The Origin Of The Universe Just Got WAY Weirder | Answers With Joe

there are a lot of popular ideas that aren't necessarily true one of them that you might have heard is that einstein actually flunked out of math class in fact i hear this a lot in my comments whenever people struggle with the math around a certain topic they always get this like you know well i mean einstein struggle with it too i mean am i right no you are not right einstein was good at math he was albert einstein actually any struggles that he had in his class were because he was way too advanced for the the math that they did in that class he did apparently fail a university entrance exam when he was a teenager but he aced the math part my point is that the truth or falsehood of a statement or the accuracy of a theory is not always really reflected in the public's understanding of it and one good example of that is the big bang theory because when you hear the term big bang it makes you think that the universe was created with you know a big bang but that's not entirely accurate technically the big bang doesn't describe the origin of the universe at all it actually just describes a change of state from one universal state to another the original state being a gravitational singularity kind of like a black hole but way more ridiculous and the big bang describes the matter in that singularity going through a phase transition you can think of it like when water turns into steam it expands it's kind of the same thing here but on unfathomable scales scientists call this the inflationary period the big bang theory has been so popular for so long that you can be excused for thinking that all the kinks have been worked out in the theory but there are actually several problems with it problems that we have to think a little more creatively to solve [Music] the creative thinking that's been applied to these problems within the confines of the big bang theory is known as inflation theory and the idea is that before the universe went through the inflationary period that we're all experiencing today it first started off in a period of sort of hyperinflation insert your mama joke here in less than a trillionth of a second the observable universe went from sub-microscopic to the size of a grapefruit and we know that it went through this because we can see it in the cosmic microwave background radiation so we can't actually see the inflationary period but we can sort of see the shadow of it in the cmb that kind of gives us an idea of what it looked like after that period of hyperinflation scientists consider inflation to be the birth of space and time for all practical purposes it's not really necessarily something from nothing it's more like something with physics we understand from something with physics we don't understand so three of the best known problems that the inflationary theory is meant to address include the flatness puzzle the homogeneity puzzle and the monopole problem the flatness puzzle has to do with the fact that the observable universe is so close to being spatially flat and when i say flat i mean will expand forever there is a mass density that can be measured in the observable universe and there's a critical value that if it falls underneath that then the universe would collapse onto itself the thing is that the measured mass density just happens to be exactly the same as the critical value in our universe which is a crazy coincidence when you think about it and because those two values are perfectly matched the universe is avoiding a collapse so the answer to this in inflation theory is that if the universe expanded that rapidly in the beginning then that flatness could be kind of baked in and there's also the idea that the universe as a whole might not be perfectly flat over all 93 billion light years but we see flatness from our perspective like our region of the universe could be flat while the universe as a whole could be a different shape i mean after all the earth looks flat from our perspective standing on it but as most of us know it's not the homogeneity puzzle is also about the scale of the universe but in this time it's the vastness that's the problem the observable universe is a cool 2.73 kelvin pretty much anywhere you look but how is that possible in the universe this big where there's no way that things on one side of the universe could affect things on the other side of the universe inflation's answer to this is that the universe expanded so quickly that there wasn't time for various parts of the universe to cool independently in other words the little mini universe at the beginning was homogeneous so the following post-inflation universe would just follow its lead the final problem is the monopole problem these are tiny particles that have only one magnetic pole like a north without a south or vice versa and science says that the universe should be filled with these things and yet none have been observed the physicist alan guth first proposed the inflationary period but before that became his claim to fame he actually did extensive work on magnetic monopoles guth pointed out that the big bang should have produced a bumper crop of magnetic monopoles but if it did where did they go he suggested that if they were created in the inflationary period they could be so spread apart that we might only be able to find like one or two in the entire observable universe yeah one or two particles in a 93 billion light year universe that makes a needle in a haystack look easy so the cosmic inflationary model was created in response to some of these problems and it's only about