How did everything fit in such small space/spot?

[Dav333]

How could everything in the very early universe occupy such a small volume? Is it because particles are described as point-like meaning on there own they take up no space or volume? Please help.

[Airbrush]

How could everything in the very early universe occupy such a small volume? Is it because particles are described as point-like meaning on there own they take up no space or volume? Please help.

 

Good question that I'd like the answer to also. It was not such a small volume. Think collision of higher parallel dimensions, like blankets hanging on two parallel clothes lines and a breeze brings them into contact. The collision takes place over a relatively large region of indefinite size.

 

How does such a "tiny" region of such high density overcome its' own gravity to become a Big Bang? That would be a black hole exploding, which doesn't happen.

Edited September 29, 2010 by Airbrush

[timo]

Apart from an arbitrary amount of random buzzwords I could throw at you (how about "tunneling between branes"? I have no idea what a "brane" is, though): Why would there be a problem in the first place? I do think it is indeed best to think that the reason is that particles are point-like and only resist being squeezed together by various forces (electrostatic repulsion being the most known; effective force caused by the fermionic occupancy statistics probably being the most relevant close to the BB). If you accept that picture (which may come with a lot of problems) then compressing your stuff is just a question of pushing it together strong enough. This then certainly allows to start in such a compressed state.

 

Airbrush: The early universe scenario is not the same as or (mathematically) similar to the black hole scenario. I'm sure you'll find plenty of FAQs explaining that if you do a forum- or Google-search.

[Airbrush]

"The early universe scenario is not the same as or (mathematically) similar to the black hole scenario. I'm sure you'll find plenty of FAQs explaining that if you do a forum- or Google-search."

 

If the very early universe started as a tiny point, how could its' density not cause a collapse into a black hole?

 

Google search of what?

Edited September 29, 2010 by Airbrush

[timo]

If the very early universe started as a tiny point, how could its' density not cause a collapse into a black hole?

That's what the FAQ hopefully will explain.

 

Google search of what?

I suggest the keywords "big bang" AND "black hole". But you are free to think out of the box and try something else.

[Airbrush]

Good advice Timo. Here's what I found:

 

"Why did the universe not collapse and form a black hole at the beginning?

 

"Sometimes people find it hard to understand why the Big Bang is not a black hole. After all, the density of matter in the first fraction of a second was much higher than that found in any star, and dense matter is supposed to curve spacetime strongly. At sufficient density there must be matter contained within a region smaller than the Schwarzschild radius for its mass. Nevertheless, the Big Bang manages to avoid being trapped inside a black hole of its own making and paradoxically the space near the singularity is actually flat rather than curving tightly. How can this be?

 

The short answer is that the Big Bang gets away with it because it is expanding rapidly near the beginning and the rate of expansion is slowing down. Space can be flat even when spacetime is not. Spacetime's curvature can come from the temporal parts of the spacetime metric which measures the deceleration of the expansion of the universe. So the total curvature of spacetime is related to the density of matter, but there is a contribution to curvature from the expansion as well as from any curvature of space. The Schwarzschild solution of the gravitational equations is static and demonstrates the limits placed on a static spherical body before it must collapse to a black hole. The Schwarzschild limit does not apply to rapidly expanding matter."

 

http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/PhysFAQ/Relativity/BlackHoles/universe.html

 

Now all I need to do is figure out what this means.

Edited September 29, 2010 by Airbrush

[Mr Skeptic]

How could everything in the very early universe occupy such a small volume? Is it because particles are described as point-like meaning on there own they take up no space or volume? Please help.

 

What makes you think it was a small volume? It could also have been an infinitely large volume, as far as I know. Only if our universe is finite would it have been a finite volume.

 

In any case, it is the density that we know more about, and the density which seems to be your question. Very high densities are hard to achieve, but it would have been very energetic like the collisions in our particle colliders which also have high density.

[lemur]

It always seems like people are cautioning others against thinking of the big bang as an expansion INTO space and insisting that it is actually an expansion OF space. In that case, I don't see why it couldn't be said that the big bang is not the expansion of a Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, only it is a black hole that we occupy and observe from the inside. I don't know if this is possible or even answerable, but it seems plausible to me that every blackhole contains within it an expanding, evolving universe and that the matter-energy entering it is in fact feeding the expansion even though it takes place over an extended period of time in the source-universe. This seems plausible to me because the singularity of a black hole could logically exist as a point without space-time differentiation, meaning everything past the Schwarzschild radius could exist as a simultaneous moment despite the fact that everything that enters the radius from outside of it takes place at different moments. The spacetime that expands within the black hole, then, could do so within its own big-bang-begun time-line. This actually sounds like some kind of familiar notion about black holes, now that I've elaborated it.

