By Laura Knight-Jadczyk
In the previous post
we learned that, apparently, the better our technology, the older the universe
appears to be. Hubble can, apparently,
see 28 billion years back in time. We also learned that the universe is
unbounded, but still finite, but we still cannot see over the cosmic visual
horizon. We also learned that,
apparently, we are more or less trapped in our 3 dimensional world and it is
irrelevant that we may be embedded in some higher dimensional space since we
can’t perceive it. I’m not so sure about
that since I have long thought that what we call ‘paranormal’ may actually be
instances of perception of other/higher dimensions. We touched on how other dimensions could be
hidden from us and Davies mentioned compactification and branes. We also
learned that it seems that it appears to be necessary for us to live in a 3D
world since a 4D world (or higher) would not be sustainable; 3 dimensions are ‘just right’. Ark added a note that he would not be
surprised if there is both compactification and branes as well as other
possibilities to explain what is going on that hides other dimensions from
us. Finally, I included two articles
that appear to contradict the Standard Model which I am endeavoring to describe
in these posts.
So now, let us
continue. Among the top requirements for
a life-friendly universe is a good supply of the chemical elements that are
utilized to make and sustain living organisms.
Scientists have been able to use the ‘hot big bang’ theory to
extrapolate how these chemicals came into being. Apparently, at the moment of the big bang,
such elements did not exist because, at one second after the big bang, the
temperature was about ten billion degrees.
Atoms cannot survive those temperatures, so, at that moment, there was
only searing hot plasma of ‘freely moving atomic components.’ Now, Davies writes that “even atomic nuclei
would be smashed apart” at such high temperatures, but when he writes that the
plasma was composed of ‘atomic components’ he lists protons, neutrons and
electrons and I cannot help but ask: where did the protons, neutrons and
electrons come from? Who/what decided that plasma should/could/would be composed
of these little critters that can make atoms?
According to Wikipedia: “By the first second, the universe is made up of
fundamental particles and energy: quarks, electrons, photons, neutrinos and
less familiar types. These particles smash together to form protons and
neutrons.” It seems to me that these ‘fundamental
particles’ might tell us something about the nature of the alleged primordial
mass that ‘exploded’ and became the universe. Well, anyway, let me quote Davies
here:
“Most of the protons that came out of the big bang remained free, and
were destined to form hydrogen atoms once the universe had cooled enough for
each proton to capture an electron.
(That final step didn’t happen for nearly 400,000 years.) Meanwhile, however, not all the protons were
left isolated. Some of them collided
with neutrons and stuck to form deuterium, a relatively rare isotope of
hydrogen with one proton and one neutron apiece in each nucleus. Other protons became incorporated into
helium, the next simplest element, which has a nucleus consisting of two protons
and two neutrons. What I am describing
is nuclear fusions, a process which is very well understood. Protons and neutrons could begin combining
together to make composite nuclei only once the temperature had fallen enough so
that the newly minted nuclei would not immediately be fragmented again by the
intense heat. The window of opportunity
for nuclear fusion was limited, however, opening up at 100 seconds or so and
closing again after only a few minutes.
Once the temperature dropped below about a hundred million degrees, fusion
ground to a halt because the protons lacked the energy to overcome their mutual
electrical repulsion.”
Apparently scientists
can also calculate how much helium was made and how many protons were left over
to make hydrogen and the answer is three hydrogen atoms to every helium atom
and nothing else except a tiny amount of deuterium and lithium. The ratio is
apparently confirmed by astronomical observations since every chemical element,
in the light they emit, have a spectral ‘barcode’ by which they are identified.
So, we know that the
universe is made mostly of hydrogen and helium in a 3 to 1 ratio and helium is
a relic of the first minutes of the big bang.
The processes of the
big bang have been tested and confirmed in high energy physics experiments in
atom colliders such as Brookhaven National Laboratories. Scientists there can
see what happened at the point the universe was “squeezed into a volume of
space no larger the solar system, with temperature almost a million times
hotter than the center of the sun. It turns
out that under these extreme conditions even protons and neutrons cannot exist
as discrete entities. Instead, they were
melded into an amorphous cocktail of subnuclear fragments.” But still, I ask,
where did those subnuclear fragments come from and what can they tell us? There
is an alternative idea that tries to suss out this problem:
Quantized Elementary Alternatives
The quantum theory of the elementary alternative was formulated by
German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in a series of
papers entitled Komplementarität und Logik (Complementarity and Logic) I-III
between 1955 and 1958. Weizsäcker calls the elementary alternative ‘das Ur’
(pronounced more like ‘poor’ than ‘pure’), after the German prefix ur-, denoting
something like primitive or primordial (compare: Ursuppe, the primordial soup,
or Urknall, the primordial bang, or big bang). Hence, the theory of the
elementary alternative is known as ur theory, which doesn’t do its
googleability any favors.
