Sabine's latest blog post explains deep problems with the theory (really an infinite class of theories) of cosmological inflation research.
Basically, it is underdetermined and can't predict anything meaningful.
UPDATE October 18, 2017
A follow up blog post explains that the flatness problem that inflation is commonly described as solving comes from an unjustified and probably unreasonable assumption about initial conditions.
END UPDATE
19 comments:
In a nutshell the Big Bang theory posits that the cmb represents a thermodynamic thermal bath of "relic" photons that still retains an equilibrium profile even though it passed through this phase change some ca. 14 billion years ago. The recombination epoch was surpassed very early within 1 million years of "creation". However, three major problems arose; namely the horizon, flatness and the minute baryon/photon ratio.
Guth's inflation theory(ies) overcomes the first two of these problems. There are several other problems that remain intractable.
We still await empirical determination of neutrino mass eigenstates so the following cosmological implications are supposition in the like manner that Newton before us had to await ca. 10years before a French expedition better determined the circumference of the Earth; the data Newton depended upon was in error by ca. 10% yet this didn't deter him.
It's now more than seven years since myself and Marni Sheppeard suggested alternatively that the Big Bang never happened. The cmb might represent alternatively an extant and not a "relic" thermal dynamic equilibrium bath of photons and neutrinos with a phase pair production temperature equivalant to the electron neutrino mass of ca. 1mev. Particle pair production at rest would equate with Newton's dust postulate. Neutrinos generated at rest would gravitate. In 1931 at a Mt. Wilson symposium Einstein drew a double set of his geometrodynamic equations underscored by a line that represented an alloy of two universes superimposed upon each other ; one with a postive cosmological constant and the latter with a negative constant, that infers an anti de sitter space (ads) wherein such a fine dust (neutrino "dust")would gravitate. Such an inference would imply that in addition to a normal Hubble Flow (the ca. 70 km/sec/megaparsec velocity) that there exists a counter current or reverse flow.
The current Hubble Flow has been equated with a violation of the second law, namely an expanding universe violates the second law. Bouncing universes avoid this difficulty by recognising that entropy does increase with bounce numerosity.
Einstein wasn't perturbed by our modern day thinking as he could literally empty space, rid of all substance. Geometrodynamics treats empty space as devoid of mass energy. He conveniently sidesteps the problem, unaware of the existence of quantum vacuum energy. It's not that galaxies are expanding but that the space inbetween expands.
Graham Dungworth
Steven Weinberg found this a hard pill to swallow in 1987, the implication that galaxies are fleeing away at greater than light speped by z (universe size factor)>1.
An ads universe of photon neutrino dust at equilibrium answers both the flatness and horizon problem. The ads universe looks the same in all directions, like a fog; the cmb radiation. When we are lost in a fog here on Earth a compass is a very handy tool; it breaks the symmetry and picks out a direction, North South. The conventional cmb relic temperature is what we measure and we transcribe that temperature 2.725Kelvin onto a theoretical cooling curve since "creation". This isn't a mathematical proof. Two thirds of all stars were formed within 4 billion years of "creation". Sentient beings elsewhere may have measured a higher temperature albeit , greater than ca 6 Kelvin; a little earlier temperatures would rise exponentially. similarly, conventional theory implies a cmb temperature of ca 1.4 Kelvin by 40 billion years ab initio.
Neutrino degeneracy pressure implies that our alloy ads universe must have a mass of 2*10^54kg which was uncomfortably high until last year Hubble Sky Survey noted we had vastly underested the numerosity of galaxies >z 2, by an order of magnitude.
An ads alloy answers the flatness and horizon problem. The dust condensate paricle pair production at equilibrium and constant entropy answers these problems and implies that the photon bath is paired not with a baryon ratio but with lepton numerosity. Also, a perfect equilibrium bath represents a condition where not just direction cannot be determined but one where there is no existence of a beginning, no prospect of an end (future). It is a timeless state. Yet we perceive baryons; galaxies,stars and planets and ourselves for one fleeting moment in the immensity of time. Our future, all future anywhere and at all times might begin when a collapsing condensate of neutrino dust of ca. 200 solar masses commence electron positron pair production, a process occurring in hyper supernova. This process may generate the necessary phase symmetry breaking that picks out a unique beginning for time and spatial direction, the origin of the notorious "axis of evil" in the cmb; that inflationary theories cannot resolve other than postulate multiverse scenarios. Metaphysics or Physics. Metaphysics is also art and I wish it well in my advancing years. I do prefer my theory yet it could be a gut reaction.
