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Our Universe: It's Geometry and Physical Laws
Our Universe: It's Geometry and Physical Laws
Physical Laws
“ Strange is our situation here upon Earth.
Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why; Yet
sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.”
(i): It concerns not with any specific physical law but rather with all physical
laws.
--- The concept of motion is relative. One can speak about the motion of an
object, but only relative to or by comparison with another. There is no
“absolute” notion of motion.
(ii): The constancy of the speed of light has resulted in a replacement of the
traditional view of space and time as rigid and objective structures with
a new conception in which they depend intimately on the relative motion
between observer and observed.
To reflect the unchanging character of the speed of light, among other
things
----- “Invariance” theory.
• What is E = mc ??
2
Energy and mass are convertible and exchange rate is ever a constant.
The conflict between the “age-old intuition” about motion and the
constancy of the speed of light is resolved by Einstein through Special
Theory of Relativity.
curvature of spacetime
Gravity
Accelerated Motion
This warping in turn, affects other objects moving in the vicinity of the
mass, as they now must traverse the distorted spatial fabric. This effect on
the motion of the object is referred to as the gravitational influence of the
mass.
According to Einstein, the warping of space is the mechanism by which
gravity is transmitted.
The gravitational tether holding the earth in orbit is not some mysterious
instantaneous action of the Sun – it is the warping of the spatial fabric
caused by the Sun’s presence.
GR vs QM
Central pt. of Black holes
GR
Massive
and
Micro
The whole universe at the
QM
moment of the big bang
violent catastrophe
Well-formulated physical problems elicit nonsensical answers when the
equations of both theories are commingled.
Everything is subject to the quantum fluctuations inherent in the
uncertainty principle – even the gravitational field.
Gravitational field undulates up and down due to QF – average value is
zero for empty space.
On smaller regions of space, the size of the undulations of the
gravitational field gets larger.
Quantum Geometry:
Q. How much faith should we really have in the Big bang theory?
• After electrons and nuclei join together to form atoms, photons are free
to travel in every direction of the universe, i.e, the universe is filled with a
gas of photons (uniformly distributed). As the universe expands, this gas
of freely streaming photons expands as well and as a result the
temperature of this photon gas decreases.
• George Gamow and his students Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann
(1950’s) and Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles (mid 1960’s) speculated
that present day universe should be permeated by an almost uniform
bath of these primordial photons, which through the last 15 billion years
of cosmic expansion have cooled to a mere handful of degrees above
absolute zero.
This was confirmed by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson (1965) of
Bell Laboratories by detecting this after glow of the Big bang while
working on an antenna for communication satellites.
• In early 1990s NASA’s COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite
collected data which have confirmed to high precision that the universe is
filled with microwave radiation, whose temperature is about 2.7 degree
Kelvin, exactly in accord withy the expectation of the Big bang theory (If
our eyes were sensitive to microwaves, we would see a diffused glow in
the world around us).
---- A confirmation of the Big bang picture of cosmology as far back as the
time that photons first moved freely through the universe, about a few
hundred thousand years after the bang (ATB).
• Can we push further in our tests of the Big bang theory to even earlier
times?
• Standard principles of nuclear theory and thermodynamics, physicists
can make definite predictions about the relative abundance of the light
elements produced during the period of primordial nucleosynthesis,
between a hundredth of a second and a few minutes ATB.
Theoretical prediction of about 23% helium in the universe is
supported from the measurement of helium abundance in stars and
nebulae. Also there is confirmation regarding deuterium abundance and
recently that of lithium.
“Super force”
Strong force
10 −35 sec
28 Weak force
Temp > 10 Kelvin
Electromagnetic force
strong force
Phase Transition: weak force
(Temp< 1028 Kelvin) Super force
electromagnetic force
Weak force
Phase Transition:
(Temp ≈ 1015 Kelvin)
Electromagnetic force
A Cosmological Puzzle
The standard Big bang cosmology provides an elegant, consistent and
calculationally tractable framework for understanding the universe in
the post-Planck era.
• A detailed further investigation shows some problems – one is the
horizon problem.
• Detailed studies of the cosmic background radiation have shown that
regardless of which direction in the sky one points the measuring
antenna, the temperature of the radiation is the same, to about one part
in 100,000. This is quite strange. Why should different locations in the
universe, separated by enormous distances, have temperatures that are
so finely matched?
• A natural answer is to know that two diametrically opposite places in the
heavens are far apart today, but during the earliest moments of the
universe they were very close together. So it is not at all surprising that
they share common physical traits such as their temperature.
Inflation
(Alan Guth, 1979, MIT)
• In this framework, the standard cosmological model is modified during
−36
a tiny window of time – around 10 to 10 −34 sec. ATB – in which the
30
universe expanded by a colossal factor of at least 10 , compared with
a factor of about a hundred during the same time interval in standard
scenario.
• This means that in a brief flicker of time, the size of the universe
increased by a greater percentage than it has in the 15 billion years
since.
• Before this expansion, matter that is now in far flung regions of the
cosmos was much closer together than in the standard cosmological
model, making it possible for a common temperature.
• Thus through Guth’s momentary burst of cosmological inflation –
followed by the more usual expansion of the standard cosmological
model – these regions of space were able to become separated by the
vast distances we observed today --- a solution to the Horizon Problem
as well as a number of other important problems.
nucleosynthesis galaxies formed
(Big bang) inflation
grand unification
104 yrs 1010 yrs
10−45 10−30 −24 −18 10 −6
sy ad01
10 10
c es 1
y adot
Time: today
(in sec) 10−36 10−12
(in Kelvin) 16
1028 K 10 K 10 K 1013 K
22
32 107 K solar system
K01
10 K
atoms formed
formed
Planck time electroweak
unification