At 12/7/04 08:30 PM, Master_Unlucky wrote:
Gladly. You know the big bang theory? Well, if you understand how it works, you realize that it would require a tremendous amount of energy to create everything. God?
heres part of a site that explains what my beliefs of how the big bang happened.
As a particle physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator back in the late 1970s, Guth never imagined that he would wind up making a profound contribution to the field of cosmology. But while at Stanford, Guth found himself working on a problem that lay at the intersection between the two scientific fields. In working on the problem, Guth focused his attention on the incomprehensibly tiny and hot patch of spacetime that was the early universe. There would have been no matter in this patch — spacetime would have consisted of a vacuum. Why study a patch of empty space?, you might ask. Well, a vacuum is not really empty. Like a sail billowing in the wind, the fabric of spacetime in a vacuum actually is roiled by quantum fields.
As Guth knew, the grand unified theories, or GUTS, of particle theory predicted that the vacuum of the early universe would have been dominated by particularly energetic fields. As these primordial “scalar” fields fluctuated, their potential energy would have risen and fallen. Guth realized that it was theoretically possible for the potential energy of the fields to have gotten temporarily “stuck” at a high value. Admittedly, this was an assumption. But when Guth worked through its implications, he stumbled onto inflation.
His calculations showed that stuck scalar fields would have caused a tiny bubble of “false vacuum” to nucleate from the primordial patch of spacetime. The amazing thing about the bubble, Guth saw, was that it would have contained a huge amount of antigravitational energy.
Although this idea may seem unbelievable, it’s actually in accord with standard particle theories. Here’s how it works:
Since an ordinary vacuum contains energy in the form of quantum fields, gravitational energy must be present as well. To understand why, it helps to remember Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2. According to the equation, energy (“E”) and the mass of matter (“m”) are really two forms of the same stuff. So if matter, such as planet Earth, exerts a gravitational pull, so must energy. In other words, the energy-containing quantum fields of an ordinary vacuum exert a gravitational pull, albeit a weak one.
But when Guth used Einstein's relativity equations to see what happen inside a bubble of false vacuum, he found that the gravitational energy would have the opposite effect of ordinary gravity. In other words, this gravity would push, not pull — it would, in essence, be a powerful of antigravity.
Starting out as small as one billionth the size of a proton, the initial bubble of false vacuum would have doubled in size many times in an incomprehensibly short interval, propelled in this exponential growth by the antigravity. According to one inflation model, in just 10-35 seconds, the bubble would have grown to the size of a basketball. And some inflation models predict far larger growth than that, perhaps as large as 101012 centimeters in diameter. That exponential number is a one followed by a trillion zeroes. (To print that many zeroes would require more than a million average size books.) Amazingly, if this picture of inflation is correct, it means that the portion of the universe we observe today is just an infinitesimally tiny mote compared to the whole.
The bubble of false vacuum would have had another peculiar property as well. According to particle theory, as the bubble expanded, the density of the energy within it actually would have remained constant. To picture this, imagine an inflating balloon. If the density of air inside is to be maintained, the total amount of air must be increased. Similarly, to maintain the same density of energy within the expanding bubble, the total energy must be increased — and by a huge amount, because the inflating bubble is growing exponentially. This theory seems to be saying that energy was created from nothing. And, in fact, Guth calls inflation the “ultimate free lunch.”
“It may sound as if I wasn’t there in my physics class when they talked about the conservation of energy,” Guth jokes. “But I was.” During inflation, he says, “the total energy of the system is conserved.” The enormous positive energy that builds up with ferocious speed during inflation creates a precisely balancing amount of negative gravitational energy (the ordinary attractive kind). “And so the net probably is zero,” Guth says.
Eventually (meaning in a very tiny fraction of a second), the false vacuum would have decayed, Guth realized. As this happened, the enormous energy that had been accumulating within the false vacuum would have been suddenly released, creating an exploding fireball of radiation and hot particles.