as old as i am which i know in youtube years that's ancient but in science years it's pretty new but it still doesn't answer some of the biggest questions like if the universe came from something a gravitational singularity say then where did that come from why did it change as popular as the big bang is it doesn't really answer these questions so there are some alternatives trying to do that and one of those theories is known as the eggperotic universe theory now it doesn't explain why there's something instead of nothing but it does provide a non-inflationary reason why the universe became the universe that we know it today all right first some definitions there's a lot of definitions to get a handle on eggpirotic refers to an ancient greek model of the universe it involves cycles of destruction by fire destructive phases followed by rebuilding phases the original paper described it in the context of a heterotic m theory which is a type of string theory and not as the name implies some kind of lurid theoretical physics erotic fiction you can spin my quark anytime i've covered string theory before you can go click on that video if you want to go deeper but in the basic level string theory basically says that the fundamental level the universe is made up of tiny vibrating strings and those vibrations create your quarks and electrons and so forth in theory takes this idea and expands it out beyond the four uh dimensions of space and time that we personally experience and includes actually 11 dimensions 10 of space and one of time the heterotic part of it is basically a fancy way of saying that it was sewn together by other theories with different ideas now despite having 11 dimensions to play in most of the action takes place in five dimensions the other six are all wrapped up and curled around and folded in on itself in something called calabi yao manifolds which keeps coming up in this channel and i still don't understand it at all and if you don't get this don't worry nobody really does outside of the math all you need to know is that objects move in m theory in ways that require an x y z and another axis to explain okay now we need to talk about brains brains brains spelled like this actually are a way of describing strings moving in more than one dimension see you can think of a string as being one-dimensional and then a brain sort of is a two-dimensional fabric of vibrating strings and then a three-dimensional brain is kind of a vibrating blob or a three brain and according to the expertise universe model the universe was created when two three-dimensional brains collided and the space between them that they collided across is known as the bulk yes the amazing bulk you know we're always complaining about the way that scientists name things but i gotta say strings brains bulk i think they kind of nailed it with this one if it helps to explain this a little better imagine a swimming pool with two people in it the water is the bulk and the two swimmers are three brains just floating around in the bulk one of the swimmers represents our visual brain that we're all living in so we can name her visible and the other one represents a hidden brain he's kind of shy so we'll name him hidden so hidden invisible are floating happily in the bulk plenty of water between them but hidden wants to flirt with visible and because he's horribly awkward and developmentally stunned he decides to whip off his trunks and throw it at her and they kind of skim across the bulk and wrap around visible's head yeah hidden is going to be lonely for the rest of his life i think so visible is furious about this for obvious reasons and turns into a seething mass of emotions or to break the metaphor she becomes an expanding universe of quarks electrons and other subatomic particles and that is the birth of our universe it was horribly inappropriate so yeah you probably thought the collision was going to be between the visible and the hidden brains but in this version of the theory anyway it's actually a piece of the hidden brain that flies off known as a bulk brain and that's what has the visible brain and the reason is that the bulk brain is mostly flat in the sense that i talked about earlier so the ripples that are created from that collision create a flatness in the universe and that solves the flatness problem and mathematically anyway the thermal energy from the collision is mostly homogeneous which solves the homogeneity problem now for the monopole problem the ecperotic theory solves this one because that creation that method of creation of the universe would have created it at a much cooler temperature meaning that those monopoles wouldn't been created at all as opposed to the insane cauldron of the inflationary singularity so the idea of brains and blobs and bulks you know yeah that sounds a little but it works mathematically anyway part of the power of the collision model is that it adds a little dynamism into a static system these brains are static and if you want to create a universe all you have to do in the words of our favorite batman villain is introduce a little chaos because chaos breaks symmetries and breaking symmetries in physics creates fundamental forces now to be fair this is true of the big bang theory too three of the four fundamental forces those being electromagnetism and the strong and weak force they kind of operate as a singular force at high energies after the energy was dispersed in that hyperinflationary period of the big bang that symmetry is broken and the fundamental forces as we understand them today came to be the only difference is the ecparotic