"JUST BEFORE" >
IE. where end & beginning join in a moment that is 'less than a moment'.
At that exact 'moment', we would see nothing with human eyes because
PURE ENERGY, whether positive type or negative type has NO physical form.
Suggesting gravity wins over inflation. All ends up in a black hole. Once that happens the black hole can evaporate. End result a release of energy.
All ending up in one is a consequence of ideas about what can increase a black holes mass. 😉 I wonder where dark energy and mass fits into that.
Can there be space without time, I.e., Spacetime? Can there be Spacetime without mass? Could there have been no space before BB and before inflation? If it was infinite space filled with pure energy that would be hard to swallow.
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I can grasp this in a hot dense universe, but not the 10^90 joules vacuum point energy or thereabouts claimed by the quantum mechanicians (that's a subtle dig BTW 😉 ) which is roughly 10^120 higher than Einstein's figure. I know who I believe.
It is postulated that the space from which the Universe emerged was far from empty, but was chock-a-block full of energy.
During inflation, this high energy state decayed into a low energy state, releasing the extra energy as a fireball of particles, antiparticles and radiation.
We don't have to believe this, it is only a hypothesis. 😉
"Higgs boson and the universe
Particles interacted with the Higgs field just 10^-12 seconds after the Big Bang. Before this phase transition, all particles were mass-less. They traveled at the speed of light. After the universe expanded and cooled, particles interacted with the Higgs field."
I sort of imagine someting like this:- The pre-proto universe was under contraction from the enormous gravity of all the matter and anti-matter (anti-matter we now know falls down and not up). As it contracted, temperatures skyrocketed to 10^32K. All matter, except for a few sub-atomic particles was turned into radiation, and this included the Higgs bosun, as a result, mass effectively 'evaporated'. At this point, with no gravity to hold the super-hot 'radiation plasma' together, the process reverses and because there is no mass, time also has no meaning so the universe undergoes inflation, expanding enormously in a short period of time before it starts to cool, and the process slows, and then we have the big bang proper. We don't know exactly why inflation took place, but a guess might be that at the 10^32K temperatures, even photons were no longer bound by c - and if time did not exist as a thing (a 'thing' being it does not pass as happens now if you travel at c or it just 'stood still' - take your pick) and this allowed the 10^78 expansion in size. Spacetime did not exist during this epoch - it's a bit like asking 'what's outside the universe?'
Steven Weinberg's 'The First Three Minutes' is a really good introduction to what happened after inflation.
I'm not sure if that statement agrees with the current hypothesis that, during the brief period of exponential inflation, the energy intrinsic in cold, empty space itself transformed into a hot dense soup of matter, antimatter and radiation that set up the conditions for the Big Bang.
As you know, it was Alan Guth who first proposed the hypothesis of cosmic inflation.
He says that the first embryonic speck of the Universe was so energetic that the pressures within generated a repulsive gravitational force that provided the driving force behind inflation.
How does something expand to 10^78 times its original size in what apparently was a fraction of a second with a ‘repulsive gravitational force’. If the universe was 1 mm in diameter, 10^78 bigger is light years in diameter.
I noticed Weinberg won Nobel in physics nearly 50 years ago, seems like eons ago, and his book came out 20 years ago. One wonders if he’s got newer editions or maybe someone else, a Nobelist would be nice, has a recent book on the subject.
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IIRC Weinberg’s first edition came out in the late 1970’s and I’d argue it was one of the best introductions to how the BB shaped matter and still is. It was updated with newer material in the late 1990’s, but the fundamentals did not change, ie as the super hot radiation plasma cooled, matter (hydrogen, lithium etc) distilled out. Steve and Galu probably understand the periodic table stuff better than me - most of the periodic table heavier stuff came later out of stellar nucleosynthesis (helium, carbon, silicon etc) and neutron star mergers (gold for example)
I mentioned it earlier in connection with the work of Fred Hoyle who first came up with the idea of stellar nucleosynthesis in 1946.
Attachments
Sadly he never got the Nobel Prize for that. He was without doubt the primary mover and shaker with stellar nucleosynthesis.
I've been diving into the archives again, updating old nuggets of information.
Stars themselves are incapable of fusing elements heavier than iron.
The majority of the heavy elements in the Universe come from neutron star mergers via the 'rapid neutron-capture process' or 'r-process'.
This is a process in which an atomic nucleus captures neutrons quickly enough to allow very heavy elements to be created before they naturally radioactively decay into lighter ones.
The r-process also occurs in thermonuclear weapons, and was responsible for the initial discovery of the heavy elements einsteinium and fermium.
The answer is no.
Space creates time. (not vise versa) Before the BB there was another universe (actually Duoverse) that had space & time.
Now, post BB we perceive (and measure) a universe with space & time.
The period that has no space or time is the BB moment, which is actually > "A moment that is less than a moment".
My hypothesis is totally dependent on a Duoverse existing.
This allows for an understanding of two types of Pure Energy. One is positive, the other is negative. (not to be confused 'charge')
One 'universe' is composed of predominantly Positive energy with a Negative component part. The other 'universe' is vise versa.
It is the 'addition' of negative part to positive (and vise versa) that creates matter > mass and all our elements.
Changing the words "positive" & "negative" to: Part A and Part B can probably help for the purpose of explanation.
The more of part B added to part A the greater the atomic mass of an Element. Once again, A added to B = vise versa.
Motion is eternal.
I am absolutely astonished if we can actually detect "Dark matter" and "Dark energy".
Fair enough if that’s what you believe.
The quote above in my post was from Edinburgh University’s Peter Higgs page - the guy who i.a.o predicted the Higgs bosun in the 1960’s and it was discovered in 2012 to a 6 sigma confidence level.
The quote above in my post was from Edinburgh University’s Peter Higgs page - the guy who i.a.o predicted the Higgs bosun in the 1960’s and it was discovered in 2012 to a 6 sigma confidence level.
I searched for the word "Duoverse", but came up with no meaning other than 'dual universe'.
Therefore, the hypothesis does seem to be very much yours. 😎
The nearest cosmological hypothesis to yours that I know of is that of the 'Mirror Universe'.
The concept is that our Universe may have a mirror image - an anti-universe counterpart running backward in time from the Big Bang.
Let's just say that your post has put me in a reflective mood! 😀
This quote from Wikipedia
"In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch is believed to have lasted from 10−36 seconds to between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the Big Bang."
But, the Higgs boson is hypothesized to have emerged at 10^-12 after the BB, so there seems to be a contradiction with Alan Guth's position in that the inflationary epoch had gravity involved. Gravity if I understand it correctly, only emerged when the Higgs bosun emerged.
"In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch is believed to have lasted from 10−36 seconds to between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the Big Bang."
But, the Higgs boson is hypothesized to have emerged at 10^-12 after the BB, so there seems to be a contradiction with Alan Guth's position in that the inflationary epoch had gravity involved. Gravity if I understand it correctly, only emerged when the Higgs bosun emerged.