Chaos Plagued the Early Universe

A new theory proposes that the earliest Universe, which formed immediately after the Big Bang, expanded in the space around it in an extremely chaotic manner.

This is not by far a new idea. It was proposed for the first time more than seven years ago, by Adilson E. Motter, who is a physics expert at the Northwestern University.

At the time when the idea was first conjectured, the physicist did not have the tools needed to prove it.

Now, with the help of a colleague, Motter finally managed to present the world with the mathematical utensils needed to demonstrate the theory rigorously.

Details of the work appear in a paper entitled “(Non)Invariance of Dynamical Quantities for Orbit Equivalent Flows,” which is published in the latest issue of the top-rated Journal Communications in Mathematical Physics.

The mathematical tools work extremely well when applied to the most widely-accepted model of how the Universe came to be.

The main conundrum the physicist was trying to crack is whether chaos is absolute or relative inside systems that are in themselves governed by general relativity.

In these systems, time itself is relative. For the purpose of the work, chaos was determined at the phenomenon by which tiny events lead to very large changes in the time evolution of a system.

The Universe therefore becomes a prime example of a chaotic system. An absolute thing, for example, is the speed of light, which remains the same regardless of where an observer is placed in time and space.

“A competing interpretation has been that chaos could be a property of the observer rather than a property of the system being observed,” says Motter, who is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

“Our study shows that different physical observers will necessarily agree on the chaotic nature of the system,” adds the expert, who is also the author of the new journal entry.

“Technically, we have established the conditions under which the indicators of chaos are relativistic invariants. Our mathematical characterization also explains existing controversial result,” Motter goes on to say.

“They were generated by singularities induced by the choice of the time coordinate, which are not present for physically admissible observables,” he concludes.

Analyzing the Big Bang Theory

Image comment: A basic representation of what experts believed happened after the Big Bang

Image credits: NASA / WMAP Science Team

Since the Big Bang theory was first formulated, astronomers and other scientists have been hard at work to either confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt, or show it to be false. At this point, it still remains the most popular explanation of how the Universe cam into being, and is widely accepted by the scientific community. Regardless of the consensus, there are still some unresolved issues related to this theory, and new experiments are currently being devised to find explanations for them, Space reports.

The general idea about the Big Bang is that it was a very powerful explosion, that generated time and space in an otherwise indefinable space. Everything that was sprung into existence at the time then expanded with enormous speed, until now, 13.75 billion years later, it grew to become what we name the Universe. All the particles inside, all the laws of nature, and all celestial bodies are therefore believed to have originated from the same source, that was at first infinitesimally small.

There are, of course, other theories on how the Universe formed. String theory, for example, proposes that the Big Bang was not a unique event. In the 11 dimensions this theory operates with, the Universe is actually a loop of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, which see everything getting recycled over and over again. But this idea has failed to gain the amount of support its rival currently enjoys as it leaves even more questions unanswered, and also because it proposes so many dimensions working in tune.

Back to the Big Bang theory, the main reason for discord among scientists is not that the Universe does not fulfill all theoretical predictions made based on the idea that the initial explosion happened. Experts tend to disagree on other things, including what happened at the very fraction of the second when the event was produced, immediately before that, and immediately afterwards. Afterwards, things are relatively simple. Space expanded, and the very hot and dense Universe was allowed to cool down, and eventually start producing atoms.

Currently, a raging debate is going on as to whether inflation – the idea that the Universe grew exponentially to 90 times its original size an extremely short time after the Big Bang – is true or not. The idea holds a lot of merit, and many pieces of evidence support it, but there are still some holes that need to be plugged in order for it to become widely accepted. But experiments that could determine the existence of gravitational waves are underway. If these events, which are hypothesized to have appeared due to inflation, are detected, then the theory would receive an important boost. And physics experiments to find them are currently underway.