Twenty-two years later

October 6, 2010

Ibegin by recalling that I published (the third paper being co-signed by my colleague and friend Maurice Viton), in 1988-1989, the first articles referring to a cosmological model with "variable constants", in particular with a variable speed of light. According to this model, the speed of light increased as one went back in time, thus solving the cosmological horizon problem without having to resort to the heavy theory of the Russian Linde, called "Inflation" (from the English verb to inflate: to inflate).

At the same time, my model implies a redefinition of cosmic time, which happens to coincide with entropy, which in this model is no longer constant and joins what is called "conformal time". As time progresses along this new "chronological variable", the Big Bang disappears, being pushed to minus infinity.

Ch this may seem strange, but in those years I imagined considering as an "elementary clock" a pair of equal masses orbiting their barycenter, imagining that going back in time, my mini-clock had not had any bad encounters with other particles, which is, at least conceptually, conceivable.

Ithen calculated how many turns this mini-clock could have made going back in time, heading towards this mythical moment "time t = 0", where t corresponds to the classical definition of "cosmic time". But, what only specialists know is that in General Relativity, this time variable does not correspond

to an arbitrary choice.

This remark may seem incongruous. But a cosmological model is never anything more than a four-dimensional hypersurface, where the choice of coordinates remains arbitrary. Similarly, a sphere is a sphere, regardless of the coordinates chosen to describe it.

W
hen one decides to take this time variable t and considers going back in time, as close as possible to this mythical "zero moment", which fascinates our media-savvy counterparts, what is the meaning of a time that cannot be measured? With what clock to do it, since this clock would immediately vanish. How to build a clock with particles whose agitation speed increases to become relativistic?

C
osmic time is just an illusion. Just like any perception or conception of time, in general. Who can guarantee us "that the course of time does not accelerate every Monday, to slow down the next day?" In so far as this disturbance would affect all objects of the cosmos, including us, we would not be able to

notice it.

O
ne comes up against a philosophical issue here. Fix your gaze on the second hand of your watch. What allows you to assert that its rotation is regular, that it does not speed up or slow down, something you would not notice if your "biological time" or "your consciousness time" evolved at the same rate?

M
eanwhile, in terms of time, what has any meaning?

S
ome angular measure - A minute is a turn of the second hand.

An hour is a turn of the minute hand of your watch.
A day is a turn that the Earth makes around its axis, referring to the position of the sun.
A year is a turn that the Earth makes around the same sun.
Etc...

This is why, in this model, I tried to take as the definition of time, as a chronological guide, an angle, the number of turns made by my elementary clock, consisting of two particles orbiting around their common center of gravity.

And I found infinity

C
hich makes the "initial singularity", the famous Big Bang, disappear. Does this mean that time "freezes" as one goes back in time, as one goes back "in the course of events"?

N
o. When my two particles make a turn, it is an elementary microscopic event. The meaning of this calculation simply means that when one tries to go back in time, towards this "zero moment", towards this "zero page" of the great book of cosmic history where the Creator is supposed to have put, in his preface, his intentions, one is faced with

an infinite number of elementary events.

E
nvision another image. You go to a publisher and propose to publish a book. He asks you what its thickness would be, and you answer by indicating a certain distance between your thumb and your index finger.

S
uspicious, the publisher signs the contract, but realizes he did not ask the right question, which should have been "how many characters does your text contain?" If you had answered "infinity", he would have abandoned this costly project. Otherwise, to publish such a book, going back to its beginning and respecting the thickness of the book, one would have to use paper whose thickness would eventually tend towards zero.

B
riefly, a book of finite thickness ("usual cosmic time") but with an infinite number of pages (the new definition of time)
Farewell to the preface, vanished into infinity "the face of God".

O
ther than being the first to consider a variation of the speed of light over time, I also imagined a "Cosmos without Big Bang", although I was not the first to have this idea, I imagine.

V
oila now the Chinese doing the same. It is Mr.:

Wun-Yi Shu

Institute of Statistics

National Tsing Hua university

Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan

who titles:

Cosmological Models with No Big Bang

O
ne can download his paper at:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1007/1007.1750.pdf

V
ou will find an evocation of this essay in Agoravox:

http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/technologies/article/nouveau-modele-cosmologique-sans-82065

E
n descending on the page of this article you will find this kind of very sharp comment, made under a prudent pseudonym, as it should be:

But please stop citing JP.Petit. In my time, five mistakes would have resulted in a "zero", a disqualifying grade. It was a good practice.

And J.P.Petit has long passed the five mistakes threshold between:

the Schkval torpedo propelled by MHD while it's the self-cavitation that has nothing to do with it ( ... ? ).
the Ummites inhabitants of the planet Ummo with whom he made his fortune.
the AZF explosion with MHD or nearby ( ... ? ).
the nuclear explosions in the abandoned Gardanne mine.
the Kursk disaster with a joint fire by an American submarine.
etc. etc.

One can only laugh at this character, nothing else to be drawn from him.

A
lthough Moffat and Magueijo, this Chinese has the courtesy to cite me as a pioneer, writing, on page 22 of his extensive thesis:

Beginning with Dirac (20) in 1937, some physicists have speculated that several so called physical constants may actually vary. Theory for a varying speed of light (VSL) have been proposed independently by Petit (21-23) from 1988, Moffat (24) in 1993 and Albrecht and Magueijo (26) in 1999 as an alternative to cosmic inflation.

I
have noted, on page 7, his sentence:

In a cosmology with a varying c and varying G, one needs a new field equation for attaining consistency, in such a way that G(t)/c(t)
2
must be an absolute constant.

C
h is exactly one of the conclusions I had reached

some twenty-two years earlier

. A word for the specialist. This ratio appears in...