Ars longa vita brevis
Graham Dungworth 15/10/2017
Graham, that all sounds interesting but unfortunately I don't understand how it works in detail. For example what exactly is the relationship between the AdS space and the other (dS?) space? Do objects in one feel the gravity of objects in the other? Is it one space with two metrics? (there are "bimetric" theories out there). Alternatively, I believe I have seen papers in which bubbles of dS form inside AdS.
Or later, you speak of a timeless equilibrium of neutrino dust. OK. Then you say a world like ours might be formed when 200 solar masses of neutrino dust collapses. It's as if you're saying that the arrow of time takes flight when that happens. Again, OK... But we see a hell of a lot more than 200 solar masses out there. What is the relationship between our little bubble of time, and all the other stars and galaxies that we can see? Are they in their own bubbles of time? Are you saying that their arrows-of-time might be going the other way??
Hello Mitchell and thanks for the interest. Let's first stick with a conventional interpretation of the Big Bang scenario and its historical evolution. This is a de Sitter space time scenario with a RTW metric. Einstein had introduced his cosmological constant, a positive big lambda, because his gut instinct told him that the universe was in a stable condition. He introduces a positive tiny constant to prevent its collapse when in ca. 1929 he realises that galaxies are infact receeding- an expanding universe! Hubble calculated the expansion with a value at least 7 fold greater than the currently accepted value of c. 70km/sec/megaparsec. Gamov at the time cites this as his biggest blunder. Newton had the same problem. If all matter gravitates why are the stars still in existence. His answer was that the good Lord had placed them at truly immense distances to counteract inevitable collapse. The existence of galaxies only became fact after 1923.
By 1987 Steven Weinberg is summarising progress, the critical mass density of the observable universe, as a whole and then empirically measured is only ca. 25% of about ~4 baryons per m^2 (namely proton equivalents). Weinberg's initial hot universe has a circumference of ca. 4 light years when it had cooled to ca. 10^12 Kelvin ca. 1 second after the BB. He muses about the question of whether there is a maximum temperature at 10^32Kelvin commensurate with the Planck scale or that the numerosity of particles created as per a particle physics standard model that grows enormously to limit the temperature to ca. 10^12 Kelvin. In answer to John Baez's comment, and his query has to be rhetorical even if unintentional, Steven regards inflation theory and the inflaton field as a fully scientific endeavour. As an analogy, although we cannot exist as an external observer, imagine we are in our living room at the time of creation, could we see our universal beginning about the size of an apple or a football or would it be soo small we might find it hard to observe or observe it not at all. The apple football size has major problems; namely the flatness and horizon problems. Weinberg favours the inflation model(s) as it does solve these problems.
Weinberg adresses the cosmic mass vacuum energy density and the familiar cosmic critical mass density (that's proton equivalents for simplicity). The latter dilutes with time, as the cube of the size metric and cools according to inverse size. We now pass by LeMaitre's super atom cosmological beginning, an outragious theory in the 30's. Frank Wilczek was troubled by the implication of naming an aether space filling quantum field. He settled on a quantum field condensate description. It's a condensed matter physicists approach. There are related vacuum energy fields. For instance, the Brout Engels semi classical quantum field, which was the Higgs Field classical approach with the " for which I am named" Higgs boson. In 2011 the Cern director was concerned about the public's reaction to potential new discoveries. When questioned, more than 50% of Cern scientists didn't believe the Higgs boson existed. The diector redirected public relations. We are looking for SUSY or Kaluza Klein particles. At the time on the GalaxyZoo forum I wrote that a Higgs boson discovery was the hottest bet in town circa 90% certain. A few particle physicists were asking related questions; did the particle Standard Model predict that neutrinos had restmass? Infact the Standard model predicts all particles have zero restmass; it nearly caused Nambu to quit after Pauli's jibes stunned him into silence. These quantum field condensates are a way of circumventing Goldstone's mathematical proof- Peter Higgs realised this in 1964 even before the Standard Model's predescessors evolved. There are infact four Higgs Fields, three of them already known with their associated particle, the Z and +-W ; enough to convince myself but too brash to claim it was 90% of a "dead certainty". It's alloyed onto the Standard model, it's a mixture. Weinberg abandoned the beauty of SU(5)this year. Mathematically it's beautiful but it is now now no longer the physics of stuff anymore- it's not scientific. Hundreds of the thousands of scientists who have worked in this field are morose-imagine your whole career in this expertise amounts to nothing. I feel for them, the heartache perhaps even anger. That's what we do, what we did, hopeful of success, not downright dejection.
