Inflationary Theory and Accelerated Expansion

[Little Bang]

What I am about to suggest is not a theory but a possible explanation of the inflationary period of the Big Bang and the accelerated expansion of the universe. What if the speed of light was not a constant but dependent upon the size of the universe. By that I mean at the instant of the Big Bang the speed of light is infinite and as the universe expands the speed of light keeps getting slower and slower. What this does is to eliminate the problem of the early universe expanding thousands of times faster than the speed of light. If what I suggest were true then it would also explain the accelerated expansion because as we look back in time were C is faster than in our local time the universe would appear to be accelerating away from us.

[ughaibu]

I'm not sure that I understand your final sentence, are you suggesting that light is faster proportional to greater distance from the observer?

[InfiniteNow]

One additional question (from the very remedial student, mind you) is whether or not you are referring to McCutcheonary expansion or cosmic inflation models. I intuit elements of both in your idea.

 

(i.e. - don't yet give it up, as the idea is interesting). ;)

[infamous]

What I am about to suggest is not a theory but a possible explanation of the inflationary period of the Big Bang and the accelerated expansion of the universe. What if the speed of light was not a constant but dependent upon the size of the universe. By that I mean at the instant of the Big Bang the speed of light is infinite and as the universe expands the speed of light keeps getting slower and slower.

There is a problem with this Little B.; If one starts with infinite speed, any fraction of infinite is still infinite. So IMHO, for light speed to slow below this initial speed which you propose, it would have to be finite.

 

 

 

What this does is to eliminate the problem of the early universe expanding thousands of times faster than the speed of light. If what I suggest were true then it would also explain the accelerated expansion because as we look back in time were C is faster than in our local time the universe would appear to be accelerating away from us.

So you're saying that as we observe distant objects in the universe, because we are in reality looking back in time, we calculate light speed at an earlier epic. Interesting idea, but my question would be; How distant must an object be before we see variations in the speed of light coming from it. From all the information I can gather, the Inflationary period was a rather brief expansion, in relative terms, when considering the overall history of the cosmos.

 

Interesting thought nevertheless................................Infy

[HydrogenBond]

The idea of the universe inflating faster than the speed of light is an artifact of using the wrong reference. When the universe was inflating, that was the only reference in the universe The zero reference that we now have did not exist then and using it to explain the inflation, takes the situation out of context with the reality that existed.

 

If one was standing on the inflation, watching the expansion, with distance so contracted, size perception would be smaller and the speed of light would not be exceeded.

 

The wrong reference that is used, is analgous to one going back into the dark ages with what you know now and assuming the people back them thought in the same way. The result would put one out of touch with the reality of those times.

[Little Bang]

I'm not sure that I understand your final sentence, are you suggesting that light is faster proportional to greater distance from the observer?

 

Instead of saying C is a function of the size of the universe I’ll say that it is a function of the energy density of the universe. At the instant of the Big Bang the energy density would be infinite and would obviously decrease as the universe expands. Let's say that you are driving on a flat straight road at 60 mph and you can see another car about a mile away in the distance. you have been told that the other car is also doing 60 mph when in fact he is doing 80 mph, it would appear to you that the other car was accelerating away from you.

 

Infa, if I look at our nearest star system at 4.25 light years away there would be very little difference because it's in our local area. The farther back in time we look the faster the speed of light.

[ughaibu]

Okay, I think I get your meaning, thanks.

[coldcreation]

Little bang, hello again. What you suggest is in flat contradiction with what is observed in nature.

 

The SNe Ia data (leading to acceleration in the standard model) shows that events appear to be slower at great distances, not faster, as would be the case according to your idea. The phenomenon is called time dilation.

 

If time were 'ticking' faster in the lookback time (i.e., if c was faster than now) then the expansion would appear to decelerate from the prespective of an observer.

 

BTW, there are other ways to solve the cosmological problems. There is thus no need to tinker with c (something that would violate relativity; both the special and general versions).

 

Nice try though.

 

CC

[Little Bang]

cc, you are correct, if light from a far away galaxy were faster than local that galaxy would appear to be decelerating not accelerating. I guess one of the things that started me thinking about C being constant is the fact that it just happens to be the number that tells us how much energy is contained in matter. The fact that C is in that equation makes me think that the phenomenon we call matter is an observer quantity. BTW time doesn't tick, events do occur but we use the orderly occurance of events to make measurements about other events.

