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."
inflaton? (Score:5, Funny)
i don't know about unifying electromagnetism and gravity, but it seems like someone just unified economics and quantum mechanics
just tell us how to avoid the deflaton particle for the next few years
Re:inflaton? (Score:5, Funny)
If those two particles meet, they don't cancel out - they actually cause a rift in the space-time continuum that is so catastrophic that it convinces people to take out sub-prime home equity loans.
Re:inflaton? (Score:5, Funny)
So that's where the money went: Into subprime space.
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Yeah, but property in subprime space is cheeeeeep!
Re:inflaton? (Score:4, Funny)
In subprime space, nobody can hear you default.
you've just described the quantum mechanics behind (Score:3, Funny)
the creation of the moron particle
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So all the big banks that had to be bailed out were the ones subject to the equal opportunity in lending rules Congress passed, right? Oh, wait, no 16 out of 17 of them were investment banks and primary insurance crafters that didn't offer any sub prime loans at all, and couldn't be pressured to offer more because that wasn't any part of their basic business. Blaming the whole debacle on Congress explains Fannie and Freddie, and One private lender out of 17 (It explains those three's problems to some extent
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unfortunately i do (Score:3, Interesting)
it was those quant assholes who got us into this mess
they used formulas extrapolating from cherry picked models to suggest that the economic universe could just go on inflating forever. big bang indeed
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704509704575019032416477138.html [wsj.com]
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Re:inflaton? (Score:5, Funny)
There might or might not be a $20 bill in my wallet; I won't know for certain until I look for it?
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Or, you know there's a bill in your wallet, but you won't know if it's a $20 or a $5 until you look at it.
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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
Never tell me the odds. (Score:2)
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
Don't you mean "approaches one"?
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You stole that joke from Bob [angryflower.com]. Buy the guy a beer, he needs one after the double-slit experiment!
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You got me thinking: Does Brett Favre read quantum physics books in his spare time?
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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.
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There might or might not be a $20 bill in my wallet; I won't know for certain until I look for it?
From this information I can infer you are married.
Re:inflaton? (Score:4, Funny)
There might or might not be a $20 bill in my wallet; I won't know for certain until I look for it?
No $20 bill... But my cat just died.
Thanks, a lot, jerk.
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Re:inflaton? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway just .02 cents.
OR PERHAPS $20! You won't know until you look.
Re:inflaton? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yep, I believe it. Money here one moment. Poof, gone the next. Gone into a Black Hole. Much Uncertainty. Confusing Boxes. Outcomes completely contrary to observation and common sense. Have to be an Einstein in statistics to grasp the concepts.
No doubt.
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Quantum Thermodynamics (another real theory) is much easier to understand and can be summed up as: "Eventually, everything is worthless."
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You want to avoid deflation?
You're stupid.
While very rapid deflation is bad (as markets cannot react instantly), deflation as a whole is in fact a good thing for everyone but the top 1% of wealthy people.
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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
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An awful lot of stupid people.
Debt is to be avoided like the plague.
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There are around 50 million mortgages in the United States. If everyone followed that philosophy, a lot fewer people would be able to own houses... or own cars, or start businesses and expand them, etc.
Like it or not, there is a place for borrowing, and we'd all be worse off without it. Well, maybe not the top 1% of wealthy people you mentioned earlier -- they can avoid debt like the plague, because they have cash in the bank to cover the expenses that ordinary people need loans for.
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There are around 50 million mortgages in the United States. If everyone followed that philosophy, a lot fewer people would be able to own houses... or own cars, or start businesses and expand them, etc.
Protip: Those people are NOT able to own the houses or cars they bought. That's why they're in debt. That's why we're fucked.
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Bullshit. It just means they can't own it straight away. They might still be able to afford it over the long term.
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And I might be able to afford a McMansion.
The bank is willing to loan me the money, and I'm sure to get that promotion, and my wife's on the pill so no more kids, and my parents are nice and healthy, and I'm nearly done paying off my car...
Retards, the lot of you.
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Sure, you could save up your cash and buy a house when you're 60 instead of getting a 30 year mortgage when you're 30. But that means you lose the use of the house for those 30 years, and the money you save in mortgage interest, you lose in paying rent on another place for 30 years!
Likewise, you could save up your cash and expand your business 5 years from now instead of getting a loan and expanding today. But you might find that competitors have already taken your spot by then, either because they have mor
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Protip: You're a moron.
A 5 year loan is fine.
30 years is fine if you plan to WORK for 30 years, at your CURRENT salary, pay it off ON TIME, and STILL have enough money over the years to handle the $XX,XXX in expenses you WILL incur to cover medical expenses, car expenses, etc.
