Disclosure:
I am fully prepared to be digitally eaten alive for what you are about to read.
Let me just say upfront that I am not a physicist or an astronomer. I am a biologist, an immunologist to be exact, and my daily professional life revolves around being highly skeptical of my own experimental data. In my field, if a model requires you to invent a magical, invisible mechanism just to make the results fit the hypothesis, alarms go off.
Over the last decade, I have read a lot of books about physics, determinism, and chaos theory. It started with massive discussions about human behavior and the line between a deterministic universe based on cause and effect and a pre-deterministic one where everything is just an inflexible fate. To truly understand how systems evolve and how forces act on incredibly small trajectories, I had to look closely at the physics of chaos.
That is when I started thinking about the apple.
We all know the famous story of gravity and the apple. We can test large-scale math by calculating the potential energy of an apple held by a human hand at a certain height. But if you zoom in, there are many-billion molecules inside that same apple that could not give a damn blink of an eye about the macro-experiment happening around them. They are in such a scale that a single phosphate molecule bumping into them will move them far more significantly than the hand of the person holding the fruit.
Keeping that apple in mind, I started looking at the cosmos and the accepted dogma of dark matter. By the way, I despise that term. If it exists at all, it should simply be called invisible matter (agreeing with Dr. Prescod-Weinstein). I looked at the problem of demarcation in science, trying to figure out where we draw the line between a mechanical reality and a mathematical convenience. I could not shake the feeling that we are writing equations to define instead of using equations to simply explain reality.
The ideas below are a trip completely outside of my expertise box. I have no intention of challenging anyone who dedicates their life to astrophysics, and I definitely cannot hold the math together. This just serves as a conceptual framework and thought-provoking skepticism from an outsider looking at modern physics and wondering if we have lost the territory. To make sure my concepts actually map onto the cosmos, I used Gemini to help translate my analogies into the proper cutting-edge physics names to make them more relevant to the field.
Here is what happens when a skeptical biologist looks at the Big Bang not as an untouchable math equation, but as a cosmic game of billiards.
The Billiard Break and the Cosmic Fluid
The standard model tells us the Big Bang was an expansion of space itself. But what if we visualize the universe not as an expanding empty room, but as a fluid? Think of the initial moment of creation as the ultimate billiard break.
Here is where we need to upgrade the analogy slightly. A standard pool table is a two-dimensional surface. The cosmic billiard table is a three-dimensional ocean. Sometimes physicists describe the universe as being flat, but they just mean its geometry is straight, meaning two parallel lasers shot into space will never cross. They do not mean the universe is a flat piece of paper.
Picture a massive, three-dimensional cluster of billiard balls suspended in this cosmic fluid. When that initial cue hit, it was an omnidirectional break. It sent everything flying outwards in every possible direction like an expanding sphere.
The matter we see today, from the stars to the planets and entire galaxies, are those billiard balls. The outward trajectories we observe are not just objects trying to escape a mysterious pulling force. They are simply riding the massive kinetic momentum of their creation.
If the universe is a fluid, then moving objects do not just travel. They leave a wake. As these massive, three-dimensional billiard balls roll through the fabric of the cosmos, proliferating and fusing into new elements, they generate massive fluid wakes. Think of them as vacuum whirlwinds trailing behind the matter.
The Phantom Wake and the Bullet Cluster
This brings us to the Bullet Cluster, the cosmic car crash that physicists often point to as the ultimate proof of invisible matter. Two massive galaxy clusters slammed into each other. The normal matter, meaning the gas and stars, crashed and slowed down in the center. But the gravitational pull kept moving, passing right through the crash site and coming out the other side.
To make the math work, the consensus is that a massive clump of invisible matter must have detached and kept going.
But let us look at it through the fluid model. First, we have to understand what a galaxy collision actually looks like. A galaxy is not a solid billiard ball. It is more like a massive swarm of bees. The stars themselves are so infinitesimally small compared to the vast empty space between them that when two galaxies cross paths, the actual stars almost never physically touch. The swarms just pass through each other and merge into a new, larger swarm.
However, the massive clouds of cosmic gas do crash. They slam together like a physical wall, slowing down and triggering massive nuclear fusion.
Now apply the kinetic fluid model to that crash. The physical matter, specifically the gas, slammed together and slowed down. But the kinetic whirlwind, the massive fluid wake those swarms generated over billions of years of travel, had so much momentum that it simply kept rolling forward. It passed right through the crash site.
What if we are looking at that passing wave and reading it as invisible matter or a detached gravitational ghost, when in reality, it is just fluid momentum? We are seeing the ripple, not a ghost.
The Shark in the Ocean
If everything is just flying outward from the original break and leaving fluid wakes behind, how do orbits stay perfectly stable for billions of years? If there is no invisible hand pulling the Earth toward the Sun, why do we not just fly off into the void?
Think of a shark in the ocean. A shark uses its oil density to find the exact depth where the upward push of buoyancy and the downward pressure of the water achieve perfect equilibrium. It gets physically stuck in that sweet spot.
An orbit is just planetary equilibrium. The planet’s massive outward trajectory, its urge to keep swimming forward from the Big Bang, perfectly balances against a physical tether connecting it to the system. It is falling inward and flying outward at the exact same time, finding its permanent depth in the cosmic ocean.
The Material Tether
But what is that tether? Right now, gravity is treated as an invisible, almost magical force acting across massive distances. But what if the universe is bound by physical, material properties we just have not fully categorized yet?
When those original billiard balls were grouped together before the break, they were fundamentally connected. What if, as they blew apart and proliferated into the matter we see today, they maintained a physical link? Theoretical physics already flirts with this idea. We see it in concepts like Cosmic Strings acting as massive fault lines across the universe, or the theory of ER=EPR, which suggests entangled particles are physically connected by microscopic wormholes.
In this framework, things are not pulling each other from afar with a spooky, invisible force. They are mechanically tethered from the moment of their explosive birth, expanding outwards until the tension of the tether matches the energy of the push or break.
Entropy and the End of the Roll
Because this is a mechanical system, it cannot last forever. Every fusion event, every collision, and every orbit burns a tiny fraction of that original kinetic energy.
Eventually, trillions of years from now, these tethered balls will just keep rolling in their trajectories until the energy simply runs out. The whirlwinds will dissipate, the tethers will go slack, and the cosmic fluid will settle into a cold, motionless halt.
It is a simple, mechanical end to a simple, mechanical system.
As scientists, we have to remember that equations are tools to map the territory, but they are not the territory itself. If our current math requires us to invent invisible matter just to make sense of the universe, it might be time to step back, look at the billiard table, and build a better mechanical model.