universe didn't start with a bang but a smash you can imagine the three brain is a glass solid static mining its own business and then a little chaos is introduced and it's nothing but shards and pieces of glass everywhere those shards and pieces are the fundamental forces in matter that was created by those fundamental forces everything we know about physics and astronomy are just learning what broke and where so expiratic universe crazy right or is it just crazy enough to work really all cosmological origins of the universe are a little crazy in some way including the big bang theory the inflationary theory has been pushed so far over the last 40 years that it's kind of gotten to where you almost have to believe in multiverse for it to work you know i mentioned earlier that you know amazing coincidence that the critical value and the observed density of the universe just happened to be perfect to make it flat one of the ways to explain that is through multi-verse theory basically saying that there are infinite bubble universes that pop up and the fact that this universe just happened to line up that way was kind of a happy accident at least two of the authors of the periodic theory strongly disagree with this argument steinhardt actually was an early supporter of the inflationary theory but he's kind of become more of a critic over the years because of what he calls the multiverse problem as steinhart told scientific american in 2014 quote inflation was introduced to produce a universe that looks smooth and flat everywhere and has features everywhere that agree with what we observe instead it turns out that due to quantum effects inflation produces a multitude of patches that span every physically conceivable outcome he later said that theories of a multiverse miss quote the most salient fact that we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales big product universe doesn't need a multiverse granted it needs 10 spatial dimensions two pre-universes and the spontaneous generation of a bulk swimming heat beam but hey simpler i mean compared to infinite universes bubbling up like cosmic champagne yes that's simpler simpler but with some quirks echotic universe was consumed to explain the origin of everything but in the original greek conclusion equarosus was a two-stage process the fiery destruction of the universe and then the rebirth of the universe out of those ashes of that fire to the ancient greeks the universe was cyclical and that's an idea that's becoming popular again all the authors of the parodic universe theory have since published papers about a recurring cosmic cycle specifically that the universe which is currently expanding will someday cease to expand and collapse back down on itself and then the pressures involved with that will cause another expansion the collapse of the universe is sometimes called a big crunch and the collapse and re-expansion of the universe is called a big bounce but there's a lot of nuance in that statement that needs explaining i should also note that all four of the authors publish their papers independently and there are differences between them and i don't have time to go through all those differences but here's just a quick breakdown of the idea for example steinhardt's theory is a collaboration with anna iyash and it speculates that the universe never quite big crunches and has no need to big bang instead it undergoes cycles of expansion and contraction over immense periods of time the gist of their theory is that the universe is eternal the universe expands for trillions of years driven by dark energy but eventually that expansion ends and contracts again and this contraction is described as ultra slow again this takes place over trillions of years and it goes down to a crunch but not a total crunch it's non-singular meaning it doesn't lead to a singularity this chart from their paper kind of gets the point across it shows five distinct universes with four distinct bounces over time you can see the universe expand as the line moves left to right when the line hits a white mark expansion ends and contraction begins when the line hits a number expansion starts over in what is essentially a new universe you'll notice that the restart point gets higher the further you go across the chart this means that each subsequent universe is physically larger than the universe before it's like if you blew up a balloon part of the way and then let some of the air out and then blew it up bigger the next time so one complicating factor in this theory is actually black holes big bounce models tend to fall apart because they can't explain why this contraction of the universe wouldn't lead to a giant black hole other models have suggested that merging black holes would become so energetic that they would trigger a premature bounce which would break the symmetry between universal collapse and dark energy expansion and cause the universe to expand out forever into an eventual heat death but the eos steinhardt model addresses that problem by saying that by the ultra slow contraction it would keep those black holes from doing that because they would radiate out over time they would dissolve through hawking radiation which would smooth out the peaks and valleys of the universe this means that the universe stays flat and homogeneous so that when the universe bounces back out again everything stays the same everything except the scale give you an idea of how much that scale changes they say in their paper quote an empty volume of space equal to the diameter of a baseball today will evolve to the size of our observable