Every single person under the water right now bit off more than they could chew, and it's their own fault for being haphazard, ignorant, or plain fucking stupid.
Gradual deflation would NOT have a terrible impact on anyone in the middl
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Or anyone in a lot of debt, I imagine.
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i don't know about unifying electromagnetism and gravity, but it seems like someone just unified economics and quantum mechanics
just tell us how to avoid the deflaton particle for the next few years
Misused quantum mechanics: the branch of quantum physics that accounts for bullshit at the atomic level; an explanation of nonsensical beliefs based on a poorly understood field.
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Hopefully you are kidding, but just in case you are not:
Deflation is very very bad if you are in debt. It was also a huge issue during the Great Depression. A few bullet points from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Effects of deflation
1. Decreasing nominal prices for goods and services.
2. Cash money and all monetary items increase in real value over time.
3. Discourages bank savings and decreases investment.
4. Enriches creditors at the expenses
This just in from LHC.... (Score:4, Funny)
"Oops. Sorry about those extra universes that just leaked out."
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Freudian slip (Score:3, Funny)
My initial reading of the subject:
Inflation of Mother, like a Universe.
Re:Freudian slip (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Freudian slip (Score:5, Funny)
Your mom is so inflated, your dad had to roll her in flour and find the wet spot.
Nah, you need to go full on physics here.
"You mom is so inflated, your dad had to roll her up like a Calabi-Yau manifold and look for the Casimir effect!"
Thank you! Am I right? Huh? Huh? Am I? Huh?
Oh, shut up.
Re:Freudian slip (Score:4, Funny)
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Yo momma so fat that the only attraction anyone feels towards her is gravitational.
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i wrote these for a Fark thread a few days ago:
Yo mama so fat i swerved to miss her and ran out of dilithium crystals.
Yo mama so fat the guild navigator needed 30 kilos of spice to see around her fat ass.
Yo mama so fat her measurements are 36AU-26AU-36AU, and her other arm is just as big.
Yo mama so fat and so black she the missing dark matter.
Yo mama so ugly the universe is expanding to get away from her.
Yo mama so black her black body radiation is 0*.
* doesn't actually claim to understand black body radiat
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yeah, except that the universe tends to go to a steady state (the opposite of inflation)
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Yeah, accept the universe is accelerating (the opposite of going to a steady state).
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Yeah, accept...
Oh shit!
*runs from the grammar nazis*
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Why "mother"? (Score:2)
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During this period in the big bang, particles had not formed yet. If you view the universe at this stage as a single particle (which you could, since it contains all energy and mass in the universe in a single entity), it creates all the other particles, but more than that it is the beginning of our current universe.
AKA, the mother of the universe, mother of all particles, mother of all matter, etc.
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It's the particle that gave birth to the universe. From the very first sentence of TFA: "The inflaton particle is credited with generating the universe and fuelling its inflation."
Brief(!) Explanation of Inflation (Score:5, Informative)
The "inflation" we're talking about here is the accelerated expansion of the early universe. So, first off why do we need it?
It turns out that parts of the observable cosmic microwave background are 'causally disconnected'. This means that you take two patches of sky as observed at the time the CMB formed (300k years after the big bang, we now think - approximately 15 billion years ago) and track their behavior back to the big bang. In the normal models where the universe is full of dust or radiation they never were in contact in the past: Light from one area could never reach another. Why is this a problem? Because they are remarkably similar. They appear to have come into thermal equilibrium (same temperature) yet this shouldn't be possible if they were never in contact. So we need to have a method by which the universe expanded faster before this period.
There are a few ways to do this - one is a cosmological constant. But the problem with a constant is that it's constant - we should still see it today, and we don't. The universe is not expanding that fast anymore - the bounds we can place on the cosmological constant today put it well below the effect we want from inflation. What we need is something that acts like a cosmological constant for a while and then drops away. This is what inflationary models are all about. The inflaton is a theoretical particle that starts off behaving like the comsmological constant, but eventually decays into the matter we see today. We model this by a particle moving in a potential - think of a ball rolling on the side of a hill. How the inflaton behaves is all about the ratio of its kinetic to potential energy - high potential energy looks like a cosmological constant, high kinetic energy looks more like normal matter. (I can explain this in more detail if anyone's interested). So the ball rolls down the hill, losing potential, gaining kinetic (there's also friction from the expansion of the universe so it loses 'energy' overall) and hence our inflaton does exactly what we need - slowly changing from looking like a cosmological constant to normal matter. In theory too, it decays once it reaches the bottom of the hill, but no-one provides much of a model for this.
