From: baez@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) Subject: Re: Why an expanding universe? Date: 11 Mar 2000 07:41:05 GMT Newsgroups: sci.physics.research Summary: [missing] In article <8ab5m0$j8g$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, wrote: >Recently, we seem to make an awful lot of conclusions about our >universe from astronomical observations - the universe is expanding, >accelerating its expansion, etc. However, as far as I know, we only >observe a tiny fraction of the universe, so tiny we don't even know >exactly how tiny it is. How can we make conjectures about the whole >universe then? Timidity in the face of ignorance is not one of the defining personality traits of theoretical cosmologists. >Isn't it possible, that only the piece of space we >happen to see is expanding, or, that the whole universe is expanding, >but only this piece accelerates? Sure, it's possible. In fact, some inflationary cosmology models, predict that what we think of as "the universe" is really just one of many expanding bubble-shaped regions in a much larger space. See the article "Inflation in a low-density universe" by Martin A. Bucher and David N. Spergel in the January 1999 issue of Scientific American for a nice picture of this scenario - or try the text below, quoted from John Gribbin. It's also possible that the unobserved portion of the universe is packed with green cheese. There's no way of knowing for sure - all we can do is make observations in the currently observable portion of the universe, use these to build theories, and if we're feeling bold, extrapolate wildly to the whole universe. In practice, what matters most about theories of cosmology is what they predict about observations we can actually make. ...................................................................... Excerpted from "Inflation for Beginners" by John Gribbin, available at http://epunix.biols.susx.ac.uk/Home/John_Gribbin/cosmo.htm [...] The inflationary scenario has already gone through several stages of development during its short history. The first inflationary model was developed by Alexei Starobinsky, at the L. D. Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Moscow, at the end of the 1970s -- but it was not then called "inflation". It was a very complicated model based on a quantum theory of gravity, but it caused a sensation among cosmologists in what was then the Soviet Union, becoming known as the "Starobinsky model" of the Universe. Unfortunately, because of the difficulties Soviet scientists still had in travelling abroad or communicating with colleagues outside the Soviet sphere of influence at that time, the news did not spread outside their country. In 1981, Alan Guth, then at MIT, published a different version of the inflationary scenario, not knowing anything of Starobinsky's work. This version was more accessible in both senses of the word -- it was easier to understand, and Guth was based in the US, able to discuss his ideas freely with colleagues around the world. And as a bonus, Guth came up with the catchy name "inflation" for the process he was describing. There were obvious flaws with the specific details of Guth's original model (which he acknowledged at the time). In particular, Guth's model left the Universe after inflation filled with a mess of bubbles, all expanding in their own way and colliding with one another. We see no evidence for these bubbles in the real Universe, so obviously the simplest model of inflation couldn't be right. But it was this version of the idea that made every cosmologist aware of the power of inflation. In October 1981, there was an international meeting in Moscow, where inflation was a major talking point. Stephen Hawking presented a paper claiming that inflation could not be made to work at all, but the Russian cosmologist Andrei Linde presented an improved version, called "new inflation", which got around the difficulties with Guth's model. Ironically, Linde was the official translator for Hawking's talk, and had the embarrassing task of offering the audience the counter-argument to his own work! But after the formal presentations Hawking was persuaded that Linde was right, and inflation might be made to work after all. Within a few months, the new inflationary scenario was also published by Andreas Albrecht and Paul Steinhardt, of the University of Pennsylvania, and by the end of 1982 inflation was well established. Linde has been involved in most of the significant developments with the theory since then. The next step forward came with the realization that there need not be anything special about the Planck- sized region of spacetime that expanded to become our Universe. If that was part of some larger region of spacetime in which all kinds of scalar fields were at work, then only the regions in which those fields produced inflation could lead to the emergence of a large universe like our own. Linde called this "chaotic inflation", because the scalar fields can have any value at different places in the early super-universe; it is the standard version of inflation today, and can be regarded as an example of the kind of reasoning associated with the anthropic principle (but note that this use of the term "chaos" is like the everyday meaning implying a complicated mess, and has nothing to do with the mathematical subject known as "chaos theory"). The idea of chaotic inflation led to what is (so far) the ultimate development of the inflationary scenario. The great unanswered question in standard Big Bang cosmology is what came "before" the singularity. It is often said that the question is meaningless, since time itself began at the singularity. But chaotic inflation suggests that our Universe grew out of a quantum fluctuation in some pre-existing region of spacetime, and that exactly equivalent processes can create regions of inflation within our own Universe. In effect, new universes bud off from our Universe, and our Universe may itself have budded off from another universe, in a process which had no beginning and will have no end. A variation on this theme suggests that the "budding" process takes place through black holes, and that every time a black hole collapses into a singularity it "bounces" out into another set of spacetime dimensions, creating a new inflationary universe -- this is called the baby universe scenario. There are similarities between the idea of eternal inflation and a self-reproducing universe and the version of the Steady State hypothesis developed in England by Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar, with their C-field playing the part of the scalar field that drives inflation. As Hoyle wryly pointed out at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London in December 1994, the relevant equations in inflation theory are exactly the same as in his version of the Steady State idea, but with the letter "C" replaced by the Greek "Phi". "This," said Hoyle (tongue firmly in cheek) "makes all the difference in the world". Modern proponents of the inflationary scenario arrived at these equations entirely independently of Hoyle's approach, and are reluctant to accept this analogy, having cut their cosmological teeth on the Big Bang model. Indeed, when Guth was asked, in 1980, how the then new idea of inflation related to the Steady State theory, he is reported as replying "what is the Steady State theory?" But although inflation is generally regarded as a development of Big Bang cosmology, it is better seen as marrying the best features of both the Big Bang and the Steady State scenarios. This might all seem like a philosophical debate as futile as the argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, except for the fact that observations of the background radiation by COBE showed exactly the pattern of tiny irregularities that the inflationary scenario predicts. One of the first worries about the idea of inflation (long ago in 1981) was that it might be too good to be true. In particular, if the process was so efficient at smoothing out the Universe, how could irregularities as large as galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on ever have arisen? But when the researchers looked more closely at the equations they realised that quantum fluctuations should still have been producing tiny ripples in the structure of the Universe even when our Universe was only something like 10^{-25} of a centimetre across -- a hundred million times bigger than the Planck length. The theory said that inflation should have left behind an expanded version of these fluctuations, in the form of irregularities in the distribution of matter and energy in the Universe. These density perturbations would have left an imprint on the background radiation at the time matter and radiation decoupled (about 300,000 years after the Big Bang), producing exactly the kind of nonuniformity in the background radiation that has now been seen, initially by COBE and later by other instruments. After decoupling, the density fluctuations grew to become the large scale structure of the Universe revealed today by the distribution of galaxies. This means that the COBE observations are actually giving us information about what was happening in the Universe when it was less than 10-20 of a second old. No other theory can explain both why the Universe is so uniform overall, and yet contains exactly the kind of "ripples" represented by the distribution of galaxies through space and by the variations in the background radiation. This does not prove that the inflationary scenario is correct, but it is worth remembering that had COBE found a different pattern of fluctuations (or no fluctuations at all) that would have proved the inflationary scenario wrong. In the best scientific tradition, the theory made a major and unambiguous prediction which did "come true". Inflation also predicts that the primordial perturbations may have left a trace in the form of gravitational radiation with particular characteristics, and it is hoped that detectors sensitive enough to identify this characteristic radiation may be developed within the next ten or twenty years. [...]