Quasi-Steady-State Cosmology

[Jess Tauber]

Some of you may remember my hypoethesis that the universe reboots itself after a Big Rip termination through shrinkage of all local observer light cones down ultimately to Planck scale, at which point (no pun intended) quantum mechanical uncertainty dictates that the energy within these spatiotemporal zones could be infinite probabilistically. This matches the 'soft rebound' apparently required by the quasi-steady-state model, with numerous (infinite?) numbers of Little Bangs rather than one big one.

Inflation, which far outpaces the speed of light by orders of magnitude, could then causally 'reconnect' these regions, originally disconnected by their having receded via acceleration of Hubble Expansion past c.

I had been unaware until now that others had speculated on anything remotely similar to my own. Now I have to try to track down papers about this work. SFAIK this alternative steady-state theory doesn't posit QM effects as the source of 'Fresh Energy' for the universe.

Jess Tauber

[Jess Tauber]

I forgot to mention that my hypothesis draws inspiration from the behaviors of soap bubbles and water drop(let)s when their size is increased beyond certain limits or drops below others. For the largest units (equivalent to the Big Rip) the surface tension and contact angle is minimal, and such bubbles or drops will easily break apart when energy is supplied to increase these values to some middling level. For the smallest, OTOH, surface tension and contact angle are maximal, and the units will merge when in contact, which allows these values to decrease to the middling level.  This would, seemingly, coincide with the idea of many little bangs. How all this jibes with the quasi-steady-state model is anyone's guess at this time.

Jess Tauber

[Rene]

Hi Jess

Your line of thinking strikes me as similar to the proposal that unstable “nothingness” gives rise to a universe — and that, should this universe eventually and effectively cancel itself out into nothingness, each reboot might yield a new universe with entirely different laws. So rather than a neat loop, it’s more like a cosmic lottery: every round starts from scratch, with no guarantee that what comes next will resemble what came before.

That possibility makes me think of the periodic table. Ours reflects a remarkably stable set of physical laws — quantised energy levels, specific force strengths, predictable chemical behavior. But in a universe born from different symmetry breakings, who’s to say there’d even be a periodic table at all? Or if there were, that it would contain anything resembling our familiar elements?

The mind boggles at the timescales involved here.

A periodic table of the universes, anyone?

René

[Jess Tauber]

I've thought that the rich variety of different phonological system in the thousands of different still-spoken languages in the world (which were far more numerous the further back in time you go towards whatever original ancestor might have been around hundreds of thousands of years ago), combined with the propensity for imitative vocabulary to utilize these different phonological systems to quantize material reality (space, time, mass, and energy) differently, are the analogue to different actual universes with different laws governing not just the primitives, but also their laws of combination and occurrence positionally. Lots of different systems work to make life on earth easier for people, but some do not occur at all (even though logically possible). Syntacticians as well as morphologists and phonologists have noticed these things for more than a century, and especially in the last 70 years, as more data gets accumulated and formally analyzed.

Perhaps such systematic rules might help us to differentiate different possible material realities versus those that cannot exist, not to mention those which are life- or mind- friendly?

Jess Tauber