[Little Bang]

Coldcreation, I’m having a slight problem with something and I need your help. How could we know the rate at which events occur in the far distant past if the only yardstick we have to make such measurements were wrong? One other thing, you said that events appear to be moving slower in the past, explain to us how that implies an accelerating universe. Slower in the past would mean deceleration to me?

Say you are some X number of feet away from me and I know that you throw a small rock at 100 ft/sec. I have you throw a rock at me and I time how long it takes to arrive. My clock says it took one sec, therefore I think you are 100 feet away, but if in fact you throw the rock at 120ft/sec I have placed you twenty feet closer than you really are because my 100ft/sec yardstick is to short.

[coldcreation]

Coldcreation, I’m having a slight problem with something and I need your help. How could we know the rate at which events occur in the far distant past if the only yardstick we have to make such measurements were wrong? One other thing, you said that events appear to be moving slower in the past, explain to us how that implies an accelerating universe. Slower in the past would mean deceleration to me?

...snip...

 

Simply put, you are correct. Without standard candles it would be very difficult (impossible?) to make accurate measurments. For now lets assume SNe Ia are fairly decent standard candles, and there are very good arguments to suggest they are to some extent. Are they very good candles? Probably not, there is quite a bit of evidence, too, that suggests there are problems with the standard candle attribution.

 

Note, the supposed acceleration is thought to be happening within the past few billion years. This means that expansion was slower in the past, not faster. Since the observed SNe exploded long ago, they occured at a time whan the expansion was slower (not yet accelerating). So, according to the standard model, that implies an accelerating universe, now. Faster in the past would mean deceleration now. Slower in the past would mean acceleration now. Thus, there apears to be time dilation in the past.

 

CC

[WillieB]

CC & Little Bang:

 

If you go to Barry Setterfields websites you will find support that c is indeed decreasing with time. I can't say that I fully agree with ALL of his conclusions, but I do believe in the accuracy of his research of the history of physics and physical measurements

[coldcreation]

CC & Little Bang:

 

If you go to Barry Setterfields websites you will find support that c is indeed decreasing with time. I can't say that I fully agree with ALL of his conclusions, but I do believe in the accuracy of his research of the history of physics and physical measurements

 

Hello WillieB,

 

I've seen some of BS's work before. I just started reading this work which seems interesting, at first glance (about ZPE and ZPF for example).

 

I'm not sure I'm in agreement wit his idea "that, following an initial rapid expansion event, the universe attained a maximum size, followed by an essentially static cosmos thereafter."

 

But most importantly, it remains to be seen exactly what predictions he can make that can be tested sometime in the future that wil either confirm or refute his theory (many aspects of which look similar to Arp's and Tiff's). In the quick read I did not see any predictions, just explainations for certain observations themselves open to interpretation (or even question, i.e, the quantized redshift: is it real or not?).

 

There are many works to sift through. I've only just begun. I did not get to the speed of light yet. So my remarks above remain first impressions only.

 

Thanks for providing the reference WB. If you have a link for his nonconstant c can you provide it? Thanks.

 

CC

[WillieB]

Thanks for providing the reference WB. If you have a link for his nonconstant c can you provide it? Thanks.

 

CC- If you go to his sites you will find an index to several of his papers including lightspeed. I most certainly agree with you in casting doubt on his assertion that the inflationary period ended in a static universe.

 

Regards WillieB

[Bob Eldritch]

The idea of the universe inflating faster than the speed of light is an artifact of using the wrong reference. When the universe was inflating, that was the only reference in the universe The zero reference that we now have did not exist then and using it to explain the inflation, takes the situation out of context with the reality that existed.

 

If one was standing on the inflation, watching the expansion, with distance so contracted, size perception would be smaller and the speed of light would not be exceeded.

 

I've seen a different version of the inflationary scenario to do with space being stretched.

 

But I can't see that any argument for inflation theory will be other than special pleading for an account that basically contradicts relativity while, at the same time, maintaining that inflation is allowed by relativity.

 

So that for those who believe in cosmic inflation according to relativity theory it both is and is not possible for objects to accelerate to faster than the speed of light. And on top of that you have to cook up a theory that makes it possible for the cosmic expansion to decelerate back to below the speed of light. And all this is supposed to have occurred well within the blink of an eye.

 

I've concluded that the Big Bang could have occured without inflation given, in the first instance, an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics to that in the standard model.

 

So that, given the much and quite unjustly berated de Broglie-Bohm causal interpretation of QM you can consider that a cause acts universally and nonlocally in addition to all the forces. And then I've found quite detailed reasons to think that this cause produces observable effects on the cosmic scale.