Dry your eyes you old fool for none are condemned to the pit. We were there in Sicily last week, at Enna and then the search for Archimedes tomb, convinced by Cicero's account, above the theatre at Syracusa.
Is supposition science? We have one form in English of expressing the conditional and even that can confuse, Spanish has three forms, and Latin six. Also our logical approach is due to Aristotle, I personally think of it as Aristotlian logic. Then there is quantum logic and for a mathematician perhaps even a transinfinate numerosity since they are totally happy with self consistent infinite logics.
Weinberg in the 90's was addressing a bewildering numerosity of outcomes for the conventional BG and its inflation analogue. Here's one of them and I paraphase. If the net vacuum mass energy density is much greater than the critical mass density and so happens to be negative there would be a rapid expansion and equally so a following contraction too rapid for stars to form. Were it positive, expansion would continue forever.
This latter condition represents the heat death of the universe. Additionally, while cosmic critical mass density depletes with time as the cube of size, the inflaton(s) field(s) in a phase transition created mass energy at constant density! This is Alan Guth's free lunch model. Everything we observe in the universe commenced creation within perhaps a 100 size doublings within a time frame of ca. 10^-35 second, a huge time after the ultimate 10^-45 sec. Ten orders of time magnituse and related size is a lot of scenarios to consider. Fred Hoyle was exasperated "our creation field formula" is the same as the one you are using for the inflaton field. A formula can no doubt be alternatively explained perhaps in many ways. All of this pertains conventionally to a de Sitter spacetime or if the algebraic sum of net vacuum mass energy contribution to big lambda is negative then also to an anti de Sitter spacetime. It's all conventional scientific thinking, it was then and is so now. That is not to say that the "steady state model" is appropriate to what I'm now writing, but to say the maths is correct but Hoyle puts the creation in the right places at the right times, that is always in time, whereas the inflaton field was for ourselves, in our observable universe or locale a once only event in time and space. In both instances it's an ultimate free lunch scenario and I kind of think Fred would be happy at that. Well we all feel a little queezy more or less. The huge numerosity of possible outcomes led Weinberg and Fred before him to raise that notorioooous speculation we called anthropromorphism in the 60's, reduce the outcomes by Aristotlian logic. A vacuum mass energy density if similar to the present critical mass energy density would be more than likely. Why? Well several alternative time fixes, ages of clusters and stars point to our existence now ca. say 10 to 20 billion years ago (how about 14.7 that's scientific precision). We inhabit a universe fit for ourselves; 2 million year of existence, homo sapiens survived extant, habilis erectus neanderthalensis, flores etc extinct, honed by blood,sweat ,tears in a brutal nature red in tooth and claw.
Weinberg adopts Fred's posture. Quote "The Anthropic Principle if valid explains the hugely improbable likelihood of the similarity of critical mass energy density to the vacuum energy density". The latter might change of course. By scale factor 2 the size of the observable universe , a third of its present size the critical density was 3^3 or 27 fold denser. Had we existed then, ca. 10 billion years ago this argument gets a little iffy, but too much so or we wouldn't be here or there then would we. This is hard anthropism . Soften it to the existence of sentient beings. When they perused all this then, the existence of extra solar planets was unknown, sheer speculation, although guys my age, albeit with honours, got away with it. The Russians didn't like it at all! It's likely that it's all happening everywhere , all the time. Eternal inflation, multiverse(s). That solved the problem of stopping the mechanism, starting it is another problem. The temperature anisotropy, once perhaps the Great Attractor is now replaced by the presence of an adjacent universe; it's a gravitational attractive effect.
