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The issue you're running into here is that you're focusing on the description of this physics in terms of particles. That's usually a very convenient perspectiv
by Steuard 13y ago
The issue you're running into here is that you're focusing on the description of this physics in terms of particles. That's usually a very convenient perspective, but it tends to have issues when gravity/spacetime is doing weird things (or even in an accelerated reference frame, which is sort of the same thing).
What you really want to focus on is the question, "What are the (quantum) fields doing during inflation?" Those fields will typically be in a state with a whole lot of symmetry, and only small, random fluctuations away from that state will lead to perturbations in the CMB.
I might be able to frame this in the particle picture, too. The issue is that there wasn't just one quark! There's a whole intense thermal mass of quarks and other particles, and the energies are high enough (and times short enough) that more of them are being pulled from the vacuum and annihilating back into it all the time (this is largely a field-theory statement, I'm afraid). That mass of quarks is what's being pulled apart by inflation. So there's no single special original quark particle that triggers the whole thing. [Disclaimer: I'm not actually a cosmologist, so I welcome corrections on anything I've misstated there!]
- selimthegrim 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affleck-Dine_mechanism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affleck-Dine_mechanism
- graycat 13y agoParticle - field, okay. To me, a 'particle' is just a temporary entity that happens when a field has an 'interaction' and decides to have its wave function 'collapse' -- then it has a new wave function. I was trying to go back before there was a 'soup' of wave functions with lots of quarks or whatever the first 'particle' was. So, as I read Guth, there was a 'something', small enough to be essentially just a 'point', but with very high energy and energy density, and that density caused high space-time curvature, and the region with that high curvature expanded, explosively, on the way to something much flatter but much larger, in the first second so large as to be nearly as large as now and with density and curvature nearly as low as now. So, back to the 'beginning': There was just one particle/wave of very high energy in a very small region of very high curvature that got pulled by the expanding space-time and, presto, soon there was two particles or wave functions. That first separation is the one I am thinking about, and it had to have an axis. And nearly all I have is just layman's descriptions of the curvature, wave functions, Guth's expansion, etc. so am typing stuff I really don't know about! In some of the math, my real field, I'm solid enough, but for the physics -- no.