Unraveling the Mysteries of Vacuum Genesis

[Mean-Hippy]

Have just watched an old documentary called "The creation of The Universe"
by Timothy Ferris, dating back to 1985. Towards the end it mentions a theory called "vacuum genesis" which is composed of familiar elements but that I had never heard in such a framework. It explains the cause of the big bang as a breakdown of the initial symmetry presents at unification temperatures and seems rather ellegant to me.
Surprisingly, a google of the therm braught back very little, hence this post.
Has this been discarded ? Is it part of the current theoretical framework without its original apellation of " vacuum genesis" ?

I have found the text itself rather elegant. Here's a transcript:

The universe may have begun in a state of perfect symmetry. The theory says that matter rose out of energy while the early universe was expanding and cooling that form arose from formlessness like ice crystals congealing in a freezing pond. The mathematical symmetries that the unified theories have exposed at the foundations of natural law are more subtle and complex than those of snowflakes. But their principle is the same, they imply that we live in a crystallized universe of broken symmetries.

Perfect symmetry may be beautiful, but it is sterile, perfectly symmetrical space means nothingness. As soon as you introduce an object into that space, you break the symmetry, thus creating a sense of location. There is a place where the object is and other places where it isn't and out of that comes tumbling all of the geometry of space as we know it.

Perfectly symmetrical time means that nothing can happen. As soon as you have an event, then you break the symmetry and time begins to flow in a given direction We live in a universe that is full of objects and events and that means that the universe is imperfect. The symmetries of the universe we live in are broken. It may even be that we owe the very origin of our universe to the imperfection of the
breaking of the absolute symmetry of absolute emptiness. There is even a theory to this effect. It's called vacuum genesis and it suggests that the universe began as a single particle arising from an absolute vacuum. Curious as it may seem , this idea violates none of the known laws of physics. We have seen how virtual particles come into existence all the time from a vacuum and then fall back into non-existence. There appears to be no upper limit on the size and longevity of particles that can be created in this way. Its just possible that there might have been absolutely nothing out of which came a particle so potent that it could blossom into the entire universe. Its is not very likely, but then it only had to happen once.

The theory of vacuum genesis is a new idea , nobody knows whether or not it is true, but it does satisfy two of the criteria of a sound scientific theory: its seams at first so strange that it must be preposterous and, like the universe itself, the longer you get to know it the more beautiful it becomes.

Out of nothingness could have come the spark of genesis. As the universe expanded and cooled, darkness descended. Then light dawned anew with formation of the first stars. Each star is a nuclear furnace where matter is coaxed into releasing a little of the energy it inherited from the primordial fireball. Thanks to imperfection, to the fractured symmetries that produce differences among the particles and forces , atoms in their varieties could build themselves into molecules and molecules rise up in alliances as life, and life gives birth to thought and thoughts produce theories about the creation of the universe.

Timothy Ferris
“The Creation Of the Universe”
@ 1:15:00
Documentary 1985.

Any thoughts on this from our more knowledgeable members ?

 

[ProphecyT]

That is so weird! I just was watching that and I heard it and tried to google it also and only got your post...I had to make a username and password just to get on here and tell you that you aren't the only one who has seen it! I thought I'd be the only one...it's a really good special I think. Does it cover everything pretty well to the best of your knowledge or is it outdated?

Anyways...Maybe Timothy just made it up? I don't know if it exists...but its interesting nonetheless...

-Tim

 

[TalonD]

so in a nutshell... in the beginning there was nothing... then there was something.

Brilliant !

 

[mysearch]

so in a nutshell... in the beginning there was nothing... then there was something.

Is vacuum genesis really saying this? Here is another source:

http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/ask/a11241.html

Is vacuum genesis compatible with observation?
In a limited way. We can create electron-positron and other matter anti-matter pairs out of the vacuum state by providing the vacuum state with enough energy. In a sense, these particles literally appear out of thin air, and as 'virtual particles' they have measurable effects. So, yes, some limited experiments in the production of matter from the vacuum have been confirmed. Presumably, the origin of the universe is only a bigger form of the same experiment using the energy stored in the curved gravitational field of the primordial universe..as the driving spring.

This description seems to require a pre-existing notion of energy, which doesn’t seem to align to an absolute definition of nothing, more of something we don’t really understand or even have a good theory to fully describe, as yet. However, somebody else might be able to clarify whether this vacuum energy is compatible with ideas about zero point energy or another quantum theory.

