We are used to thinking that the Universe is made up of stuff we can touch and see. Wrong! Atoms like those within and around us only make up about 0.4% of the matter + energy in the Universe. Worse, this number is declining! (Maybe that weigh loss program you are on has a future after all!)
Another 4.2% of the atoms in the Universe are spread out in interstellar gasses. But that’s it for ordinary matter!
The rest is made up of what we might call Dark Stuff: Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Here’s the way this started out, and what it looks like now:
Like the Wicked Witch in wizard of Oz, “We’re shrinking!!!!”
Previously physics has been able to deduce the existence of dark matter and dark energy, based on movements of galaxies across the Universe. But not what they are.
The New Physics hypothesizes that dark matter is simply matter made of neutrons. A large enough star can collapse into a neutron star. A large enough neutron star will collapse into a black hole. It seems plausible that the dark matter is scattered about the Universe as black holes made of neutrons, or just chunks of neutron matter. This is not possible in the older physics models but is perfectly feasible in The New Physics.
But what about that mysterious Dark Energy? Recall our model of the neutron as a bubble in space supported by a quark structure:
As the black hole acquires more and more mass, the pressure on the neutrons in the center would increase. There must be a point at which it would collapse. All that would be left would be the quarks, if even them. Everything would be converted to energy. This would mean two things at once: the gravitation of the neutron would be gone, and the resulting dark energy would be stuck inside the black hole.
This would explain the evolution of the Universe we showed above: normal matter being sucked into dark matter, dark matter shrinking and dark energy increasing. Gravitation in the Universe would be disappearing, explaining the observed expansion of the Universe:
We’ve covered everything from the structure of protons and neutrons to the expansion of the Universe. The New Physics covers a lot of territory. Literally.