Sunday, March 24, 2002
The Inflationary Universe
MIT Professor and Physicist Alan Guth has a theory about what came before the Big Bang. His Inflation Theory is gaining widespread acceptance by many cosmologists and is growing stronger with every cosmological finding. What does the theory say, the premise is that the universe expanded at an exponential rate much faster than explained by the Big Bang in it's extreme infancy (when it was less than 1/100th of a second old) before settling to a more sedate expansion as described by the Big Bang. How fast is that you ask, very fast. In perhaps 10 (to the -34) of a second the universe expanded to roughly the size of a marble. Eh not very big but it's the equivalent to a pea growing to the size of the Milky Way. So far, what inflation theory predicts, the observable universe has reflected. All of this subscribes to Quantum Theory, so far the best theory yet for describing the physical universe. So what came before the Big Bang, why nothing ... the entire universe still holds to laws of conservation of energy. That is to say, all the matter in the universe plus all the gravity equals zero so the universe could come from nothing since it's essentially nothing.
MIT Professor and Physicist Alan Guth has a theory about what came before the Big Bang. His Inflation Theory is gaining widespread acceptance by many cosmologists and is growing stronger with every cosmological finding. What does the theory say, the premise is that the universe expanded at an exponential rate much faster than explained by the Big Bang in it's extreme infancy (when it was less than 1/100th of a second old) before settling to a more sedate expansion as described by the Big Bang. How fast is that you ask, very fast. In perhaps 10 (to the -34) of a second the universe expanded to roughly the size of a marble. Eh not very big but it's the equivalent to a pea growing to the size of the Milky Way. So far, what inflation theory predicts, the observable universe has reflected. All of this subscribes to Quantum Theory, so far the best theory yet for describing the physical universe. So what came before the Big Bang, why nothing ... the entire universe still holds to laws of conservation of energy. That is to say, all the matter in the universe plus all the gravity equals zero so the universe could come from nothing since it's essentially nothing.
