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Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

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David Eric Smith

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

Hi Doug,

I know this isn't the main point of the thread, and perhaps already stuff you know, in which case apologies for redundancy:

> Even the events after that instant of the big bang, where it is postulated that our universe expanded from sub-atomic dimensions, through inflation (inflation? WTF caused that?)

I think current understanding of inflation and the cosmological constant have all grown out of the way we think about the Higgs mechanism and the energy in the vacuum. I did have a chance to ask a real cosmologist this to be sure I wasn't mistaken, and I believe what I will say below is right.

The point of Higgs was that the vacuum underwent a freezing transition as it cooled, in one of the "bowl-to-mexican-hat" potentials that one always sees illustrated in explanations of magnetization etc. (keyword for a google search would be Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, and apologies that I can't write more here, since I should be working). The general kind of freezing mechanism is used for a lot of stuff and reasonably well understood (understanding why pi mesons are "roughly" massless, how magnetization forms, etc.) The interesting thing is that the massless particle that should have been formed when the Higgs vacuum froze was "eaten" (as they say in the jargon) by the previously-massless weak bosons because it had weak charge, and that made them massive. (Keyword here would be interaction of gauge fields with Goldstone bosons.)

But all that is essentially background. The point for this discussion is that when the vacuum could be frozen into the low-energy "rim" of the hat, but starts out on the high-energy center (the part where the crown of your head goes), it has energy to give. If it can succeed in freezing, that creates a shower of massive matter. But if it is delayed in collapsing to the frozen vacuum, like water that is supercooled before it can freeze into its proper crystal, that excess vacuum energy becomes a source of stress energy-momentum for gravitation. That stress energy momentum is the cosmological constant, and it drives exponential expansion. Since the Higgs is a very high-energy-scale field (on people-scales), the cosmological constant associated with not-yet-having-relaxed is huge. I don't know whether inflation people still think it was the Higgs of the weak boson that drove initial inflation, but I believe that was the proposal back when Alan Guth was working on these things.

In that parlance, the current small-but-not-zero cosmological constant is a tiny residual vacuum energy-momentum that hasn't succeeded in relaxing away into a more stable, truly zero-energy, vacuum.

This is probably not a great answer to the question of what caused inflation, but to the extent that having melted the vacuum to see the un-frozen Higgs as a particle seems to get everything right that we can measure, from only this minimal model, it is hard to see from here what would guide us to a more thorough characterization.

It is remarkable, though, that the vacuum can have un-relaxed energy. I should understand these things better than I do, but I was a bad student when I should have been learning them.

Eric

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

Interesting, Eric. I've never heard of inflation being attributed to the Higg's boson. The concept of inflation was first cooked up as a fudge to explain the observed size of the fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation. I've never heard of anybody claiming to be able to explain the mechanism of inflation.

--Doug

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Doug,

I know this isn't the main point of the thread, and perhaps already stuff you know, in which case apologies for redundancy:

> Even the events after that instant of the big bang, where it is postulated that our universe expanded from sub-atomic dimensions, through inflation (inflation? WTF caused that?)

I think current understanding of inflation and the cosmological constant have all grown out of the way we think about the Higgs mechanism and the energy in the vacuum. I did have a chance to ask a real cosmologist this to be sure I wasn't mistaken, and I believe what I will say below is right.

The point of Higgs was that the vacuum underwent a freezing transition as it cooled, in one of the "bowl-to-mexican-hat" potentials that one always sees illustrated in explanations of magnetization etc. (keyword for a google search would be Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, and apologies that I can't write more here, since I should be working). The general kind of freezing mechanism is used for a lot of stuff and reasonably well understood (understanding why pi mesons are "roughly" massless, how magnetization forms, etc.) The interesting thing is that the massless particle that should have been formed when the Higgs vacuum froze was "eaten" (as they say in the jargon) by the previously-massless weak bosons because it had weak charge, and that made them massive. (Keyword here would be interaction of gauge fields with Goldstone bosons.)