All matter gravitationally attracts. I'm left handed and so is the universe and so too the Standard Model; its a chiral model a left hand chiral model. We observe only left handed neutrinos and right handed antineutrinos. For a difficult to understand what chirality and helicity mean read Tip Toneda online; it took a week to sort out errors. Our genes spiral one way, our amino acids are L chiral form. Are there D amino acids? Yes- but they are toxic to us. If we find similar nucleic acid type organisms elsewhere on other planets there's a 100% chance we can communicate and gravitate,a 50% chance they and we are toxic to each other. Currently, a new planet is discovered literally daily. I was a codiscoverer of the first Kepler planet at the time when ca. 60 were known, about 5 years ago. All matter gravitates. Normal matter gravitates , antimatter gravitates, but Radan Hadjukovic at Cern considers whether matter and antimatter antigravitate. Weinberg realised this problem with the conventional BB. Where resides antimatter? Radan knows and has his own bounce universe in deSitter space. There black holes and antiblackholes. Additionally with each bounce our kack handed universe reverses; to my chagrin as I'm left handed and have had to adapt to all but teacups. It's a nice toy model, all in antide Siiter space. Radan loves the neutrino but does a norml matter left hand neutrino have a chiral R form? No. Not according to the L chiral standard model. They are not observed. But does that mean they don't exist? Particles are created in pairs, particle and antiparticle, say electrons and positrons. The maths description includes what is called a nonphysical electron; it exists but is not observed empirically. Hawking radiation from the electron positron pair production is a glacially slow process. A small blackhole the mass of the Moon is stable because the gravitational attraction of the cmb balances and increase in its mass energy while Hawking radiation depletes mass. According to Radan a 7 milli eV neutrino pair production can evaprate a whole galaxy of stars in the 14 billion tears, rather than 10^100 year.
Sorry about the length Mitchel and all who might wander by.
There might be twice as many particles as we imagine. I'm stumped by SU(3), I handle the geometry but I can't write a line of algebra without proving 0=0. I graduated as a chemmist in 1966. The most energy efficient way of stacking these particles, R and L chiral forms is 24 order chiral terahedral. I can't handle bi quaternions Marni. Marni mused that it will be a bi octonion universe but it's hard Graham to come up with a master symmetry. St Augustinwho knew little Latin and Greek once mused in a North African monastery about that little bird in a fleeting moment flew in through one window and out the next.
Were the neutrino mass to accord with the Brannen/Koide prediction and with Marni's algrebraic negative phase (say a-b)then an 0.00117eV electron neutrino mass would equate with a cmb equilibrium temperature of 2.737Kelvin only if the particle pair were represented as half masses given by a +-a +-b ie. 4 forms; even though the Standard Model and ourselves as living mass are represented by only two forms. It's axiomatic that particles are generated in pairs. In deSitter space the mass energy density of the cmb amounts ie. 410 million photons and similarly neutrinos equivalent to ca. 1 electron mass per cubic metre. Also, this fog since it's at equilibrium could have been ever present, an eternal universe. It's mass energy density is minute ca. 1/2000 part of the 1 known baryon/m^2, the other 3 parts are DM and DE. The photons represent the bird fleeing in and out in a deSitter space. The neutrinos represent St Augustin and the room itself. They are generated at rest.
They must gravitate and represent a -ve lambda and that means we are engulfed in an antideSitter space, everywhere , every nook and cranny, even though their density is minute. Neutrinos packed tightly together at the equivalent lambda max wavelength, the Compton equivalent wavelength, 410 million of them per m^2; a fermi condensate at 2.737 Kelvin. Alternatively, and conventionally we exist presently and coincidentally on a cooling curve 14.7 billion after the creation. By how much can one compact these neutrinos. The air we breathe at ca. 20Celsium consists of atoms as a gas , about 300 molecules apart. If we condense them or better watervapour they approach as a liquid at the Bohr length. Squeeze more by size 1/137 they are at the compton wavelegth in a quantum environment and so on by another 1/137 size fctor to the electron wavelength but alas they are not moleculs or atoms anymore.
How big is this quantum field condensate. I called it a photon neutrino aether that is what Newton called a fine dust. Why not call a spade a spade. It is generated at rest. Does this violate Lorentz invariance. Yes it does but very slightly so. That's a big challenge but not so big a change as a second law challenge. I've kept faith with my old tutor who once remonstrated with me in 1963; Graham a better study of thermodynamics will better help you in life. it will never let you down. I lot of scaffolding is needed to create a whole universe.
