I'm pretty sure nobody cares ...

[abraxas]

I've just read that somewhere within the first billionth of a billionth of a second of the 'big bang', all matter in the universe inflated from the size of a proton to the size of a grapefruit! In order to do this, everything in the universe would have had to travel faster than the speed of light!

Fffffffppppp, fppp, ffffppp, cough, cough, cough,... whoa!!!

... That's just so cool!

 

[LaFoto]

Congratulations to your 55th day without smoking!
And WOW, yes, that piece of information is way, way cool. Thanks for sharing!

Have you ever been to our meet-up thread, Walter? You don't want to miss that one, now do you?

 

[Big Mike]

Was that grapefruit on the back of a turtle?

 

[Alex_B]

I am a scientist, so I do not believe in all this

 

[Overread]

Don't be silly - it was on the back of an elephant which was on the back of the turtle
I often find it hard to accept this line of theoritical science - we know so little about today can we really work out what happened with any accuracy at the start?

**good work on 55 days - Keep going abraxas!

 

[Alex_B]

Keep in mind that there are several models for the universe and its dynamics. Some of them contain the big bang in the way you describe it. Some differ. No final answer has been given yet.

 

[abraxas]

Congratulations to your 55th day without smoking!
And WOW, yes, that piece of information is way, way cool. Thanks for sharing!

Have you ever been to our meet-up thread, Walter? You don't want to miss that one, now do you?

I've been checking that out, during and after- Looks like you all had a lot of fun. I noticed the absence of tripods though. As much as I don't like drinking though, I sure could use a liter of some kind of German dark beer,... and a cigarette.

Now that I haven't been smoking I find I'm not as interested in practicing my aternative vice to alcohol. I hate the taste of coffee, and tea wires me up way, way, way too much. A lot of reading junk I didn't care to understand before. I'm not sure I understand any of it now, but it takes my mind off smoking.

Last night was Max Planck and the beginning of the universe. Fascinating to me drifting through some of this mumble-jumble. Started by checking out some dillweed-comment about the smallest theoretic aperture size (right here of TPF). I figured that to be a water molecule. That led to the atom and that to the deduction that there were such things (about 2,500-3,000 yrs. B.P.). Then I read about the components of the atom and then string theory and super strings and 10th & 11th dimensional stuff and four major forces of the universe separating from a super force from within a super molecule, and even quarks moving backward through time,... and laws of physics not withstanding, a guy comes to the realization that when God said, "Let there be light", there was more planning to it than flipping a light switch.

Later I want to read about critical density and try to figure out if the universe will go until it stops or suck back into itself. Meaningless pursuits for certain, but my smoking has got to stop. Getting sick last January scared the hell outa me.

.

 

[Alex_B]

Last night was Max Planck and the beginning of the universe.

Funny enough, I currently work for an institution of that name

 

[Alpha]

Empirically speaking, traveling faster than the speed of light happens routinely in physics. It's called quantum tunneling. Though many theorists are attempting to explain how instances of tunneling appear to exceed the speed of light but don't actually do it.

Generally speaking, tunneling occurs when something hits an energy barrier that in theory it doesn't have enough energy to overcome, but does anyway. The wave function decays exponentially when it hits the energy barrier but never quite reaches zero, which is what makes tunneling possible. This is all a matter of probabilities. The wave function is more or less describing the probability that something (a wave, or particle) will exist at a given point. So long as it's non-zero, anything is possible. That is, if I'm driving my car and I crash it into a wall, there's an extraordinarily tiny probability that the car can also exist on the other side of the wall, in essence driving through it, and it would in theory have to travel faster than the speed of light to do this. Most things that physicists routinely refer to as zero are actually just infinitesimally small probabilities that they do happen.

Some examples include electrons moving around in their orbitals. The probability that they exist at the orbital node is basically zero, though they have to pass through it to get to the other side (in p, d, and f orbitals, which have nodes). It gets to the other side by "tunneling" through the node. Another example is the famous umbrella flip that ammonia does, even though it doesn't have enough energy to do it. Alpha decay is another example. Alpha particles (2 protons plus 2 neutrons) technically don't have enough energy to escape the nucleus. But this happens millions of times per second in the sun's core during nuclear fusion reactions. The coolest recent empirical example of tunneling is the prism experiment, where you take two triangular prisms and align them to that their hypotenuses are parallel but there's a physical gap between them. When you shine a laser into one of the prisms, it should come out of the same prism at a right angle but instead it comes out of the opposite prism along its original path in spite of the physical gap between them. This apparently requires that the laser travels faster than the speed of light.

Sorry TMI i'm sure. Any quantum physicists in the house feel free to correct any minor errors in my technical detail.

 

[Hertz van Rental]

In order to do this, everything in the universe would have had to travel faster than the speed of light!

I presume you mean the current speed of light.
Light travelled much faster in the early stages of the Universe but has slowed considerably as the energy level in the Universe has dropped*.
Entropy rules!



*This is as a direct result of the creation of matter.
E=mc2 doesn't just hold true for atomic bombs but for all matter.
The total energy in the Universe is a constant. During the first micro-second of the Big Bang the Universe would have virtually zero mass so E=c2 more or less, giving a phenomenally high figure for the speed of light.
As matter was created mass began to have an effect and, E being a constant, as m increased c must have decreased.
It is also probable that, as the Universe increased in size and the same amount of energy had to fill it, local energy levels decreased further slowing the speed of light even more.

 

[Alpha]

Any astrophysicists in the house?

Those gamma ray jets shooting out of super massive black holes would have to exceed the speed of light. Is the radiation coming from gamma decay of matter at the singularity or the conversion of accumulated matter into energy?

 

[Overread]

My brain hurts!

 

[Hertz van Rental]

Those gamma ray jets shooting out of super massive black holes would have to exceed the speed of light.

You still haven't grasped that the speed of light is variable depending upon where you are observing from.
Light traveling through glass moves slower than light traveling through a vacuum if you view it from the vacuum. But if you were inside the glass looking out then the light in the vacuum would appear to be traveling faster than light because you would be measuring it against your light speed.
Try reading Einstein.

 

[Alpha]

Read it. Special relatively doesn't have anything to do with the medium the light is passing through. That's not what I was talking about anyway. I meant the theoretical speed of light in a vaccum.

 

[spiffybeth]

where's alex b?