Purely out of interest, is there any scientific definition of `nothing`?
e.g. nothing is nothing, meaning no space, no time, no energy, no concept of spacetime geometry, gravitational fields or scalar fields etc, simply nothing.

 

[TalonD]

how do you do the multi quote?

Anyway, mysearch,
I don't know if there is a scientific definition of 'nothing' but you put it pretty well, the absence of everything. 'Nothing' as a concept akin to 'non-existence'. Maybe that would be a good definition. "the absence of volume" or perhaps "the absence of any dimension" ?


In vacuum genesis, I get the impresssion that we are saying that there is a preexisting three dimensional volume of pure vacuum in which there are no virtual particles or anything else. And suddenl through some unknown process a single particle came into existence and began expanding?

Or did everything suddenly exist where before there was nothing. In fact, in that case you can't even use the word 'before' because you can't have a 'before' without time already existing.

That brings up an interesting question. does time exist in a pure vacuum in which there is no matter or energy and even no quantum processes, no virtual particles, no time consuming processes, nothing but pure spatial dimension?



on creating virtual particle / antiparticle pairs, I have a question. In that quote, about creating them out of the vacuum by applying enough energy. It leaves me with the impression that the energy is left over after the particles are created. But isn't it true that the energy becomes the particles? not that the particles are created out of nothing and the energy is still left over zipping around as a thing sepparate from the particles? isn't it that the energy itself sort of becomes the particles and when they anihilate then they turn back into energy?

So in the vacuum genesis, wouldn't a single matter particle have to be produced? if it was a particle / anti-particle pair would they not simply anihilate and not expand into a universe?

The only case I can think of where a virtual particle becomes real is in Hawking radiation.

 

[marcus]

how do you do the multi quote?
...

Before you click the "quote" button, go thru and press the multiquote for each post that you want, so it lights up on each desired post. Then press "quote".

Multiquote is boolean so if you change your mind and don't want a post quoted you can click a second time and the light will turn off.

 

[Chronos]

Something from nothing? Is 'nothing' merely 'something' in disguise? You can hide 'something' behind layers of 'something else' for awhile, but eventually the point must be conceded. Either 'something' has always existed, or 'something' came from 'nothing'. Neither solution is more logical than the other, in my mind. I prefer 'in the beginning'. What came before that is unknowable. I find that strangely comforting.

 

[mysearch]

'Nothing' as a concept akin to 'non-existence'. Maybe that would be a good definition. "the absence of volume" or perhaps "the absence of any dimension" ?

Yes, it can be quite difficult to be precise about absolute nothing However, in terms of cosmology, I believe the relevance of the issue is whether we really have any science that can support a physical process being created out of absolute nothing, i.e. this includes no energy. If not, maybe it suggests an extended cosmology model infinite in time, although, as you point out, the concept of time may be a subject of debate. Anyway, while this is an interesting line of thought, it is possibly just Aristotle’s idea of a `primer mover` in disguise.

on creating virtual particle / antiparticle pairs, I have a question. In that quote, about creating them out of the vacuum by applying enough energy. It leaves me with the impression that the energy is left over after the particles are created. But isn't it true that the energy becomes the particles? not that the particles are created out of nothing and the energy is still left over zipping around as a thing sepparate from the particles? isn't it that the energy itself sort of becomes the particles and when they anihilate then they turn back into energy?

I cannot talk with any authority on these issues, but here are some thoughts. As I understand it, the annihilation and creation of particles, even in the quantum world, involves energy. At one level, this energy seems to be an attribute of the vacuum. However, I am not really sure how a vacuum can store energy without the definition of some structure, i.e. the inference being that energy is not a substance in itself, but rather something we associated with a process. For example, the units of energy are mass (kg) * distance (m^2) over time (s^2) and it is not obvious to me how a vacuum is said to support these concepts. Of course, mass itself is energy by virtue of E=mc^2, so this idea of energy is a little recursive in those terms. Therefore, we might wish to switch to Planck’s equation E=hf and infer some equivalence between mass and frequency, but even so, it would seem that energy cannot be stored in `nothing`, therefore does this imply that a vacuum has to be `something`? This is a logical premise, but not necessarily an authoritative one

More by way of a footnote, there does seem to be a notion of negative energy in the form of potential energy. In concept, if you expand a system to infinity, it has a maximum negative potential of zero. If this system is then allowed to collapse under gravity, it increases in negative potential energy and positive kinetic energy in equal amounts, i.e. the system has net zero energy, ignoring the rest mass. Of course, you might still be left wondering how and why it expanded in the first place, so this might not be of much help

 

[oldman]

Thanks for the interesting transcript, Mean-hippy. Here's a quote that's very relevant now that there's a financial mess everywhere:

... It is
perhaps just as well that the average taxpayer, who funds research in physics, is unaware of
the trouble we have in understanding even nothing at all...

