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3 Sep 2024 15:14:45 EDT (-0400)
  Question about the Big Bang  
From: Warp
Date: 18 Nov 2010 10:53:38
Message: <4ce54c02@news.povray.org>
This has puzzled me for a while, and I can't find an answer.

  There was a time during the beginning of the Universe, when all the
energy in the Universe was compressed into a space smaller than its own
Schwarzschild radius. This should mean that this energy could not escape
that radius, and would have quickly collapsed back into a singularity
(or whatever is happening inside a black hole). However, that didn't
happen. Why? How did all the energy escape its own event horizon?

  After much deliberation I have come up with a wild hypothesis which,
as a complete layman in physics, I have no idea if it's even close to
correct and the actual explanation:

  At the beginning the Universe expanded much more rapidly than c
(and in fact, that's still happening today). This is not against general
relativity, as it fully allows this (and in fact it's one of its
predictions). In GR the distance between two points in space (and thus
the distance between two particles) *can* increase arbitarily faster
than c (what GR forbids is a particle *traveling* between the two
points faster than c, which is a completely different thing). In fact,
the Universe is, it seems, even today expanding faster than c, which is
why the observable Universe is smaller than the whole Universe in existence.
In the beginning, however, the Universe expanded *a lot* faster.

  Gravity, on the other hand, can only propagate at speed c because it's
also bound by the same law as any particle. Thus because the Universe was
expanding way faster than c, the gravity wave which all the energy was
producing was lagging behind. Thus the gravity well necessary for the event
horizon to form did simply not have time to propagate fast enough to
"enclose" the energy existing at that point. Thus an event horizon never
formed, and all the energy got distributed beyond its Schwarzschild radius.

  I wonder if this explanation is even close to correct.

-- 
                                                          - Warp


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