On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Richard Ruquist <[email protected]> wrote:
> Please explain how you cannot sum all the energies in each branch. > Summing up the energies in every branch would be easy if the total energy in each universe is zero, and today it looks like it very well might be. But before you start adding up all the energy in a universe you've got to remember that energy can be positive or negative; mass/energy is positive and you can use it to perform work, but if something had negative energy I couldn't get any work out of it, I'd have to use work to do anything to it. Gravitational energy is negative, if I wanted to lift you out of the Earth's gravitational well and put you on the moon I would not get any work out of it, I'd have to use up work to do it. And it was found that if you add up all the positive energy contained in ordinary matter in the universe and then subtracted the negative energy that every particle has with every other particle you get a figure close to zero. If Dark Matter is added to the calculation things get even closer to zero and many strongly suspect is precisely zero. Think what this means, the total energy in the universe is zero. That's all fine for a universe that isn't accelerating but ours is, so what about Dark Energy? That's where the theory of inflation comes in. Einstein knew as far back as 1917 that mass\energy was not the only thing that can produce gravity, pressure can too, and pressure can be positive or negative. If you stretch a rubber ball in all directions it will be under negative pressure (also called tension) and according to Einstein such negative pressure will produce a small negative gravitational field pushing things apart. The idea is that VERY soon after the Big Bang the universe was full of a inflation field that had a enormous negative pressure, and this caused a enormous negative gravitational effect, which in turn caused the super fast expansion of everything. After a billionth of a trillionth of a second or so this field underwent a phase change and became something much less ferociously powerful but it still had a (much more modest) negative pressure so the acceleration of the universe became much more gentle. The really neat part is that when something that has a negative pressure expands it gains energy and the pressure becomes more negative, unlike things that have a positive pressure (like a gas) where expansion causes them to loose energy and the pressure to become less positive. So as the universe expands the pressure of the inflation field becomes more negative which creates a stronger negative gravitational field which causes the pressure of the inflation field become even more negative which creates a even stronger negative gravitational field which... So the universe expands faster and faster and all without violating the law of conservation on energy. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
