The Creation

[StickySid]

apologies for the bold - can't undo it... (fixed by mod)

 

We’ve known for a while that something fundamental is wrong with our standard model. We’ve got the basics right and are making incredible advances in the atomic and quantum departments but something's not quite right; things just don’t add up. What if our fundamental premise about our universe is flawed - our ‘creation’ story?

What if, before the instant of the ‘beginning’ of our universe, rather than nothing there was everything? What if all matter and anti-matter already existed in a stable homogenous state… impossible I hear you cry, but hear me out - let’s call it a matrix. An unimaginably infinite matrix. The big bang remains the ‘beginning’ of our universe when, at a single/multiple(?) point on this matrix, a disturbance causes a local coalescence of the previously stable matter/anti-matter. This coalescence creates a domino-effect chain-reaction expanding in a multi-dimensional ripple like a fire consuming the fuel, leaving behind (creating) a scattering of swirling masses (galaxies?) in our ever-expanding universe of concentrated matter/anti-matter reactions. Essentially with this creation idea, all the mass of the universe is not required to be in the same infinitesimally small space and ‘explode’ outwards - the ever-expanding domino-effect boundary of this chain reaction is creating more and more of our universe as it moves, but the fuel-stuff is already there, in the matrix, ready to be used.

The boundary of our particular ripple must be expanding exponentially. Beyond the boundary of the ripple is outside ‘our’ universe, as we think of it, but is actually just our universe in a stable state before it’s changed from the homogenous matrix into concentrations of matter as the ripple passes. Not so much something from nothing but something from something else.

I have a feeling if this is viable, if you can get past the basic premise (that everything is already ‘out there’)  it would have some important implications.

Anyway, thanks for reading, apologies if it’s a really silly idea - but, is it?

any thoughts?

Sticky

[swansont]

4 minutes ago, StickySid said:

We’ve known for a while that something fundamental is wrong with our standard model. We’ve got the basics right and are making incredible advances in the atomic and quantum departments but something's not quite right; things just don’t add up. What if our fundamental premise about our universe is flawed - our ‘creation’ story?

Any new theory is going to be consistent with what we already know to be how nature behaves. Yes, we could have a new paradigm, but that will only manifest at the existing edge cases and at scales we are only just reaching now, much like how QM didn’t eliminate classical mechanics above the atomic scale or thereabouts, under mundane conditions. 

[StickySid]

Why do we insist that there was nothing before something? Maybe nature would be happier with a change of state of something rather than sudden creation from nothing?

I have trouble with all the matter in the universe being present at the physical point of creation and expanding ever outward - I mean surely, if it follows our rules, it must be getting more and more sparse as it spreads, ultimately petering out? Continual expansion could continue infinitely if the 'fuel' is already out there, beyond 'our' universe, waiting to be nudged by the ripple - creating a fairly uniformly spread universe if observed at sufficient scale

[Area54]

1 hour ago, StickySid said:

Why do we insist that there was nothing before something?

Who is the "we" you refer to? Certainly not most cosmologists. While many/some cosmologists accept the possibility that the universe may have arisen from nothing, that "nothing" is not the "nothing" of the laypersons vocabulary. Moreover, very few insist that this must have occurred. If the "we" is anybody other than bona fide cosmologists their opinions may reasonably be dismissed.

[StickySid]

Sor

3 hours ago, Area54 said:

Who is the "we" you refer to? Certainly not most cosmologists...

Sorry, I was being lazy and assuming that was the accepted view. Probably more my idea of what the previously accepted view was...

Anyway, I assumed that anything before the big bang is by definition unknowable and so who's to say what was or wasn't there? Like I said, it seems to me more plausible that the whole of 'creation' was already spread around, just in a different form, beyond our physics - rather than just popped into existence

[Phi for All]

16 minutes ago, StickySid said:

I assumed that anything before the big bang is by definition unknowable and so who's to say what was or wasn't there?

This is basically correct. And the BB theory doesn't quite go all the way back to t=0, so not only can we not know anything about the universe prior to that time, it's also, by definition, NOT "the creation".

20 minutes ago, StickySid said:

Like I said, it seems to me more plausible that the whole of 'creation' was already spread around, just in a different form, beyond our physics - rather than just popped into existence

There you go, trying to describe pre-BB existence again, even though you said you assumed it's unknowable. 😁 

"Beyond our physics" isn't a valuable phrase. We exceed our own knowledge on a minute-by-minute basis, and expressing our best current explanations as theory allows us to constantly update the sum total. 

"Just popped into existence" is particularly unhelpful when trying to map all the variables that went into the LCDM model. It's inaccurate, misleading, and trivializes the rigor with which these calculations are currently applied. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but like any theory it has its areas of application, and it has its limits (extrapolating back to the moment of the Big Bang using GR yields infinite temperatures and densities before we actually get to t=0).

[beecee]

7 hours ago, StickySid said:

Why do we insist that there was nothing before something?

As others have said, the BB isn't about "creation"...and the "nothing" isn't the nothing as generally inferred. The BB gives us a reasonable picture and framework of how the universe we see today, evolved from a point, t+10-43 seconds. Before that, yes cosmologists at this time can only speculate, just as you are doing. 

Speculatively speaking, the "nothing" as defined by most cosmologists and promoted by Lawrence Krauss, and which has existed for eternity, is the quantum foam...pretty close to the nothing that a lay person may describe, and once did describe as nothing.

[StickySid]

Ok, seems like I've fallen into a few newbie traps... sorry to be so predictable folks 🙄

So, I take it my 'lightbulb moment' is already an established (and presumably much better described) idea? I'll go check out Krauss' quantum foam see how it compares to what I have in mind - any other reading suggestions I may find helpful?