- #1
BOAS
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Hello!
I am reading "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene at the moment and I have a few questions about his discussion on inflationary cosmology that I do not feel he covered/I was able to understand from the text.
As far as I can tell, there is a hypothetical field called the inflaton that has uniform energy and permeates all space. This uniform energy gives rise to negative pressure and 'repulsive gravity'. What he refers to as quantum jitters are responsible for knocking the energy of the field down in certain places and from common sense, as space expands, the energy within the field is spread out among a larger area and thus decreases uniformly.
He also mentions that matter condensed out of the extremely high energy values the field inhabited at the very early stages of our universe.
Hopefully there are no gaping misunderstandings in what has been said, but based on that I have a few questions.
If the universe is truly infinite, doesn't this imply infinite energy? Since the field must permeate all of space to be considered uniform (unless it has a sharp boundary, and there are areas where the field hasn't had time to influence).
Following on from that, does this not imply that there will be a continuing gain of matter in the universe from it's condensing out of the field?
He also talks about if the universe is truly infinite, then we can have a 'quilted multiverse' where there are an infinite number of regions similar in size to our observable universe that have not been around long enough, and are separated by large enough distances so as to not exert any influence on each other and thus we would not know they are there. It seems to me that this is only possible if there is an infinite amount of matter/energy.
I understand that the book is intended to convey ideas rather than hard facts and that I'm very likely to have misunderstood some of it, but i'd be very interested to see some discussion on this.
Thanks!
I am reading "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene at the moment and I have a few questions about his discussion on inflationary cosmology that I do not feel he covered/I was able to understand from the text.
As far as I can tell, there is a hypothetical field called the inflaton that has uniform energy and permeates all space. This uniform energy gives rise to negative pressure and 'repulsive gravity'. What he refers to as quantum jitters are responsible for knocking the energy of the field down in certain places and from common sense, as space expands, the energy within the field is spread out among a larger area and thus decreases uniformly.
He also mentions that matter condensed out of the extremely high energy values the field inhabited at the very early stages of our universe.
Hopefully there are no gaping misunderstandings in what has been said, but based on that I have a few questions.
If the universe is truly infinite, doesn't this imply infinite energy? Since the field must permeate all of space to be considered uniform (unless it has a sharp boundary, and there are areas where the field hasn't had time to influence).
Following on from that, does this not imply that there will be a continuing gain of matter in the universe from it's condensing out of the field?
He also talks about if the universe is truly infinite, then we can have a 'quilted multiverse' where there are an infinite number of regions similar in size to our observable universe that have not been around long enough, and are separated by large enough distances so as to not exert any influence on each other and thus we would not know they are there. It seems to me that this is only possible if there is an infinite amount of matter/energy.
I understand that the book is intended to convey ideas rather than hard facts and that I'm very likely to have misunderstood some of it, but i'd be very interested to see some discussion on this.
Thanks!