Thursday, September 27, 2007

Idle Rambling

I was thinking about that paper referenced in my "Where did the Universe come from? Part 3" post yesterday.

Particularly the quote:

The implication of such a description, as we have suggested in Section (1), is that Poincare recurrences are inevitable. Starting in a high entropy, “dead” configuration, if we wait long enough, a fluctuation will eventually occur in which the inflaton will wander up to the top of its potential, thus starting a cycle of inflation, re–heating, conventional cosmology and heat death.


Before I go on, I have to say that this is all idle speculation. I am not an expert on this. I may have completely misunderstood the paper. I do not believe this is the absolute, final truth. It's just idle speculation.

What this seems to be saying is that given a long enough time, the universe will naturally fluctuate from a high entropy state to a low entropy state. If this happens to the entire universe, or even just locally, say a few hundred trillion light-years in diameter (a microscopic dot compared to an infinite space), it would appear to violate 2LoT. I don't know what a Poincare recurrence is, nor do I have the time or ambition to work through the math. Maybe it doesn't.

But anyway, I like the idea of local fluctuations. Each separate fluctuation could be considered its own universe, which nicely incorporates multiple universes hypotheses. A fluctuation would be like the Big Bang, with matter and energy suddenly emerging from nothing. The physics of each universe could be randomly set at the moment of fluctuation. As a universe wound down, it would tend to spread out (expanding universe). Which could lead to interesting consequences if two (or more) of these universes were to intersect. A universe would expand until it was gone, rejoining the background nothingness. No need for expansion/contraction cycles.


This sounds like a rough basis for a science fiction setting. I may try my hand at writing again.

Later,

2 people have spouted off:

Qalmlea said...

I sort of wonder if it's possible for 'space' (meaning the medium in which it is possible for matter to exist) to expand indefinitely, or if eventually there will be a limit where it begins to rip apart into separate 'island universes', with no (known) way to get from one to the other. For that to work, there would have to be some sort of elasticity of space, where when it rips apart, the intact bits can contract again.

This is also complete and utter speculation. ^/^

John said...
wild speculation is fun!
9/28/07, 10:16 AM