Wolfgang Korsus Dipl.-Ing NT, Astrophysicist
Klingenberg 40
D-25451 Quickborn
Mobile 01625680456 FNet 0410669295
Website : wolfgang.korsus.net
Inflation….say clearly better „The cosmic inflation“.
About thirty years ago the American cosmologist Alan Guth proposed an excellent model.
I try to explain it, because I have followed this model myself theoretically and intellectually more and more often and I am convinced that this model is not only a hypothesis ( statement whose validity one considers possible, but which is not proved or verified ), but ……..so it has been actually. Because the living being man did not exist yet therefore it can never be proved.
If you decide to measure anything, you should think and ask yourself : what is my reference point ? It is a zero !…….denn the height of mountains is measured „above sea level“, the depth of oceans „below sea level“. Accordingly, Mount Everest is 8900 meters high and the highest mountain on earth. But the volcano Mauna Kea on Hawaii rises 10.000 meters above the „sea bottom“ – actually it is the biggest mountain on earth. …….Denkste !!!
Another example :
Imagine a dammed river: Upstream the water level is much higher than downstream. Here I say : This difference in height results in a corresponding difference in potential energy and this can be used to operate a power plant which generates electricity by the falling water.
That says, if the transition from one energy level to another takes place very suddenly, energy is released. With the cosmic inflation already mentioned by me one can imagine well that the whole universe of today originally consisted of a small bubble of extremely hot matter, causally it was coherent and in the thermal equilibrium. Only the ground state, thus the reference point, was far above our today’s at that time. This primeval bubble expanded, cooled down gradually and was brought thereby to a critical point.
But it must be said in addition with the mentioned process the space expanded extremely in very short time, because that says the term „inflation“. I had mentioned that the matter before the expansion was in the thermal equilibrium, so it remained in the corresponding state also after the breaking apart into causally „incoherent“ areas. The inflation theory explains itself as already mentioned to the fact that one measures the same background temperature in all areas of the sky today.
To the inflation there are also simple explanations and I try it times on this way. It starts : before the inflation all participants were in the same „bucket“,
that means for the information they tuned. So they remained in the subsequent transition. So it was an information transition from higher to lower level.
And through this, a lot of energy was released; this „#’ö „dark energy“ permeates the (our) whole universe. This energy was up to now and remains the motor for the expansion. Even the „cosmic“ inflation explains at best how in the calculated extremely short time a hot, expanding universe could develop.
However, I must not forget to point out …. the origin of the conditions necessary for this process remains furthermore in the dark.
So it will remain eternally because the real beginning of everything remains further beyond the science and with it eternally in the dark.
The, I call it „postinflationary“ development, depends then, as I already mentioned, on the interaction of gravity and dark energy. It should also be mentioned, however it may go on, today, in any case, everything expands increasingly.
Only always remember, this expansion is not an „explosion“ which e.g. hurls debris into an empty space. The space originated only in the big bang, and it is the space itself which is hurled out. I find certainly a better comparison how one can represent the universe today, namely in such a way as it was described already often. Now follows the example with the cake …….
…..our universe today can be imagined like raisins in a cake pond. This has already been some time in the oven and the cake „rises“.
Everyone knows what happens when a cake rises, ….then all the raisins notice something very specific, namely the neighboring raisins move further and further away from each other. The dough between the raisins is equal to the space and for the idea of expansion it doesn’t matter how much dough there is and whether it stops somewhere.
So back to cosmology, because similarly the prime matter of the early universe was not concentrated at one point in space. We see only the part of the universe whose light reached us in 14 billion years, and this part was indeed spatially localized. What there was and still is outside this area, we simply cannot say, at least not today. But shouldn’t, if we only wait long enough, the light from these at present still unreachable regions arrive with us?
As we know today, this is not the case. We can use Hubble’s law to calculate how far away from us a star must be for it to disappear from our view at more than the speed of light. As we will see in a moment, this does not mean that this star itself is traveling somewhere at faster than light speed, which would contradict relativity. Rather, it means that the part of space in which it is located is moving away from ours so rapidly due to the expansion of the universe. After all, Hubble’s law states how fast distant regions of space are disappearing; with the given value of the Hubble constant, this expansion reaches the speed of light at a distance of 14 light-years. A star, which is today so far away from us, disappears, together with its environment, with more than light speed, and no signal from it will ever reach us. There is an absolute cosmic horizon…….!