Game Night at Princeton by William J. Vajk
Now that I have achieved 79 years of age and have
no personal aspirations beyond living out my life as
comfortably as God and/or the fates are willing to
permit me to experience, the time has arrived for me
to publish this little paper that I’ve been thinking
about, off and on, for more than half a century.
My “little brother” Peter graduated from Princeton
High School in June of 1959, attended Cornell for
the next 4 school years, and then participated in
John A. Wheeler’s graduate program in physics at
Princeton University from the fall of 1963 till his
graduation. Indeed it might be said that once a
member of that class, participation in Wheeler’s
program is lifelong. I wasn’t formally a member of
Wheeler’s program, but it should be understood that
such things sometimes have a way of spilling out
beyond the intended group.
During that later period of his education, Peter
invited me to a “game night” with a couple of British
gentlemen who shall remain unnamed here because,
when I inquired several decades later, they preferred
to disremember the occasion, I suspect, because of
some raw embarrassment. I wouldn’t be surprised
if Peter elects to disremember that night as well (we
have been estranged for a number of reasons.) I
will say that each of the unnamed participants
managed to make names for themselves. Their
identities are doubtless in Wheeler’s archives.
I hasten to add that I never met Wheeler in person
although I did share time with his daughter Alison
since we both played cello in the Princeton High
School orchestra, but that’s as close as I ever got
to JAW. As a prelude to what follows here, I am
of the opinion that Wheeler was the consummate
teacher as well as a scientist who had a propensity
to “throw spaghetti against the wall to see what,
if anything, would stick.” I don’t mean to imply
that Wheeler necessarily believed any of let alone
all such things nor am I making light of his efforts
to understand nature. But proposing solutions,
even with known flaws, is a well established
practice relying on subsequent self-correcting
evolution as an essential element.
“Game night at Princeton” occurred at one of
the little houses on Hamilton Avenue just west
of Harrison Street where our host was living at
the time. The game itself was played using the
appointments comprising the Parker Brothers
“My Rich Uncle” board with freshly altered
rules provided by one of my unnamed hosts for
the evening. It was a game in which the winning
team (Peter and I played against one another)
would capture/win all the game money in a
simulation of Wall Street trading with fixed
advantages and impediments randomly provided
(shuffled face down cards) by the game.
At one point, Peter and his game partner left
the room to plan their strategy, so with the
“marketplace” left unprotected I rearranged the
board cards to ensure a win for my team. I
add here that under the rules of the game, as
published for the evening, that gambit was
completely legitimate since one of the
announced rules was that anything not covered
specifically by the rules was permitted, (indeed
the basis on which Peter and his partner secretly
shared information) and I freely owned up to all
the facts at the end of the game adhering to the
finest of social conventions.
N.B. In any cut-throat game, exactly as it is in
real life which this game intended to simulate,
it is begging for trouble whenever you leave any
interests vulnerable, carelessly or otherwise. One’s
belief in what the opponents might or would never
do is never of any real consequence. Any number
of hidden camera television shows (Candid
Camera springs to mind) clearly demonstrated
such results over the years.
When the game was over, we got into a discussion
of the hot topic in Wheeler’s universe at the time,
black holes, that were a new concept for me. I
only had high school and undergraduate college
math and physics on my side, while the other three
people present were heavy hitters in both fields
who had a world renowned advanced science
advisor leading their studies.
It was proposed by one of the Brits that the light
that might otherwise emanate from a black hole
was, instead, infinitely red shifted by gravity
from a singularity at the core of a black hole and
thus could never escape to reach someone viewing
the black hole from the outside.
Here, in my “ignorance” I put my foot down, by
asking the simple question,“is there the requisite
amount of energy/matter available to create the
gravity necessary to cause this resulting infinite
red shift?” Like a good lawyer, I already knew
the answer, but it rocked our hosts back on their
heels because they had not considered that at all
and the question of available mass/energy is the
very essence of such issues.
After extensive discussion one of the Brits finally
said to the other, “We have a lot of work to do.”
