THE 10^19 CANDY SHOP

Nothing

Before something was there, there was absolutely nothing. Is it possible to imagine that? An emptiness, so vast, that even our universe would be hardly imperceptible in such a huge void? The blackness is impenetrable, there is no light, nothing to observe, nothing to look at, so why even bother looking at all? Our language is short of concepts to convey this extreme nothingness, so very nothing that one couldn’t even imagine that no observer could be there, to determine there’s nothing he could look at and that there is no purpose whatsoever to even watch. This void is so empty, that no object could exist there, for even the most dense object would have to have been evaporated due to the infinite vacuum. There’s just nothing there.

But then, weirdly enough, something pops into existence. Why? How? How can I imagine how that works, what it looks like? From where and from what? I try to visualize this, by looking at boiling water. As the external pressure on the water decreases, the water forms bubbles (of water vapor) which then rise to the surface. Not only on a heating flame, but also in a near vacuum, the water would start boiling.

Candy Shop

If conservation of energy is true, and thus likewise conservation of mass, then somewhere something must have existed all along. Let us assume that ‘our’ universe (as from here I shall call it the ‘Candy Shop’, for there’s at least one Milky Way and one Mars in it) originated from the Big Bang, but beforehand, the singularity was invisible and infinitesimally small… So small, that it wasn't even there, fitting inside a Planck's length cubed. Apparently there must have been something at all, perhaps just energy. How in the name of the Universe of universes, could so much energy stack up in such a tiny space and get so densely crammed together, that it reached the point that it turned unstable? And just when a few features happen at the same time, there may be smaller or bigger bangs.  

The first feature is the occurrence of a minor distortion in a field of some sort. One guess may be, that so long as the singularity was smooth on its outside, nothing could harm it. A minor distortion makes the singularity bulge one side and immediately 'the energy oscillators' in the vacuum may perceive this distortion and then proliferate it to other parts of the huge nothingness. Then, as vacuums tend to do, the vacuum exerts its infinite suction force on the only thing within reach and in an infinitessimally small indivisible Planck's time instant, it suddenly and unannouncedly tears the singularity to shreds. The tiniest particles, all similar, form the primordial plasma in which the fundamental forces were still united. The vacuum as such wants to spread everything evenly and therefore even sucks space into these smallest particles that were torn out of the singularity.

The second feature is that once the plasma was hurled into the vacuum, all through the cosmos particles seem to pop in and out of existence. A particle of what? Well just a particle, not an atom or a molecule, just some basic subatomic particle. What that is, I shall explain later; see the last paragraph of this article. Then there are particles and antiparticles, but only those that do not match in pairs, are the ones that come to exist as 'matter' and are not annihilated by their opposite. All the rest of the cosmos is full of pairs of matter and antimatter particles and represent the nothingness. According to classical theories of thermodynamics, that occurrence of matter and antimatter particles in pairs, that continuously annihilate each other, is called total entropy. Therefore I consider entropy as perfect order in stead of ultimate chaos. There is a perfect dispersal of energy, the most wonderful equilibrium.

The third feature is that particles cling together. They should not do that, but there may perhaps be some excess electromagnetic energy, that makes particles sticky.

These three features form a tiny blob of plasma, in the first stage of the energy to mass transformation process. Why then is this blob invisible and doesn’t even appear to exist? That is because in this process, at first there was only energy, then there was energy and (plasmatic) matter, although the energy was sheer infinite compared to the tiny amount of matter and thus the particles could orbit one another at sheer infinite speeds. Their mutual attraction serves as a brake for these speeds, whereby the energy starts to conserve as potential energy within the blob. Thus the blob starts to heat and the inward pressure accumulates until the blob is a self-preserving singularity.

Still there is a field in and surrounding the blob. In fact, this blob is the singularity that the Candy Shop was before the Big Bang. It grows infinitely dense and heavy and would exist forever as a singularity if there would not occur an irregularity in the field. Just as a pinprick is a discontinuity in the surface of a balloon, the irregularity is a distortion of the energy fields in and surrounding the blob, that cause the blob to explode into what we now call the Candy Shop. This sounds different from the vacuum suction and shredding theorem presented in the 'first feature' paragraph, but it's no different at all and doesn't contradict.