But all that is essentially background. The point for this discussion is that when the vacuum could be frozen into the low-energy "rim" of the hat, but starts out on the high-energy center (the part where the crown of your head goes), it has energy to give. If it can succeed in freezing, that creates a shower of massive matter. But if it is delayed in collapsing to the frozen vacuum, like water that is supercooled before it can freeze into its proper crystal, that excess vacuum energy becomes a source of stress energy-momentum for gravitation. That stress energy momentum is the cosmological constant, and it drives exponential expansion. Since the Higgs is a very high-energy-scale field (on people-scales), the cosmological constant associated with not-yet-having-relaxed is huge. I don't know whether inflation people still think it was the Higgs of the weak boson that drove initial inflation, but I believe that was the proposal back when Alan Guth was working on these things.

In that parlance, the current small-but-not-zero cosmological constant is a tiny residual vacuum energy-momentum that hasn't succeeded in relaxing away into a more stable, truly zero-energy, vacuum.

This is probably not a great answer to the question of what caused inflation, but to the extent that having melted the vacuum to see the un-frozen Higgs as a particle seems to get everything right that we can measure, from only this minimal model, it is hard to see from here what would guide us to a more thorough characterization.

It is remarkable, though, that the vacuum can have un-relaxed energy. I should understand these things better than I do, but I was a bad student when I should have been learning them.

Eric

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Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

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Robert Holmes-3

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've never heard of inflation being attributed to the Higg's boson.

Not looking something up in Wikipedia is almost as big a sin as not googling something…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Theoretical_status

glen ep ropella

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

Douglas Roberts wrote at 04/23/2013 10:33 AM:
> BEFORE THE BIG BANG, OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE...
> [...]
> Another concept is that of a "cyclic universe". Derived from string
> theory, the hypothesis postulates that our Universe is a
> four-dimensional "brane" in a higher-dimensional space. It repetitively
> collides with another such brane. The collisions result in tremendous
> release of energy and creation of matter which we'd observe as the Big
> Bang. Again, it turns out that these periodic collisions of branes also
> must have a beginning.

And to be fair, there are other cyclic models like Penrose's CCC.

On CCC-predicted concentric low-variance circles in the CMB sky
http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5162

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis

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Owen Densmore

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

Administrator

Actually, Alan Guth .. who started the whole inflation thing .. went after it initially via a thermodynamic approach. Same mexican hat.

AG also thinks GUT is misspelled .. the T is a "theory" so therefore should be GUTh.

-- Owen

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:45 PM, glen e. p. ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:

Douglas Roberts wrote at 04/23/2013 10:33 AM:

> BEFORE THE BIG BANG, OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE...

> [...]

> Another concept is that of a "cyclic universe". Derived from string
> theory, the hypothesis postulates that our Universe is a
> four-dimensional "brane" in a higher-dimensional space. It repetitively
> collides with another such brane. The collisions result in tremendous
> release of energy and creation of matter which we'd observe as the Big
> Bang. Again, it turns out that these periodic collisions of branes also
> must have a beginning.

And to be fair, there are other cyclic models like Penrose's CCC.

On CCC-predicted concentric low-variance circles in the CMB sky
http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5162

--
glen e. p. ropella, <a href="tel:971-255-2847" value="+19712552847">971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis

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David Eric Smith

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

In reply to this post by Robert Holmes-3

Thanks Robert and Owen too,

Yes, many sins. in all possible arenas. The only limit is how fast one can commit them....

On Apr 23, 2013, at 5:30 PM, Robert Holmes wrote:

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've never heard of inflation being attributed to the Higg's boson.

Not looking something up in Wikipedia is almost as big a sin as not googling something…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Theoretical_status

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

Actually, I did look at WP, just not at that entry. As an aside, it is fascinating in its own way how little FRIAM bullshit matters, when viewed from behind the comfortable haze produced by Rosarita served up at the Dragon Room.

On Apr 23, 2013 5:09 PM, "Eric Smith" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks Robert and Owen too,

Yes, many sins. in all possible arenas. The only limit is how fast one can commit them....

E

On Apr 23, 2013, at 5:30 PM, Robert Holmes wrote:

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've never heard of inflation being attributed to the Higg's boson.

Not looking something up in Wikipedia is almost as big a sin as not googling something…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Theoretical_status

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Presented for FRIAMic Consideration

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

"As an aside, it is
fascinating in its own way how little FRIAM bullshit matters, when viewed
from behind the comfortable haze produced by Rosarita served up at the
Dragon Room."

Why don't you put down that Nexus 4 you love so much and be sociable?

Marcus

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