universe a cycle from now the something the size of a baseball will be 93 billion light years across in the next version of our universe and there are a lot of different versions of this theory like i said that's just one example right there there are some that say that the two brains do actually collide and there are some that talk about virtual brains colliding whatever that means all as i say that that product universe is very much a theory in motion whether or not it goes anywhere is up to the investigators and the universe of course but there are some predictions that are made in the ek product universe model that are testable in june of this year a paper was published that highlighted a number of simulations that were done in computers uh on the er steinhardt model and it did show that that ultra slow contraction would be able to outperform the black hole problem and smooth things out over the universe so that was sort of proven in a computer anyway computer simulations obviously are not the same as observed evidence but as our understanding and observations of the cmb become more and more accurate as gravitational wave observatories become more and more powerful there's all kinds of things that might become on earth that would prove or disprove this theory like it's thought that there are certain energy polarization measurements that would prove true in a neck periodic universe model that wouldn't be true in an inflationary model now what that means i don't know but that's one of 17 different things that are proposed in the original paper that say that could be testable evidence of this now obviously understanding things like quantum gravity and the exact nature of dark energy would go a long way toward this but those are two of the most vexing questions in science so yeah don't hold your breath on that one but then of course there's the big question if the universe came from brains then where did the brains come from it seems like in every origin story of the universe it's just turtles all the way down experiment theorists freely admit that their work is only beginning we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg so far as to where this theory can go and where it will go in the future we'll just have to see but yeah i'm curious of your thoughts you know the inflationary model of the big bang has been so popular for so long a lot of people look for alternatives how do you feel about it does this kind of answer your questions does this bring up more questions than it answers discuss our understanding of the cosmos is changing all the time and if you like these kinds of far out ideas and you want to explore them further maybe a good place to start is get the fundamentals down and i can highly recommend for that the astronomy course on brilliant over 30 interactive quizzes and more than 300 exercises you'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the cosmos including black holes dark matter hubble's law black body radiation and much more and once you've absorbed all that you can move on to some of the other courses on brilliant like the classical physics courses the quantum mechanics courses applied science computer algorithms even competitive math and the thing about brilliant that's so well brilliant is it teaches you these things by solving problems this wires your brain to think like a scientist and superpowers your problem-solving abilities that can pay off in every area of your life plus you can do it on your mobile device and even offline so you can take it with you wherever you go and they've got daily challenges so if you like a little random brain nugget every day just to keep you sharp it's a great way to spend 10 minutes or so while you're you know procrastinating getting work done if you want to get a little taste of what i'm talking about here they have free brain teasers that you can check out or the first section of any one of their courses you can try for free before signing up but if you do sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses and you're one of the first 200 people to do so you can get 20 off your subscription when you go to brilliant.org so go check it out brilliant.org slice answers with joe link's down in the description big thanks to brilliant for supporting this channel and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that i cannot thank you enough you guys are forming an awesome community helping me out in so many different ways i got some new people i got to murder their names real quick we've got sean burton wes young tyler durden upped his pledge i appreciate that jamie davis agd in california ca i think hm colin ed clink megan cheer brian risius chris and katie mateo thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos and just form uh be part of an awesome community you can go to patreon.com answerswithjoe please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you'll like that one so maybe click on that one to see what you think or check out any of the other videos on my face on them and if you enjoy them and you want to see more i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right thanks a lot for watching you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 856,690

Rating: 4.9044561 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, big bang theory, cosmology, ekpyrotic theory, origin of the universe, string theory, M-theory, branes, 3-branes, bulk branes, how did the universe begin?, the big bang theory is wrong

Id: __0Y5SyEVUI

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jwwetzel]

There's no evidence of inflation yet, but we're looking!