Dear Luke,
Reality never withdraw!
let me answer your first question with the scope of current cosmology
community. First Jin's view is not correct in my point of view. I am
not an expert of this field either. however, the discussion of you
guys strongly brought back my interest in cosmology.
Please allow me to give a rough picture of evolution of the universe.
Please forgive my mistake and the unclear parts, I believe a real
cosmologist can definitely do a better job.
It was dense and hot in the early universe. There were no
galaxies,clusters, either the large scale structures because of the
fast moving particles. Let us mark this time T0 which is roughly 13
billions years ago. At T0, the universe was pretty homogeneous and
isotropic.
Before T0, there was a fast expansion of the universe, which is called
inflation and because of which our observed universe at that time or
(today at a very large scale) is homogeneous and isotropic.
Before inflation, it is believed there was no matter-like things at
the very beginning. While, in a very short time, these matter like
things which might be Higgs boson in the standard model or something
thing we do not know yet appeared suddenly because of the fluctuation
of the space and time tensor in Einstein equation. Some people call
this process quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, for which a better
quantum gravity theory is needed!
Everything before T0 is still under debate. However our nowadays model
after T0 is pretty solid and well experimental tested.
As the universe expands, temperature of the that drops.
1 Previous particle from quantum fluctuation which might be Higgs or
some other X particles started to decay into standard model particles
and dark matter. Simultaneously with the decaying, the universe kept
expanding and some particles freed in, some particle freed out.
2 As temperature became even cooler, nuclei begun to form which was
corresponding to a process called Nucleosynthesis.
3 As time moving forward, expansion was still going and the temperate
was keeping going down. At certain temperature, electrons were no
longer energetic enough to overcome the attraction of the nuclei. Thus
atoms came to from. At the same time, light manged to travel freely
in the universe , which hence became transparent.
4, Then the stars! then stars gathered together! Then the galaxies!
then large scale structures! Then nowadays universe!!!
There are several observation techniques supporting the above view 1
Cosmic microwave background 2 Gravitational lensing 3 the abundance of
the light nuclei ,etc
our current universe is still growing bigger and is observed to have
an acceleration in expansion. According to model and data, the
universe is divided into 30% matter and 70% energy which is called
dark energy. Among the matter part, the portion which are similar to
what we are made of is only 4% and the rest is dark matter. Actually,
light can travel freely trough dark matter, and their path can be
distorted by these dark matter, so Jin's idea might not be accepted by
the scientific community.
SJ
