Conversation with Astronomer Charles Liu - March 9, 2006

PG - So, originally the idea was to start with the One thing, the singularity, and having it separate into the Four Forces. Then as they separate and break off from each other, as far as chaos goes, it's a bifurcation of sorts. This falls within my love of polyphony and I'm thinking it might be interesting to…it's a nice balance that, as everything slows down and expands, there's always this balance i.e. more detail and complexity as things expand. Though, I don't want to make it too balanced because that would be static. Symmetry's cool as long as there's that one thing that sets it off. You know what I mean. So, I'm just playing with that idea.

Talking about the different epochs, I think I'd like to do it in a linear fashion, in one direction or the other, but not to scale since so much happens in the first second. It'd be really incomprehensible to really map it out.
 
CL - Again, you could do it logarithmically, as it's shown out there (the Big Bang exhibit in the Rose Center) being able to stretch 10-43 seconds to one second.
 
PG - Well, that's all in the notes. I basically transcribe everything we say or at least pull out the coolest stuff and that works out just fine. I just wanted to take this time to get your take on, metaphorically speaking, well, let's do it from the direction we know. I have the Quantum Gravity Era pretty well down and after my study of the earliest Universe…
 
CL - Assuming that it's true. It's still not 100% clear…
 
PG - Of course not! But I mean, in our first discussion you brought up the concept of branes using two soap bubbles as a metaphor, bubble in different dimensions and that made sense. Then, as a musician, I wonder was that a onetime occurrence or part of a very larger cycle. Then, learning String Theory concepts like "the branes within the bulk," so, I've been trying to catch up as much as I can. I hope to make it as interesting as possible to the layperson.
 
CL - Oh, you know pretty much at this point.
 
PG - Yeah, but you know the math! It's like when I write down music and some people wonder how I can do that. The symbols are a language. OK. Basically what I was talking about with Brian Schwartz regarding the Big Bang and whatever caused it to happen, that is, what is observable, and how everything before Planck Time is totally up in the air, if we can take it back that far. We talked about the Inflationary Period which turns out to be a lot more exciting than it looks on paper.
 
CL - Oh sure!
 
PG - I just don't see powers of ten yet like others do. Something like the size of a pea that quickly expands something much larger than our solar system (metaphorically), as Brian was explaining it and he said "Check with Charles on this," so we're all on the same page, but it sort of defies the speed of light in a certain sense, in the speed in which it expanded. He was saying that it expanded to such a point that its antipodes, if they were able to survive long enough, would never be able to communicate with each other because their distance would be so vast.
 
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CL - Yeah, that's right. The Inflationary Period was originally established to figure out why that would be the case, because of that and the combination of the Universe's flatness.
 
PG - So that then is the reason we know about it. And, layman that I am, is it like dropping a ball of oatmeal on the floor as opposed to SLAMMING it on the floor?
 
CL - It's not a bad metaphor, it's not a bad analogy. One thing you might think of is that sound, in real life, travels slowly. The old style movies and so forth would show in the distance a nuclear detonation. You'd see the big flash and the mushroom cloud and then the sound would come rolling across the hill and they'd have this huge burst of the blast. I'm sure there's still some surviving footage that you could find.
 
PG - What's your favorite footage of an atomic detonation?
 
CL - Oh jeez, I don't know where they all come from. There's always that montage at the end of Dr. Strangelove which is also famous.
 
PG - When me and my brother were kids we used to simulate atomic explosions with an old circuit board submerged in a casserole pan filled with water. We'd drop drops of milk into it to make little mushroom clouds appear over what appeared to be a miniature city (the circuit board). That's what kids did for fun back-in-the-day before they had all the toys that they do now, but I digress.
 
CL - It's actually not that much of a digression. You can think of the Inflationary Period as a time when things are traveling so fast that you don't find out about it until much later. You can imagine that the light that comes out of the nuclear blast spreads out so fast that the roiling sound that comes from the shockwave can never catch up to it. That might be an Inflationary scenario. Basically, the Universe is expanding…
 
PG - And the metaphor being that the sound represents the Inflationary Period…?
 
CL - Just the sound from the atomic explosion, any explosion really, would represent the speed of light in the Universe, the Hyper-Inflationary Universe. And the light from the explosion would represent Space and its expansion, in the Hyper-Inflationary Universe I should say.
 
PG - Gotcha.
 
