2009/9/14 [email protected] <[email protected]>: > Yet that fails to answer my initial query. Before the big bang, what > substance was there for energy to exist in?
It is called a quantum vacuum, or space-time foam. The space-time foam that gives rise to universes is infinite in both space and time. It has always been. It is what many call 'nothing' but in actuality there is no 'nothing'. The energy in the space-time foam comes from the curvature. This curvature creates less-than proton sized bulges in the foam. Once a bulge starts it only takes 10^-42 of our seconds to turn into a proton-sized bubble and break free of the foam. The bubble then begins a rapid expansion and that is where the 'big bang' begins. To make this clearer, imagine that you have a pot of boiling water on the stove, look down into it and you will see all these tiny little bulges on the bottom that break free, turn into bubbles and expand as they rise to the surface. That is analogous to how universes are created. Millions of universes are created constantly from this foam. Some are failures and disappear shortly after breaking free. Some are successful and begin expanding and creating elements and chemicals and some end up like ours, capable of developing carbon life forms that evolve and develop as we have. These universes eventually run out of expansion, grow cold and dead and decay, their constituents rejoining the curvature of space-time called 'nothing'. So, that is it in a nutshell. Just an eternal, infinite, curved 'nothing' spitting out universes like there is no tomorrow. This not conjecture, all of it can be derived from Einstein's equations written in 1916!! There is experimental evidence of ex nihilo spontaneous creation of virtual particles. This is becoming the dominant view of physicists from Hawking to Penrose and Stenger. In general relativity, spacetime can be empty of matter or radiation and still contain energy stored in its curvature. Uncaused, random quantum fluctuations in a flat, empty, featureless spacetime can produce local regions with positive or negative curvature. This is called the "spacetime foam" and the regions are called "bubbles of false vacuum." As the bubble universe expands, a kind of friction occurs in which energy is converted into particles. The temperature then drops and a series of spontaneous symmetry breaking processes occurs, as in a magnet cooled below the Curie point and an essentially random structure of the particles and forces appears. Inflation stops and we move into the more familiar big bang. To Quote Dr. V. Stenger: "The forces and particles that appear are more-or-less random, governed only by symmetry principles (like the conservation principles of energy and momentum) that are also not the product of design but exactly what one has in the absence of design. The so-called "anthropic coincidences," in which the particles and forces of physics seem to be "fine-tuned" for the production of Carbon-based life are explained by the fact that the spacetime foam has an infinite number of universes popping off, each different. We just happen to be in the one where the forces and particles lent themselves to the generation of carbon and other atoms with the complexity necessary to evolve living and thinking organisms." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
