Dr Param Singh Quantum Mechanics

Dr Param Singh is working on a theory that he hopes will shorten the odds. He’s trying to overcome the same problem as everyone else, namely the rather inconvenient idea of everything emerging from nothing, one Thursday afternoon 13.7 billion years ago. But Dr Param Singh’s ideas strike at the fundamental principles that caused all the problems in the first place.

Dr Param Singh “So, if you believe the universe is expanding and if you look at its history then the universe must have expanded from something. And if you look backward and backward, what big bang theory tells you is that the universe starts expanding from nothing.”

Retracing Hubble is impossible – mathematically

The principal mathematical objection is that, as the clock is wound back, and Hubble’s zero hour is approached, all the stuff of the universe is crammed into a smaller and smaller space. Eventually, that space will become infinitely small. And in mathematics, invoking Infinity is the same as giving up. Or cheating.

Dr Param Singh “Even if the mathematical laws would not have broken down at this point, even then its philosophically very incomplete, like, how can something just originate from nothing? And that is what the theory has to explain.”

It’s Param’s job to understand how the unimaginably large emerged from the infinitesimally small.

But it’s not just philosophy and Infinity that stand in his way.

Param Singh “If you look at our universe which is at large scales, the mathematics that we know from Einstein’s theory very well describes most of the phenomena – like all phenomena. Like this ball which I throw up – it comes back.”

Quantum Mechanics

Dr Dr Param Singh “But if I want to describe what is inside this ball, the atomic structure of the ball, or how the molecules are made and how atoms are made, what are their fundamental constituents, then I don’t use classical gravity, I use a completely different physics called quantum mechanics. If I look at the universe, and I ask the question, I want to describe how it came from nothing, what was its nature when it was very small, then I have to use both the classical gravity and quantum mechanics and they don’t talk to each other. What they need is a new theory, and new mathematics. And that is the biggest problem to find.”

Dr Param Singh has been working on a new way to combine the two systems. A scheme that works in the very big AND the very small. What he’s found is that the maths predicts a very peculiar phenomenon.

Dr Param Singh “What we find is, that gravitational force, which is attractive, becomes repulsive when the universe is very small. That is predicted by the mathematics, the new mathematics which we obtain by the marriage of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s gravity. It is a completely different paradigm now.”

The problem of the Big Bang. infinities are swept away by the new “repulsive” gravity. The point of “everything is nothing” is never reached.

Equation Detail
Dr Param Singh “The maths is here, so this is one of the equations which took a couple of years to derive and the part in orange is the one that is predicted by Einstein’s theory and the part in the white is the corrections which come from quantum gravity. So if you look at this orange part, this orange part tells you that if you look at the universe, which is becoming smaller and smaller as you approach a big bang, the left-hand side and the right-hand side, they both become Infinity. And we know that whenever we encountered Infinity in mathematics, something has gone terribly wrong. So what quantum gravity gives us is this expression, which ensures that as we approach the big bang, when universe is becoming smaller and smaller, both sides become zero, and after that, the universe starts expanding again on the other direction and the same laws remain valid.”

Bouncing Universe

In Param Singh’s scheme, instead of emerging from nothing, our universe owes its existence to a previous one that had the misfortune to collapse in on itself, then, thanks to some clever maths, rebounded to become what we see today. So the big bang was not a bang at all. It was, rather, a bouncing universe, big bounce.

Dr Param Singh “It’s a surprising thing, a bouncing universe, but in nature, if you look around us, there are lots of cycles, always happening, like we have seasons, we have even the motion of planets around the sun. In fact, nature tries to prefer things were just cyclic and a way. But if we look at the whole lifespan of the age of the universe, which is billions of years, then maybe these cycles or the bounces, may not at all be surprising, and these are just the cycles of weather, in a way, for the universe, of going through contraction and expansion and contraction and expansion and so on.”

Of course, it might all be nothing more than a fantasy world of mathematics and little else. And there’s always the nagging question of what started the infinite bouncing in the first place.

Dr Param Singh “Well, that’s the most important question and I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe very soon will find an answer to how it all started.”

(PhysOrg.com) — By looking far out into space and observing what’s going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this was the beginning of everything, but lately a few scientists have been wondering if something could have come before that, setting up the initial conditions for the birth of our universe.

In the most recent study on pre-Big Bang science posted at arXiv.org, a team of researchers from the UK, Canada, and the US, Stephen M. Feeney, et al, have revealed that they have discovered four statistically unlikely circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The researchers think that these marks could be “bruises” that our universe has incurred from being bumped four times by other universes. If they turn out to be correct, it would be the first evidence that universes other than ours do exist.

The idea that there are many other universes out there is not new, as scientists have previously suggested that we live in a “multiverse” consisting of an infinite number of universes. The multiverse concept stems from the idea of eternal inflation, in which the inflationary period that our universe went through right after the Big Bang was just one of many inflationary periods that different parts of space were and are still undergoing. When one part of space undergoes one of these dramatic growth spurts, it balloons into its own universe with its own physical properties. As its name suggests, eternal inflation occurs an infinite number of times, creating an infinite number of universes, resulting in the multiverse.

These infinite universes are sometimes called bubble universes even though they are irregular-shaped, not round. The bubble universes can move around and occasionally collide with other bubble universes. As Feeney, et al., explain in their paper, these collisions produce inhomogeneities in the inner-bubble cosmology, which could appear in the CMB. The scientists developed an algorithm to search for bubble collisions in the CMB with specific properties, which led them to find the four circular patterns.

Still, the scientists acknowledge that it is rather easy to find a variety of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB. The researchers emphasize that more work is needed to confirm this claim, which could come in short time from the Planck satellite, which has a resolution three times better than that of WMAP (where the current data comes from), as well as an order of magnitude greater sensitivity. Nevertheless, they hope that the search for bubble collisions could provide some insight into the history of our universe, whether or not the collisions turn out to be real.

“The conclusive non-detection of a bubble collision can be used to place stringent limits on theories giving rise to eternal inflation; however, if a bubble collision is verified by future data, then we will gain an insight not only into our own universe but a multiverse beyond,” the researchers write in their study.

This is the second study in the past month that has used CMB data to search for what could have occurred before the Big Bang. In the first study, Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan found concentric circles with lower-than-average temperature variation in the CMB, which could be evidence for a cyclic cosmology in which Big Bangs occur over and over.

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

Big History begins at 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after The Big Bang, or the first Planck Unit, when Eienstein’s Theory of Relativy breaks down.

Saint Augustine believed that before the birth of the universe there was no time. Eienstein’s Theory of Relativity backs this up. This period has become known as the Augustinian Era since it was named in 1952 by George Gamow.