One can only speculate about the Beginning (if indeed there was one). But lots of cosmological folk seem to accept that 'beginning physics' involved an instant of exponentially accelerating expansion called 'inflation', before regular expansion set in.

Few seem to appreciate the difficulty that physics might have had in operating in any remotely familiar way during inflation. This is because the kind of exponential expansion envisaged for inflationary would generate truly stupendous tidal forces on even the smallest quantum entities one can imagine. Such expansion would also red-shift radiant energy by stupendous Z factors as it were transmitted across even tiny spacetime intervals.

So perhaps nothing at all can happen during this instant and the inflating universe is indeed as symmetric as Timothy Ferris suggested. But how would we ever confirm via observation whether this is nonsense or not?

 

[leacella]

The Heart Sutra states...

"Emptiness is form."
"Form is emptiness."
Long before scientist even considered this.
Hawkins has already proven there was no "big bang."

 

[nicksauce]

The Heart Sutra states...

"Emptiness is form."
"Form is emptiness."
Long before scientist even considered this.
Hawkins has already proven there was no "big bang."

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it is definitely a fact that no one named Hawkins has ever proven there was no big bang.

 

[leacella]

The theory of the "big bang" is a logical fallacy whereby a premise is true only because it has not been proven false. This is a moment...never began, never will end.
Something cannot arise from nothing. Steven Hawkins admits there was no "big bang".
400 years ago it was postulated that the form we experience is the same thing as emptiness and the lack of form or emptiness is the same thing as the form.

Einstein showed that energy and matter were the same. 400 years later.

 

[nicksauce]

Even if Stephen Hawking admitted there was no big bang, which he hasn't, it wouldn't change the fact that all the empirical evidence favors the big bang model (Hubble's law, Existence of CMB, Prediction of light element abundances, Successful theory of structure formation, etc.). And please drop the Buddhist mumbo-jumbo; it's not at all relevant to modern science.

 

[Chronos]

Who proved the universe must kneel before the edifice of human logic? If we have learned anything from quantum physics, it is that logic is optional.

 

[leacella]

And how about string theory. Multiple "big bangs" in an endless universe.

Human kind is not advanced enough with their science (the new religion) to conceive

the true nature of the universe let alone fathom how it started which it didn't.

 

[yogi]

The theory of the "big bang" is a logical fallacy whereby a premise is true only because it has not been proven false. This is a moment...never began, never will end.
Something cannot arise from nothing. Steven Hawkins admits there was no "big bang".

.

But what is something and what is nothing - is not everything a distortion of spacetime

 

[apeiron]

If we live in a broken symmetry, it of course makes sense to suggest we sprang from a state of perfect symmetry or infinite symmetry. But then as several posters say, you have to go to the next step and ask what kind of "thing" is this perfect symmetry?

If it is a kind of nothingness, and also an everythingness, it is what the ancient Greeks called a pure state of potential. And what modern philosophers have called a "vagueness".

Now this might seem a re-naming of a mystery but vagueness is actually a technically distinctive idea. It has useful features that cannot be found in the more familiar ontic choices of "nothingness" and "everythingness".

I've gathered some resources on vagueness in this thread... https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514

Having said all that, I have to add that the vagueness approach does not support the "one little particle fluctuating into existence" idea here. Because it is not the first "atom", the first scrap of substance, that is the problem when getting a universe started, but the emergence of dimensionality itself.

So the story would go that the perfect symmetry would have to be an infinity of dimensionality (a plenitude). And for some reason this gets broken down so that only a very few (three spatial, or perhaps a few more with strings) get expressed. The rest are as a consequence firmly suppressed.

To me, this is very reminiscent of dissipative structure theory in open system thermodynamics. Order emerges by the "dissipation" of degrees of freedom.

To illustrate this, take a very simple example like water going down your plughole. At first the water molecules are disorganised even as they all head down the drain. Their motions are vague in the sense they are going in every direction and no direction in particular.