 

I propose that such a theory can resolve all the problems of Big Bang theory that inflation is intended to resolve, including the horizon problem.

 

So to solve the hoizon problem, in short, inflation theory assumes that there can be no faster than light causal connections and thus faster than light expansion is needed to explain universal isotropy and homogeneity. Whereas faster that light effects have now been measured in many quantum physics experiments.

 

Admittedly faster than light effects appear to contadict relativity as well. But you can point out that nonlocal causation would need to be quite unlike the action of any force in that, in particukar, its effects cannot be measured to vary at any distance between objects. Hence nonlocal causation could not be described as acting in fields that surround objects in 3D space like the forces. So that one can conceive of this cause as needing to act from outside 4D spacetime in extra spatial dimensions and to which relativity need not apply.

 

(Can't post links yet apparently but for the horizon problem and quantum physics experiments (in "Bell test experiments") see wikipedia for a start.)

[firecracker]

:cat: Little Bang:

Please forgive me for jumping in here at this late date. When I logged onto the forum this time, the forum asked me to make some comments or ask some questions. (From time-to-time, when I look at the box which tells me what I'm allowed to do, it tells me that "may or may not do this or that" It's a little disturbing!)

 

Much of my time is spent considering the things that happened at the (supposed) beginning. I remember a PBS program narrated by Timothy Ferris in the mid to late '80's called "THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE", in which he stated that the universe began as a 'Sea of free quarks when Protons, neutrons, and atoms had not yet formed . . . '. I refer to this as it relates to the emission of photons and the subsequent velocity of light. Richard Feynman, well known for his now famous Feynman diagrams, indicated that upon the combination of quarks to form either protons or neutrons, a photon and a neutrino were emitted in the process. This leads me to believe that in the very beginning, when there was only a sea of free quarks, the universe may have been expanding alright, but originally there was no light! (Please, this is pure speculation on my part; it just started me thinking that perhaps the actual expansion was 'out running' the emission of photons if my interpretation of what Ferris said was correct.

Another interesting point would be to suppose we could have been able to construct a hypothetical optical bench at the beginning to measure the speed of light scientifically where we would also have to know the risetime of the trigger, the time delay in the intrinsic apparatus, the sensitivity of the detector, etc, all the while viewing the event from afar. Would it still count as a valid measurement of the speed of light if I had the trigger 'there' and the detector 'here' separated by the vastness of the universe? I ask this question because of my suspicion that we can never know the exact size and speed of anything unless they exist within our own frame of reference. And when we speculate on these criteria, do we consider the theories of relativity and how they would have been interpreted in these instances? (i.e., Would the gravitational effects have been large enough, coming from an infinite point source, to have prevented the escape of light in the first place?)

[Theory5]

What I am about to suggest is not a theory but a possible explanation of the inflationary period of the Big Bang and the accelerated expansion of the universe. What if the speed of light was not a constant but dependent upon the size of the universe. By that I mean at the instant of the Big Bang the speed of light is infinite and as the universe expands the speed of light keeps getting slower and slower. What this does is to eliminate the problem of the early universe expanding thousands of times faster than the speed of light. If what I suggest were true then it would also explain the accelerated expansion because as we look back in time were C is faster than in our local time the universe would appear to be accelerating away from us.

 

Little Bang, your Theory is interesting.But help me out here.You and CC have already said that you don't and u CANT know if the speed of light is decreasing the further back u look. But here is what i have trouble with,If you CANT look back then why not look at something OTHER than going back in time to see if ur theory is correct. Cause if u only do that u can only hope that logic is logical and you can only call ur theory a theory, no matter how much math u do and how correct it is. BUT waht universe are u talking about when u say the creation of the universe? are u talking about all of space? or of our solar system and nearby solar system? I really don't know a lot of math because im only in 9th grade so i don't know what u mean by C but if all the stuff that was floating around Before the universe quarks and stuff, lets say that when light travels through quarks it goes faster than when light travels through, ummm i believe scientists call it "dark matter", it goes slower because dark matter is thicker and well, denser, than quarks. so (we can see other universes right?) if we figure out a way to send a signal of some sort to a distant star and back in a short amount of time, then couldn't we pick another universe and do that? just to mesure how fast light goes? becuase at the beginning of the universe there was little mass, and now by some unknown cause there is much more mass than there was, thus causing light to go slower.

I hope i added another view to your discussion and didn't cause u confusing and make ur brain hurt. :-P