Why is there anything at all?

HANDOUT #5

We return to the question of how did the universe begin. With general relativity alone, Hawking and Penrose showed the universe traces back to a singularity. Recall that GR involves gravity and QT does not. QT and GR are incompatible. This singularity is not location in time or space. This singularity is all there at the time of the BB. Shortly after the BB, the universe was in thermal equilibrium, extremely hot but extremely smooth. It did not have a random distribution of temperature. Shortly after the BB, the universe was doing what relativity predicts, but at the beginning we dont know what was going on. But space has a curvature according to GR and it has a wave function according to QT. For these to interact, we need a theory that unites GR and QT. But we still have to account for the low entropy of the early universe. Why is it smooth? Maybe it just is, but that is not a very satisfying explanation. What we really need to do is bring gravity into the picture. We need a theory of quantum gravity. One possibility is that universes are constantly being created in some sort of ground space, so to speak. Universes keep bubbling up and either all are subject to the same physical laws but with different initial conditions, or they can have different physical laws, but there are so many of them that it is likely that one of them looks like ours. M-theory, a generalization of string theory, has around 10^500 different solutions to its equations and each of these might represent a different universe. One interesting facet of M-theory is that GR can be derived from it. But 10^500 is still not infinite, even if every possible solution represents an existing universe. Moreover, the laws and initial conditions cannot simply be arbitrary because they interact in so many ways. (See notes from Holt.) Furthermore, how does a universe get started? The Measure Problem, as opposed to the Measurement Problem, is that anything that is possible recurs an infinite number of times. So if our universe is possible, there are infinitely many universes that look exactly like ours. We may have a universe that is cyclic. It expands, contracts to a point, and then bounces again. But the new universe may look nothing like the universe that preceded it. Also, current observations indicate that the universe will expand forever. Even without dark energy there is not enough matter in the universe to cause it to contract eventually, i.e., for gravity to overcome the force of expansion. Where did the energy to get the BB started come from: Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle. But Alan Guth proposed an inflaton field that expands a baby universe extremely rapidly for an extremely brief period just after its birth, after which some of the field condenses into ordinary energy. Space is expanding far more rapidly than the speed of light. Space can do this, but signals cannot. Why did the BB happen? Tracing the universe back from its current state and taking into account all of the evidence for the BB, either the BB, or something similar to it, almost certainly happened. But here are some of the questions that come to mind: First, what energy drove the BB and how much matter or energy was necessary at the beginning

in order to generate what we see today: 100 billions galaxies each containing about 100 billion stars, plus lots of other stuff, including dark matter and dark energy? Second, why was our early universe so uniform, or, as we discussed earlier, why was the entropy of the early universe so low? Third, are the particular physical laws, particles, and constants we see necessary or was this just random? Fourth, what laws were there in whatever space, emptiness, or whatever that allowed the BB to happen? Fifth, is our universe just one of a possibly infinite number of universes, or is it unique? Clearly, the answers to these questions are interrelated. We must realize that we may never be able to definitively answer some of them, e.g., if there are additional universes, we may have no way to test for their existence. It takes very little matter/energy to create the universe. Example: Stretching a perfectly elastic rubber band seems to use up energy, but there is exactly as much energy at the end as before, The gravitational potential energy of the universe may balance the energy needed for the BB. Matter, according to GR, is just condensed energy. In an absolutely smooth universe, the total energy is 0. The energy of space-time itself, depending on how space is curved, might be negative enough to balance the initial energy of the BB, giving a net energy of 0. Alan Guth proposed the theory of inflation. This theory proposes that for an incredibly short time incredibly close to the time of the BB, the universe expanded at an accelerated rate greater than the speed of light. There was an inflaton field which started the expansion and something ended it, although it may still be going in parts of the extended universe. That is, the expansion might have frozen out, changed state, for part of the inflaton field and kept going, continuing to create additional universes. What problems concerning the universe does inflation solve? uniformity, missing magnetic monopoles, the Past Hypothesis, why our universe is the way it is(only one of possibly infinitely many possible universes). What it does not solve: what turned the field on and off so we got what we got, how to test it