[between3and26characterslon]

How could everything in the very early universe occupy such a small volume? Is it because particles are described as point-like meaning on there own they take up no space or volume? Please help.

 

Even though particles are described as point like it doesn't mean they have no volume, it's just a mathematical concept. If particles did have no volume then they would all be black holes due to the 1/r^2 nature of gravity.

 

The black hole at the centre of our galaxy is something like a million miles in diameter, if you took all the mass in the universe and squeezed it into a black hole it would have a diameter of billions of miles.

 

But the beggining of the universe was a singularity so how did it all fit in. It simply wasn't matter yet. After the big bang and after the inflationary period the universe had cooled enough for matter to start forming. The universe was pretty big by the time matter was being created.

[lemur]

Even though particles are described as point like it doesn't mean they have no volume, it's just a mathematical concept. If particles did have no volume then they would all be black holes due to the 1/r^2 nature of gravity.

 

The black hole at the centre of our galaxy is something like a million miles in diameter, if you took all the mass in the universe and squeezed it into a black hole it would have a diameter of billions of miles.

 

But the beggining of the universe was a singularity so how did it all fit in. It simply wasn't matter yet. After the big bang and after the inflationary period the universe had cooled enough for matter to start forming. The universe was pretty big by the time matter was being created.

 

Well, if particles of matter actually consist of force-fields, how do you delineate the volume of such a field? Does a magnetic field have a volume? Doesn't the volume of the ability of the field to repel a field of the same charge vary with the amount of force pushing the two magnets together?

 

Likewise, what makes you think that the force-fields that make up basic matter don't simply collapse in a black hole? If you put enough pressure on two repelling magnets, you can overcome their fields and simply stack them against each other despite their repulsion, no? Now, if the matter of the magnets themselves gave way just like their fields did, what would be left in terms of volume? The force itself might remain, but not in the form of volume-generating mutual repulsion with other particles.

 

That is interesting about the universe having to cool for a while before matter was able to form. That brings me back to my interest in how matter forms from energy, i.e. what that process would or could be.

 

Still, I think you are making a mistake to assume that energy has a maximum density. Ultimately this is my opinion, but I can't think of any reason why their should be a physical law guaranteeing volume from force or energy. If matter consisted of some kind of fundamental particles with absolute volume, maximum density would be possible, what what evidence is there that matter is absolutely conserved at some level? At this point I was under the impression that most indications suggest that matter and energy are fully interchangeable. Is this not the case?

[between3and26characterslon]

Well, if particles of matter actually consist of force-fields, how do you delineate the volume of such a field? Does a magnetic field have a volume? Doesn't the volume of the ability of the field to repel a field of the same charge vary with the amount of force pushing the two magnets together?

 

I think your saying that particles are just force fields and force fields have no volume therefore particles have no volume and are pointlike. But if r=0 then 1/r^2 would be infinite. TBH though I'm not sure if that's what you were asking.

 

Likewise, what makes you think that the force-fields that make up basic matter don't simply collapse in a black hole? If you put enough pressure on two repelling magnets, you can overcome their fields and simply stack them against each other despite their repulsion, no? Now, if the matter of the magnets themselves gave way just like their fields did, what would be left in terms of volume? The force itself might remain, but not in the form of volume-generating mutual repulsion with other particles.

 

Do you have a link to a reputable source where I can read an explanation of this? I'd be interested.

 

I don't know how strong the force required to collapse a proton, for instance, is. I know gravity is a weak force and it increases as r gets smaller, I guess other forces involved behave in the same way. I don't know if a balance would be reached or if gravity would win out and collapse mater. What I was suggesting is that black holes have a size that's bigger than the universe was at the moment of creation, I've often heard of black holes described as being the mass of the sun but the size of a grapefruit. Maybe I was taking that to literally but I've always heard of black holes as having size.

 

It seems to me that thinking of TBB as an exploding black hole (which seemed to be the OP's line of questioning) is confusing.

