Inflation 1

Yes! My ‘But wait’ series has been building up to something. There is a theory which solves some of the problems we’ve discussed here. It’s called inflationary theory and it was developed 1980. It was invented in order to address the monopole problem but it also, inadvertently addresses the flatness and horizon problems. The reader’s digest version goes like this. After the universe cooled down a little, but before the particles and anti-particles started to form, something weird happened with physics. Have you ever seen a very very still pond the morning after a frost? Well that pond is supercooled. Its actual temperature is below freezing but it hasn’t started to form ice yet. Well the same thing happened with the universe. It cooled to the point where it should have started ‘freezing’ or particles should have started forming but they didn’t. I don’t know why, but they didn’t. It just kept on cooling and settling. Then all at once with a big cosmic ripple the energy condensed into matter. You know the equation E=mc^2. Well that says that if for instance you put in 15 units of energy and convert it to mass you get in 15/c^2 units of mass. C stands for the speed of light, 300000000 or 3*10^8 meters per second. So 15 divided by that is a really small number, a really small number. So when the energy started forming into mass the energy in the universe stated to drop dramatically. But then something else happened. When particles are formed they like to go together, to form pair or triples and when they find a group they really like and want to settle into, they release energy. So there was this tidal wave of energy like in the picture, or at least that is what I got from my little bit of reading on the subject. And this fixes our problems…but I don’t know how yet…and I’m out of space today, so perhaps I will tackle this tomorrow.