Posted on 09/09/2001 1:05:44 PM PDT by telos
Did photons appear during or before the inflationary period? If they did appear, could they go anywhere without being absorbed by some kind of intergalactic gas [before the stars and galaxies appeared]?
God's honest truth? I can't help you here. While I understand Guth's contention that inflation proceeds faster than light, causing different portions of the universe to lose causal contact with each other, it is not exactly clear to me why it doesn't run afoul of special relativity. I think I can regurgitate the causality argument that permits it, but the math has eluded me.
Here's another misunderstanding I have about inflation. It's rather technical and I hesitate to mention it here, but I can't resist the opportunity to drop names, because I actually asked this question to a panel consisting of Guth, Michael Turner, Paul Steinhardt and Burt Ovrut, the giants of inflationary cosmology. Other cosmology giants such as Max Tegmark and Miriam Cvetic were there to speak up if they misspoke. (I was even sitting next to Alan Guth's mom at the time; although I didn't expect her to contribute to the discussion, some mojo might have rubbed off.)
We know that the total energy of the universe is zero. The problem is that mass, as well as energy, is conserved. (Suppose, for example, I have a pi0 of 135 MeV that decays into two photons of 67.5 MeV. The photons are massless by themselves, but together they still represent an invariant mass of 135 MeV.) But while there is negative energy (gravitational fields) there is no such thing as negative mass. I can't meaningfully discuss "the mass of the universe" as a concept, but I can state with confidence that there exists at least 100 kilograms of mass in the universe, because that is my mass. So since the universe started out with less than the amount of energy this represents, where did all my mass come from?
The answer was that it comes directly from the collapse of the false vacuum, and that mass conservation itself is only an effective global symmetry anyway. That's probably the correct answer, but again, the math eludes me.
Good question. Photons per se didn't appear until the breaking of the electroweak symmetry, which was right about at the end of the inflationary epoch. But still there were some sorts of massless gauge bosons flitting around the universe all through inflation, that can serve as conceptual stand-ins for the photons we see nowadays (but that didn't technically exist back then).
So you're saying that God couldn't have made it that way if he wanted to. OK, I believe that you believe it.
Like a space plateform that rises from earth's surface, using some of horizontal propulsion to achieve orbit. Or an anti-gravity sled that can carry huge amounts of spoil from an excavation site to a dump site. Or overcoming limitations of vertical construction. In fact, there probably many, mnay more uses for such an application than I could even think of.
Get busy, young Einstein. The world needs you.
Wow.
Congratulations PH, looks like you managed to "stump the band!"
Anybody know what the prize is for getting "Physicist" to cry "Uncle!"? An fun-filled one week, all-expense paid vacation with medved and G3K?
All kidding aside, thanks for sharing your uncertainty on this topic; I was merely regurgitating what I thought I had read previously. And I certainly haven't even looked at the math behind it.
Perhaps one of our other resident cosmo-nerds can shed some light (no pun intended) on this topic.
I'm sure it's no comfort, but the math eludes me too. And all that Higgs-field stuff which starts the whole inflationary scenario going. But I shall persever in my reading. At this point, I gather that inflation solves a whole bunch of problems (monopoles, smoothness, etc, which I never knew were problems) but it still has a gerry-rigged feel to it. For what that's worth.
I'm just speculating now, so bear with me. Is it possible that something about the inflationary scenario leads to the equivalent of a "temporary suspension" of the law of Conservation of Matter, which resumes it usual role and authority once the inflation phase is complete?
In the alternative, are you saying that the matter formed in the inflationary phase does NOT violate the C of M?
You tell me.
Oh, that's the one thing it doesn't have for me. There are no epicycles here, you start with one very simple concept--the false vacuum--and the rest just sort of unfolds uniquely out of it. It's like the way the Mandelbrot set just unfolds out of Z<--Z² + C. That's not to say that I personally understand all the details of how it unfolds, but there often comes a time when we dumb experimentalists have to take a theorists word for it.
And He did, too. But His book is written on the face of the sky, and not on the face of a page. I assure you He was quite clear about the expansion of the universe, in the book that counts.
U.S. Has Heavily Researched Anti-Gravity, Book Says
Not that I think there is anything to this doesn't stop me from reading up.
I have trouble unfolding a camp-chair!
Good metaphor...do you think there is any significant isomorpism between them?
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