Can anyone help me disprove something

[Timenspace]

Hello all. My first post here (and most possibly last! Not a braniac here).

I was talking with a friend about space and the universe. We are both interested in this matter (pun intended!) , the physics of it at least, but have no math, physics, science, biology or astronomy background. I probably left out a few backgrounds we also don't have but I can't think of them at the moment. In other words, we are both complete laymen. But my friend posed an idea to me that I wanted help disproving (and look smarter doing so), and in laymen terms of why it would not be possible for this to occur in our universe.

Here it is.


Ok first he suggested that it might be possible that space was compressed at the time of the big bang with the creation of matter in pockets, and after which it started pushing back against matter, trying to revert to its original form and there by spreading matter out overall, but in places, pooling matter together.

So does space act as a force against matter?

What is the easiest way to disprove this theory with hard facts?

Thank you for your help.

 

[Ken G]

Ok first he suggested that it might be possible that space was compressed at the time of the big bang with the creation of matter in pockets, and after which it started pushing back against matter, trying to revert to its original form and there by spreading matter out overall, but in places, pooling matter together.

So does space act as a force against matter?

The standard view of the Big Bang is that space determines, well, the space between matter-- so when space expands, the matter gets farther apart. That's not exactly a "force" against matter, but it certainly can be pictured as "carrying matter along with it", so your friend's version doesn't sound that way off to me. The idea that matter gets pooled together somewhere else violates an important cosmological principle (in fact it is called "the cosmological principle"), that space is doing the same thing everywhere. But this principle is really only intended to apply to the universe that we observe-- outside that universe we can't really say, there could be pooling, it just isn't a necessary or useful part of the model.