CL - Then the sound would never catch up to the light. Let's say that blast of light from the nuclear explosion only went for a second or two and after that only expanded very gently since then, you could imagine that the sound would never catch up. So that's the kind of thing that I might use as a metaphor to see if you understand Hyper-Inflation.

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PG - That's a great metaphor. OK, I got that. What happened after that? There was a period of radiation, right?
 
CL - Right. Exactly. What we care about after that and the part that's not precise about this metaphor regarding the Universe's expansion, is that it was expanding in all directions at once. When you have a nuclear blast, or any explosion, it's happening at one spot in Space and then spreads through Space that already exists.
 
PG - Like inflating a balloon?
 
CL - Right. What we're really talking about in the expansion of the Universe is that Space is expanding at once. If you wanted to continue that metaphor, then you would have to imagine that the light from the explosion, if you continue to think of that as Space and that what the sound is traveling through is the energy, the matter, whatever information that's traveling through, is moving through Space. So Space itself, is this thing that just went everywhere, and that in every single spot, there was that same amount of energy. The same amount of all that sound and dirt and dust is spread out all at once.
 
PG - In a sense, could you call it "potential?"
 
CL - It is possibly some sort of a potential that has been released. That potential field remains very unknown. I believe that the word used for it is "inflaton." In order for the Hyper-Inflation to have occurred something must have happened to have triggered this enormous change form this potential scalar field, the Inflaton, to have injected so much real energy in from this potential. And nobody really knows what it is yet. It's still a model in search of a theory.
 
PG - I'm sure that some people have thought of it as some kind of cosmic harmonic?
 
CL - If. Even if that.
 
PG - As a musician I think of spinning a rope faster and faster and watch it divide into nodes at the half, third, fourth etc. points along its length the faster it was spun. But this expansion were talking about went from the first harmonic straight to more than the thousandth in a split second skipping every one in-between!
 
CL - That's right. There was such a huge burst of energy that the whole Universe was simply filled and inflated and increased by, I think I heard, 120 Orders of Magnitude.
 
PG - What is an Order of Magnitude?
 
CL - A factor of 10. So, if it started out at 1 (or whatever), let's say 1 meter in diameter, it is now 1 billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times bigger.
 
PG - Damn!
 
CL - And, it all happened within one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second. So, in 10-32 seconds, the Universe increases to 1020.
 
PG - This is based on things that are observable?
 
CL - No. I suppose this model came about because folks observed that the Universe was so smooth, so flat. And yet, no matter which way we looked, everything was so perfectly smooth and nobody could make any contact with each other. How could they have been exactly the same?
 
You could make a biological analogy as well with Convergent Evolution. Why are there plants in Africa that look like those in America? How can that be? How did the communication occur that they'd wind up looking so similar? If you look at them now, the ones that are not actually genetically related they say it's because the environment created the same sort of survival stresses that caused evolution to occur similarly in very different locations. Then, you could imagine that they were all in contact at one time and that they are all genetically related.
 
PG - That's Pangea.
 
CL - That's right. They were all together in the same spot and then over many millions of years everything drifted apart. They started out with the same raw materials and finished with the same end materials.
 
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PG - One thing I'm curious about, this Inflationary Period, it's all laid out so nicely on this Timeline (refers to chart), as we understand it at this point. But, is it possible to put dates by each item on the line, they certainly weren't learned (discovered) in a linear fashion, either/or accepted that way. Wasn't it put together as a hop-scotch of dates where all those things came in? That's curious too how the Big Bang was discovered as a theory then accepted and then the Inflationary Period was added. Do you know what I mean?
 
CL - That is true. The original idea of the Big Bang was first proposed by Georges Lemaître as early as 1927. The Big Bang as a scientific concept emerged out of the Theory of Relativity. Lemaître was Belgian, a priest-mathematician-theoretical physicist who said, "Scientifically there should have been a Big Bang."
 
Then Edwin Hubble in 1929 observationally saw that the further away you were from an object the faster it appeared to move. That's the classic position of an explosion. So then, the idea of the Big Bang existed.
 
In the early 50s, George Gamow, Bob Dickey, and a bunch of others the idea of a Hot Big Bang as a theoretical underpinning. This explained what the deal was and why the Universe is expanding the way that Hubble saw it. Of course, this context is possible only if Lemaître was correct mathematically.
 
