Where does the original singularity get its energy from?

  • #1
Arasvo
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Where does the original singularity get its energy from?
 
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  • #2
You mean how does a universe emerge from nothing? Good question!

There are some speculative theories, but it may be a question too far for science to answer.
 
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  • #3
The point about a singularity is that it's a place and/or time we can't extend our models through. So we don't really know.

Singularities are almost certainly problems with the theory, though, so if we ever work out a quantum theory of gravity we might be able to eliminate the singularities and get an answer. But at the moment we don't know.
 
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  • #4
PeroK said:
You mean how does a universe emerge from nothing? Good question!
Ohh very good question :smile:
PeroK said:
There are some speculative theories, but it may be a question too far for science to answer.
I think that some future theory, by improving a current theory, will provide the answer
Ibix said:
The point about a singularity is that it's a place and/or time we can't extend our models through. So we don't really know.
Do you think that the singularity is an "un-physical" object ?
Meaning it have zero volume, so any mass will cause infinite density and so on.
Ibix said:
Singularities are almost certainly problems with the theory, though, so if we ever work out a quantum theory of gravity we might be able to eliminate the singularities and get an answer. But at the moment we don't know.
Where they came from ? ( the singularities e.g in the centre of a black hole and the Big Bang )
I think that some in-perfection in the mathematical model caused appearance of the mathematical point in the physical reality.
That can be classified as mixing the "object" language (physics) and the "meta" language (math).

For example , the linguistics is the "meta" language (nouns, verbs ...) for the common language - literature ( noun =mouse, verb=eating ...)

[1] "A mouse eats cheese." / a sentence from the object language
[2] "Cheese is a word" / a sentence from the meta language

From [1] and [2] we can conclude > "A mouse eats words" :smile:
 
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  • #5
Bosko said:
Do you think that singularity is "un-physical" object ?
Meaning it have zero volume, so any mass will cause infinite density and so on.
I don't think you can define things like volume of a singularity in any particularly meaningful way. I think the expectation of more or less everyone is that they aren't anything at all, just the maths' way of saying there's something wrong with the model and a more advanced theory will eliminate them (we hope).
Bosko said:
Where they came from ?
There's something missing from the model. Most likely it's some quantum nature in spacetime (or whatever replaces spacetime in the correct theory) that becomes important when the curvature reaches some very small length scale. But who knows?
 
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  • #6
Arasvo said:
the original singularity
We don't know that there was one. There is an initial singularity in some idealized models of our universe, but we have no evidence that those models are correct in that regime.
 
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  • #7
Arasvo said:
Where does the original singularity get its energy from?
Just in case you are not aware of it, the current model of cosmology, the Big Bang Theory, does not include a singularity. Rather, it describes the universe starting at the end of the inflation period (itself not a proven fact but almost certainly true).
 
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  • #8
phinds said:
Just in case you are not aware of it, the current model of cosmology, the Big Bang Theory, does not include a singularity. Rather, it describes the universe starting at the end of the inflation period (itself not a proven fact but almost certainly true).
I would disagree with the "almost certainly true" part.
 
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  • #9
ohwilleke said:
I would disagree with the "almost certainly true" part.
Do you have a citation that it is true or are you saying you think it is unlikely to BE true?
 
  • #10
phinds said:
Do you have a citation that it is true or are you saying you think it is unlikely to BE true?
The likelihood that it is true are much lower than "almost certainly". See, e.g. (from here):

many physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science have voiced criticisms, claiming untestable predictions and a lack of serious empirical support.[5] In 1999, John Earman and Jesús Mosterín published a thorough critical review of inflationary cosmology, concluding,

"we do not think that there are, as yet, good grounds for admitting any of the models of inflation into the standard core of cosmology."[6]
As pointed out by Roger Penrose from 1986 on, in order to work, inflation requires extremely specific initial conditions of its own, so that the problem (or pseudo-problem) of initial conditions is not solved:

"There is something fundamentally misconceived about trying to explain the uniformity of the early universe as resulting from a thermalization process. ... For, if the thermalization is actually doing anything ... then it represents a definite increasing of the entropy. Thus, the universe would have been even more special before the thermalization than after."[131]
The problem of specific or "fine-tuned" initial conditions would not have been solved; it would have gotten worse. At a conference in 2015, Penrose said that

"inflation isn't falsifiable, it's falsified. ... BICEP did a wonderful service by bringing all the Inflation-ists out of their shell, and giving them a black eye."[7]

A recurrent criticism of inflation is that the invoked inflaton field does not correspond to any known physical field, and that its potential energy curve seems to be an ad hoc contrivance to accommodate almost any data obtainable. Paul Steinhardt, one of the founding fathers of inflationary cosmology, has recently become one of its sharpest critics. He calls 'bad inflation' a period of accelerated expansion whose outcome conflicts with observations, and 'good inflation' one compatible with them:

"Not only is bad inflation more likely than good inflation, but no inflation is more likely than either ... Roger Penrose considered all the possible configurations of the inflaton and gravitational fields. Some of these configurations lead to inflation ... Other configurations lead to a uniform, flat universe directly – without inflation. Obtaining a flat universe is unlikely overall. Penrose's shocking conclusion, though, was that obtaining a flat universe without inflation is much more likely than with inflation – by a factor of 10 to the googol[j] power!"[5][112]
Together with Anna Ijjas and Abraham Loeb, he wrote articles claiming that the inflationary paradigm is in trouble in view of the data from the Planck satellite.[132][133]

There are multiple theories out there to explain the same observations, including "Big Bounce" models, ekpyrotic and cyclic models, and string gas cosmology.

There are literally hundreds of different inflation models out there, many of which have been ruled out by a failure to detect evidence of primordial gravitational waves, and none of which have been confirmed.

To be clear, I am not claiming, as some of those quoted are saying, that cosmological inflation is clearly not true. I am merely claiming that it is not "almost certainly true."

Cosmological inflation remains an open question that is nowhere close to being resolved.
 
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  • #11
thanks for that info
 
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