Chapter 4 - Inflation and Parallel Universes

The fourth chapter in my novel concerns itself with inflation and parallel universes. There is theory that the universe was created from a small amount of net matter, perhaps even as little as an ounce. In nature, we can observe a large amount of symmetry. So, physicist David Gross once said “ the secret of nature is symmetry, but much of the texture of the world is due to mechanisms of symmetry breaking.”

So, if the big bang were perfectly symmetrical, there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter produced. Which is why we should wonder: why do we exist?

Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov proposed that perhaps the big bang was not perfectly symmetrical. There may have been a tiny break in symmetry where matter dominated over
antimatter at the moment of creation which made possible the universe we see around us.

The way the symmetry breaks at the very beginning of the universe denotes how the universe will look like. Think of when a mirror shatters into a thousand pieces. The original mirror was symmetrical so that whichever way you turned it, it still reflected light in the same way. But once the symmetry breaks, the mirror is shattered. So, depending on how the symmetry breaks will determine how the mirror shatters. So, they way the symmetry breaks in the creation of a universe will determine how it will look.

I found this theory very interesting, because it states that there are many other universe that exist, and it can give you a hint as to what other universes may look like. For example, the way the symmetry is broken will determine the strength of various forces. If nuclear forces were decreased the formation of stars could cease leaving the universe in complete darkness, and so life could not exist. Another possibility is that more stable particles, like protons could be created. This means that there would be many more strange chemical elements. These elements could become part of our DNA making like look very much different.

The importance of symmetry is shown in this chapter and I have learned that it is the reason we look like we do. It decided how strong gravity would be and how stable protons would be, creating humans. I was surprised at how such a subtle difference in matter over antimatter could create such a huge universe and how big of an impact the matter had. It starts to make me wonder about life in other universes and how different it would be. And how unique our universe must be.

Chapter 3 - The Big Bang

While studying the Big Bang and the aftermath, scientists soon discovered that most of the universe was not made up of familiar atoms but mostly substance called “dark matter.” Dark matter weighs approximately10x more than normal matter.

In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer, Fritz Zwicky, noticed that the Coma cluster of galaxies were not moving according to Newtonian gravity. He saw that the galaxy was spinning so fast it should fly apart and dissolve. He suggested that the only the cluster was not being ripped apart was if it had hundreds of times more matter than what was seen by the telescope. In 1930, either Newtonian laws were incorrect or there was a huge amount of invisible matter in this cluster holding it together.

Nobody believed Zwicky and so the theory of dark matter was abandoned until 1962 when astronomer Vera Rubin noticed that the Milky Way was experiencing the same problem. According to Newtonian Laws, the Milky Way was missing 90% of its mass. Since so much mass was missing, Rubin knew that there must be some other form of matter that takes up the extra mass. Unfortunately, Vera was a girl, and so she was ignored until 1978, when a man, Albert Bosma, published an analysis showing that Rubin had been right all along, and “dark matter” does exist.

Dark matter has now been mapped out over the entire universe. From the picture on the left, we can see that dark matter clumps together, and over time it is getting closer and closer together. Not shown in this picture, but has been observed by telescope is that matter tends to form it self on top of dark matter, meaning that there is more matter wherever there is more dark matter.

The theory of dark matter intrigued me because it is invisible mass. It coexists with us, but we cannot interact with us. It controls the movement of our galaxy yet we know so little about it. We don’t know what it is made of, but it has been speculated that it is made of brown dwarf stars, neutron stars and even black holes. All of these are nearly invisible to us which is why we can’t see dark matter.

Interestingly, some scientists disagree, and think that dark matter is made of a an entirely new type of matter called “cold dark matter” or “weakly interacting massive particles.”

We know very little about dark matter, but it is speculated that it accounts for 22% of the mass of the universe. Observable mass/energy, or the matter that we can see accounts for 4% of the mass leaving 74% of the mass of the universe to “dark energy” which is even more interesting than dark matter. Dark energy being the energy of nothing or the repulsive form of gravity.