Peter, on our drive home, asked if I knew what I
had just done. I didn’t and he didn’t elucidate.
Because theoretical physics was never of
significant life interest to me, I didn’t
even think very much about it till later in life
when my world slowed down and I had the
opportunity to ponder this unresolved problem.
So here was the problem, in a nutshell, in the
1960’s. Wheeler and others had been promoting
a “big bang” theory for the beginning of the
universe based on a singularity, consisting of
an infinitely dense point mass that mysteriously
exploded forming, over time, the universe as we
know it. In the 1960’s as “black hole” theory
was evolving, it too depended on a
similar “singularity” around which the black
hole formed. The problem, simply stated, is that
the model of the singularity that they were using
at that time, a dimensionless point containing a
large amount of mass simply cannot exist if we
limit ourselves, as we must, to accepted
mathematics.
In order to achieve compressing ANY mass
into a point, a point being dimensionless, would
require an infinite amount of energy, and that
level of combined mass and energy has never
existed in this universe because, as we
understand matters, the universe is finite. “Infinite”
exists, so far as we know, only as a mathematical
construct, and has no actual existence in nature.
Similarly we consider the possibility of the
existence of any “zero” in the universe. It too is
only a mathematical construct that only has
usefulness in solving problems within
mathematical process.
Of course the singularity concept used as the
jumping off point for big bang theory seemed
so nice, and apparently no one significantly
challenged it in the academic world, so it was
carried over into then evolving black hole
theory. Unfortunately singularity cannot work
as proposed. In the context of this paper I do
not get bogged down with the details driving
the mathematical proofs of this ideology, nor
do I need to.
My heavy handed, while very simple, “That’s
Not Possible because the universe is finite”
proof threw a wrench into the works. I do think
Wheeler teased the science community with
these paradigms that have outlived him. Indeed,
to this day in 2019, even Britannica continues
the “zero volume and infinite density style of
singularity” myth. Interestingly, that encyclopedia
was owned for a long period of time
by another large university also significantly
at the center of theoretical physics studies, yet
the singularity myth spilled through that
ownership unabated.
In recent years, here and there, I’ve seen some
hints about the concept of singularity evolving
to have a “near zero volume” and indeed for a
number of reasons that’s what I came up with
on my own as being a possible solution to the
problems. Not the least of those is that you cannot
achieve the existing non-uniform distribution of
matter in the universe if it all originated from an
exploding uniform point mass. The near zero
volume variation on the current definition of
singularity inherent in some newer versions of
the singularity myth is an obvious solution to the
problems I outline here, but that too has several
problems beyond the scope of this discussion
leaving it in doubt.
Possibly the entire big bang concept itself could
be completely wrong, but I am not here to argue
that. With the essential element, a singularity
(select the form you prefer) seriously in question,
the entire concept is up for grabs. Perhaps, like
geocentricity, big bang was just a waystation
enroute to a more legitimate understanding of
nature.
Perhaps it is time to get off our collective laurels
and for those better gifted than I to begin anew to
explore the origins of our universe without
bowing in deference to “big bang” as apparently
has been done for decades. It should start with
(as it once did) “given the universe we see, (and
I mean that literally,) what sequence of events
could have formed it.
The model that Wheeler taught as a possibility
for so long was severely flawed on the most
elementary level. Nevertheless, as far as I know
neither Wheeler nor anyone else suggested his
models of nature were the final word.
Wheeler, like all his kindred spirits, delved in
the business of driving a human thought process
intent on discovering the realities ordering nature.
The nice thing about science is that nature
modeling evolves. But to my way of thinking
the models have not yet evolved sufficiently,
so in this discussion I am proposing a new
kick-start to the discovery process because I
am so thoroughly disappointed in present day
explanations that appear to me to have stagnated.
It could be humankind will never achieve a
definitive set of answers that withstand the test
of time and new developments in the world of
science. Really good questions invariably lead
to even more interesting questions, and I hope
that’s the result of this little almost math free
paper. I am hopeful that in my lifetime at least
one more major advance presents itself.
William J. Vajk, Iron River, Michigan,
25 March 2019