PG - Now, is this the point that in order to get back to the beginning, astrophysicists as they were called, began to "run the film backwards" to see where it lead?
 
CL - Sure, why not? Hubble is really the point you start. If you know that the Universe is expanding it means that it wasn't that big yesterday and that's where you really got the idea of running back. That's where Gamow and these guys said, "Yes, the Universe was probably small." If you treat the Universe as something approximating what we consider gas, thinking of the stars as gas particles, when you shmush them together they'll get hot.
 
PG - (Using a surfer voice) Do you think it would be really cool if we had spaceships that went faster than the speed of light?
 
CL - Ha ha! It would always be fun!
 
PG - I'm just checking. After all this talk I'm feeling do bound down by these human bodies we're trapped in.
 
CL - Humans have always wanted to go faster. It was only a little over a hundred years ago where the fastest you could travel was a month and a half across the ocean. How frustrating it must have been.
 
PG - If you made it!
 
CL - Well, yeah. John Adams and Abigail Adams, I like them very much, two dudes I like in history. They talk about how they'd have to travel for 3 weeks between Boston and Philadelphia to see each other. That's terrible!
 
PG - I bitch when I can't see my girlfriend for 3 days sometimes.
 
CL - I know! It's 3 hours now between here and Boston on the Amtrak Acela, if it's running. Ha! So now we're trying to think of getting from here to Pluto and that's a very different dynamic. We just have to be patient because we are curious and want to be there.
 
But, if you have Space moving faster than light, then you are not violating any Laws of Physics. So in Space, the light, traveling at its own speed is just kind of poking along in there. The Hot Big Bang suggests that's OK.
 
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation discovered in the 60s, which was the prediction…
 
PG - Discovered by Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias, that is, once they cleaned the bird poo out of that satellite dish!
 
CL - …which provided the evidence for…
 
PG - Sorry. I just like earthiness of that whole story.
 
CL - Me too. I just wonder if they actually did the cleaning themselves or did they just call maintenance because Bell Labs had, no doubt, very good poop removers.
 
PG - I saw them in an interview where they said they did it themselves. They showed how hard it was by getting up on a ladder and demonstrating. It was tricky because it was that funny horn shape. Wilson said, "You didn't want to slip so you always lead with your left foot!" A very earthbound story.
 
CL - So, it was after that, that it definitely solidified the Big Bang Theory. Now that we know that the Big Bang really did happen, how do we solve this flatness of horizon issue?
 
PG - Did you see "The Elegant Universe?" (Actually it was Neil deGrasse Tyson's Nova series 'Origins' - PG)
 
CL - The three part Nova show? I only saw portions because I have kids keeping me busy!
 
PG - Well, one thing that stuck out, well it's cool, so I've been showing it to a lot of friends…
 
CL - "Hey, put down the roach and check this out!"
 
PG - Ha! No, most of them put down the roach a long time ago. One of the things that stuck out most was, in the discovery of background radiation, they had this nice graphic how, on the old style TV, the static or "snow" one gets in-between stations, they took out 99% percent of it so you'd see just a few white dots popping around the screen. This was to illustrate that 1% of that static is that very Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang.
 
CL - That's right.
 
PG - Everyone who watched it was like "Whoa!" A very good metaphor and as a musician, I like them. Anyway, we've really got to get moving here I'm having too much fun!
 
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CL - Me too. OK then. It was Inflation that came in then in the 70s. After the Big Bang was shown to be true they had to go back and find out what was the deal with Inflation. Then, if the Inflation were true, you have Dark Matter to deal with. How does Dark Matter all work?
 
PG - What's your metaphor for Dark Matter?
 
CL - Oh…headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler is the visible light, the visible matter. The rest of the semi-truck, the big rig, is the Dark Matter.
 
PG - Ha ha! Thank you! I gotta write that one down.
 
CL - That metaphor works out just fine.
 
PG - …and that it can slam into you just as well, whether you see it or not.
 
CL - Oh absolutely. We human beings figured out some time ago that when you see parallel lights coming right at you that there's probably some more mass right behind it. By the same token, we human beings figure we know how much matter there is in a given location based on how objects move around it. The objects that we see moving are remarkable. Just like that with lots and lots of matter attached to it.
 
We can either decide that our Laws of Physics are flawed or we try and do something else with it. If we decide that our Laws of Physics are OK then it means that there's lots of other stuff out there and that's the position that most astronomers take. There are a few people who'd prefer to think that the Laws of Physics are more complicated than we know right now and therefore what we're seeing is a sort of manifestation of the complexity we don't understand.
 
