The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything

[joeninety]

ahh.... a devotee of the anthropic principle. And where beyond our universe might this creative force live?

I am a devotee of life, logic and when all else fails??? I cannot comprehend infinity nor would I even bother trying too, that will probably always be incomprehensible

I have seen enough to know their is a much bigger picture, anyone can see if they choose to be adventurous and decide to actually open their eyes.

Once you do you no longer have to take things on faith nor theory

[Stavros]

Prospero, as I pointed out in the earlier post, a third of the Trinity, with Mary Magdalene are living in Queensland, Australia. Do try to keep up. Its not like we are on the satellite of a Red Dwarf waiting for the sun to shine and ripen out grapes.

[Prospero]

darn... sorry Stavros. i missed that.

[martin48]

And if the gods made bad things, then the fault was surely theirs. But no...it Eve's fault! Let's all blame it on Eve.

I thought it went like this.

Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the snake. And the snake didn't have a leg to stand on!

[danthepoetman]

Ouch!

[danthepoetman]

[danthepoetman]

[danthepoetman]

Don't you love this one? Now that has to be a great book...

[trish]

I don't know what happened. I started with the intent of making a snide remark and this came out. Sorry.

If General Relativity (GR) is even partly reliable, the cosmos (in which we find space and time and the stars and galaxies that nature our lives and imaginations) passed through a period of high density and rapid expansion. The classic GR-equations only describe the expansion. They do not describe a big bang but only a singularity; i.e. a boundary on and beyond which the equations, our current understanding, do not apply.

Dynamically perhaps the very very early universe was a simple place. What could be simpler than isotropic, homogeneous, uniform expansion? But the physics was anything but simple. When the entire universe is smaller than a proton, the macro-world collides with micro-world. In this domain we have difficulty construing the notions of information, entropy, space and time. We only surmise that at the end of this brief, brief Planckian period there was space-time and there was energy; both in rapid expansion and with incredibly low entropy (packed with information).

The early universe was so compressed photons could not escape from the confines of the hot charged particles that at these temperatures would hurl them at relativistic speeds as gamma radiation. Instead photons remained trapped within. The very universe was hot, yet black. The heat was so intense nucleons couldn’t catch hold of each other to form atoms. But as the expansion continued and the cosmos cooled, nucleons were able to bond and form hydrogen, helium and some lithium (surprisingly the proportions of those elements that exist today are as predicted by theory). This periodic is known as the era of cosmic nucleosynthesis. The end of this period marks the decoupling of photons from the hot particles now free to produce and eject them. The universe filled with a hot photon gas. Unimaginable. A gas of highly energetic light particles blowing across the universe at the maximum speed limit. All space was filled with this searing gas, hot enough to vaporize hell. Now it is less than three degrees above absolute zero, a cool, omnipresent microwave radiation which makes its presence known as a weak static to those who known how to tune into it; so innocuous it was mistaken by its discoverers as a nest of pigeons who found harbor in their antennae. Today we call it the CMB (cosmic microwave background); it was quantitatively predicted by theory and figures as one of the earliest evidences of the theory of cosmic expansion (named by its opponents The Big Bang Theory).

Lucky for us the universe wasn’t perfectly homogeneous and isotropic. Nothing is perfect, but the universe isn’t nothing. The small differences in the density of matter between one region and another created gravitational slopes, swoops, swells and wells that drew clouds and dust together into clumps, lumps, spheres, rotating discs etc. Gravity is weird this way. It has negative heat capacity. Leave a hydrogen gas and some dust alone in a gravitational field and it will begin to heat up. Dropping from regions of high potential energy it picks up kinetic energy (heat). If you got enough gas gravity will compress it into a ball with a warm center. More gas, a hot center. More gas and dust, a fiery center. More hydrogen and the gravitational pressure will force the hydrogen to fuse into helium and ignite a star. The stars clump, lump and swirl into galaxies and generations of stars working with heavier and heavier fuels fuse heavier and heavier elements. The abundances of elements predicted by this model of galactic evolution match the abundances surveyed by our best telescopes. From these elements the planets formed. The planets, bathed in the outward flux of energy that pours from the stars they orbit, evolved complex geologies, atmospheres, climates and surface chemistries. No planet is a closed system. Ordinary equilibrium thermodynamics does not readily apply. The climate and surface chemistry of a planet are continually in flux. Thinks of the non-periodic motions in a lava lamp. Or a fishing bob stuck in the swirling turbulence at the base of a water fall. It wanders a little away from the falls but gets caught in a current that pulls it back; it’s caught in a loop but its motion isn’t periodic. Given enough time its as likely to escape as it is to remain. Life is motion within a flux; the flux of energy from the Sun. Shining Apollo is the love of my life. (Bless me Apollo. Stop by some time and I’ll give you a ride.)

So we’re lucky the early universe wasn’t perfectly homogeneous or isotropic. How lucky? Some researchers suggest that the universe is fine tuned. If the curvature of the universe was just slightly off in one direction, there wouldn’t have been enough gravitational clumping to produce the stars, galaxies and ultimately us. If the curvature off a little bit off in the other direction, the clumping would have been to quick and the universe would have collapsed before it got started. Some have taken this to be indicative of the hand of God. Others say that fine-tuning calculations are highly speculative; we know to little how to compute which value for a constant of nature or which universe is more probable than another. There is no experimental side to the study of possible universes and there is no universally accepted theory beyond what we currently have. Still others have pointed out fine-tuning calculations usually only move one tuning knob at a time (holding the others fixed) and do not consider how much easier it might be for the cosmos to “self-tune” if all the knobs turned. I agree with these objections.

We all know that the Earth rests within the warm flux of the Sun. Her biosphere bobs up and down in endless variations on the Sun’s luminous current of photons. She occupies one regime for a time and then another, evolving far from equilibrium and semi-stable plateaus of existence. We forget that the cosmos too is not in equilibrium. It is instead rapidly expanding. Someday our galaxies will be isolated from one another separated by insurmountable Rindler horizons. Matter will become diffuse and attenuated, or clump in remote far flung places unseen by other clumps. What will remain, if it exists at all, is the dark energy of Einstein’s modified equations. It’s density remains fixed and eternal. A black remnant of spent energies. A remembrance of good times. Its almost silent buzz the snore of a universe gone asleep.

[Stavros]

Trish, your enthusiasm for the subject is expressed in language of elegance and intelligence. However, I think you also recognise that when cosmology and physics set aside the mathematics and the chemistry of the universe, the conceptual problems remain that enable people to insist or maybe just conjecture a, or the crucial formative role of 'God' -the most obvious question being: What existed before the big bang? Plenty of believers in world religions understand the concepts of gravity, black holes, sunspots, dark matter, and so on: but reach a blank page or a brick wall when language seems to run out explanations, and mathematics as it were, returns to zero. How does science describe the universe before the Big Bang?