The Universe of Fluctuations: The Architecture of Spacetime and the Universe

In 1997, contrary to the ruling paradigm which was that of a dark matter filled, decelerating universe, my work pointed to a dark energy driven accelerating universe with a small cosmological constant. Moreover, the many supposedly accidental Large Number relations in cosmology, including the mysterious Weinberg formula were now deduced from the theory. Observational confirmation for this scenario came in 1998, while dark energy itself was finally reconfirmed in 2003, thanks to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
The 1997, and subsequent work was the consequence of mainly three considerations: dark energy or the well known Zero Point Field, fuzzy spacetime and fluctuations. Indeed String Theory and Quantum Gravity approaches have had to discard the smooth spacetime of General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, in a quest for a unified description of these two pillars of twentieth century physics.
This book is the result of some seventy five papers published in international journals, and partly an earlier book, ”The Chaotic Universe: From the Planck to the Hubble Scale” (Nova Science, New York, 2001), as also several lectures delivered in Universities and institutes in the United States, Canada and Europe. It describes how, in a simple and somewhat conventional framework, an underpinning of Planck scale oscillators in the ubiquitous Zero Point Field or dark energy leads to a unified description of phenomena involving elementary particles and the cosmos. In particular, apart from the cosmology mentioned above, these considerations lead to a unified description of all interactions, including gravitation, though in an extended gauge field treatment. Furthermore, it brings out the character of gravitation as being quite different from other interactions. It is distributional in nature, over all elementary particles in the universe, rather than being a microphysical interaction in the sense of electromagnetism. This incidentally resolves a paradox pointed out years ago by Steven Weinberg, and which has been since overlooked. Pleasingly we recover conventional theory in a suitable limit - when the ”quantum of area” is neglected, infact.
Chapter 1 gives a flavour of the considerations that lead to the above model. Chapters 2,3 and 4 summarize very briefly the standard models and other approaches like Quantum Superstring Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity.
Chapters 5 to 8 discuss the above scenario in detail while Chapter 9 deduces on the basis of dynamics, a simple formula which gives the masses of all known elementary particles with a maximum error of about three percent. Finally Chapter 10 describes some further experimental and observational consequences. These include a new short range force rather like the postulated B3 force, the anomalous accelerations of the Pioneer spacecrafts and tests for detecting violations of Lorentz symmetry, planned for studies of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays. The treatment in the book makes it accessible to Graduate students in physics and Junior and Senior Researchers in High Energy Physics and Cosmology
I am thankful to Professor G.’t Hooft and the Late Professor Ilya Prigogine for valuable discussions.