So as I pictured this process as the vacuum pulling on the on the blob from every direction, it could be correct, assuming that vacuum energy exists (which I think it does). As energy creates gravity, but the energy would be spread out evenly, gravity would pull and push everywhere in every direction equally, and no effect of gravity would be noticeable. Same goes for energy. If all energy everywhere would be equally distributed, no-one could perceive energy, for there would not be a potential anywhere.

But now I came to assume pressure from within with a very tiny internal or external cause of distortion, like a pinprick. That made the singular blob explode and expand into the unimaginable vast universe we live in.

Assumed Diameter

Within the Candy Shop, we as humans developed the ability to measure space and time and therefore calculated that our universe, at least the observable part of it, measures some 92 billion light years in diameter. For calculation’s sake, the 92 billion is rounded up to 100 billion or 10¹¹, then the assumed total universe is a hundred times bigger across. Let us assume that it’s far bigger, say ten trillion (10¹³) light years across. The total volume would be 10¹⁹ light years, a hundred thousand times bigger than the one with the 100 billion ly diameter. Anything from that far away is futile, for we can never (in our lifetime) experience anything that happens out there, unless it happened so long ago that the effects will reach us before we swap our existence for eternity. That would then have to have happened at least 10¹³ years ago, if it were only the photons that reach us. Matter is assumed to come more slowly.

So assuming that our blob has grown to be 10¹⁹ ly cubed, and this is a very average normal middle of the road universe, as is our galaxy and our solar system and our sun and our earth and everyone on it[1], then there may be other universes beyond the most extreme horizon of our Candy Shop. These are separated by – again – empty spaces. Or could it be that they clot like bubbles in a foam? Who can tell. But as my character Pioneer in my previous blog item experienced, a universe can get heavily dented by another one, as and when something big explodes.

Out Of Reach

It is okay to assume any multi-universe theory. But we will never know for sure, unless we can time travel or travel at superluminal speeds; just light speed would not be enough, for then it would take us 46 billion years to reach the edge of what is the observable universe. And by twice the light speed, we would learn what is stashed in the other onion layers of our 10¹⁹ Candy Shop, but still not reach the outer edge of the store. Only at billions of light speed, we would have time to gaze at the marvels and get back home on time to report to colleagues, audiences and family and friends. But still be unaware of what lies outside the Candy Shop.

Moreover, we know quite well that the observable part of the candy blob expands and that at the same time, tiny bits of light from the parts beyond seep into our regions, so that serves as the expansion of the expanding observable part. I tend to think that our entire Candy Shop keeps expanding forever, until something stops it. As long as what could stop it, is not completely surrounding the Candy Shop, all but the part that encounters that other object or force will keep expanding in all directions of space and time. In the end, all gets dispersed, flattened equally in all dimensions, with no baryonic energy flows anymore, no light, all matter crumbled into subatomic particles and eventually… nothing is left but total blackness, total nothingness and complete order in an undisturbed smoothness and ultimate equilibrium. That again is entropy, paradoxically.

Explaining what subatomic particles are, is the domain of quantum field theory. And also my domain. I shall explain what the smallest particles are, in a next episode of this blog.

What is your opinion on the rise and fall of the Candy Shop? Does it make sense or should someone tell me to shut up with my crazy ideas?

Do not hesitate to send your comments; if in my humble opinion they are worth publishing, I will do so. And of course, I very much appreciate if experts on these subjects submit their views. Would you then please add your own brief ‘about me’?

<<

---

[1] Or, as Matt O’Dowd says in Spacetime episode The Vacuum Catastrophe (https://youtu.be/n6jAOV7bZ3Y): “We exist in an extremely rare universe whose fundamental fields canceled out their zero-point energy”.