THE NEW COSMOLOGY AND THE NEW GRAVITY

“New Cosmology” also called Apex Cosmology (AC) is a model for the history of the universe (ie. cosmology) that does not feature a ‘Big Bang’ as does the current standard model of cosmology. Instead, AC features a ‘cyclic cosmology’ with the universe eternally cycling through “seasons” referred to as Summer and Winter. These seasons are each many billions of years long. We are currently in early Summer with familiar physics (ie. familiar laws of nature). In Winter, the laws of physics change in such a way to allow many processes to reverse (eg.. reverse nucleosynthesis) so that by the end of Winter, the matter in the universe has returned to initial conditions (primarily hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of metals) and is ready for another cycle. Although Summer and Winter are each very long, they are separated by two brief transition periods that are chaotic. These ‘short’ (ie. a few million years) transition periods are logically referred to as Fall and Spring. We have no way of knowing how many seasons have occurred in the past as the age of the universe is essentially infinite in AC (ie. no beginning and no end). We also have no idea how large the universe is as the size of the universe could also be infinite. The ultimate age and extent of the universe in AC are outside the realm of human knowledge (ie. unknowable). Cosmology in AC is governed by two newly proposed fields; a self-supporting, isotropic tensor field (the apex field) and a real self-supporting isotropic scalar field (the Epoch field). These fields permeate all of space, change with cosmological slowness, and are only very minimally coupled to normal matter. Thus matter and gravity have no influence on cosmology - the cosmological seasons progress oblivious to the state of matter. In AC, the red shift of starlight, which is the basis for Big Bang cosmology, is due to the direct interaction of photons and gravitons with the apex field (ie. redshift is a universal property of the vacuum). 

“New Gravity” is a model for gravitation that is very different from the currently accepted theory known as General Relativity. NG proposes that gravity is actually a combination of multiple overlapping fields (all second order tensor fields) instead of only a single spin 2 tensor field as in GR. Furthermore, the multiple overlapping fields in NG have different ranges and strengths with some being attractive while others are repulsive. At any point in space, the sum total of these overlapping attractive and repulsive fields produces the total gravitational potential and thus the force of gravity. Another important difference is that the range of the gravitational force in NG is finite and different for each of the fields (although still very long – measured in millions of light years). The different ranges and strengths of these fields is what allows NG to correctly predict astronomical observations outside the solar system (eg. galactic rotation curves, kinematics within galaxy clusters and large-scale structure like filaments and voids). GR on the other hand requires unsupported conjectures like Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Inflation, and is still unable to accurately account for any observations outside of our solar system. 

Following are just a few of the well-established astronomical observations that are accurately described by NCNG: 

• The precession of the perihelion of orbits near strong gravitational sources (eg. planet Mercury).
• The bending of light in gravitational fields (ie. both weak and strong gravitational lensing).
• The amplitude, polarity and wavefront velocity of gravitational waves.
• The cosmological and gravitational redshift of both light and gravitational waves without universal expansion.
• The radial rotation velocity curves of spiral (late type) galaxies are correctly predicted without the need for dark matter.
• The kinematics (unexpectedly large velocities) of galaxies in large clusters without the need for dark matter.
• The structure and dynamics of filaments and voids (ie. large scale structure) of the universe is explained by NCNG without the need for dark matter, dark energy or inflation.

Following are just a few of the specific as yet unobserved predictions made by NCNG:

• No population III stars (stars made only of pure hydrogen and helium) will ever be observed because the recycling of matter in winter back to hydrogen and helium is not 100% complete, there will always be some small amounts of heavier elements (ie. metals) remaining at the start of each summer season.
• The maximum cosmological redshift to be detected will be z < 15; because redshift is a property of the vacuum and dependent on the apex field, and the gradual change of seasons will begin to blue shift electromagnetic radiation once this maximum value is reached in mid-summer. This also implies that z (ie. redshift) is degenerate, and two objects at very different distances could have the same value for z.
• Rotation curves of galaxies (rotation velocity) will steadily increase beyond current observational limits. Unlike with GR, the force of gravity in NG becomes relatively stronger at distances beyond ~100,000 light years and therefore the rotation velocity of gas and stars at this distance will increase with distance instead of decrease. This increased gravitational force extends for millions of light years and also explains the unexpectedly high velocities of galaxies (kinematics) in large clusters. 
• The full equations of state for compact astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes are derivable using the equations of NG; unlike the pathological solutions of GR where pressures and densities are mathematically undefined beyond the “event horizon” or Schwarzschild radius of a compact object like a ‘black hole’. In NG, compact objects like ‘black holes’ are just matter and are described by well-behaved equations of state all the way to their cores (r=0).
• The dynamics and formation history of the supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies can be fully described by NG – again because supermassive ‘black holes’ are just matter and can be completely described by well-behaved equations of state.
• Photons (ie. light) cannot be captured or trapped by any compact object like a ‘black hole’. This is because of the specific ‘strong field limit’ of NG. The paths of photons are strongly lensed (ie. bent) by strong gravitational fields in NG just as they are in GR, but there are no gravitational fields anywhere in the universe strong enough to ‘capture’ light – either now or at any time in the past. Any photon that passes arbitrarily close to a ‘black hole’ (without directly impacting its surface) may be twisted around many times, but will always eventually depart to infinity on a lensed trajectory. The strong field limit of NG is simply insufficient to capture photons. 

