Inflaton, Mother of the Universe 163
quantalm writes "Forget the god particle, we're talking about the universe's particle mother. The theory of supersymmetry has rolled out two new ideas about the particle that puffed spacetime up from smaller than a proton to bigger than a soccer ball: it could be the 'unified particle' of Grand Unified Theories or a smaller-scale version that could be tested at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN."
No! Don't use "inflaton" as a particle name! (Score:1, Insightful)
Every time I see it, my brain will scream "Typo!"
Re:Prior to the expansion (Score:2, Insightful)
What is this time you speak of at those moments?
Oh wait...
Re:inflaton? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway just .02 cents.
OR PERHAPS $20! You won't know until you look.
Re:inflaton? (Score:2, Insightful)
There might or might not be a $20 bill in my wallet; I won't know for certain until I look for it?
The likelihood of there NOT being a $20 bill in your wallet approaches infinity for the cube of the number of women in your life.
Or something
Re:inflaton? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, cash behaves fairly classically. It's the rest of the economy that's quantum. For example, your house might or might not be worth $200,000. You won't know for certain until you try to sell it.
Re:inflaton? (Score:3, Insightful)
Deflation is bad for anyone who has any debt, which is an awful lot of people. The amount you owe is specified in nominal dollars, so deflation means you have to pay back a greater real value than you would otherwise.
It's also bad for anyone who runs a business, or works for a business, which again is an awful lot of people. Deflation -- or rather, the expectation of more deflation to come -- makes people less willing to spend money. I don't want to buy ten widgets for $10 today if I think I can get eleven for the same price tomorrow. So the widgets don't sell, the widget vendor gets desperate and drops his prices, and now he has to cut wages or lay off employees, and the cycle continues.
Re:Brief(!) Explanation of Inflation (Score:3, Insightful)
"black hole hits critical mass"
What mass is this? How do you fix the scale?
"black hole explodes"
By what mechanism? How does a trapped surface become untrapped? Where does the mass go if the region is still dense enough to cause a trapped horizon, how can it 'explode'? ...
"stars coalesce along with planets from gas and matter in the expanding galaxy"
Actually planets come from exploded stars.
"Gravity, though seemingly weak, eventually slows the galaxy down enough to where it begins contracting again."
It's more than that - it's the entire universe. Except, that's only if the universe is above a critical density, i.e. we're in a closed universe. Which we don't know. In fact, for some reason the rate of expansion appears to be accelerating.
Anyone can have a crazy guess about how the universe works. The science part is formulating this in a rigorous manner, fitting it with existing knowledge and making testable predictions.
Re:Inflationary theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Inflation didn't begin one planck time after the big bang. So far as we can tell, it was more like 10^6 planck times. (See Mukhanov http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0503203 [arxiv.org] or Rindler's book on cosmology). There certainly are useful models for this phase too - various string theories, ekpyrosis, loop gravity are amongst the candidates. Also your statement about 'quantum foam' is gobbledygook - a 'non-zero sum' of what? Energy? Mass? Perhaps you're trying to say that there is matter associated with empty space, a la cosmological constants etc?
I'm afraid I'm also going to have to jump on statements like "As you approach T=0, the rate of change of time also approaches zero."
Rate of change of time with respect to what exactly? dt/dt =1 by definition, so what is time changing with respect to? Hawking most certainly does NOT support the idea that there was no big bang or no time for it to take place - in fact the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems rather prove that GR predicts that not only was there a big bang, but it happened a finite amount of proper time ago. "Likewise time follows a parabolic path" - parabolic with respect to what other parameter? The whole point of GR is that we can change coordinates and reparametrize as necessary (see rindler coordinates for black holes, for example, or proper-time descriptions of cosmology). Therefore the singularity can certainly be placed at a finite point on (the boundary of a) space-time manifold.
Hydrogen bomb per cubic centimeter doesn't even come close to the energy scale you're looking at - it's more akin to all the matter in our galaxy being packed within the size of an atom. I'm afraid your post is mostly wrong - where are you getting your material from?