Then the symmetry (of this infinite or rather unconstrained directionality) gets broken. A vortex forms. Direction is constrained to the motions of an accelerating spiral. The degrees of freedom are greatly reduced. A vast number of tangental actions are suppressed. However the ones that remain are now very definite, large scale and enduring. So the few grow stronger at the expense of the many - the essential asymmetry that breaks the equipotential, the symmetry, of the original disorder.

There are a few name cosmologists like Charlie Lineweaver getting into dissipative structure based theories (check his maximum entropy production papers). And a lot of inflation cosmology uses phase transition ideas (although in a closed systems way rather than open). So this systems-based view is dancing around on the periphery of cosmology.

 

[Abbas Sherif]

so in a nutshell... in the beginning there was nothing... then there was something.

Brilliant !

Is mean hippy referring to the idea of the Yang- Mills field interaction? Thus is where particles are created out of vacuum. There should be no absolute rest in a vacuum which we all know will violate the uncertainty principle( both momentum and position zero). In suct case, there is what is called the ground state fluctuation which creates energy. Now we know that with energy, particle-antiparticle pairs are created which in turn give rise to matter. This is a fair theory which should explain a lot of how even the particles of thee big bang came from.

 

[Walt Martin]

"Something unknown is doing we don't know what."
Sir Arthur Eddington, comment on the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, 1927
English astronomer (1882 - 1944)

 

[Chronos]

Prior BB's is evasive. You must either subscribe to a 'beginning' or something that resembles the steady state universe advocated by Hoyle. A 'beginning' does not demand assumptions, steady state does. What assumptions are necessary to support the hypothesis?

 

[turkeyburgers]

Well the Vacuum of space is in a relationship the matter inside of the vacuum. The Vacuum might have it's expansion rate be dependent on the gravitational pull from the amount of matter/energy inside of the vacuum. Currently Stars are turning matter into photons which have no mass and would exert no gravitational pull on the expansion rate.

The more matter/mass that is converted into photons/mass-less the faster the expansion rate is going to accelerate. Until we hit another photon epoch and the Vacuum is free to expand at infinite speed for infinite direction. But originally for the Universe to have been a compacted vacuum to have energy/matter inside of it it would have needed to have something collapse the vacuum.

And if the vacuum was collapsed and contained our entire universe in a small space there would have needed to have been a reduction in the amount of matter keeping the vacuum compacted for it to suddenly uncompact and have the vacuum expand super fast. But if there was no mass with gravitational pull to compact the vacuum then how did it get compacted? How did the vacuum compress to small size and compact the mass? If the vacuum existed before the mass/energy then the vacuum should be infinite size and infinite distance unless there is something else besides gravity that caused the Universe to speed up it's rate of expansion and then to recently start to increase the expansion again.

If there is a Universe Vacuum it should technically be infinite from our observations the Universe is expanding, basically the vacuum is expanding. And if the vacuum existed before the matter/energy inside of the vacuum there would be nothing that would limit the speed of the expansion rate of the vacuum. And if an infinite vacuum appeared before the matter/energy inside of that infinite vacuum it would take infinite amount of time for the vacuum to go from infinite distance to collapsed small vacuum singularity pre-bigbang.

But if the mass/energy existed before the vacuum we would invent some new medium of time and space to keep our matter/energy in. Or a new vacuum lul.

So is the vacuum of space the space/time? If so it would seem that space/time expands into something that is not space/time, or the lack of space/time. I mean really that is what is going on. Either the vacuum goes on forever or the vacuum is expanding into nothingness of nothingness.

So Expansion Rate = The amount of gravitational pull exerted from the mass of the matter in the Universe. The more that is converted into massless photons the less gravitational pull there is on the expansion rate, the faster the expansion rate is able to expand.

Is the natural state of the Vacuum to expand? Without matter it would seem like the vacuum goes buck wild and would expand to infinity and beyond.

 

[yoda jedi]

Is vacuum genesis really saying this? Here is another source:

http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/ask/a11241.html


This description seems to require a pre-existing notion of energy, which doesn’t seem to align to an absolute definition of nothing, more of something we don’t really understand or even have a good theory to fully describe, as yet. However, somebody else might be able to clarify whether this vacuum energy is compatible with ideas about zero point energy or another quantum theory.

Right.

"Nothing: the absence of anything at all.
"Nothingness: the state of nonexistence of everything.
so, from nothing, nothing come from.

exist the true vacuum and the false vacuum but they are not the nothing.