Are we thinking about the big bang all wrong?
This is not one of those clickbait posts where I actually answer the question in the title, or spend 1,000 words getting to the conclusion 'we don't know'. I'm actually curious here.
So it's my understanding that the Universe is said to have started with an infinitely small point, and through unknown mechanisms in which time and physics must have been very different, things transitioned to the expanding universe we know today.
However, for this, we also have to contend with the concept of 'something from nothing' to an extreme extent. For example, if we were to get every single atom from all living humans and remove the space between electrons and the nucleus etc, and compressed us all together into one spot, we would create a sphere the size of a baseball.
That's pretty small, but still finite, still tangible, and only humans alive today on this one small planet. So do we necessarily have to move on to some kind of 'many worlds' theory or membrane multiverses, or is there some more fashionable explanation?
I had an idea but assuming physicists have already thought about it, I'd like to know why the idea can't be true:
The universe is expanding equally in all directions, creating a problem. If the Universe is expanding in the same way in all directions no matter where you are, that means there's no central point, at least in the way we traditionally think about it.
Instead, the analogy usually gets clarified with a balloon. You put black dots on a balloon and then inflate it. You'll see that the space between each dots, in all directions, increases as the air beneath it stretches the rubber in 3 dimensions.
If we apply this to the Universe, does this mean 'space' is popping into existence between each other space, and if so, why could it not be true that there wasn't a single big bang, but an infinite number of small bangs whose expansions melded into each other over time? Could the edge of the Universe (should there even be one) be a vast series of little bangs expanding and melding into our current Universe?
I drew a picture to demonstrate:
As you can see by my masterful artistry in MSPaint where I couldn't create diagonal arrows, the big black Universe is expanding, denoted by the purple arrows - to be clear, the Universe can expand in more directions than up and right - the expansion is caused by the small blue circles which show the location of where little bangs appear (from nothing?).
This much coincides with the balloon analogy. But, outside of the boundary of the Universe (white) you see a continuous supply of blue bangs with their own much more pathetic attempts at universes expanding outwards, where they inevitably bump into our successful universe and indeed other pathetic universes.
Since ours is the biggest in this particular example, we get to gobble up the real estate and claim it as our own, but perhaps we are also continuously bumping into even more successful Universes who consider ours just a petty failure, nothing more than an extra addition to the collection of Universes on their mantlepiece.
Now this may or may not attack the idea of 'infinitely small'. If there were an 'infinite' number of small bangs, then the 'stuff' can be infinitely dispersed among them. Having an infinite number of single points like this, from a naive human's intuition, seems more comforting than getting a solar system-sized ball to somehow compress down to a single point of the same size.
The problem for me is that if it truly was infinite, surely the Universe would be saturated with nothing but little bangs, making it inevitably one big bang that's just continuing to this day and thus impossible for us to exist.
So to be clear, I'm not suggesting that I've just come up with some revolutionary new direction in physics, but I do want to know what makes this idea invalid.
So, physicists, rip it all apart for me!
Cheers
The right answer is that we don't know... :D
We have observations and assumptions on what happened in the first moments of the universe, but there is very little data on these moments. We have what is called standard cosmology which is somehow the minimal model that works (with respect to the observations we have), but there are alternatives. In addition, god said: never divide by 0. Therefore, at t=0, standard cosmology breaks down. There is in fact no t=0 since the big bang is the moment where time starts to be defined.
There is nothing that contradicts this idea. It is just less minimal and less simple (which does not make it wrong). But I will destroy your dream: you are not the first proposing this (see multiverse theories) :p
Pff I figured the answer would be along these lines =P
I know the multiverse theory but I feel mine is distinguished in that it includes constant flow of little bangs within our universe right now causing the expansion in all directions which... I don't think i've heard about before?
