A Personal History of Dense Space
I first read Steven Hawkins's, A Brief History of Time a year after it was published. Several errors immediately jumped out at me. One of the most striking was his statement that time could not exist soon after the Big Bang as everything becomes too small to observe. He wrote something similar to: time becomes conceptual, rather than actual. Well the error was pretty obvious, all time prior to the present is conceptual rather than actual, we have to work with conceptual time regularly so this allows us to consider all periods, even before the Big Bang. He also missed that there could be someone observing the phenomenon of the Big Bang from another sector of the universe not involved in our Big Bang.
Furthermore it seemed natural to me that the Big Bang is more probably part of a series of Big Bangs - which expand and contract to near point size as there is an argument which pushes the universe to a set size equilibrium state as excess matter gets lost in previous Big Bangs, until the Universe is just big enough to contract at some stage. I believe this may be wrong as I hear the current belief is that the universe is continually expanding, unless it is still seeking an equilibrium state. But this is oversimplification and I digress.
From this point I asked myself what happened towards the 'beginning of time', or near complete universal stillness (time is commonly held by physicists to be a product of motion - if nothing moves there is an effective beginning of time). It was a question which produced interesting results. I came up with the idea for example it is impossible for a constructs to exist towards the beginning of time, as no one / being / phenomenon has had enough time to make it, similarly there can be no atoms as they have assembled component parts which take time to put together. Curiously all that the argument leaves you with is space and energy! At first I believed that the energy must express itself in variations in Space Density (the origin of the term for me). Recently I have changed my mind to the idea that it is more likely that there were areas of space moving in different directions which then collided. This is a slightly preferable idea as if an area of space moves in vacuum, it is actually still relative to itself, and has no energy, if another area of space collides with it, only then do spatial potentials, blobs of dense space, chaotic interactions and so forth allow for the creation of a universe to take place, from a quasi zero energy blank canvas, a beginning of sorts. It could be happily followed by the BB or a series of them.
I was somewhat desperate to get this, but especially dense space particle, results published and went as far as to drop in on a Physics lecturer at the Imperial college London. They get students with crazy theories all the time and I was lucky to get a courteous welcome. Very nervously I described the ideas I had at the time. He was impressed with me and unimpressed with the papers. I hadn't written down formula. I personally did not care about the formula, it was all completely straightforward and writing a formula for something does not make it right! In fact they mislead more than explain in many instances. He was still unimpressed! But one of the ideas I had was that time is a product not a function. (Time is a product of motion, if everything in the universe stopped, so would time.) This idea was apparently agreed upon at a physics conference some months later. So I did not give up hope whatever the lecturer said, I was right about that, and I was sure I was right about many other things too.
Unfortunately as is the way of things sometimes, bad luck was to follow bad luck. I tried very hard to show that dense space existed through a series of thought experiments. I even sent a few papers into Nature, full of collected ideas from the previous years, but they were alas rejected. There was simply no way on earth to make these papers look professional enough for publication (I had yet to attend college). Especially as I was going up against the phrase 'curved space' which was invented by Einstein. I was also taking the wrong attitude with one of the papers in trying to delineate them as separate phenomenon whereas in reality they are mathematically identical.
Eventually in 2002 I joined Mensa and subscribed to one of their in house publications Physigma, and had some dense space papers published. They contain a few errors (to put it politely), but considering the complexity of devising a whole new approach to quantum mechanics and other issues simultaneously, I think that is only to be expected. The papers were also published on the web and are still hanging about like woeful dogs on my personal homepage.
I was relieved actually to get Physics out of the way! I have many other things and hobbies in my life, and simply when you have a breakthrough idea it is very exciting, too exciting in a way. Such ideas cause me to go into a world of my own and get fairly unapproachable. It is not a comfortable feeling, and initial ideas are often prone to painful set backs and brick walls. So in truth I try and stay away from developing new ideas! I am trying to set up a business and earn a living and there is very little space for writing physics papers. (Though a lecturing post or bursary would be great!) Nevertheless, when I had published on the web, I was very happy to have got the information into the public domain, and I knew if I waited long enough people would pick on the ideas and develop them. Unfortunately dense space is not something that inspired enthusiasm in others as much as I had hoped for and occasional surveys to see what was happening in this realm revealed that aside from occasional papers from Dr Siepmann nothing else was happening. That was until Jan 2004 when I was struck with the idea that curved space and dense space are exactly the same thing mathematically. A piece of great news. Suddenly dense space had to be accepted into main stream physics. Unfortunately getting articles published on dense space is difficult outside of the Journal of Theoretics - it is simply impossible to put references into the papers covering entirely new phenomena and very hard not to make assumptions. The phrase dense space sounds fringe, but with no references and so forth only the Journal of Theoretics would consider taking a recent paper, but they are unable to publish it assuming a successful peer review until 2005 due to a back log. Hence this journal was born.