Gravitons in NG have a large but finite range (these ranges being measured in millions of light years). Thus, a collection of matter like a galaxy cluster can only interact gravitationally with other objects that are within a sphere of limited radius and are completely oblivious to any masses outside this radius. This maximum radius is approximately 20 million light years and is independent of the source mass or season. Thus, matter in the universe is sequestered in these spherical shells called canisters. The energy needed to escape a canister will generally be much greater than the available kinetic energy of any of its constituents and so the contents of a canister can evolve undisturbed for billions of years.  Most canisters of significant mass will contain a ball of superheated intergalactic plasma at its center visible only using soft X-ray photography (~0.4 Kev). This spherically symmetric gas ball with a radius of 1 to 2 million light years will be of isotropic density and pressure and will generally account for most of the mass (>90%) within any canister. The galaxies contained in a canister have little bearing on the evolution of the canister contents as each of them simply orbit the center of mass in randomly distributed orbits (similar to the dispersion of stars in an elliptical galaxy). Many/most of the larger galaxies in a canister will actually move within this diffuse gas ball, and any observers in these galaxies would be unaware of this fact other than a faint X-ray sky glow. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are both within the same canister and presumably move within the superheated gas ball contained therein. The movements of these galaxies are not dictated by the gravitational pull between them, but instead by their individual orbits around the center of mass of the canister that contains them. 

As discussed above, the gravitational force in NG is the result of the overlapping fields of multiple different gravitons. These overlapping fields have differing strengths and ranges (measured in millions of light years), and some mediate repulsive forces while others are attractive (see Section IV-B; page 28). This profile results in the existence of a significant potential well approximately 20 million light years from the center of mass of any large canister. Since Apex Cosmology implies an essentially infinite time for evolution of the universe through successive cycles of summer and winter, the randomly moving canisters can become trapped in these wells if they do not have sufficient kinetic energy to exit. Over an extended period of time, one would expect to see structures like long filaments and sheets with massive galaxy clusters separated by distances (on average) of about 20 million light years. These filaments could extend for billions of light years and form massive walls and voids because the canisters in one area have no gravitational interaction with those in other parts of the filament – only with the canisters immediately adjacent to them – much like those magnetic stick building toys. The large scale structure of the universe is the product of eons of random movements and capture of canisters into the filaments, walls and voids that we see today (see Section V-L; page 38).

In NC, light that is redshifted in early summer is subsequently blue shifted in other seasons before being redshifted again and so on. Thus there is no horizon in NC, a photon in flight can travel for eons before it is absorbed by matter - including from previous seasons. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are relic photons that could be emitted by sources at any distance. Thus some CMB photons could be trillions of years old. These relic photons create a black body spectrum due to the essentially infinite distribution of their emission distances and relative redshift/blueshift over trillions of years. The anisotropy that has been proposed is not an intrinsic feature of these relic photons, but is instead a foreground effect. The nature of matter distribution into cannisters in New Gravity and the change of local gravity in early Spring in New Cosmology has the effect of changing the temperature of any photons that happen to be within a cannister during the brief early Spring transition (see  Appendix N: "CMBA Details"). This transition would have occurred around 20 billion years ago, so only the shell of cannisters that are 20 billion light years distant from earth would have contributed to the temperature shift and resulting anisotropy. Thus the CMBA is actually a map of the distribution of cannisters occupying a spherical shell approximately 20 billion light years from earth. An observer in a distant part of the universe would see a completely different anisotropy map than what we see on earth.

No, NG starts with the assumption that GR is a wrong theory that must be completely abandoned. Importantly, neither the Ricci tensor (Rμν) nor the Ricci curvature scalar (R) appear anywhere in the NG equations. These measures of “spacetime curvature” are obsolete relics of nineteenth century differential geometry that have absolutely nothing to do with gravity or cosmology. 

NCNG is a work in progress. Importantly, the values of the many universal constants proposed in this theory must be determined by careful observations of astronomical phenomena. The values of many of these constants are constrained by the values of the others (ie. they are interrelated). As new technologies allow better observations, the values of these constants will change and impart subtle (or not so subtle) changes in the theory, but as long as these revisions still contain the basic elements described in the manuscript, the theory will still be considered NCNG. 

John R Rix received his BS degree in Physics from Caltech (class of 1960) and a PhD in physics from Harvard (1965) where he worked under an NSF fellowship in high energy particle physics. His graduate advisor at Harvard was Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert, whose other student at the time was Gerald Guralnik (one of the theorists who predicted the Higgs boson and spontaneous symmetry breaking). At Harvard he became friends with Sidney Coleman, who he had previously known at Caltech. Sidney personally tutored John on the details of the eightfold way developed by his mentor Murray Gell-Mann. One of Sidney’s greatest contributions to physics was his development of the theory of vacuum collapse in the late 1970's. It was ultimately through extensions of these two theories (the self-supporting scalar Higgs field and the theory of vacuum collapse) that the new Apex Cosmology was made possible. John later became an assistant professor in the Dept of Physics at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH) where he remained for several years before leaving academia in 1970 to work in the private sector. Although John lost interest in academia, he never lost interest in theoretical physics, and he continued to work independently on many important topics throughout the following decades. The ideas related to Apex Cosmology and New Gravity were first formulated around 2004 and then further developed by John over the following 20 years.