skaltezon

You just brought it up. Is that theory related to your earlier post?

SIRIUSB

In a way yes.

skaltezon

Why is that a non-sequitur?

lucifer_sam

non-sequitur, literally meaning "it does not follow", from:

(1) When the Big Bang is described as the event during which the cosmos went through a superfast "inflation," expanding from the size of an atom to the size of a grapefruit in a tiny fraction of a second (as shown in Jackhammer's original post: http://ssscott.tripod.com/bang.jpg), I imagine the universe as having consisted of an infinite space full of those tiny atom-sized areas expanding.

(2) The universe would then be an infinite space where expansion occurs at every point within that space.

(3) If the universe at the time of the Big Bang was an infinite space of dense matter and expanded at every point within that space, then we would have something without limits that expands yet isn't actually getting "larger" because the space was infinite to begin with.

I've boldfaced the parts that I can't follow. It wasn't just matter expanding during the Big Bang, it was space itself (which she later remarked about).

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jackhammer

Yeah thanks for this boffins. It is something that has been theorised and maybe even fantasied about but things are taking a whole new turn:

BBC News - 'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background

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VEGANGELICA

Yes, I meant that space itself was expanding during the Big Bang (and continues to expand). That is the meaning of the quote about the universe expanding from the size of an atom to the size of a grapefruit in a tiny fraction of a section. I assumed we were all in agreement about space itself expanding, so I didn't emphasize it.

I am saying that perhaps the universe, at the time when people describe it as the size of an atom, a tiny pinpoint, was then composed of an infinite number of such tiny pinpoints. This would thus be infinite space. (The idea was suggested to me by a Scientific American Magazine article that I love, called "The End of Cosmology? An accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origin," by Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, March 2008: http://genesis1.asu.edu/0308046.pdf.)

Then, during the Big Bang, all those tiny pinpoints of space expanded, leading to an infinity of space that is expanding yet is no bigger than the space before, since it was infinite to begin with. (Sounds paradoxical and weird, but so is the idea of space expanding, so I can roll with it. )

One of those atom-sized pinpoints expanded to give rise to what we know as the observable universe.

My point was that I don't imagine the universe as a single, atom-sized space that expanded during the Big Bang, but as an infinite volume in which the space at all pinpoints within that volume expanded rapidly during the Big Bang.

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lucifer_sam

Ah. What you're describing isn't really a 'singularity' event, then.

I found that an extremely illuminating article, but I couldn't find anywhere in it that brushed on the idea that you're introducing. In fact, there wasn't much discussion of what happened during the initial phase of the Big Bang. The cosmologists go on to suggest that they really can't tell what happened in the beginning:
Other materials I've read that touch on it suggest otherwise (in other words, that the Big Bang was indeed a singularity event, both in matter and space), but I would be extremely interested in seeing a scientific journal that supports your hypothesis.

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VEGANGELICA

After I made that previous post, I did some more reading to try to find out what astrophysicists actually say if they appear to question the singularity of the Big Bang. This led me to an article (see below) about cosmologists who hypothesize that the universe arose from an earlier universe: Sean Carroll, Assistant Professor in Physics at U. of Chicago, and graduate student Jennifer Chen.

Their views (as best I can understand them) were the closest I could find to my naive imaginations only in that they hypothesize a universe existed out of which ours arose...so there could have been infinite space before our universe.

They hypothesize that the universe of which we are a part may have arisen from a small portion of a universe (still in existence, I assume) where space had stretched very very far and matter was spread extremely thinly (as is occurring in our universe). This would mean that "inflation" didn't start with our universe but had occurred before (and for all we know is still occurring somehow, outside our universe).

Their proposed initial birthplace of our universe as an infinite area of expanding space and dispersed matter is very different from my incorrect imagination of the birthplace as being an infinite area of dense (compact?) space and dense matter:

When I wrote that my previous (I now realize incorrect) imagination of our universe's origin from infinite space was suggested to me by that Scientific American Magazine article, (http://genesis1.asu.edu/0308046.pdf), I didn't mean that they suggested the idea but that something they wrote made me wonder if the initial state of our universe could have been infinite space. I should have clarified that, Lucifer.

They had a figure showing one part of our universe...our observable universe and part of the universe that has become unobservable to us due to space's inflation. They said that aliens anywhere else in our universe would see space expanding in the same way, and that perhaps the universe is infinite.

I then imagined the deflation (?) of our universe, as I think back through time, to try to picture the initial state. I imagined that if one small speck of space could inflate to create an infinite universe, then a region equal to ten specks could inflate to create an even greater infinity of space ... so then an infinite number of specks of original space could have expanded into an even greater infinity of space! That's how I came up with my wild idea that has no basis in any theory.

It all hinged on the idea that I haven't heard it said that our universe arose out of an infinitesimally small point, but rather out of an atom-sized space...so then I started imagining lots of those atom-sized spaces as one giant original space, and what expansion of that would look like.

Back to Carroll and Chen, though: I do feel it makes more sense for our universe to have arisen from another universe that had the same characteristics as ours (continual, accelerating inflation of space and dispersal of matter), rather than have our universe pop into existence out of nothingness. That doesn't answer how it all began, though, if there was a beginning!

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skaltezon

Thanks VEGANGELICA for the link to the Krauss/Scherrer article on The End of Cosmology. Good premise, that information on how the universe began is disappearing. The Krauss/Scherrer collaboration is on a recent theory that dark energy appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.

EVIDENCE FOR DARK ENERGY

In 1998, published observations of Type Ia supernovae ("one-A") by the High-z Supernova Search Team followed in 1999 by the Supernova Cosmology Project suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since then, these observations have been corroborated by several independent sources. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, and the large scale structure of the cosmos as well as improved measurements of supernovae have been consistent with the 'standard' (Lambda-CDM) model of the cosmological constant.

The more recent 'WiggleZ' project in Australia, which measured the redshifts of 240,000 distant luminous blue-star-forming galaxies from 2006-2011, apparently supports current dark energy theory that the universe is made up of 71.3% dark energy and 27.4% of a combination of dark matter and ordinary baryonic matter (according to wikipedia).

Dark energy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In short, faraway objects are gaining speed as they recede from us, presumably because of dark energy. And the dark energy model is consistent with measurements of other observables that are independent of the recession-velocity measurements.

In a lecture to the Atheist Alliance International (AAI), Krauss puts it another way:

This is startling news.

Wikipedia has a good article on Krauss that made me enthusiastic about following his work. But when I found the video of an hour-long lecture he gave to AAI, I realized I'd seen it before in connection with researching Richard Dawkins. I don't like Krauss' combative attitude and his tendency to politicize his science by gratuitously insulting people (which is why I didn't listen to the whole lecture the first time I found it). He also lacks the humility he says everyone else should have. Overall giving me a tension headache. That's not to say that his science isn't good. I'd just rather hear it from someone else. But here's the lecture:

Episode 15 – Dr. Lawrence Krauss | Smart People Podcast

I'll leave the the Carroll/Chen musings on the arrow of time for Lucifer to unravel.

The Monkey

I read that dark matter and dark energy acts as counteracting forces on the speed of the universe's expansion, which dark energy causing it to accelerate and dark matter (along with gravity), decreasing the level of acceleration. Because dark energy is more common than dark matter, the universe's expansion continues to accelerate, rather than decrease.

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