Backtracking 1

If you couldn’t tell, yesterday I went and talked to my cosmologist friend. It was rather ‘interesting.’ I learned quite a bit, and hopefully I shall continue to learn more. But to continue…we shall start with our timeline of the universe. But I think we shall go backwards…start with the present. So we have this universe. We can only see a small part of it (because of our horizon), and I’ve included a picture of what it looks like (it’s on a logarithmic scale). And if you download Google earth, it has a sky function and you can zoom in and see all the stars, it’s very fun. But anyway, when we take a catalog of the red shifts and the things we see it appears the things are moving away from us. But we already knew this from Hubble. But what we’ve found recently is that those things are moving away from us at faster and faster speeds. This is a bit strange cause you would think that after the big bang and inflation stuff would start slowing down. But what we are seeing now, with our infinitely advanced technology, is that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. And they are going really really fast. They are actually leaving our horizon. And you know what this means, this means they are going faster than the speed of light! Yep space, as we speak may be expanding faster than the speed of light and leaving our horizon and thus, our field of vision. This is the universe we have right now.

Inflation 8 / WHAAAAAAA?!

STOP THE PRESSES! Hold the phone! Take a step back! Ya know that whole thing about nothing going faster than the speed of light, yeah, well that’s not quite true! I know, crazy! Psycho! I’m in shock. But it turns out that space can exceed the speed of light. (For those of you who have no idea what is going on, general relativity states that nothing goes faster than the speed of light, and this is a very widely known and accepted principle, so that’s why I’m freaking out). General relativity dictates what goes on within space-time but it turns out it doesn’t dictate the expansion of space itself. So ya know how I was asking about why the horizon problem is solved by inflation well this is exactly why! Its cause space expanded outside our horizon (which is caused by light) and then it is slowly been coming back into our view (if we neglect the expansion of the universe, we’ll get to this later). Was this common knowledge? Did other people know this! Was I left alone in the dark on this (yes that was a stupid pun). I’m still in shock over this.

Why the IRS doesn't like me

You will have to forgive my sudden absence. It would appear that the IRS dislikes my birth date and I was summoned to ‘correct’ the ‘mistake.’ Even with my unyielding insistence on the truth of the date, they said I needed to change it or I would be sent to court. So I changed it. According to the government I was born in 1944 and am 65. It was quite an unpleasant weekend, but I made it through. And I have decided on something. I’m going to get help from an actual cosmologist on this inflation issue I am actually going to ask someone who knows what they are talking about it. Hopefully this will lend me a bit more information as to how and why inflation actually happened. And when I figure out the answer to those questions I will be sure to let you know. Until then I think it would be fruitful to move on to something else. I was thinking that we could explore the timeline of things a little better. We brushed over it to get a context for inflation but I think it merits a better exploration so this is what I shall be proceeding with. And for your viewing pleasure I have included a lol cat. Have a pleasant Sunday.

Inflation 7

Ok today we tackle the flatness problem, which is also solved by inflation (supposedly). It’s actually really, really simple when you take all the math out of it. Ed’s text has a considerable amount of math in it but I don’t know where it was derived from so I’m not gonna go there. But there is a simple explanation, and here it is. Inflation just stretches out the universe to its current flat state. It’s like if you have a balloon that got stuck behind the TV after the birthday party a month ago; ya know how it’s all wrinkly and bunchy. Well, if you take that balloon and somehow manage to untie it and blow it up some all the wrinkles will come out of it. This is what happened with the early universe. It may have been all wrinkly at the begging but then it got stretched in inflation and became flat again. That’s all there is to it (ok not really, there’s a lot of math but…we can worry about that later…maybe).

Inflation 6

So where were we with the inflation thing? Oh yes, so I in the last entry I explained how inflations fixes the horizon problem. And now we have an explanation for why it fixes the monopole problem. Oh I should explain where I am getting my information from, shouldn’t I? Well, right now, on inflation, I’m mainly pulling from two sources, the Wikipedia article on inflation, and a text book on cosmology by some guy named Edward Harrison. But anyway, back to the monopole problem. So, apparently, according to Edward, the monopoles do exist they are just really rare and hard to find. In fact, there should be about one of them or less per galaxy! But the way inflation fixes the problem is not settling well with me. I think I need to more fully understand the math associated with it, but here’s what I got so far. Ok so we have a bit super cooled vacuum right before inflation. And there are a lot of monopoles. A LOT of monopoles. But then inflation starts and the universe expands really fast and it shoots these monopoles really far apart. So they are a lot more dilute then they were. That’s about it. Yeah…it is still very unsettling to me that this would be the answer. If there were a lot of them then there would still be a lot of them they would just be spread out. I don’t get it. But if any of you do please enlighten us! Or even if you don’t understand please comment, just to say hi! Please! I’m begging you! PLEASE COMMENT!

God's Aside 2

So… say there is this God who created everything, implying he is responsible for the big bang. So he invented space, time, physics, energy, and all that stuff in one big shebang. As far as we can tell, there is a whole lot of structure and precision involved in this creation. And math! There is a lot of math. A lot of really complicated, beautiful math. And he invented it all. And human life…well, perhaps I shouldn’t get into that. Save that for another day. Yeah. Another day. But he made it all so that we could understand it. Or maybe not, maybe we don’t understand any of it. Perhaps all of physics is just flawed. I was reading a book a while back in which the author, Joao Magueijo, commented, "For all we know the universe is not homogeneous at all, but is a fractal. If this is true, burn this book, forget about Big Bang cosmology, and start crying convulsively." Well perhaps that is it. Perhaps this God is eons above our ability to comprehend and we are just grasping at all the wrong things. Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Inflation 5

So, to continue where we left off yesterday what happened with inflation was kind of strange. So at the beginning right before inflation began, let’s say the whole universe is the size of Wal-mart. When our universe begins we have someone in the food section, you are in the men’s wear, someone else in the garden section and someone in hardware. So like I explained yesterday we have this horizon that you can’t see outside of like in the first picture. Inside your view are 2 of the 3 other people. Then inflation starts and the universe start expanding. Space-time carries the people outside of your horizon when Wal-Mart is expanding like in picture 2 (you can't see the difference unless you click on the pictures). Then in picture 3 we see the people come back into view as the horizon expands. If you will recall this was the issue with the horizon and homogeneity problems. Our question before was, how come things that never had contact can have the same properties. Well the answer that arises from inflation is that they were in contact at one point in time, before inflation. Then after inflation the things that were in contact suddenly weren’t, and as the horizon expands those areas come back into view and like magic they have the same properties. Ha ha there’s no magic! It’s physics! But I still have some questions. The horizon is made by light and in inflation the universe has expands beyond the horizons that means the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, which is totally against the laws of special relativity. But i don’t really know. Perhaps we shall see tomorrow??