Posted on 02/22/2007 11:46:29 AM PST by SunkenCiv
According to Stanford physics Professor Andrei Linde, one of the architects of the inflationary theory, our universe (and all the matter in it) was born out of a vacuum... In the same session, titled "Multiverses, Dark Energy and Physics as an Environmental Science," physics Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford will talk about string theory and its relation to inflationary theory and physics Professor Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University will represent the skeptic view. The conventional theory of the Big Bang says that the newborn universe was huge, containing more than 10^80 [ten raised to the power of eighty] tons of matter. But physicists were stumped for an explanation of where all this matter came from. Inflationary theory solves this problem by showing how our universe could emerge from less than a milligram of matter, or perhaps even from literally nothing... Physicist Alan Guth of MIT proposed the inflationary theory in 1981, but its original version did not work until Linde improved it. Guth and Linde realized that rather than expanding at an ever-decreasing rate, as was predicted by the Big Bang theory, the universe could have inflated at exponentially rapid speeds... "If galaxies are the result of quantum fluctuations," said Linde with a shrug, "imagine what we are."
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
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This is one way it could have happened.
Or God may have created the universe.
One of these notions strikes me as ludicrous.
It's the anthropic principle at work. :')
Maybe God's recipe called for less than a milligram of matter?
This is one way it could have happened.
Or God may have created the universe.
One of these notions strikes me as ludicrous.
These notions are not mutually exclusive.
Science is bound by Natural Law. I think it is ... challenging ... for science to explain how a milligram of material can be used to create trillions of tons of matter.
The fact that String Theory (apparently) explains how this can be so, goes a long way toward explaining why String Theory is not taken seriously by a lot of people (the WSJ had an article a few months ago saying that Physics may have wasted a few decades devoting much of its best talent toward a theory that has become a joke).
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