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In Search of the Big Bang

By: De_Composed in GRITZ | Recommend this post (0)
Wed, 08 Jan 25 8:26 AM | 29 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Grits Breakfast of Champeens! 		Msg. 02282 of 02312
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I'm sharing a remarkable figure from the John Gribbin book "In Search of the Big Bang" (written in 1986). One thing that's kind of cool about such an old book is the many cases where it refers to something being "the weak part of a theory" or "as yet unproven" that now HAVE been proven. It happens over and and over, with the most recent case I can think of being the existence of a Higgs boson and Higgs field which give mass to particles. It's now proven. At the time the book was written, Guth's theory that the universe experienced inflation (rapid expansion) following the Big Bang as a result of it falling from a false low energy plateau into a real one was described as weak (meaning "poor," not to be confused with the weak force) because of its total dependence on a hypothetical Higgs field. Well, the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. It's existence is now fact, greatly adding to the plausibility of inflation. Guth is still alive. Maybe he'll get his Nobel Prize yet.

In theory, as the song goes, after the Big Bang "the whole universe was in a hot, dense state." Today's linear accelerators are able to briefly release energies comparable to the universe in its first fraction of a second, when particles and forces were very different from how they are today. Many particles that were common back then ceased to exist or became exceedingly rare ("frozen out") as the universe quickly expanded and cooled, even though by today's standard it was still mind-blowingly small and hot.

Conversely, the four known forces - gravity, weak, strong and electromagnetic - are thought to have once been a single force which experienced "broken symmetry" as the universe cooled. Gravity was the first to go its own way, separating from the Superforce just 10 to the minus 43rd seconds following the Big Bang.

That's .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after t=0 when the universe was 10 to the 32nd degrees Kelvin.

The strong force came second, and the electromagnetic and weak forces went their own ways relatively recently, about one ten-thousandth of a second after t=0.

Math supporting the unification of electromagnetic and weak forces was announced in the 1960s, for which Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize in 1979.

A Grand Unified theory uniting the four forces has yet to be mathematically "proven." Einstein spent much of the last forty years of his life pursuing it.
































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