of energy (c = 1/√(μ0ε0)), mimicking what we call gravity without a whisper of mass or curvature?
Now, suppose these dipoles don’t hum alone. Their spins—some slow, some wild—stack frequencies into a broadband stew at every point, a glow not unlike the incandescent iron Planck once measured with thermocouples. Might this stew, summed across the lattice, average out to a faint, universal hum—say, 160 GHz—echoing what we tag as the cosmic microwave background? Not a relic of a fiery start, but a living pulse of the lattice itself, its hot spots swelling into galaxies, its cool stretches thinning to voids?
Push the thought further. What if these dipoles, stretched or squashed by the lattice’s local grip, sometimes spin so fast their charges touch—head biting tail—locking their energy into magnetic rings, toroids where time turns inward? Could this trapped energy stand in for what we call mass, not born of a Higgs but knotted by the lattice’s own rules? And what if broadband energy—spread too thin across all frequencies—lacks the punch to spin these rings, while a concentrated spike, a peak frequency, does the trick? Might this explain why colliders burn so much juice to nudge particles near c, stacking a spectrum’s worth of hum to hit that one, toroid-making note?
Now, wander to the edges—not a boundary, but where the lattice thins. Imagine energy stretching here, gradients easing, c ticking closer to its max as dipole knots unravel. Could redshift—the stretch of light’s wavelengths—emerge not from cosmic expansion, but from this lattice’s entropy, hot zones bleeding energy to cold, dense galaxies fading to sparse rims? What if the James Webb Space Telescope, peering deep, sees no hard edge, just a field that keeps going—galaxies at all stages, no start, no end?
Ponder this: if entropy lives in the lattice, not the dipoles, might each charge pair reshape itself—gaining here, losing there—while the grid itself balances the books? Could galaxies be hot plates in this lattice, radiating to cooler voids, their “mass” just toroids humming in place, their “gravity” just energy slowing energy? And if we measure this hum—thermocouples summing broadband like Planck, or calorimeters catching collision spikes like the LHC—what story do we tell? A cosmos of peaks and averages, or a lattice bending its own way, whispering truths we’ve yet to name?
Take a step back. Could this lattice hum, edged with stretch and knot, rewrite what we think we know—gravity, mass, redshift—without declaring a single law broken? Or does it merely dance at the fringe, a shadow of equations we’ve already carved?