Thoughts on Steady State Univerese

[Impaler]

From what I’ve read online of Lerner’s Plasma Cosmology theories the Universe is not expanding and is extremely old, though how old or if it is in fact without beginning or end is not clear to me. But from my thinking a non-expanding universe would need to be immortal with out beginning or end and largely unchanging on all scales.

But we know that nucleo-synthesis in stars would eventually use up available hydrogen and galaxies would ‘run-down’. Earlier steady-state models seem to call for matter to be created in empty space out of an unknown energy field, this seems implausible because it fails to create a closed-loop with the matter of stars and planets. But what if their were mechanisms perhaps operating at a very slow rate which reverses nucleo-synthesis and returns matter to mix of hydrogen and helium suitable for feeding new star and even galaxy formation. The continual cycling of matter at the level of galaxies might go unnoticed if only the creation side of the process is easily observed, or we could be mistaking some devolution process as evolutionary as we are by necessity observing snapshots and assuming a one way evolution.

In order for this to be consistent with conservation of energy and mass the process must be the reverse of fusion, consuming the energy emitted by fusion. This would explain why the Universe dose not continually heat up from the light output of stars over infinite time or why we can not see beyond a certain threshold . It may even be the cause of Red-shifting as the energy of starlight leaks into the reverse nucleo-synthesis process. Because gravitational collapse creates galaxies and stars the process would need to transport matter and energy a significant distance outside galaxies and possibly out into the huge cosmic voids between galaxies ware it could be drawn back in. This process could continue indefinitely and would always resemble the collapse of matter from an initially homogeneous state even though no such state may have ever existed.

I can only really speculate on the mechanism itself but my guess is that it could involve neutrinos, they are now know to have mass and are in fact a significant amount of the mass of the universe. They are produced by fusion and carry away a significant portion of the energy output of stars and could easily leave the galaxies providing the transport mechanism. I don’t think neutrinos just turn into hydrogen, rather then recombined with the nucleons that emitted them in the original fusion. Less clear is how nucleons escape from gravitationally bound objects like dead stars, planets and galaxies in general. Possibly these bodies are ejected from galaxies and then break-up over immense periods of time, during which they fill the remaining Dark Matter budget of the universe. Black holes are another problem, while they are known to give off Hawking radiation which means they are recyclable in theory if they are hotter then the background radiation, unfortunately the radiation theory predicts that over a certain size the holes will be cold enough to last forever by absorbing background radiation.

As you can see this is a rather wild series of speculations with no grounding in observation but it dose seem to me to be the only conceivable way for a steady-state non expanding universe to exist eternally with out running into some kind of heat-death. The one definitive observation that would bee needed to support such a model is that heavy element abundances should be constant out to the limits of observation, secondarily galactic structure should remain constant as well with the full range of galaxy types present throughout the universe rather then the ‘primitive’ galaxies at the edge of observation predicted by BB.

[Impaler]

Some additional attempt to develop this concept on my part, though I am grossly under-equipped to do so thus any help assembling the raw data on densities, energy requirements etc which would be necessary to create even a semblance of a theory.

My research has identified so far 4 known mechanical mechanisms that could effectively reverse the process of Fusion and return ‘spent’ mater back to primordial fuel aka hydrogen. As particle physics is a very mature field I’m going to stick to know physics.

Photo-disintegration: The simplest to understand this is simply the process of an atomic nucleus absorbing a high energy photon and breaking apart, the process is endothermic and seems to be very capable of breaking up larger nuclei but it will take extremely high energy photons to break up the smaller nuclei.

Cosmic-ray Spalation: This is the process of fast moving nuclei or electrons crashing into other nuclei and breaking them up, I know Lerner focuses on this mechanism to explain the creation of Lithium without the need for the BB but I’m speculating that it can be used to break up nuclei all the way down to hydrogen.

Neutron Beta decay: Any neutron freed from a nucleus by the first two mechanisms should rapidly decay to a proton, electron and anti-neutrino. This is a fast decay taking only 15 minutes for it’s half-life so in a low density plasma it would be nearly impossible for a free neutron to rejoin a nucleus before decaying in this way.

Inverse Beta Decay: This is the absorption of a Neutrino by a Neutron to create a Proton and electron. While this process would seemingly be the ideal way to get rid of the neutrinos produced in fusion the legendarily low probability of neutrino collisions with atoms in even dense matter makes this unlikely. More likely in my mind is that most Neutrinos are annihilated by anti-neutrinos from the previously mentioned Beta decay process. The resulting gamma ray energy is then available for Photo-disintegration or other endothermic processes.

I’m going to try to get some rough back of the envelope calculations on how active these processes would need to be to balance the fairly well know rates of stellar fusion. Presumably the more matter is in the ‘decay’ portion of the loop the more slowly in can decay while still balancing fusion, conversely the hotter and more energetic the decay the faster it would proceed and the less matter would be needed outside of stars. I’m hoping that some kind of reasonable model can be constructed that has a reasonable matter density, reasonable temperature and produces an element mix matching observations.

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