Tag: anti-Universe

The Futile Search for Anti-Me

On By rolcottIn CosmologyLeave a comment

“Nice call, Sy.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Your post a couple weeks ago. You titled it ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once.’ That’s the movie that just won seven Oscars — Best Movie, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress… How’d you predict it?”

“I didn’t, Susan. I wasn’t even trying to. I knew the movie’s plot was based on the multiverse notion. That’s the theme for this post series so it seemed like a natural cultural reference. Besides, that post was about the Big Bang’s growth in a skillionth of a second from a Planck‑length‑size volume out to our ginormous Universe and all its particles. ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once‘ seemed like a nice description of what we think happened. A mug of my usual, Al, and I’m buying Susan’s mocha latte.”

“Sure, Sy. Nice call, by the way. Have a couple of scones, you two, on me.”

“Thanks, Al, and thanks, Sy. You know, I’ve noticed the multiverse idea cropping up a lot lately. They used it in the Spiderman franchise, and the recent Doctor Strange pic, and I just read it’ll be in the next Flash movie.”

“Oh, it’s an old writer’s ploy, Susan. Been around in one form or another since Aristophanes invented Cloudcuckooland for one of his Greek comedies. Small‑screen scifi uses it a lot — Star Trek used it back in the Kirk-Spock shows and DS9 based a whole story arc on the idea. Any time an author wants to move the action to a strange place or bring in some variation on a familiar character, they trot out the multiverse. Completely bogus, of course — they may sound all science‑y but none of them have anything to do with what we physicists have been arguing about.”

“You mean your anti-Universe won’t have an evil version of you in it?”

“I certainly don’t expect it to if it even exists. Suppose an anti‑Universe is out there. Think of all the contingencies that had to go just right during 13½ billion anti‑years of anti‑quark‑soup and anti‑atomic history before there’s an anti‑planet just like Earth in just the right environment around an anti‑star just like ours, all evolved to the level of our anti‑when, not to mention the close shaves our biological and personal histories would have had to scrape through. I’d be amazed if even anti‑humans existed there, let alone individuals anything like you and me. Talk about very low probabilities.”

“You’ve got a point. My folks almost didn’t survive the war back in Korea. A mine went off while they were working in our field — another few feet over and I wouldn’t be here today. But wait, couldn’t everything in the anti‑Universe play out in anti‑time exactly like things have in ours? They both would have started right next to each other with mirror‑image forces at work. It’d be like a pool table show by a really good trick‑shot artist.”

“If everything were that exactly mirror‑imaged, the anti‑me and I would have the same background, attitudes and ethics. The mirror people on those scifi shows generally have motives and moral codes that oppose ours even though the mirror characters physically are dead ringers for their our‑side counterparts. Except the male evil twins generally wear beards and the female ones use darker eye make‑up. No, I don’t think mirror‑imaging can be that exact. The reason is quantum.”

“How did quantum get into this? Quantum’s about little stuff, atoms and molecules, not the Universe.”

“Remember when the Universe was packed into a Planck‑length‑size volume? That’s on the order of 10‑35 meter across, plenty small enough for random quantum effects to make a big difference. What’s important here, though, is everything that happened post‑Bang. The essence of quantum theory is that it’s not clockwork. With a few exceptions, we can only make statistical predictions about how events will go at microscopic scale. Things vary at random. Your chemical reactions are predictable but only because you’re working with huge numbers of molecules.”

“Even then sometimes I get a mess.”

“Well then. If you can’t reliably replicate reactions with gram‑level quantities, how can you expect an entire anti‑Universe to replicate its partner?”

“Then <singing> there can never be another you.”

~~ Rich Olcott

A Two-Way Stretch, Maybe

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Uncategorized1 Comment

“Okay, Moire, I guess I gotta go with the Big Bang happening, but I still have a problem with it making everything come from a point full of nothing.”

“Back at you, Mr Feder. I have problems with your problem. To begin with, forget about your notion of a point with zero size. There’s some reason to think the Bang started with an event sized on the order of the Planck length, 10-35 meter. That’s small, but it’s not zero.”

“I suppose, but with the whole mass of the Universe crammed in there, ain’t that a recipe for the ultimate black hole? Nothing could get outta there.”

“Nothing needs to. What’s inside is already everything, remember? Besides, there isn’t an outside — space simply doesn’t exist outside of the spacetime the Bang created. Those bell‑shaped ‘Evolution of The Universe‘ diagrams are so misleading. I say that even though I’ve used the diagram myself. It’s just a graph with Time running along the central axis and Space expanding perpendicular to that. People have prettied it up to make it cylindrical and added galaxies and such. The lines just represent how much Space has expanded since the Bang. Unfortunately, people look at the bell as a some kind of boundary with empty space outside, but that’s so wrong.”

“No outside? Hard to wrap your head around.”

“Understandable. Only physicists and mathematicians get used to thinking in those terms and mostly we do it with equations instead of trying to visualize. Our equations tell us the Universe expands at the speed of light plus a bit.”

“Wait, I thought nothing could go faster than the speed of light.”

“True, nothing can traverse space faster than light or gravity, but space itself expands. At large distances it’s doing that faster than light. We actually had to devise two different definitions of distance. ‘Co‑moving distance‘ includes the expansion. ‘Proper distance‘ doesn’t. In another couple billion years, the farthest things we can see today will be co‑moving away so fast that the photons they emit will be carried away faster than they can fly towards us. Those objects will leave our Observable Universe, the spherical bubble that encloses the objects whose light gets a chance to reach us.”

“My head hurts from the expanding. Get back to the Bang thing ’cause it was small. Too small to hold atoms I guess so how can it explode to be everything?”

“‘Expand’, not ‘explode‘ — they’re different — but good guess. The Bang’s singularity was smaller than an atom by at least a factor of 1024, but conditions were far too hot in there for atoms to exist, or nuclei, or even protons and neutrons. Informally we call it a quark soup, which is okay because we think quarks are structureless points that can cram to near‑infinite density. We don’t yet know enough Physics for good calculations of temperature, density or much of anything else.”

“That’s a lot of energy, even if it’s not particles. Which is what I’m getting at. I keep hearing you can’t create energy, just transform it, right? So where did the energy come from?”

“That’s a deep question, Mr Feder, and we don’t have an answer or hypothesis or even a firm guess. It gets down to what energy even is — we’re just barely nibbling at the edges of that one. One crazy idea I kind of like is that creating our Universe took zero energy because the process was exactly compensated for by creating an anti‑Universe whose total anti‑energy matches our total energy.”

“Whaddaya mean, anti‑Universe and anti‑energy?”

<deep breath> “You know an atom has negatively‑charged electrons bound to its positively‑charged nucleus, right? Well, the anti‑Universe I’m thinking of has that situation and everything else reversed. Positive electrons, negative nucleus, but also flipped left‑right parities for some electroweak particle interactions. Oh, and time runs backwards which is how anti‑energy becomes a thing. Our Universe and my crazy anti‑Universe emerge at Time Zero from the singularity. Then they expand in opposite directions along the Time axis. Maybe the quarks and their anti‑quarks got sorted out at the flash‑point, I dunno.”

“So there’s an anti‑me out there somewhere?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

~~ Rich Olcott