 

That is interesting about the universe having to cool for a while before matter was able to form. That brings me back to my interest in how matter forms from energy, i.e. what that process would or could be.

 

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8fI8wdvteU&feature=PlayList&p=9A8A80BC2834046A&index=0&playnext=1 Take out the spaces and copy and paste, then the second part of this episode should play automatically (it's a bit dumbed down for mainstream audiences but is still quite interesting)

 

Still, I think you are making a mistake to assume that energy has a maximum density. Ultimately this is my opinion, but I can't think of any reason why their should be a physical law guaranteeing volume from force or energy. If matter consisted of some kind of fundamental particles with absolute volume, maximum density would be possible, what what evidence is there that matter is absolutely conserved at some level? At this point I was under the impression that most indications suggest that matter and energy are fully interchangeable. Is this not the case?

 

I'm not sure I did assume that.

 

Matter outside of a black hole must have size/volume because of 1/r^2. Does matter inside a black hole have zero volume? Tricky, does space exist inside a black hole? I don't know.

[lemur]

I think your saying that particles are just force fields and force fields have no volume therefore particles have no volume and are pointlike. But if r=0 then 1/r^2 would be infinite. TBH though I'm not sure if that's what you were asking.

Would it be too hasty to generalize that equations like this one carry a bias against considering that the particle form or characteristics of the field, and therefore the equation itself, transform under certain conditions? If a field would collapse or transform under certain conditions, I would expect its force to be conserved albeit in different terms. A star, for example, could be viewed as converting gravitational force into radiating electromagnetic force, no? These fields create volume because they are in motion relative to other fields, no? If they no longer had the capacity to repel or move relative to each other, their repelling force might be transformed into something else, no?

 

Do you have a link to a reputable source where I can read an explanation of this? I'd be interested.

I just put it out there a possibility based on the empirical observation that repelling magnets can be pushed to the point of direct contact. Their fields do no increase to infinite intensity to prevent them from making contact at all. This makes sense in the same way it makes sense that light can't propagate at infinite speed. Thus, I wouldn't expect matter to have a minimum volume for the same reason.

 

I don't know how strong the force required to collapse a proton, for instance, is. I know gravity is a weak force and it increases as r gets smaller, I guess other forces involved behave in the same way. I don't know if a balance would be reached or if gravity would win out and collapse mater. What I was suggesting is that black holes have a size that's bigger than the universe was at the moment of creation, I've often heard of black holes described as being the mass of the sun but the size of a grapefruit. Maybe I was taking that to literally but I've always heard of black holes as having size.

 

I don't know if the grapefruit comparison would refer to the actual volume of matter comprising the BH or just the size of the Schwarzschild radius (I can never spell this word). If it refers to the S. radius, then there is no knowing what the actual volume of matter within that radius would or could be. All you really know is that the radius itself increases as mass (and energy?) enters. Maybe the mass/energy is getting directly converted into pure gravitation; i.e. fueling the expansion of the attractive field itself.

 

It seems to me that thinking of TBB as an exploding black hole (which seemed to be the OP's line of questioning) is confusing.

I have often heard ppl get corrected for thinking of TBB as an explosion instead of an expansion. Maybe part of the problem is that ppl tend to think of BHs from the outside. If TBB was an expansion of a black hole as it occurs from the inside, that would make more sense, imo.

 

 

Matter outside of a black hole must have size/volume because of 1/r^2. Does matter inside a black hole have zero volume? Tricky, does space exist inside a black hole? I don't know.

Would another way to express this be that size/volume can exist outside a black hole because gravity levels are low enough to permit linear motion? After all, photons are the fastest-possible agents of motion in that they have no mass and all their energy gets expressed as linear motion. So if even photons cease to radiate linearly, how could volume exist? I.e. for a point to generate dimensions, it has to move from A to B (to C to D, etc.).

 

 

[between3and26characterslon]

It always seems like people are cautioning others against thinking of the big bang as an expansion INTO space and insisting that it is actually an expansion OF space. In that case, I don't see why it couldn't be said that the big bang is not the expansion of a Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, only it is a black hole that we occupy and observe from the inside. I don't know if this is possible or even answerable, but it seems plausible to me that every blackhole contains within it an expanding, evolving universe and that the matter-energy entering it is in fact feeding the expansion even though it takes place over an extended period of time in the source-universe.