We come up with ideas, for example something called the Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which might explain for example, how wide, large galaxies at their edges spin at the speeds they do. They should spin more slowly but as they do they spin more quickly.
 
Could this be because there is a complexity in physics that we don't understand? So, things continue to be changed and there's still a lot of uncertainty going on. The Dark Matter aspect though is pretty solid.
 
PG - Is that like saying then, I can take flour, water and an egg and make egg noodles and a French guy can take the same and make a crêpe? Is it just combining the same elements together and getting different results, not necessarily more complex, just a search for a different approach?
 
CL - Right. You know, the complexity with physics, with Newtonian work, Gravity specifically, is that we used to think of Gravity as a force between two objects. Then Einstein showed that a better way to look at it was that Gravity is a wrinkle in Spacetime. And so, the old Newtonian way still works in certain circumstances, certain scales, planetary scales. But now, if we talk about Black Holes for example, the Big Bang etc…
 
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PG - ...and Gravitons...?

CL - Well, that's a Quantum Mechanical aspect. The Graviton is a QM construct. Einstein never thought about particles that carried Gravity. He just sort of said, "Gravity naturally happens because Space exists. The Quantum theorists said, "Well, that not actually how force works on the tiniest scales. The way force gets exchanged is when you send a particle from one thing to another. You have to send a particle. For example, if you're exchanging Electromagnetism…

 

PG - What I got out of String Theory is that Gravitons might be as strong as the other forces except that they move through branes.

 

CL - Right. That's really something that's, at this point, unprovable. It's untestable. It doesn't mean that it's invalid.

 

PG - Well, that's the thing. Our friend Steve (Weinberg) says that it's the perfect theory because it's untestable. Now, if it's untestable, is it a physics or is it a philosophy?

 

CL - Right. So for now we should stick with theory and we'll do philosophy some other time.

 

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PG - Very good. Let's see now, I just want to move quickly. (Looks at Big Bang Timeline) For me, it starts to thin out as it goes along. Is Dark Matter part of the time of Radiation?

 

CL - No. matter and Radiation are very different at that point. The separation from matter and Energy is what is called "de-coupling" which happens around 300,000 years after the Big Bang. That's when Dark Matter, or the Luminous matter, start acting independently of the energy that's floating around.

 

PG - (Looking at Timeline) OK, there's Planck Time, separation of the Strong Force. OK, but Planck Time, that suggests Gravity?

 

CL - Within the Planck Time? You mean before?

 

PG - No, no, at the Planck Time.

 

CL - Yeah At 10-43 seconds that is when Gravity is working at that point.

 

PG - OK…the Strong Force, we talked about the Inflationary Period…quarks and anti-quarks begin forming, the Grand Unification Period? As they put it, which comes right before the Weak Force separates?

 

CL - If you call that era the Grand Unification Period…

 

PG - Hey, we just pulled this chart off of Answers.com…

 

CL - And they got it from Wikipedia and they're usually correct. Correct by consensus. That period there the GU Period, that's just a time when all the forces were somehow connected. One way or another. The Electroweak Force breaks off from the Electromagnetic. When that happens, that's the last force, the last of the four forces that now stands alone. So, before that time, the period when the GU idea is important, every time you break off another force, the Universe comes closer and closer to the way that it works today. So, before that, things are fundamentally different.

 

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PG - So, looking at this chart now, is there anything, in your opinion, that is the most dramatic? What's the stuff that's like, "Wow, this was really something when this happened!" or are they all equally amazing?

 

CL - The thing that I like is when you get the quark gluons at about 10-6 or 10-5 seconds. See, at this point, starting at around a millionth of a second and maybe a little before then, during the millionth of a second period on up is when matter as we know it begins to exist. Electrons and neutrinos, protons eventually, then neutrons as we know them. So you have to build up what they call the Lepton which makes up you electrons and neutrinos, quarks: up and down etc. The things that hold all these together are the gluons. So, when you weren't sure yet that the quarks were going to form individual particles. That's the 10-5 period.

 

PG - So, is that this period here where quarks and Anti-quarks begin to form, and during all this, they're hashing out their differences and in the meantime the larger forces are separating? Is it quite possible that the very separation of these forces made this stage all possible?