Weizsäcker’s starting point thus is basic logic—how we should reason
about the things in the world. Complementarity, then, is the central phenomenon
of quantum theory that entails the necessity of formulating the description of
a system in terms that are both mutually exclusive and jointly necessary (as in
wave/particle duality; see the previous discussion here). As Weizsäcker argues,
this should be a fundamental building block of the logic used to reason about
and construct scientific theories. But this itself constrains the theories that
can be built, in surprising and illuminating ways.
Weizsäcker’s outlook is, thus, at first brush broadly Kantian: there are
certain concepts that we may consider ‘innate’, that dictate the form of our
experience of the world. Kant considered, e. g., space and time to be among
these; hence, no non-spatial experience is possible, or even imaginable.
This is a break with the atomist tradition. Rather than simply being at
the receiving end of unbiased data emanating from the world, the observer in
this picture mediates the data through the process of observation—thus, the sorts of theories that can be built do
not describe unvarnished reality, but the experience of an observer in the
world. The idea of an observer-less world is immediately nonsensical, as the
notion of ‘world’ carries that of the ‘observer’ with it.
From there, Weizsäcker proposes to build a theory of physics, taking as
its point of origin nothing but the ur theory, that is, the quantum theory of
the elementary alternative—the qubit, in modern parlance. In this way, he
proposed an information-theoretic
grounding for physics three decades before Wheeler ever coined the famous
slogan ‘It from Bit’.
Getting back to
Davies: notice that he wrote that the universe was “squeezed into a volume of
space no larger the solar system, with temperature almost a million times
hotter than the center of the sun.” Our solar system is pretty darn big
relative to our planet and us. Voyager 1
has been traveling for more than 40 years and still has not escaped the
influence of our sun at almost 14 billion miles out. So that ‘primordial atom thingy’ was really
huge. Was it flat like a pancake or
round like a ball? What was it? How did it come into being?
Whatever it was,
apparently the science tells us that the universe doubled in size between 1 and
2 microseconds (a millionth of a second), but by one second, the expansion rate
had dropped to a trillionth of what it was at one microsecond. The apparent reason for this rapid slow-down
was gravitation. The attraction between all forms of matter put the brakes on
especially because of the extraordinarily compressed state of matter at the time,
i.e. that giant, solar-system sized ‘primal atom’. Notice that we are talking about matter
before matter was supposed to exist. It
was “an amorphous cocktail of subnuclear fragments” that we don’t know anything
about.
Davies provides a graph
of the rate of expansion of the universe that resembles the curved line
designated ‘open’ in the graph below:
The caption beneath Davies’ single line graph says: “How the size of the universe should increase with time according to the general theory of relativity. It starts out expanding explosively fast at the big bang origin, but progressively slows as the attractive force of gravitation acts like a brake.” Obviously, there is some discussion about whether the universe is open or not nowadays.
· Open universe: One that continues to expand.
Gravity slows the rate of expansion but is not strong enough to stop it.
· Closed universe: One that will eventually
collapse back on itself. This would result in a BIG CRUNCH which is the reverse
of the Big Bang.
· Flat universe: The force of gravity keeps
slowing down the expansion but theoretically, it'll take an infinite amount of
time for it to come to rest.
Research in this area
is ongoing and much is not well understood, so keep that in mind. In 1997, cosmologists determined that the
universe appears to be more open than
expected. They concluded that there must
be some other previously unknown force, acting in opposition to gravity, which
is pushing the universe apart. This was designated ‘Dark Energy’.
In any event, it appears
that the rate of expansion vs deceleration played a very important role in the
physical processes taking place at a given time and this was extremely
important for the creation of the atoms that are necessary to life. So it appears
as though this whole process was ‘controlled’ in some way so as to definitely
result in a life-friendly environment. As Davies writes:
“Our universe has picked a happy compromise: it expands slowly enough to
permit galaxies, stars and planets to form, but not so slowly as to risk rapid
collapse. … Explosions are normally
rather messy affairs. If the big bang has been slightly uneven, so that the
expansion rate in one direction outstripped that in another, then over time the
universe would have grown more and more lopsided as the faster galaxies
receded. We don’t see that. Evidently the big bang had exactly the same
vigour in all directions, and in all regions of space, tuned to very high
precision. How has the entire cosmos
cooperated to achieve this?”
Enter theoretical
physicist Alan Guth. Guth’s idea was ‘inflation’
as opposed to ‘expansion.’ According to
Guth, the traditional big bang didn’t need to be uniform or orchestrated, it
could be as messy as any other explosion.
Then, the universe almost immediately jumped in size by a huge factor. An analogy would be something that jumps from
the size of a proton to the size of a grapefruit virtually
instantaneously. At that point, the rapid
‘inflation’ stopped and normal ‘expansion’ took over as according to the given
story of the early universe as already described. This almost instantaneous inflation has the
effect of smoothing the universe the same way blowing up a balloon gets rid of
any wrinkles.
Guth’s idea also included that inflating space in this way made it less curved; inflated enough and it is indistinguishable from flat. Et voila! Inflation explains uniformity and the apparent flat geometry of space!