 

 

Would it be too hasty to generalize that equations like this one carry a bias against considering that the particle form or characteristics of the field, and therefore the equation itself, transform under certain conditions? If a field would collapse or transform under certain conditions, I would expect its force to be conserved albeit in different terms. A star, for example, could be viewed as converting gravitational force into radiating electromagnetic force, no? These fields create volume because they are in motion relative to other fields, no? If they no longer had the capacity to repel or move relative to each other, their repelling force might be transformed into something else, no?

 

I don't understand, are you saying that black holes contain universes (which themselves contain black holes which contain universes which contain black holes ad infinitum). Are you saying that equations and matter 'outside' our universe are different to equations and matter inside our universe which inturn are different to equations and matter inside black holes

 

This seems plausible to me because the singularity of a black hole could logically exist as a point without space-time differentiation, meaning everything past the Schwarzschild radius could exist as a simultaneous moment despite the fact that everything that enters the radius from outside of it takes place at different moments. The spacetime that expands within the black hole, then, could do so within its own big-bang-begun time-line. This actually sounds like some kind of familiar notion about black holes, now that I've elaborated it.

 

Or are you saying the laws of physics are the same inside a black hole as they are on the ouside??

 

I just put it out there a possibility based on the empirical observation that repelling magnets can be pushed to the point of direct contact. Their fields do not increase to infinite intensity to prevent them from making contact at all. This makes sense in the same way it makes sense that light can't propagate at infinite speed. Thus, I wouldn't expect matter to have a minimum volume for the same reason.

 

What exactly do you mean by contact? As the electrons surrounding the atoms that make up one of the magnets come into close proximity to the electrons that surround the atoms that make up the other magnet they repel each other with an ever increasing force. Not matter how hard you press the magnets together they never touch. Not just magnets though, nothing ever 'touches' anything, your fingers are not touching the keys on your keyboard. Under the extreme gravition of a black hole electrons would be squeezed ever closer together but whether or not they touch I don't know. Then there is the force which is holding the electron itself together.

 

 

I don't know if the grapefruit comparison would refer to the actual volume of matter comprising the BH or just the size of the Schwarzschild radius (I can never spell this word). If it refers to the S. radius, then there is no knowing what the actual volume of matter within that radius would or could be. All you really know is that the radius itself increases as mass (and energy?) enters. Maybe the mass/energy is getting directly converted into pure gravitation; i.e. fueling the expansion of the attractive field itself.

 

Are mass and enrgy the same thing or are they just equivalent? Can you have gravity without mass? Are they converted into "pure gravitation"?

 

 

I have often heard ppl get corrected for thinking of TBB as an explosion instead of an expansion. Maybe part of the problem is that ppl tend to think of BHs from the outside. If TBB was an expansion of a black hole as it occurs from the inside, that would make more sense, imo.

 

Would another way to express this be that size/volume can exist outside a black hole because gravity levels are low enough to permit linear motion? After all, photons are the fastest-possible agents of motion in that they have no mass and all their energy gets expressed as linear motion. So if even photons cease to radiate linearly, how could volume exist? I.e. for a point to generate dimensions, it has to move from A to B (to C to D, etc.).

 

Again you seem to be contradicting your self here. If graivity is so high within a black hole how can a universe exist inside it? Also if two black holes of similar size collide the each universe within those black holes will double in mass and energ.

 

 

Anyway the OP asked a rather simply worded question and I gave a rather simply worded answer which suggested that crushing all the matter of the universe into a black hole is not a good analogy of the big bang and would lead to exactly the confusion that was evident in the original question.

[lemur]

Again you seem to be contradicting your self here. If graivity is so high within a black hole how can a universe exist inside it? Also if two black holes of similar size collide the each universe within those black holes will double in mass and energy.

But that was my whole point, i.e that force can be converted into energy, and that spacetime could be a product of energy and gravity, NOT a fixed container that the universe expands INTO. It sounds like you're assuming that for the universe of the BBT to expand, there needs to be some volume surrounding it for it to expand into. It could be that the energy inside a black hole becomes spacetime without the blackhole needing to grow in volume as viewed from outside.

 

Anyway the OP asked a rather simply worded question and I gave a rather simply worded answer which suggested that crushing all the matter of the universe into a black hole is not a good analogy of the big bang and would lead to exactly the confusion that was evident in the original question.

But you're assuming that once matter is crushed, it cannot generate spacetime where there was previously none. Isn't this the whole premise of BBT?

