3.4.5 Aether and the Cosmological Constant Problem

Aether was described by ancient philosophers as a thin transparent material that fills the upper spheres where planets swim. The concept was also used again in the 18th century to explain the propagation of light and gravitation. This continued until the late 19th century in what is called: luminiferous aether, or light-bearing aether, which was needed to allow the wave-based light to propagate through empty space.

The concept of aether was contradictory because this medium must be invisible, infinite and without any interaction with physical objects. Therefore, after the development of Special Relativity, aether theories became scientifically obsolete, although Einstein himself said that his model could itself be thought of as an aether, since empty space now has its own physical properties. In 1951, Dirac reintroduced the concept of aether in an attempt to address the perceived deficiencies in current models, thus in 1999 one proposed model of dark energy has been named: quintessence, or the fifth fundamental force. Also, as a scalar field, the quintessence is considered as some form of dark energy which could provide an alternative postulate to explain the observed accelerating rate of the expansion of the Universe, rather than Einstein’s original postulate of cosmological constant.

The classical concept of aether was rejected because it required ideal properties that could not be attributed to any physical medium that was thought to be filling the otherwise empty space background which was called vacuum. With the new dynamic creation, however, those ideal properties can be explained, because aether is no longer something filling the vacuum, but it is vacuum itself, that is perpetually being re-created at the absolute speed of light. Thus its state is described by: (c, 0) as we explained above, which indicates infinite and inert space that is the ground state of matter particles that are then described by (c, v), whereas the absolutely-empty mathematical space is now called void and its state is (0, 0).

As we already explained above, this state of (c, 0) corresponds to absolute zero temperature, and it is a perfect super fluid described by Bose-Einstein statistics because its points are non-interacting and absolutely indistinguishable. When this medium is excited or disturbed, matter particles and objects are created as the various kinds of vortices that appear in this super fluid, and this is what causes the deformation and curvature of what is otherwise described by homogeneous Euclidean geometry. Therefore, the Duality of Time Theory reconciles the classical view of aether with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory at the same time, because it is now the ground state of particles that are dynamically generated in time.

The smallness of the cosmological constant became a critical issue after the development of cosmic inflation in the 1980s, because the different inflationary scenarios are very sensitive to the actual value of the density. Many solutions have been suggested in this regard, as it was reviewed by Weinberg [(Weinberg, 1989)] and Sanhi [(Sahni and Starobinsky, 2000)], which include various modifications on either General Relativity or Quantum Filed Theory or the way they are linked together. However, because the difference is so huge, none of these speculations came ever close to solving the puzzle.

The 10120 discrepancy is actually many orders of magnitudes larger than the number of all atoms in the Universe, which is called Eddington number N=1080. This indicates that there is something substantially wrong in our understanding of the quantum processes at the sub-atomic level. It would not be strange, therefore, if we postulate that this huge number of atoms, or elementary particles, is not real! Yet since we clearly observe multiplicity in our normal level of time, it remains that they are multiplied in the inner levels of the real flow of time.

According to the Duality of Time postulate, this huge discrepancy in the cosmological constant is diminished, and even eliminated, because the vacuum energy should be calculated from the average of all states, and not their collective summation as it is currently treated in Quantum Field Theory. As we showed in Chapter V of Volume II, applying the Duality of Time postulate reduces the cosmological constant discrepancy by 117 orders of magnitude, from 120 to 3! The reason is simply because we should divide the vacuum energy density by the number of modes included in the unit volume, which is equal to the cube of Planck length: 1.616229 x 10-35 that is approximately 10-117. The remaining small discrepancy could now be explained according to quintessence models, which is already described by the Duality of Time as the ground state of matter. However, more accurate calculations are needed here because all the current methods are approximate and do not take into account all possible oscillations for all the four fundamental interactions.