 

CL - Yeah. Without the separation of those forces the gluons and quarks would not have pulled together to form atomic nuclei, protons, everything like that.

 

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PG - OK, so looking at the Timeline we have Photons now…

 

CL - Right, and the Photons are the things that squirt out of the Electromagnetic Force, they carry the Electromagnetic Force.

 

PG - So, when did Photons come into being? At the very beginning?

 

CL - Does it say so? I actually don't know for sure. I think it's about 10-5.

 

PG - So, theoretically then, everything before that happened in darkness?

 

CL - It all happened with so much energy density that particles like Photons couldn't even escape. The concept of them then is very hard to grasp.

 

PG - I think I just caught my own question then.

 

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CL - OK. What we got here at this point, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is formed, this period of Re-combination, De-coupling, they all happen around the same time. At this point, at the 300,000 to 400,000 year mark, then finally when they separate, then matter is able to do its thing with Gravity. Then light gets spread out throughout the whole Universe. It begins to get more transparent at this point.

 

You can think of the Universe as being like a fog for a long time. What happens in fog, here on Earth, a whole bunch of water particles which are really droplets, so you're standing in droplets. Now, if you try to shine a flashlight into the fog, what happens? The light beam hits the fog and gets refracted back and gets scattered into a scattered blinding glare. It's a two-way street, back in the "old days," around the third million year mark or so. When you shine the light it knocks into the matter so the light can't get through.

 

But if the matter tries to move, there's so much light that it actually drags on the matter. When light hits a mirror it bounces off. But if so much light hits a mirror, it can actually produce a pressure and move the mirror backward because Photons have momentum. And so what was happening was that there was so much light floating around in the Universe as an energy density.

 

PG - Creating like an aerodynamic drag?

 

CL - Right. So say you have a particle here (holds out hand) and a particle here (holds out other hand) and they're trying to pull together because of Gravity. Their actions are so pulled out because the light is pushing them this way or pulling them that way so they can't move independently of light. That was when they were all tied together (intertwines fingers). So when this De-coupling happens, at this point in time, this last thing on the Timeline, the energy density and the matter density both get low enough they no longer drag on one another.

 

So that way the Cosmic Background Energy just gets spread out slowly. Today its microwaves but back then it was 3000° Kelvin. That's quite hot and now it's very, very cold but that energy is still there, it's just been spread out over a very, very large volume. Meanwhile the matter, which had been pulled and pushed and interfered with by all that energy, is now free to stream on its own, to interact with other matter.

 

So now, Gravity begins to dominate the behavior of matter. That's a very substantial event where matter finally begins to move independently because of Gravity and nothing else. Light, primarily now, just occupies Space without having a pull on matter. That separation is extremely important. It made it possible now for things like stars to form and that made it possible for us to today see all the other stuff that happened, the forming of elements etc. That's the important part, the figurative fog lifting.

 

The story's not over quite yet because after that, for about another several hundred million years later, there's a lot of matter, it's all Hydrogen and Helium and little tiny bits of other stuff.

 

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PG - Now this I've got a good grip on: how through fusion in stars all of the elements get created.

 

CL - Yes, that would be in a star. But before the first stars formed, after this separation of energy and matter in the Universe, there was a period of time when all there was, was just cloudy stuff in which matter could travel but there was nothing to shine, nothing shone. So after the first stars did form then light existed. This light when it shined out was like shining a flashlight into a fog because the matter particles are still there. We needed the stars to burn away the fog.

 

But to generate enough ultra-violet radiation to knock the electrons and protons apart so that they're independent of one another and travel without being hit and stopped, that second process is called the Re-Ionization of the Universe. Originally the Universe is ionized because it was so hot, protons and electrons can't hang onto one another. But then the Universe becomes neutral after this separation of matter and energy and then it gets re-ionized so that light can travel.

 

If most of the matter in interstellar space were not ionized it would neutralize. If a beam of light came from a distant source it would inevitably hit so many atoms that it could never shine through.

 

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PG - OK. How does this relate to the kind of ionization that takes place during a thunderstorm? That has a correlation, doesn't it?

 

CL - Hmmm. Yes it does. Let me think about this… When a storm happens you are sending static electricity from the ground to the cloud or from the cloud to the ground, either way, when that happens you create a channel of plasma, electrically charge (ionized) gas. There's a channel that goes from one to the next and that channel of electrically charged gas is basically lightning. So, for a brief moment on Earth where the atmosphere is usually not ionized, for a brief moment that area is ionized. Light, electricity etc. travels right through there.