You can check conformal cyclic cosmology. Similar to yours somehow :)
I was about to tag you but here you are doing justice to the question :D
Reminds me of Endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi transport. But more like vesicles from one compartment are fusing into another, unidirectionally. So, if I think of space as lipids and galaxies as proteins or even those lipid rafts as galaxies then adding new vesicles should make the compartment expand. The distance between the embedded proteins should increase. Except there is one issue, unless the frequency of adding lipids is homogenous in all directions, we should not have a homogenous expansion. Say space gets added between two galaxies by this new baby universe. Then these two galaxies should accelerate faster compared to those other galaxies far away. If space was compressible then this would lead to these two galaxies moving away from each other at accelerated rate while others moving closer. If non compressible then the nearby galaxies have increased rate of expansion but far away galaxies keep moving at the same pace. That is obviously assuming that addition and spread of space has finite speed. So in case of non homogenous addition of baby universes the only way your model can work is if addition of space at any points spreads through out the universe at infinite velocity. Well, that is because the cosmological constant is assumed to be constant through out the universe. And it's observed that no matter which direction we look into the rate of acceleration is the same. Also, let me forward this ro my astrophysics friends who are not on steem.
There is no velocity to the warping of spacetime. Spacetime is conformed to the existence of the forces in it exigently. Since we perceive time and space differently, like we do hot dogs and buns, we see this conformance as occurring at infinite velocity, which, incidentally, is faster than I can eat hot dogs.
This is a complex thought process and makes me re-consider the idea of infinite points. I wonder about the infinite velocity though. Space can accelerate away from us faster than the speed of light, simply because there's more than one direction.
If we had multiple points moving away at lightspeed, then the velocity compounds to something far beyond lightspeed, no?
Would be great to get your buddies involved!
If lightspeed is constant, and the distance between origin and destination increases due to spontaneous eruption of space between them, then lightspeed would appear to slow to observers keeping an eye on it. But it's not space that erupts - it's spacetime.
Since speed is a function of both time and space, lightspeed appears constant because both time and space are actually one thing. Although the light now has more space to traverse, it also has more time to traverse it. The speed of light remains constant.
Are you assuming there is a single container containing all of the "multiverses" which share the same coordinate space? If this is the case I don't think you can assume this, and therefore these universes don't/can't overlap. Not sure how you setup an experiment to test this though...
If by containers you mean the red boundaries in the picture, no I just wanted to emphasize the 'melding' process. Since there's no 'space' outside of space, I think, then there is no need for such boundaries and these expanding masses would be growing throughout nothingness (white). But I've yet to fathom what that nothingness actually is so...
It is indeed hard to comprehend how something could have emerged out of nothing.
But of course, it is equally hard to understand how something has always existed.
A beginning to our story makes us question what came before this beginning which would, in other circumstances, be a weird question to ask.
Yet, a story without any beginning is just as strange to us.
Whatever the truth may be, our small brains will find it hard to accept.
Personally I find the idea of something always existing far easier to settle with than something from nothing. Time is relative after all, and the idea of time freezing happens in numerous instances in physics. I can totally see how our minds are only set up to comprehend a forward arrow of time, whether ot not that's truly the case, but the idea of something coming from nothing seems a lot more fantastical, something you'd typically attribute to a God or magician. I'm inspired to get that Krauss book now!
But, the idea that something emerges from nothing only makes sense if accept that there was a time just before the big bang when there was nothingness.
However cosmologists usually believe that it is meaningless to think about a "time before the big bang", which would make the "something out of nothing" point also meaningless.
Don't ask me... ;-)
It is meaningless. I can't explain but I know it's true for me. ;-)
I've thought about this before. Much more than that; what if the entirety of the observable and non-observable universe is just one fragment of a "multiverse"? These are the things we don't know. Or maybe the whole of our universe is just like a little science project for an alien species somewhere :p.
Before the bang (whether big or small) what happened? I mean; was the "bang" the beginning of the existence of the universe? If it is; then what initiated the bang? Remember one of Newton's laws of motion that expresses the fact that things would continue in their state of rest until acted upon by force.
