Understanding the Universe in 6 Easy, But Controversial, Steps

The Italian scientist Galileo described his experiments mathematically some 400 years ago. Ever since, scientists all over the world seem to distrust articles that don't include mathematics, comparing them to mistakes made by the members of the ancient Greek philosophers who didn't use maths (unless, of course, those articles are the result of Einstein's thought experiments). Many famous scientists have said that if you really understand something, you can explain it in plain English or to a young person with no maths training. So, as I normally do, I'll shy away from equations and scientific language (the great Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein used both things, so I think I must use them to some degree if I want to understand the universe) and try to rely on pure logic. Another great scientist of 100 years ago, Niels Bohr, was said to be able to do his work without relying on maths, so perhaps equations are over-rated and are actually the servants of intuitive insights. The early-20th-century's Jules Henri Poincare was one of the greatest mathematicians of modern times, but also one of the greatest believers in intuition. This article feels more like doing a 40-year-long jigsaw puzzle than something that required me to be an author. Sure, it took a long time and required a lot of thinking. There were times when the going felt frustrating, or tiring, or like smooth sailing. But I always had the feeling, similar to that of Paul McCartney when he wrote the song “Yesterday” for the Beatles or of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart writing his classical music in the 18th century, that all the pieces of the puzzle already exist and I just had to put them together. Sometimes, I even felt as though pieces were being handed to me in the right order … at the right time. The article was written after reading “How the Universe Will End” by Francis Reddy (a senior science writer at NASA) in Astronomy magazine – Sep. 2014, and my article is restricted to the 6 topics which came to mind while reading it. The 6 steps are 1) Space Cannot Expand Faster Than Light, 2) Cosmic Inflation Replaced, 3) Dark Energy and the Big Rip, 4) What Is the Relation Between Gravitation and Black Holes?, 5) What Is Dark Matter?, and 6) The Universe Will Not End. An important point to remember – Einstein’s General Relativity gives a geometrical description of space-time and gravitation. The “Digital String Theory” section, speaking of the Mobius loop etc, doesn’t contradict that description but complements it since the Mobius and Klein bottle belong to a branch of geometry called topology or “rubber-sheet geometry”. String theory has been called “a little piece of the 21st century that dropped into the 20th century” (it’s the 21st century now, so it’s time for string theory to become more than a self-consistent theory and to blossom into the wondrous thing it was destined to be). Combining it with electronics and the above topology into “Digital String Theory” might possibly present an accuracy to description of space-time which simply wasn’t available when Albert Einstein lived (although one of the first papers on topology was mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler's 1736 paper on the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg, the digital age was only approx. a decade old when Einstein died).