 

PG - Good. Now, for a guy like me, what little I know about electricity and electronics, I want to speak of "potential difference." When we speak of anything that is ionized, we're speaking of difference.

 

CL - Yes, we can be. You could say it that way, from what it normally is.

 

PG - I mean it in the sense that, we're talking about flashing a flashlight against that fog, when the Universe became ionized, when everything separated, oh I'm not using scientific terms at all…

 

CL - That's alright. The things that used to be proton-plus-electron became proton flying off here and electron flying off there.

 

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PG - Good, I'll back that up. Now, I think I'm going to finish with one last thing. I like this idea of telling the story backwards. So, say that I was to, I know that we're talking about incredible powers of ten, so if I were to start out with today and then move backwards, could you take me back through a couple of steps, in retrograde fashion? So, where are we today?

 

CL - Now we're in an era when stars are important. Really though, the biggest structures in the Universe are the super-clusters, which are thousands and thousands of galaxies. As you step backwards…

 

PG - They're functioning as a unit?

 

CL - Well, actually like nodes of a web. You can think of matter being spread out in big webs and at the nodes of the webs are groups of thousands and thousands of galaxies.

 

PG - "Aggregates" could be another word?

 

CL - Yes. As you move further and further back in time those aggregates are more and more separated and with less structure, more and more uniform as you move back in the time that Gravity has been able to interact with these structures. So right now, Super-Clusters are the largest structures in the Universe.

 

As you go further back, you see that the clusters are not so big. And you go further back still and you see that the clusters aren't really there at all, that there's only a really tiny bit but you do see galaxies which themselves are huge amounts of mass.

 

Then even further back galaxies aren't really there either, maybe a billion or so years ago. There's no galaxies as we know them today. There's clumps of matter, maybe millions of stars or maybe even billions but nothing like a hundred billion. Not as many as now.

 

Go back even further and you wind up with a Universe of individual stars that were huge, much, much bigger than our current Sun, but they're stars. That's the biggest structure.

 

PG - Is this a function of Gravity or something else?

 

CL - It is. It's Gravity playing out itself through Time. You wait 13 billion years and things get bigger and bigger into larger structures.

 

PG - Is that like if I had a pail of some fluid with stuff floating in it and then vigorously stirred it up?

 

CL - Well, it starts out stirred and then you let it go about its natural course and through entropy it would begin to create its own patterns. Something like that. But in this case there is no Magic Hand, right? Basically it starts out uniform but we're going backwards in Time so you're starting out with high structure and structures become less and less. You start out with galaxies, then just sub-galactic clumps, then just the stars themselves.

 

Then if you go even further back there aren't even stars. There's just swirling gas seeming to be making snake-like patterns throughout the Universe.

 

PG - So, no fusion.

 

CL - Right. You have to get enough mass together to collapse under its own weight until they produce at their center the temperature and pressure needed to make nuclear fusion.

 

Then you go back in time some more and now the gas is locked in tight with the light, back to the fog we were talking about.

 

Then from there we go through the period before separation so you have all this matter and energy tied together,

 

You go back further and you lose all distinction. You can't even tell the difference between matter and energy they're so interchangeable.

 

PG - Like the optical illusion where you can't tell if it's a picture of a vase or of two faces, convex and concave?

 

CL - No, it's a good question though. What's basically happening, how I see it, is that they become one another so readily. The environment is so hot and so dense that particles and anti-particles are annihilated in creating energy and the timing of that is so rapid that the distinction between the particles is lost because of these physical processes. Eventually matter cannot exist because it's so hot and so dense and you just have this tight bundle of energy.

 

And that's it.

 

PG - Everything was infinitely heavier…

 

CL - Not heavier but denser. There's a difference.

 

PG - I guess I said heavier because I was thinking about Gravity.

 

CL - Then you end up at Planck Time where the density was 1097 times greater than water.

 

PG - I can see why we need those numbers (powers of ten) because we can't really compare it to anything we really know.

 

CL - No, I'm afraid not. I talk about stars a lot in my classes. A little tiny brown dwarf star is a million times less luminous than our Sun. Our Sun is a million times less luminous than Rigel for example. Imagine a thousand 1000 watt light bulbs compared to a tiny night light. That's the difference. Wow!

 

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