This is old (20-30 years old is old in theory standards) stuff from Linde, Mukhanov etc. No-one would take it seriously, except that when you calculate things from it, it works incredibly well - it's the source of http://xkcd.com/54/ [xkcd.com] - it's still controversial. Some people love it, others think it's a fudge and doesn't do much for you. The new stuff here is that there is a method being proposed by which a multiplet of supersymmetric particles (again, I can say a bit more but it's not my field) is shown to be able to act like the inflaton. Ie a stable state of multiple particles bound together could act this way, and could be found at the LHC. Now, that's a lot of 'could' - the usual inflaton mass is set to around 10^12 GeV - way above what the LHC can reach, and this is the same across most inflationary models. But if the LHC can see evidence of supersymmetry (again, another discussion, but it is thought to be likely that if supersymmetry is real then the LHC will see it) it might be able to at least give some credibility to some of these models of inflation.
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No-one would take [inflation] seriously, except that when you calculate things from it, it works incredibly well - it's the source of http://xkcd.com/54/ [xkcd.com]
Not quite. You don't need inflation to get the blackbody spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) observed by the COBE satellite, which is what the xkcd comic depcits. That's a prediction of plain vanilla Big Bang cosmology, with or without an early inflationary phase.
However, inflation does predict details in the CMBR angular power spectrum, the "acoustic peaks", which were observed by the later WMAP satellite. And it solves other "paradoxes", like the horizon problem you mention.
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You're right - it's a blackbody spectrum not the angular power spectrum. My mistake.
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Should have gone with
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/uploads/wmapspectrum.png [discovermagazine.com]
instead. Now that's a model that fits data! :)
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Light from one area could never reach another. Why is this a problem? Because they are remarkably similar. They appear to have come into thermal equilibrium (same temperature) yet this shouldn't be possible if they were never in contact. So we need to have a method by which the universe expanded faster before this period.
Maybe they have the same temperature because they were made/subject-to a similar environment, simply because they shared a similar history and so changed in similar ways.
Alternatively they could have been entangled (quantum spooky action at a distance), although the high energies would probably have broken entanglement, but maybe things were different back then.
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Similar environments and histories has been posited a number of times, but given just how similar the regions are and how many of them there are it doesn't seem likely. But more so, this only pushes the question further back: Why were their histories identical? Did they all start in roughly the same state? Why? And at the same time?
Entanglement requires causal contact. Two particles are entangled when they have been in contact, and then move apart, so this doesn't help.
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Ah, now you're into the fun stuff: Just about every physicist believes that general relativity will have to be modified by quantum mechanics at some stage and at least once you get to energy densities around the planck density (this value comes mostly from dimensional analysis - it's more of an order of magnitude thing). Since the standard big bang that results from GR has infinite density, we believe that corrections will happen before you get there - that quantum mechanical effects take place and that we
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> They appear to have come into thermal equilibrium (same temperature) yet this shouldn't be possible if they were never in contact.
This has always bothered me, and I'm certainly not trained in these disciplines so that may be the sole reason, but ... why should 2 areas *NOT* be the same temperature simply because they haven't "met"? It's impossible that 2 things in the early universe can't have *independently* arrived at the same state?
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Well, it's not just two areas, it's any two areas. If the model you're considering doesn't have inflation, the number of patches of sky that are causally past disconnected yet have the same temperature is of the order of a million. Two things independently reaching the same state is a curiosity (well, it depends on how close they are really, but we'll let that go for now). A million things on the other hand, well, that's more than just curious.
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I guess I haven't studied it enough and I don't have the requisite background. I understand what you're saying from a mathematical point of view, but I guess my gut just doesn't understand why something that expanded from ~the size of a proton can't show homogeneity without a hyper inflationary phase. I'll keep reading the comments here to try and get a sense of it. Thanks for your patience!
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I think the idea is that you need a mechanism whereby two objects close enough together to thermalize, are pushed far enough apart fast enough that they appear to be too far apart to have equalized.
I think.
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But 'coincidence' doesn't cut it for science - it's one hell of a coincidence that the temperature of the entire sky varies by less than one part in 10,000. It could be a coincidence that we orbit the sun and our angular momentum is constant, but as it turns out there are fundamental and simple laws governing this motion. Finding these laws is the job of science. As for another reason, yes there could be one but there aren't many hypotheses for what this other reason could be, and none that have been tested
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"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 mor
SUSY? (Score:2)
Re:I love scientists. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm Sparticles!
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No, I'm Sparticles!
