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Page iii.


Précis 2020

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I’ll summarize my theory as succinctly as possible in this précis, before moving on to the details. Some of the background information removed here will most likely appear soon on a website that I am planning to launch (www.exogravitation.com).

The germ of the Exogravitation idea struck me in the early 2000s while I was reading several books on a display in a San Diego bookstore. The display, as best I can recall today, nearly twenty years later, dealt with issues in current cosmology, and featured works by many of the leading cosmologists.

I had a moment of insight while reading about the enigma of our expanding, accelerating universe. To wit, an unknown force generally referred to as Dark Energy is causing the universe to not only continue expanding in all directions, but to constantly accelerate while expanding.

This came as a surprise to astronomers and cosmology experts in the late Twentieth Century, who had expected their research to lead to one exclusive outcome from among three possible: still expanding but ever more slowly due to a central or aggregate gravitational force; past the ultimate expansion, no longer even slowly expanding, but actually contracting toward (probably) an ultimate collapse maybe back to some infinitesimal dead point; or, the Fred Hoyle solution from the 1930s, the universe is in stasis (steady state; neither expanding nor collapsing). The outcome was a totally unexpected, inexplicable discovery: our cosmos is not only expanding, but at an ever increasing rate.

The force propelling this is unknown (Dark Energy) and seems to defy the laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy. We are confronted with a mystery. It’s established that there is this force, or dark energy, so where has it been hiding? Matter and energy cannot be created ex nihilo, from nothing. The term Dark Energy is what engineers call a ‘black box,’ meaning an unknown or an anticipated solution when the inputs and outputs of a process are known or defined.

At that moment in the bookstore, I was struck by the germ of an idea. The notion of an ever-accelerating force baffled me, as it does everyone else, but there is one common vector in the known universe that will consistently cause such a result: gravitation.

In simplest terms, the metaphoric apple is hanging on a tree (potential energy). A gust of wind causes the stem to snap, leaving the apple in momentary free-fall. The centripetal attraction of earth’s mass (gravitation) pulls the apple (a tiny gravitational mass in itself) toward the earth’s center. The apple begins to move, faster and faster, until the surface stops its motion.

In general, that sort of vector motion seemed to me to very closely mirror the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.

Then it struck me: what if the universe is not being pushed to expand ever faster by some hidden internal force that defies the laws of conservation? What if the universe is instead being pulled apart (falling in all directions) by a vast exterior gravitational attractor?

That became my thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment) that I call exogravitation. Call it a theory, call it a hypothesis; I am content to call it either or those, or simply a thought experiment.

The exogravitation idea implies many things, among them the existence of a larger universe, most likely a Cantorian infinity of spaces and eternities of time, in which our cosmos is simply one grain of sand on an endless shoal of space and time.

In the 1920s era, Edwin Hubble and other researchers demonstrated a number of things: that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus (and ancient predecessors) is forever gone, because not only is the sun not the center of all things, but our solar system is not at the center of the universe, and our galaxy (on whose remote rim our solar system is an obscure neighborhood) is not the entire universe but itself a mere grain of sand on a vast beach of galaxies. Today we face yet another paradigm shift, to borrow a term from Thomas S. Kuhn (1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). The 1920s work of Edwin Hubble, compounded with that of Albert Einstein, Georges Le Maître, caused a paradigm shift beyond the Copernican view, and just as importantly, made us realize that our galaxy is just one of many. Just as there are structures in the universe larger than our galaxy, so now we can seriously entertain the notion that there are infinitely many universes like our own.

Exogravitation poses yet another hyperstructure: a super-cosmos of infinitely many universes, or eternities of time and infinities of space, as many scientists have long suspected—here it is!).

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NOW AVAILABLE: The book (article) by John T. Cullen is now available for purchase at Amazon.com and other sites or stores. Visit:

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