As noted in another thread, Sir Fred Hoyle has died.
I know that this might be better in GQ, but damn it- anything regarding Sir Fred should be a debate- so here goes:
The most famous piece of evidence for the Big Bang is the Cosmic Background Radiation. When that was discovered, many former critics of the Big Bang accepted it as the idea that best fit observations.
Hoyle’s Steady State theory says that the observations we make of the universe could be explained by spontaneous creation of matter in space, causing, among other things,the galactic redshifts.
We know that, according to QM, virtual pairs of particles continuously form and annihilate. We also know, from the fact that we’re here, that the universe seems to have some sort of bias toward matter, so we could perhaps expect at least some of those pairs to not annihilate with each other, but rather expect that the anti-matter particle would be destroyed (absorbed?, eaten?, exfoliated?) by whatever it is that causes this bias, leaving the matter particle free. If this happened often enough, that would be enough matter to satisfy the requirements of the SST.
My question is this: could the CBR, rather than being the distant flash from the Big Bang, instead be Hawking radiation from the “orphaned” particles that create the matter in a Steady State universe?
JDM
p.s., I found it very sad a few months ago someone on this board referred to Sir Fred as “the science fiction writer, Fred Hoyle” with no knowledge of his scientific achievements.
Hah, matter/antimatter spontaneously forming with a predominance of matter? You must be crazy! Matter can only spontaneously interfere with itself and be in more than one place at the same time, it can’t just “come into being”. Sheesh, get some real science, would ya?
I think that a “white hole” or similar matter-source would violate the second law of thermodynamics, among other conservation laws, and turn quite a few heads the other way because of it. As “crazy” as QM is, it doesn’t ask us to violate any physical laws, merely the context in which we understand them.
Yes, Padeye, but as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, once you state that someone or something created the universe, you’ve just doubled the size of the original problem.
From “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking:
**So in empty space the field cannot be fixed at exactly zero, because then it would have both a precise value (zero) and a precise rate of change (also zero). There must be a certain minimum amount of uncertainty, or quantum fluctuations, in the value of the field. One can think of these fluctuations as pairs of particles of light or gravity that appear together at some time, move apart, and then come together again and annihilate each other. These particles are virtual particles like the particles that carry the gravitational force of the sun: unlike real particles, they cannot be observed directly with a particle detector. However, their indirect effects, such as small changes in the energy of electron orbits in atoms, can be measured and agree with the theoretical predictions to a remarkable degree of accuracy. The uncertainty principle also predicts that there will be similar virtual pairs of matter particles, such as electrons or quarks. In this case, however, one member of the pair will be a particle and the other an antiparticle (the antiparticles of light and gravity are the same as the particles). **.
In “Coming of Age in the Milky Way” Timothy Ferris quotes Richard Feynman as saying “Created and destroyed, created and destroyed, what a waste” about these events.
Now in “normal” space the creation and annihilation are so fast and small as to have little effect, as Hawking points out. He goes on to say that, at the event horizon of a black hole, the gravity is strong enough to pull the pairs apart, so that the positive particle could “**escape from the vicinity of the black hole as a real particle or antiparticle. To an observer at a distance, it will appear to have been emitted from the black hole. **(Hawking)”
Of course, the gravity of the black hole adds energy to this event, and has its own entropy increased by it. My question was simply this: since there seems to be a bias toward matter in the universe, could the cause of that bias add energy to these interactions in a way analogous to a black hole, annihilating some of the antiparticles and causing a small burst of Hawking Radation which we observe in the aggregate as the CBR? I don’t see how the presence of such an energy is any more far fetched than the Cosmological Constant, and that has been having a bit of a comeback lately. Of course it would have to follow the SLOT, but remember, we’re talking about the universe here. Processes that violate the SLOT can go on for zillions of years or operate in areas larger than we can observe- they just have to be “paid for” sometime, or somewhere. After all, the seeming fact that matter is predominant in the universe could be viewed as a violation of the SLOT. JDM