All the baryons we see, planets , stars, galaxies even multiverses will need this scaffolding. It has to be at least 30 fold the size of our observable universe set in a de Sitter sea of space to work. The neutrinos will gravitate but neutrino degeneracy pressure requires a mass of them of ca. 2*10^54 kg. This greatly outweighs the observable mass including dark matter DM and Dark Energy DE . Nor is the distribution of normal matter isotropic and homogenous. I helped classify more than half a million galaxies, infact more galaxies than classified stars in our Milky Way; some 200 billion stars perhaps. Galaxies appear as filaments with great voids and many triple junctions, analagous to the movement of plate boundaries here on Earth. Some of these galactic triple junction seem to have failed , as here on Earth. Many honoured geologists in the 60's and 70's never accepted plate tectonics; it could only happen on an expanding Earth. The recognition that destructive margins conserved volume settled the debate. The disbelievers died.
Galaxies and deSitter space coexist-alloyed or mixed in this thermal bath. Galaxies have a past and future. They inhabit a cosmic ocean of a thermal bath of neutrinos and photons in antideSitter space at 2.73 Kelvin. I don't find a coincendatal existence on some cooling curve a better interpretation. Affords nature no greater aim? Are these bubbles of normal baryonic matter riding in a fathomless sea? Yes, it's a decent analogy. Is our observable universe normal matter in deSitter space floating in this antideSitter ocean of living extant photon neutrinos rather than a relic radiation? I anticpated but one metric.
Not even Moses could carry more than ten commandments; he dropped many more.
A year ago I sat on an Andalusian hill looking at a lenticular cloud on the adjacent mountain. A farmer approached me. It sits there sometimes for days. It never moves.
How can I explain it I thought in my guttural limited Castillano. I couldn't except to say that it is living, it's stable for a while and needs a big list of intitial conditions to survive. One could google translate into Spanish but would not have been understood. It took a month to flesh out this stability , a phase transition at constant entropy locally. For a physicist it's obvious. Neutrino degeneracy pressure is crucial, an initial condition. Do neutrino stars exists? Of course not. A 1eV neutrino in gravitating would create a halo around a galaxy, kiloparsecs in extent. It couldn't form a star of 1 solar mass (2*10^30kg)let alone a galaxy ca 2*10^41kg. Each cubic metre of space collapsing from a numerosity of 410million neutrinos/m^3 of an endless continuum at 2.73 Kelvin eventually at best to form a star with a 5700 Kelvin continuum.
I would do back of the envelope calculations (literally so., I have piles of them; why waste costly A4 sheets, and come back after a few months and start again from first principles, attacking the problem from more angles than Linda Lovelace. I was a bounce universe, several of them and would come to the same conclusion. I was always disatisfield. The entropy problem and than the nucleosynthis of H and He etc and the Li problem. The reverse reaction envisagd as symmetrically reversable. A few days later in maybe May I returned and got out the blank envelopes accrued. I don't get much mail anymoreapart from the IR etc. I was about to draw a few diagrams and relist the 12 problems of the standard model, knowing full well I'd replicate at best previous doodlings. "Graham-try a bottom up approach" in a different voice to my mind's eye voice.
"What do you mean? -I've done it before" I spoke out loud. Silence no answer. I never do get an answer. Once before I received an answer many years before in my 50's " No-one is interested Graham". This time it wasn't so esoteric. Many are indeed interested and to be politically and polite, this photon neutrino cosmic bath was absolutely rubbished 7 years ago, that caused Marni angst and depression. I'm thicker skinned, it's par for the course, maybe pennance.
A cold start to the universe you mean , forget conventional bounces and scavage what is useful.
Degeneracy mass in Planck units for a 1meV neutrino, msubscript planck mass cubed/1meV squared.
