Pitt Scientist's Unified Theory of the Origin of the Universe Supported by Recent Observations

PITTSBURGH, March 22 -- The "big bang" that created the universe was the last step in a series of divisions of a "primeval atom," during which the embryonic "seeds" of all galaxies and stars were produced, according to Ernest J. Sternglass, an emeritus professor at the University of Pittsburgh, in a paper presented today at the American Physical Society's Centennial Conference in Atlanta.

Rather than condensing slowly from a diffuse gas over billions of years after the big bang as has been widely assumed, Sternglass' theory states that the initial state of matter consisted of a single electron and positron rotating about each other in an orbit 100,000 times smaller than an ordinary atom.

This immensely dense system, containing the entire energy of the universe, divided by two in a series of 270 steps trillions of years before the big bang. Protons and neutrons constituting normal matter were formed in the last step of division at a temperature of a trillion degrees.

This simple model for the origin of the universe is now supported by recent astronomical observations by other researchers.

 In particular, the finding that the universe appears to be accelerating in its expansion, was what Science Magazine called "the breakthrough of the year" for 1998. This phenomena is difficult to explain by the "standard model" for the universe, but was predicted in Sternglass' 1997 book, "Before the Big Bang," which states the largest systems of galaxies rotate and expanded more slowly than smaller cosmological structures such as galaxies, stellar clusters and stellar systems such as ours.

The standard model predicted that the universe's expansion must slow down due to gravity, and an unknown repulsive force had to be introduced to explain the observed increase in speed. Einstein introduced such a repulsive force in 1917 as a "cosmological constant" to prevent a static, non-rotating universe from collapsing: he subsequently called this his greatest blunder when it was discovered that the universe was expanding.

Sternglass' electron-pair model explains the repulsion as centrifugal force from the enormous rotational energy in the original electron-positron pair.

In the new model, every system rotates and expands until it reaches an equilibrium between the centrifugal force and gravity, as in the case of the planets rotating about the Sun. According to this model, the universe will reach a maximum size 200 times its present radius and will neither fly apart into dead ashes, nor collapse into a fiery point, allowing life to continue forever.

Another recent discovery that supports Sternglass's theory is the finding by the Hubble Space Telescope that the most distant galaxies are small, spherical and surprisingly well organized and not large and diffuse as would be expected in a slow process of random condensation from a uniform cloud of gas.

Because the theory allows one to calculate the strength of the gravitational force from the electron's mass, charge, spin and maximum velocity with which it can move, it unifies the description of nature along the lines Einstein had encouraged Sternglass to pursue as a young man.

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