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"He told them still another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."
What happens when you mix flour and yeast. It expands. So what in the universe is expanding. Well, the universe itself; and perhaps because of Dark Energy, it is expanding at an accelerating rate.
So let's take process theology seriously, which uses physics to understand scripture, and uses scripture for scientific inspiration.
General Relativity GR, and Loop Quantum Gravity LQG as well, says that space is derived from the gravitational field of matter. But the total matter in the universe is constant; whereas the space of and the amount of Dark Energy in the universe is growing.
So the idea here is to determine what yeast is in analogy in order to determine what the kingdom of heaven is. It seems that the analogy is that flour is likened to space or Dark Energy; and yeast is likened to matter, because the amount of yeast is a constant.
The amount of matter, as stated above, is constant in the universe. Most of this matter is in the form of Dark Matter. And since we may suppose that heaven is invisible- jesus probably said that someplace- heaven is likely to be Dark Matter rather than physical(baryonic) matter.
Now to carry the analogy a bit further; we know that it is the yeast that causes the dough to expand. Therefore, the analogy would specify that Dark Matter is the cause of the expansion of the universe. Since GR and LQG say that space is derived from the gravitational field, which in turn is derived from matter as its source. Then it follows that Dark Matter is indeed responsible for the expansion of the universe and that Dark Energy is really just a passive property of space.
How can that be??? Well, we know that space is expanding at an accelerating rate. Since it incorporates an increasing amount of Dark Energy, it is tempting to assume that the acceleration is a linear effect of increasing amounts of Dark Energy. But if the gravitational field is dependent only on mass, not energy, assuming that Dark Energy has no mass-- and if GR and LQG are correct-- then universal expansion must an as yet unknown nonlinear effect of Dark Matter.
Any theory that makes such a prediction would be falsifiable. But it would not be a true prediction as there is already evidence of an accelerating expansion. In fact, it should be relatively easy to invent models if not theories that make such predictions.
I have seen papers on arXiv.org that claim Dark Energy is derived from Dark Matter, but not any that attribute universe expansion to Dark Matter. Rather the linear effect of Dark Matter would cause universe contraction. It is said to be responsible for galaxy formation, clusters of galaxies and super clusters. So the linear effects dominate up to super cluster scales.
The nonlinear effects are likely to be holistic on the scale of the universe. Is this beginning to sound like god? Is god the equivalent of the cosmological constant, which can already predict universal expansion on the basis of GR? How is the cosmological constant related to Dark Matter, to pose the question more scientifically?
So our nonlinear Dark Matter should predict the value of the cosmological constant as measured by the observed expansion of the universe.
I have not seen any such theory; but I have seen solutions to the equations of GR that predict space creation as a function of mass inflation. It happens in charged black holes where physical charged matter is repelled by the central (singularity) charge and is flowing outward in the black hole. When that physical flow encounters Dark Matter being absorbed by the black hole, new space is created in the form of a white hole as the physical matter passes through the Cauchy horizon.
This GR solution predicts that the smaller the amount of Dark Matter absorbed, the larger is the inflation of the physical mass flow, a nonlinear effect. If the created space were still in our universe in some sense, then that would be a nonlinear mechanism for space expansion from Dark Matter.
Now perhaps I could have thought all this up without the inspiration of the bible, but I doubt it. I expect that intelligent heavenly beings, perhaps being products of more advanced and evolved beings from other planets, would be way ahead of us in science. Therefore many of these open-ended parables may have been said for future generations to appreciate. The Koran is full of them. In fact, Mohamed said that prophets are no longer needed with the advent of scientific prediction. So I think a part of process theology should be about scientific interpretations of such parables.
I commend you if you read this far.
Richard |