That means, sometimes must have triggered the bang. And if something triggered the bang, then that thing existed before the bang, and that means the bang isn't the beginning of the universe... Many things we don't know
Nice piece buddy
Suppose you have a ginormous vacuum. Nothingness. And in it, you have your unstable baseball-sized supermolecule. At the time of the big bang, it explodes and all the matter escapes in all directions. Spreading throughout that vacuum. With the outer edge limit of the matter in effect being the boundary of the universe. No extra space would need to be created. Just matter would get further apart as the universe ages.
At least, that's how I've always understood it. So there's no need to create space / matter after the big bang.
I'm familiar with this line of thought, but this inevitably leads to the question of 'what is nothing'. I know Lawrence Krauss wrote a book 'A Universe from Nothing' but I've yet to get a hold of it, and I doubt it'll be an easy read...
Good question. And it's probably easier to attempt to define than to visualise. An absence of all matter / energy for the definition. The known universe just without any matter / energy in it when you try to visualise it. Virtually impossible to comprehend (that's theoretical physics for you) but could it be any other way? Kind of like the quote on the human brain:
It seems possible, BUT:
In science we apply Occam's razor. The hypothesis that requires the simplest explanations is the ruling theory. This does not mean it cannot be overthrown, should another hypothesis prove better (=easier) explanations or solve newly observed problems that conflict with the ruling theory.
Put differently: Knowing that we can never find the pure truth, we have to abstract truth to find the best possible approximation of it.
Yep this is true but I don't feel, from a purely intuitive and zero mathematical point of view, that this is any more complex or convoluted than current ideas. The universe doesn't have to obey our ruling theories anyway =P
I am quite sure that it's more complex from the mathematical point of view.
Of course you're right, the ruling theories are just an approximation to understand/explain the universe, and not "rules" or "laws" in the non-scientific understanding.
Wrong account, but that was me.
lol woah, interesting... ought I follow this account?
It's short content that would spam my real blog, and for which I feel uncomfortable getting auto-votes for. Mostly in German language, too. But of course, feel free to follow.^^
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This is essentially what I see occurring presently. Creation is ongoing.
We aren't really equipped to envision this level of reality. For example, you refer to the space outside our universe, but there is no space outside the universe. Spacetime, also, is a thing, not space and time. So not only is space continuously spontaneously erupting out of the vacuum pressure, time also.
Interestingly, gravity is also some feature of this spacetime. It's not a force, but an aspect of the relationship between forces (mass, which forces exert) and spacetime, a distortion in spacetime itself produced by forces in it. It does not take millions of years for the effect of gravity to travel between stars millions of lightyears apart because gravity is just how those masses impact the spacetime they exist in, and the spacetime doesn't take millions of years to distort. The gravitational force exists just as the spacetime exists, because it is a feature of spacetime.
The interesting thing about this, to me, is that this means that everything in the universe is linked in realtime. Such information as gravitional influence reaches to the furthest extent of spacetime without having to get there. It's all there as soon as spacetime is distorted, which is as soon as mass exists, wherever mass may be.
So gravity, space, and time are all aspects of some thing, and that thing is continually erupting into existence. All information concerning that thing and all the forces interacting with, and in, it is impacting the whole universe simultaneously. We don't know how to access that information, but it's there anyway, Heisenberg be damned.
As you might guess, I am not in agreement with the Copenhagen School of quantum theory. Probability may be the best guess we can come up with, but the universe is deterministic, necessarily. God doesn't play dice, Einstein said, and I don't think more than one roll of the dice is possible in terms of physics. Since the dice, the table, and all factors affecting how the dice will be rolled are in intimate relation, that roll may appear random to us, who don't know all those factors, but it is as predetermined as our first loves ending in tragedy.
Or was that just me?
Not a physicist, nor a mathematician, but this is my grasp of relativity and Hawking's proof of spontaneous particle production.
Interesting questions you ask.
Thanks!
Awesome picture btw :D