By learning more and more about what our universe is made we realize that we actually know less and less about the universe. We don’t even understand what makes up 74% of the energy in our universe. We realize that we have a far way to go in understanding what really is going, and makes us wonder if we’ll ever know what is really controlling us.

To learn more about the picture, how scientists created the picture, or to learn more about dark matter, please watch this video. It is only three minutes, but it will be worth your while.

Chapter 2 - The Paradoxical Universe

When the apple fell on Newton’s head, this caused him to think to himself: “if an apple falls, does the moon also fall?

Newton, while observing Halley’s comet noticed that the force of the sun on the comet diminished as the comet got further away. Newton discovered that the comet was moving in an ellipse as a consequence of the inverse square law. After the apple incident, Newton realized that everything in the universe falls under the inverse square law. Newton also noticed that the mathematics of his time were too primitive to solve the law, he created calculus to help determine the motion of falling objects, including the moon.

Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy or, Principia, described the rules of mechanics such as the inverse square law, and it raised paradoxes about the construction of the universe. After Newton’s work had been published, there were arguments debating the size of the universe and whether or not it was finite. In 1962, Richard Bentley wrote a letter to Newton concerning the finiteness of the universe. Bentley noted that since gravity was always attractive, and if the universe was finite, all the stars would collide into a fiery superstar. He also wrote that if the universe was infinite, any force tugging on the star would be infinite as well resulting in all the stars being ripped to shreds.

Newton responded saying that he preferred an infinite universe, but the force pulling the star to the right would be cancelled by the force pulling it to the left leaving us with a static infinite universe.

Since the universe is infinite, there should be an infinite number of stars glowing white, and therefore the night sky should be white. Edgar Allen Poe, a famous poet wrote that “… that there could be absolutely no point … at which would not exist a star.” He concluded that even though there is never a point in the universe where a star doesn’t exist, that the distance between us and this invisible background is so immense that the light from these stars still has not hit our eyes.

With this new idea from Poe, astronomers programmed the Hubble space telescope to take a picture of the farthest point in the universe. This photograph showed ten thousand infant galaxies 13 billion light-years from Earth. When studied, scientists noticed that there is only blackness between the galaxies and this is what causes our night sky to be black. However, they soon discovered that the blackness was actually microwave radiation from the big-bang itself. So, if we could somehow see microwave radiation in colour, our night sky would not be black at all, but the colour of microwave radiation.

Below is a time line of the creation of our universe.

Chapter 1 - Baby Pictures of the Universe

Since the beginning of human existence, we have pondered whether or not the universe is timeless or has a beginning or end. In different cultures, you’ll find different answers. Scientifically, we have found that there was beginning, but when did this beginning happen?

Scientists have been studying a new satellite known as the WMAP or the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe. This satellite was launched in 2001 and can paint a detailed picture of the universe when it was 380,000 years old. (Comparing the universe to an 80 year-old man, this detailed picture would show the man as a newborn less than a day old.) The WMAP can detect the radiation emitted from the original fireball that created the universe. This map measured the age of the universe to be about 13.7 billion years old and that the temperature of the universe was between 2.7249 and 2.7251degrees Kelvin.

When the Big bang originally happened, the universe had a great period of inflation. Now, scientists predict that within a fraction of a second, the universe is expanding by a factor 1050. But, what caused this inflation? It is not yet discovered what caused it, but Russian physicist has proposed that whatever caused the inflation then could still be at work randomly causing other regions of the universe to expand.

According to this theory, a part of the universe will “bud” creating a “daughter” parallel universe which will in turn bud and create another daughter universe. This theory could mean that our universe could simply be the daughter universe of another universe.

So, if our universe was simply a daughter of another universe, the chances of life in other universes are relatively high. And so, the next question is proposed: will we ever be able to leave our own universe, and how can we do this?