Now, I don’t know about you, but this
instantaneous ginormous expansion smacks of the paranormal to me. You know, cases where objects sort of just
materialize out of nowhere and are just suddenly there. But, whatever floats
your boat. Davies acknowledges this:
“Guth’s inflation seems little more than a magic wand. It would have fallen on deaf ears had Guth
not provided a credible physical mechanism to explain how inflation might have
occurred… The gravitational pull of the universe serves to diminish the
expansion rate progressively. Inflation
does just the opposite: it is a brief episode in which the expansion rate
accelerates hugely, causing the universe to swell up super-fast. Guth proposed that a type of antigravity
force was responsible.”
Conveniently,
anti-gravity is built into Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But where does it come from? Guth proposed a scalar field and he called
this hypothetical entity the ‘inflation field.’
(Wikipedia: In affine geometry, uniform scaling (or isotropic scaling)
is a linear transformation that enlarges (increases) or shrinks (diminishes)
objects by a scale factor that is the same in all directions. The result of
uniform scaling is similar (in the geometric sense) to the original. A scale
factor of 1 is normally allowed, so that congruent shapes are also classed as
similar. Uniform scaling happens, for example, when enlarging or reducing a
photograph, or when creating a scale model of a building, car, airplane, etc.)
Back to Davies’
explanation:
“In Newton’s theory, gravitation is generated by mass. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity,
mass is also a source of gravitation, as is energy (remember that Einstein’s
equation E = mc2 tells us that energy has mass). But it doesn’t stop there. Pressure too is a source of gravitation in
the general theory of relativity. …if the pressure gets seriously big, it can
rival the energy in its gravitating power. ‘Seriously big’ here means the sort
of pressure found inside a collapsing star … Another example, however, is a scalar
field: it has a pressure comparable to its energy. …But why does the scalar
field produce anti-gravity? The crucial
factor is the pressure: for a scalar field it is negative. Negative pressure isn’t especially exotic: it
is no more than what we normally call tension – a stretched elastic band
provides a familiar example. In three
dimensions, a block of rubber pulled in all directions would have negative
pressure. Now negative pressure implies
negative gravitation – a repulsive, antigravity force. So a scalar field generates gravity by virtue
of its energy, but antigravity by virtue of its (negative) pressure. A calculation shows that the antigravity
beats the gravity by a factor of three, so the net effect of the scalar field
is to antigravitate.”
So it was: Guth
theorized that during the first instant after the birth of the universe a
scalar field permeated space exerting a powerful antigravity effect which
induced the universe to leap into runaway expansion. (What manifested this scalar field? How did it come into being?) This antigravity effect had
to be strong enough to overpower the incredible gravity of the ‘normal matter
in the universe,’ i.e. the solar system sized primal atom. He plugged in some numbers and discovered
that the antigravity would not only easily overwhelm the universe, it would be
so strong that the universe would double in sized every 1014
seconds.
The only problem is:
what stopped this almost unthinkable expansion?
Guth had an answer for that: the inflation field was inherently unstable
and only existed for a brief time. It
just decayed and disappeared, more or less. Poof! And once it disappeared, then the
big bang proceeded according to the Standard Model. Well, more or less. According to Guth, the energy stored in the
inflation field became heat and it was this heat that created protons and
electrons and all the 1050 tons of matter in the universe. Afterward, with the field decayed, the CMB
represents the remnants of the inflation field.
In any event, Guth’s
theory had a flaw: the exit from inflation. Note he thought it was just ‘inherently
unstable’, but the decay of the inflation field is a quantum process and thus
is subject to the usual unpredictability of quantum fluctuations. Davies writes:
“As a result, it would decay at different times in different places, in
the form of randomly distributed bubbles – bubbles of space, that is, in which
the inflation field had decayed surrounded by regions of space where it had
not. The energy given up by the decayed inflation
field would be concentrated in the bubble walls. Bubble collisions would release this energy,
as heat, but the process would be utterly chaotic and generate as much
inhomogeneity as inflation was designed to remove. … The solution was to find a theoretical
scheme that would avoid bubble collisions and enable the bubbles to grow to a
size much larger than the observable universe.
One way to do this is called eternal inflation.”
One thing to notice
here: by its very nature, inflation erases the record of what went before and
makes it impossible to deal with the question: What caused the Big Bang and
what was before it? Inflation may help
to explain the fundamental features of the universe, describing them as purely
physical processes, but it appears to prevent penetrating beyond that.
I don’t care much
about the fancy mathematical/terminological footwork going on here, what he is
describing still amounts to manifesting something out of nothing or something
moving between dimensions and suddenly appearing as an apport. Notice also that nobody has yet observed a
scalar field, according to Davies.
P.S. 10-06-24 14:27 (A.J.)
• Biological quantum systems• Engineering for Quantum Hardware• Foundational Quantum Mechanics and Theory with a focus on experimental observables• Materials for quantum technologies• Metrology and Instrumentation• Quantum Algorithms and Machine Learning• Quantum Chemistry• Quantum Communications, Security and Cryptography• Quantum Computing and Simulation• Quantum Gravity and Cosmology• Quantum Information Theory and Processing• Quantum Imaging and Photonics• Quantum Physics and Thermodynamics
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