Wait on a collapsing cloud in my lenticular cloud would first generate lepton pairs, charged lepton pairs. What's the degeneracy pressure for pair stability(instability). There's no feedback mechanism. It's a star, a big one ca. 200 solar masses. This was something I knew about loosely, the bare bones. It's fast, in one second an adiabatic transition at constant entropy. That's a hypernova. It's rare but come in the early universe. I needed more facts. But type 1's and even rarer hypernova leave a signature. The H/He core and metals cause the collapse and rebound. All protons are converted via SU(2)and the weak force into neutrons. 90% of the total energy from gravitational collapse radiates as relavistic neutrinos. Ni and Co isotopes abound for a month, their gamma ray photons thermalise. Weinberg and Hoyle sought to find a way of thermalysing photons to the cmb temperature and failed miserably. There are several classes of hypernova, although few are known. There is one class in the corner of the plots and low <1ppm metallicity(meaning all elements beyond He) where 50% of the energy released are gamma bursts and neutrinos. After a month a gaseous envelope remains but only consists of H and He. It doesn't happen often. By 2012 myself, Robert Gagliana and a few others codiscovered 151 type 1's in one years. I think it's still a one all time record. We saw no Hypers. So they are rare. Neutrino degeneracy doesn't lead from a core bounce off a H He core. Overcoming neutrino degeneracy pressure would lead to a black hole, not from baryonic matter but neutrino matter. But particle pairs are created at rest whenever the energy surpasses enough energy to form the pair. That's not just L protons and R antiprotons but their chiral particles, the R forms. Rather than accept that parity is violated in our universe, we can regain it in this Ur star. Parity is regained not lost. If Radan is correct then this is a moment of creation. At the proton pair production at ca. 10^12 Kelvin there is a mighty explosion, not a bounce, the L proton emerge from antidS into our world. Their opposite antimatter partners are destined to the pit, new blackhole. It doesn't happen once, it happens all the time. not in a central location in adS space; that's highly improbable. These first stars break the symmetry of the ads sea; start time's arrow and pick out a direction. appended to Birkhoff's geometric Law, abeit based upon istropy and homogeneity, this picks out a direction in space and and in time , as in a lenticular cloud over Andalusia.
Time's arrow in the reverse direction is a Radan Hadjukovic black hole which will rapidly evaporate within millions rather than billions of years for a 1meV neutrino.
The H and He observed envelope with no metallicity surrounding the hypernova remnant isn't relic at all; it's new baryonic matter. Hoyle in his steady state model, and which isn't at all appropriate here generates new matter every where at all times. ie. in the wrong place.
Perhaps the filament galactic plate boundaries represent regions where spacetme is not bent by the presence of matter and mass energy but is destroyed! and new Lbaronic matter created. These millisecond gamma ray bursts are isotropic and an almost daily occurrence. It would be nice to have a constant volume process where spacetime is destroyed amongst the filaments but created in the voids. It's from these highly infrequent daily hypernova bursts in any region that create the baryons from which later stars of average 1 solar mass evolveand then galaxies evolve and ultimately evaporate. This would answer the problem of the locale of antimatter. It's all around us in the galaxy, but in blackholes; it may at least in part solve the DM enigma/mystery.
As for Lorentz violation. I've not violated it at all. I've destroed a fraction of space time. The Earth in its history has destroyed about a 1000 metric tonnes mass energy equivalent of space. Space is relative and so is time but spacetime is absolute and can be retained by generating new spacetime in those 500 million light year voids, which disturbingly appear to increase, have not settled down , they have increased four fold, too much to have attained such size in 15 billion years. Of course the infill of 1000 tonnes of cold neutrino dust is the same order as meteoritic dust on a daily basis, yet it enough to close the universe. The axis of evil dosn't appear to be a local effect of the Great Wall or the Virgo Cluster nor of the need to envisage a multiverse unless these domains line up with the poles of the our axis. The photon neutrino field may break the symmetry of the antideSitter cloud, in the like manner that our gravitational field breaks the symmetry to give a lenticular cloud, and rain falls out as baryonic water dust or rain. Same equations different interpretation, obviously speculative but nuts! rubbish it if you will. It's a scientific explanation, a theory or hypothesis if you will but I see and feel a wry smile, a chortle from those now departed. This is science, this is how we think to a greater or lesser extent,modesty should not be abused. It is a radical departure from conventional thinking. Seven years ago I proposed a radical reinterpretation of the BB and disillusioned by vile invective I likened some to proponents of the phlogiston theory. My apologies, I was too rude.
Apologies Mitchell but you asked some quite simple questions that required this lengthy monologue to help the lay reader. Best wishes and the hrlp you have given to Marni over the years.
Apologies too for not editing this too long ad lib reply
Lubos protests fervently and inaccurately. https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/10/anti-inflation-quacks-supported-not-by.html
Leave his virulent anti-feminist,potentially libellous abuse aside Andrew and concentrate upon his position.
