How big was the big bang ?
This is one of my popular talks and describes in detail the evolution of the
universe from the beginning to now and the future.
It is in three sections, the slides from the first from the beginning onwards
covering the period of inflation of incredibly rapid expansion which then
settled down as the universe went into energy balance. Its expansion was then
governed as is now, by a rate providing kinetic energy to exactly balance the
negative energy of gravity from all its mass, making it look Euclidian flat. In
the presence of gravity alone it would be curved like a sphere and eventually
collapsed back on itself due to the huge negative energy of gravity itself. It
is my belief that the overall energy is zero and always has been. Each phase
change represented a change in symmetry, which releases energy to appear in the
form of new families of particles and antiparticles in equal measure initially.
The analogy is formation of ice crystals from water on freezing. The water has
symmetry in all directions but the ice crystals have limited symmetry and
release energy at the same temperature in in their formation. Each crystal leads
to the formation of another one linked together, just like the cloning process
of particles forming in the early universe. In the reverse process of the
earlier analogy, it takes a lot of energy to turn ice at 0°C back into water ;
or for example a kettle of water at boiled at 100°C into steam at the same
temperature.
The initial rapid inflation insured that particles and antiparticles which
normally are in reality all the time being created out of the vacuum for an
instant before they self annihilate, had no chance of getting back together
during that period. The particle antiparticle binding energies were stretched to
the point of breaking and every time the energy went into creating more clones
so filling the vacuum. That is the essential creation process. The Inflation
period guaranteed any variation to be smoothed out except for very small quantum
fluctuations which led to the formation of its present structure.
At all times since inflation, the overall energy is zero, each phase change
released less and less
energy available for this process and eventually the electrical charge protons
and electrons combined to form neutral atoms, at which point the universe became
transparent with a final release of photon energy which is now seen through the
Doppler shift of the expansion in microwaves as the microwave background
radiation.
Discussing the structure of the universe, as the universe expands, chains and
ribbons of galaxies, through their gravitational attraction ,hold back the local
expansion meaning that the rest of the universe expands more rapidly leaving
larger and larger voids between the Galaxy chains.
The talk continues with missing mass, dark matter, and possible acceleration. It
concludes with various current theories, including multi-universes, dark energy,
and especially the anthropic principle in which we are active participants and
in particular how the universe is here because we are here to see it and how we
as observers, appear to influence the outcome of events.
To view some of the slides from the talk click here....
For some more details on cosmology you can download these articles which were
written for the Mathon Village magazine.