pair production analogy

[Andeh]

This is really speculative. So speculative that it's probably going to piss people off even though it's in the Speculation section. Likewise, I have no idea how to test it, so it's not scientific. But whatever...

 

 

First, some backgorund info. In pair production, two photons (chargeless) can create an electron (negative charge) and a positron (positive charge), so the charges cancel out, and the whole system is neutral. Likewise, if there is extra energy (more energy than the rest mass of the particles) it becomes kinetic energy after pair production, and the electron and positron move in opposite directions--therefor the motion also cancels out.

 

I had the idea of applying that logic to the entire universe. In other words, the big bang created 2 universes. The expansions of both universes cancel each other out, and the net expansion is zero. Time "moves", as it were, in opposite direction, and so the net "motion" of time is zero.

 

Also, I thought that perhaps one of the universes is dominated by antimatter and the other by matter, but I dismissed this. Since after all, the first particles were photons (which are their own antimatter equivilants) and so barygenesis happened (somehow) after those photons gave rise to other particles.

 

Anyway, this just simplifies things a bit.

 

 

[md65536]

It's an interesting idea.

 

I don't see the analogy though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in pair production, the particle and the antiparticle exist at the same time.

 

Suppose an electron is created by pair production, and sometime later is annihilated with a positron. If you consider the positron to be moving backward through time, it is "created" at that point of annihilation, and moves back through time while the electron is moving forward through time. Then the positron might be "destroyed" by an earlier pair production (not typically with the same electron). Again, correct me if I'm wrong... I don't really know.

 

 

 

 

But I think the analogy is reasonable without the matter/antimatter idea at all. If the universe is like particles colliding and forming new particles that move forward through time, then from the perspective of the new particles, time might be considered "going backward" before the big bang of the collision. The process of smashing the particles into each other might be considered an entropy-lowering process, and the particles coming together and colliding is analogous to a time reversal of particles forming and moving apart after the collision.

 

In the analogy, smashing particles together doesn't actually lower entropy because the larger system, including for example a particle collider, used a lot of energy to accelerate the particle and the overall system's entropy increases. But it might be possible to imagine an entropy-lowering, time-reversed system leading up to the big bang...

 

 

Anyway I think the problem is that to use the analogy, you may have to think about "time before the big bang" and then it breaks down. There would probably be no evidence for or against this idea, so I'm not sure if it could be justified well enough.

Edited December 28, 2011 by md65536