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And so am I!
.
(Sparticles would have worked so much better in "Fires of Pompeii" -- so very much more Doctorish.)
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Inflationary theory (Score:4, Interesting)
Please correct me if I'm mistaken with any of this, but this is my understanding of its history. Earlier versions of the Big Bang theory did not include this rapid inflation in the earlier universe; the universe was said to expand at a more constant rate. However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model. So physicists decided to plunk down a mysterious inflationary phase into their models of the early universe, a concept with no known cause or explanation, but which made the CMBR fit with the Big Bang theory. However, it's a concept that to this day they're still trying to reconcile with the rest of observed physics, as this article shows.
Could the theory be true? Sure. But if it is, it's because those physicists got lucky with their educated guess on the matter. Other theories with much more solid backing have in the past been roundly disproven.
Re:Inflationary theory (Score:4, Informative)
I hear what you're saying. But the problem is, if the inflationary theory is false then we need some other mechanism to explain the cosmic background. Inflation solves the problem without breaking the speed of light or special relativity -- both of which are kind of important to keep around.
Inflation *could*, ultimately, be proven false. But if that happens it will topple a lot of important theories along with it. So you can understand why most physicists are assuming it's the correct model, and trying to figure out exactly how it happened.
Re:Inflationary theory (Score:5, Informative)
There are certainly alternatives to inflation that people do find attractive - ekpyrotic, cyclic or simply oscillatory universes for example can easily bring points into causal contact by extending the past of these points beyond where there would be a classical big bang. Various string models, and Loop Quantum Cosmology have methods for this (LQC has a really neat well understood bounce) and the idea goes back to Lemaitre's 'Phoenix Universe' ideas. However, inflation does more than just explain existing phenomena - it predicted a spectral index between 0.98 and 0.92, and COBE/WMAP bring it in at around 0.96. It also does a really good job of explaining structure formation. Now, that isn't to say that it's necessarily right, and that other theories couldn't do a similar thing, but inflation really does a good job. It's certainly far from perfect, numerous people have objections to it, but so far it fits the data we have.
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Mod Parent up (we don't fucking know but this theory predicted data better)
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Where on Earth did you ever get that idea? Inflation makes no such prediction. For example, Linde's "Hybrid" inflation model predicts a spectral index greater than 1.0, and is pretty much ruled out by WMAP. Similarly, so-called "Natural" inflation models can easily accomodate a spectral index as low as 0.7 or so. See for exa
Re:Inflationary theory (Score:5, Informative)
I should be clear: My experience is with scalar field inflation with a quadratic potential - the simplest models that are most common. Hybrid inflation can do almost anything, it's true.
My references for that statement:
Tegmark: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0410281 [arxiv.org]
Steinhardt: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507455 [arxiv.org]
I believe Mukhanov and Turok both talk about it too, though I can't find the references easily at the moment.
Re:Inflationary theory (Score:5, Funny)
I should be clear: My experience is with scalar field inflation with a quadratic potential
The world needs a lot more people who say things like this. :D
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There isn't necessarily an unknown mechanism that resulted in the background radiation pattern.
If there is no such mechanism, it merely means that our guesses about the universe prior to the earliest pictures we have are wrong.
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And that, it turns out, is how science works.
Nobody believes something until it fits the data.
As opposed to that other thing, whatchamacallit, "faith."
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Re:Inflationary theory (Score:5, Interesting)
However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model.
Actually you have that backwards, without inflation, the CMBR should be extremely irregular. There should be huge blotches of stuff all over. Think of a balloon filled with paint splattering on the floor - it doesn't create a fine coating all over the floor, it creates huge splatters here and there with huge gaps of nothing in between.
The CMBR, however, is extremely uniform. When you look at a picture of the CMBR, the variations in color are artificial (similar to the way the color nebulae from infra-red data) and represent extremely minute changes in radiation (you'll note there are no areas with no radiation, but there should be). The CMBR effectively shows a nice, even "coating" of radiation that covers the universe from one end to the other. This is disturbing, and cannot be explained by any physics we know of.
The only way to explain this is if the big bang wasn't an explosion (huge release, starts fast but decelerates quickly), but actually a controlled inflation - it had to start slow, accelerate, and then decelerate in order to produce the nice, even radiation we see. They had to accelerate the time-line of the Big Bang for a microsecond and then decelerate it immediately after in order to reproduce the uniformity seen in the CMBR. It's completely arbitrary, and has absolutely no grounding in physics, yet it's the only way to fit the physics we do know with the observations we see.