Like Luther before him he stands upon firm ground and defends these big number "sacrements". We are talking cosmology- that's 10^11 stars per galaxy, 10^11 galaxies, recently increased to 10^12, tenfold greater than Dirac's and Hoyle's Big Numbers. You are also in the BN game. Perhaps 40 billion of us; that's homo sapiens have existed in the last, who knows, I guess say 100,000years. What makes them and more importantly for you and me so unique? As for myself my genetic future is shaky; my mother's mitochondrial line has expired, no offspring from my sole sister and my surname proves the law of disappearing surnames. We play these BN games in many disciplines. The bottom line for many of us I exist, that's it , that's enough; "ego sum ergo est!
Imagine I toss a ball up into the air many times; I mean a huge number of times. It takes a long time to do this, namely 10^121 times, and over a huge time period, in our case 14 billion years. We note that for each throw the ball's trajectory reaches a maximum height and then falls back, 50% of the time. In the other 50% cases the ball never returns. Of course we know from Newton's law of gravity, such cases have exceeded escape velocity from Earth. In only one instance of our throws does the ball hesitate and actually stop for one fleeting instance of time before returning.
This is the scenario which Lubos and ourselves adress, where Big Lambda =1 and space is flat. The reason why this and other such cosmology numbers are either so huge or so incredibly tiny is because the gravitational force is so tiny in comparison with the other forces of nature; the electric force, the weak force and strong force.
Cosmologists are very thin on the ground, always were so, perhaps thirty of them , 90% dead and and exinct. By comparison there are many thousands of particle physisicists and an equivalent order of string theory theorists, Calabi Kaluza Klein hopefullae, the latter who consider even large BNs, 10^3000 . Lubos is their saviour, and so is John Baez in his thread.
One second after the BB, whether it's Inflation(s), ekpyroticisms, bounces etc in abundances Big Lambda is also 1 but the combinations we address is much reduced, perhaps 10^50.
Even on a hot day we all know why the soup served us is hot and it doesn't require much gumption to understand this. I approached Lubos's reasoning from the approach that a theorist can always juggle initial conditions and tacit assumptions to provide logically consistent interpretations that justify his/her existence and necessary financial funding in difficult economic times. What fuelled the religious wars and former crusades? Indulgencies were part of it, a ca. 10% tax upon wealth. Scientists need substance to survive. Alfred Russell, malnourished and feverished, discovered a thin edge of life's wedge and applied a big lever, the impact of which Darwin quickly exploited and realised the significance of hot soup.
Late in life I came to appreciate the virtues of gazpacho, after deprecating it for so long. Cold soup destroys BNs.
Imagine a time when only U1*SU(2) existed. When the universe was devoid of baryons, when a vast abyss was composed of photons and uncharged leptons, represented by Smoot's face of God, much to his chagrin. A timelss era at thermodynamic equilibrium with no direction for time's arrow. A space we would descibe as antidesitter with a negative BL, that although at equilibrium would collapse in part, not so the photons, but a trace mass energy component that represents Einstein's cosmolgy with a faint trace of matter stuff in deSitter space. Newton thought of such stuff as fine dust, that it would collapse. Einstein sidestepped the problem by emptying space of all matter, all mass energy. He could have claimed his model predicted an expanding or contracting universe. Either way he would have been correct.
An antideSitter universe of U1*U(2) will collapse and by neutrino degeneracy pressure will create leptogenesis including charged leptons and by 1 second will evolve to include SU(3). Such a timeless cold gazpacho universe would require a mass >10^54kg, and a tiny gravitational pre existing force, little explored presently. within this primordial first arrow, when time was born, a mass of 10^32kg would form Locally, the first hyper supernova type star in which the first baryons were formed.Nucleosynthesis of H,He and Li commenced but the matter antimatter asymmetry exploded the neutrino star , matter ejected and antimatter destined for the first mini black hole . The process may have continued manyfold globally, perhaps 10^120 fold, beyond our horizon into what some describe as a multiverse.
Thanks for the extended reply, Graham. I had meant to respond but I have been busy with non-cosmological physics. But I'm sure I'll return to this topic.
Graham, I found you at last! Hope you are well. No comment on my own situation. I have just written a paper to show Mitchell et al how it can all work with his precious AdS stuff ...
http://vixra.org/abs/1711.0119
@Marni I'm delighted to see your comment. I hadn't seen you out there for a while. I'll check out that paper.
Andrew, thank goodness you are here with Graham. Please tell him to check out my new blog. Forget trying to contact me by email.
http://arcadiangravity.typepad.com/blog/
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