 

 

 

[between3and26characterslon]

But that was my whole point, i.e that force can be converted into energy, and that spacetime could be a product of energy and gravity, NOT a fixed container that the universe expands INTO. It sounds like you're assuming that for the universe of the BBT to expand, there needs to be some volume surrounding it for it to expand into. It could be that the energy inside a black hole becomes spacetime without the blackhole needing to grow in volume as viewed from outside.

 

 

But you're assuming that once matter is crushed, it cannot generate spacetime where there was previously none. Isn't this the whole premise of BBT?

 

 

No I'm not saying that there had to be space for the universe to expand into, I was saying exactly the opposite. Black holes exist in space and can have a huge radius whereas TBB had no space to exist in. This to me differentiates it from a black hole. Also when matter falls into a black hole its (the black hole's) energy increases but I'm not sure whether the energy of the universe is increasing.

 

What I was getting at with your response is that on the one hand you are suggesting that anything that falls into a black hole is converted into 'pure energy' and on the other hand you're saying that a universe, which is made up of physical matter, could exist inside a black hole. You can't have it both ways, either matter is crushed into oblivion or it isn't.

[lemur]

No I'm not saying that there had to be space for the universe to expand into, I was saying exactly the opposite. Black holes exist in space and can have a huge radius whereas TBB had no space to exist in. This to me differentiates it from a black hole. Also when matter falls into a black hole its (the black hole's) energy increases but I'm not sure whether the energy of the universe is increasing.

The Schwarzschild radius is the radius at which the gravitational field reaches light-constraining levels, but I don't think it's accurate to infer this as the volume of the black hole. It's just the point at which all signs of anything falling into the hole disappear. Also, how could you be sure that TBB did not occur within a BH derived from a preceding universe? If the S. radius delineates a radical transformation point where all forces and energies get converted from extensive to intrinsic, then why shouldn't that intrinsic force result in an expansion of spacetime within the intrinsic universe inside the BH?

 

To conceptualize this realistically, I think you would have to look at spacetime purely as an effect of force/energy without the assumption that volume is mutually excluding such that a BH expanding intrinsically would have to be expanding extensively into the universe that is feeding it.

 

 

What I was getting at with your response is that on the one hand you are suggesting that anything that falls into a black hole is converted into 'pure energy' and on the other hand you're saying that a universe, which is made up of physical matter, could exist inside a black hole. You can't have it both ways, either matter is crushed into oblivion or it isn't.

I would assume that everything that enters a BH would not just be crushed into oblivion but that the very forces that make it up all get converted into a universal force that propagates intrinsically. This is where I get somewhat confused, because how can anything propagate and grow intrinsically? If all the energy of an object is simultaneously released as radiation but the radiation can't radiate anywhere, what happens to it? This is where I think the logic of TBB comes in, insofar as it contains the idea that spacetime itself can expand as a product of energy. Since spacetime is a function of energy and gravity, it seems possible that spacetime could be generated intrinsically within the BH, creating a new universe insofar as spacetime itself could propagate intrinsically - of course, from the perspective of an observer evolving within that universe, it would appear to be expanding since expansion itself is the produce of spacetime being generated, no?

 

So I think the universe that would form as a result of intrinsic propagation of force/energy within a BH would literally resemble the big bang, where differentiation of radiation/energy and matter/gravitation would only occur after some time, probably only once enough spacetime was generated for energy-density levels to be less than that of a BH.

 

I don't know if intrinsic propagation is something that has been talked about elsewhere, maybe with a different name. I'm not trying to be speculative. I'm really just wondering what could occur within a BH and whether any reputable cosmologists have already considered this and somehow ruled it out. I read, for example, in Hawking's book that people entering a BH would be turned into spaghetti, jokingly, but I don't think he specified any positive hypotheses about what could in fact occur with matter/energy/force once inside. I believe he dismissed wormholes, or at least said that they would be highly unstable if they existed. This was an old book and I don't know if there are others who participate in cosmological discourse in an active way.

Edited October 4, 2010 by lemur

[michel123456]

How could everything in the very early universe occupy such a small volume? Is it because particles are described as point-like meaning on there own they take up no space or volume? Please help.

 

Look at this presentation made by the American Museum of Natural History (secure), make a stop in the middle, it's the believed time of the Big Bang. What do you see? Certainly not " small volume"