Many Worlds in One
PART I
GENESIS
1
What Banged, How It Banged, and What Caused It to Bang
In the context of inflationary cosmology, it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
--ALAN GUTH
On a Wednesday afternoon, in the winter of 1980, I was sitting in a fully packed Harvard auditorium, listening to the most fascinating talk I had heard in many years. The speaker was Alan Guth, a young physicist from Stanford, and the topic was a new theory for the origin of the universe. I had not met Guth before, but I had heard of his spectacular rise from obscurity to stardom. Only a month before, he belonged to the nomadic tribe of postdocs--young researchers traveling from one temporary contract to another, in the hope of distinguishing themselves and landing a permanent job at some university. Things were looking bleak for Guth: at age thirty-two he was getting a bit old for the youthful tribe, and the contract offers were beginning to dry out. But then he was blessed with a happy thought that changed everything.
Guth turned out to be a short, bouncy fellow, full of boyish enthusiasm, apparently untarnished by his long wanderings as a postdoc. From the outset, he made it clear that he was not trying to overthrow the big bangtheory. There was no need to. The evidence for the big bang was very persuasive, and the theory was in good shape.
The most convincing evidence is the expansion of the universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. Hubble found that distant galaxies are moving away from us at very high speeds. If the motion of the galaxies is traced backward in time, they all merge together at some moment in the past, pointing to an explosive beginning of the universe.
Another major piece of evidence in favor of the big bang is the cosmic background radiation. Space is filled with microwaves of about the same frequency as we use in microwave ovens. The intensity of this radiation dwindles as the universe expands; hence what we now observe is the faint afterglow of the hot primeval fireball.
Cosmologists used the big bang theory to study how the fireball expanded and cooled, how atomic nuclei formed, and how the grand spirals of galaxies emerged from featureless gas clouds. The results of these studies were in excellent agreement with astronomical observations, so there was little doubt that the theory was on the right track. What it described, however, was only the aftermath of the big bang; the theory said nothing about the bang itself. In Guth's own words, it did not say "what 'banged,' how it 'banged,' or what caused it to 'bang.'"1
To compound the mystery, on closer examination the big bang appeared to be a very peculiar kind of explosion. Just imagine a pin balancing on its point. Nudge it slightly in any direction and it will fall. So it is with the big bang. A large universe sprinkled with galaxies, like the one we see around us, is produced only if the power of the primordial blast is fine-tuned with an incredible precision. A tiny deviation from the required power results in a cosmological disaster, such as the fireball collapsing under its own weight or the universe being nearly empty.
The big bang cosmology simply postulated that the fireball had the required properties. The prevailing attitude among physicists was that physics can describe how the universe evolved from a given initial state, but it is beyond physics to explain why the universe happened to start in that particular configuration. Asking questions about the initial state was regarded as "philosophy," which, coming from a physicist, translates as a waste of time. This attitude, however, did not make the big bang any less enigmatic.
Now Guth was telling us that the veil of mystery surrounding the bigbang could be lifted. His new theory would uncover the nature of the bang and explain why the initial fireball was so contrived. The seminar room fell suddenly silent. Everybody was intrigued.
The explanation the new theory gave for the big bang was remarkably simple: the universe was blown up by repulsive gravity! The leading role in this theory is played by a hypothetical, superdense material with some highly unusual properties. Its most important characteristic is that it produces a strong repulsive gravitational force. Guth assumed that there was some amount of this material in the early universe. He did not need much: a tiny chunk would be sufficient.
The internal gravitational repulsion would cause the chunk to expand very rapidly. If it were made of normal matter, its density would be diluted as it expanded, but this antigravity stuff behaves completely differently: the second key feature of the strange material is that its density always remains the same, so its total mass is proportional to the volume it occupies. As the chunk grows in size, it also grows in mass, so its repulsive gravity becomes stronger and it expands even faster. A brief period of such accelerated expansion, which Guth called inflation, can enlarge a minuscule initial chunk to enormous dimensions, far exceeding the size of the presently observable universe.
The dramatic increase in mass during inflation may at first appear to contradict one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the law of energy conservation. By Einstein's famous relation, E = mc2, energy is proportional to mass. (Here, E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light.) Sothe energy of the inflating chunk must also have grown by a colossal factor, while energy conservation requires that it should remain constant. The paradox disappears if one remembers to include the contribution to the energy due to gravity. It has long been known that gravitational energy is always negative. This fact did not appear very important, but now it suddenly acquired a cosmic significance. As the positive energy of matter grows, it is balanced by the growing negative gravitational energy. The total energy remains constant, as demanded by the conservation law.
In order to provide an ending for the period of inflation, Guth required that the repulsive gravity stuff should be unstable. As it decays, its energy is released to produce a hot fireball of elementary particles. The fireball then continues to expand by inertia, but now it consists of normal matter, its gravity is attractive, and the expansion gradually slows down. The decay of the antigravity material marks the end of inflation and plays the role of the big bang in this theory.
The beauty of the idea was that in a single shot inflation explained why the universe is so big, why it is expanding, and why it was so hot at the beginning. A huge expanding universe was produced from almost nothing. All that was needed was a microscopic chunk of repulsive gravity material. Guth admitted he did not know where the initial chunk came from, but that detail could be worked out later. "It's often said that you cannot get something for nothing," he said, "but the universe may be the ultimate free lunch."
All this assumes, of course, that the repulsive gravity stuff really existed. There was no shortage of it in science fiction novels, where it had been used in all sorts of flying machines, from combat vehicles to antigravity shoes. But could professional physicists seriously consider the possibility that gravity might be repulsive?
They sure could. And the first to do that was none other than Albert Einstein.
Copyright © 2006 by Alex Vilenkin