If you think you are disturbed by this, talk to a cosmologist or a physicist sometime. They absolutely hate having to change a model to fit observations without having any idea what is missing in their model to cause that change. It's like Dark Energy and Dark Matter, or the singularity of a Black Hole - cosmologists hate all of them. They use them, because it works, but they hate them all the same. They screw with their nice, neat physics.
Same thing with inflation - there is no known physical property that should cause inflation, yet inflation is the only way to explain the universe as it is now. It means there is something fundamental to the universe that we don't know or understand.
PS: Fun fact: if you tune an analog TV to an unused channel, something like 10% of the fuzz you see is caused by the CMBR.
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It's completely arbitrary, and has absolutely no grounding in physics, yet it's the only way to fit the physics we do know with the observations we see.
If you think you are disturbed by this, talk to a cosmologist or a physicist sometime. They absolutely hate having to change a model to fit observations without having any idea what is missing in their model to cause that change. It's like Dark Energy and Dark Matter, or the singularity of a Black Hole - cosmologists hate all of them. They use them, because it works, but they hate them all the same. They screw with their nice, neat physics.
Inflation is just the latest "cosmological constant". It doesn't make much sense, and I think those working in the field are fully aware of that. It tells us there's somthing fundamental lacking in our understanding, but offers no clue as to what that actually is. I guess every job has its frustrations.
Personally, I think inflation is a particularly silly idea, but then I don't have a better answer either, so I'll shut up now.
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Not quite. The Inflationary phase was anything but controlled. The current model predicts that between the initial Big Bang and the start of the inflationary phase (roughly one planck time), the universe expanded at some unknown rate. We can't observe the pre-inflationary phase, so there is no useful model for it. When the conditions for inflation were met, the Universe suddenly expanded at a truly fantastic rate (effectively faster than light). This inflationary phase not only generated an enormous amount
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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
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How do we know that the CMBR is not the result of another phenomenon? Could it be, for example, the result of the virtual particle soup that permeats the universe? Is there no alternative explanations for it?
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The universe was always as big as the whole universe, so how can it expand? How do we know we're not shrinking inside a fixed size universe?
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That's an interesting question to which an answer can take a few forms. One is that below describing the balloon. This would be a closed universe model (finite size, wraps around itself) such as a torus or sphere. However, suppose the universe is truly infinite - what does it mean to be expanding?
Well, suppose one can put a mark on two points in space, and watch them over time. To be expanding these two points will move apart, as will any two points in space. To do it a little more mathematically: Suppose I
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However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model. So physicists decided to plunk down a mysterious inflationary phase into their models of the early universe, a concept with no known cause or explanation, but which made the CMBR fit with the Big Bang theory.
Just to be clear: the CMBR itself and it's general characteristics were predicted in advance by the Big Bang Theory and the initial measurements of the CMBR were
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Ah, see, the problem is you've got wrong how the idea of inflation came about.
Basically, since the CMB is so uniform, the different parts of the cosmos must have been in contact at some point in the past. When you run the numbers, this cannot have been the case if the old big bang theory (a big explosion, followed by slowing in the rate of expansion due to gravity) were the case. Enter inflation. It solves the CMB uniformity problem.
But the CMB isn't completely uniform - there are fluctuations. Well, in
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What is this time you speak of at those moments?
Oh wait...
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Or perhaps neither time nor space existed within the universe before the big bang, as the universe existed only in the form of a singularity, and the big bang was nothing but a particular way of observing this singularity, so that the universe still exists in its singularity form, on a scale so small we can't even comprehend it.
Re:Has anything to come out of string theory ... (Score:5, Funny)
I think that there are some really interesting predictions of how gravity should behave on a submicron scale which could rule out (or in) large number of potential string theories.
Of course, while I can imagine that gravity could be tested on a submicron scale when I start to try and imagine what kind of experiment could be constructed that actually did that I start to flail about and gape and make little clucking noises. I expect there are a fair number of physics fellas doing the same.
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I don't claim to know a bean about this, but perhaps this paper indicates the issues and opportunities, and challenges!
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C0507252/papers/T032.PDF
Of course - it would take considerable time and effort to actually be able to say if the paper was sensible and meaningful, but I think that it appears to be an indication of the topic I was alluding to.
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Yes: We have conclusive proof that string theory leads to publications. :-)
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String theory hoven proven worthless. However, not all physicists were suckered into it, and so there's been cool stuff going on in other areas. The CMBR stuff that less to TFA, for example, I find exciting. It's cosmology, except wit 2 significant digits - I never expected to see that.
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Would that be an American Football or an European Football?
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Mod parent up 2 Interestons!