In researching why gold is so rare, I came across the phrase “The big bang was not a uniform process”, as an explanation* for why the universe no longer an expanding cloud of helium and hydrogen.
Why wasn’t it uniform, or - to put it another way - why was the primordial gravy so lumpy?
I’m under the impression that most simple, natural processes are innately uniform, absent external forces.
*I realize this is probably a significant oversimplification, even with my rather limited knowledge of physics.
This is the question of structure formation, which is still under some debate in physics. The currently leading theory is that these fluctuations are ultimately due to quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, most quantities don’t have a well-defined value, but rather a range of possible values that they can take on. This means that just by random quantum-mechanical chance, some regions of the Universe would be a little more dense, and some would turn out a little less dense.
Once you have a region that’s a little more dense, then gravity takes over, drawing in nearby mass and making that region even denser. Let that happen for another 13 billion years or so and you get galaxies, stars, and apes that can ask questions about same.
This may not have been part of the OP’s question, but the uniformity or lack thereof of the big bang has little to do with the rarity of gold. It is my understanding that all nuclei heavier than lithium (and much of the helium and lithium) were made in stars and all nuclei heavier than iron were made in supernovae.
The only connection with the big bang would be how many stars were eventually formed and how big they are as the big stars went supernova first.
I think perfect uniformity would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If it was perfectly uniform, you could know any particle’s velocity and mass at the same time.
I was thinking more along the lines of taking a handful of dimes and quarters, throw them up in the air, and see where they land.
You, of course, will not find a perfectly even-spaced crystal lattice distribution of dimes and quarters on the floor: there will be irregular clumps of more-dimes-than-quarters, and vice versa.
There’s also the question of why there was a bit more matter than anti-matter created so that we have matter left over after all of the other matter and anti-matter annihilate. Ideally there would be an equal quantity of matter and anti-matter which completely annihilate and leave no matter, only photons.
Couldn’t it have been possible that the primordial singularity, during its first femtosecond of existence, even before all its constituent matter could fly apart, possessed a property that gave it some sort of bilateral symmetry? Like polarity, or spin, for example. Then, when the particles came into being, they were pushed into one of the two polar directions, according to their kind. Thus, the universe didn’t expand spherically, but rather bilaterally; two expanding hemispheres, rather than one sphere. Matter could have been pushed one way, and antimatter another way, which is why antimatter is so rare in our parts of the universe. That would also explain why we don’t witness signs of matter and antimatter annihilating each other somewhere out in deep space, because they’re flying apart from each other.
You only need a center if you limit things to 3 dimensions. Seems reasonable enough that the antimatter could have expanded into its own 3 antidemensional universe immediately adjacent to our own.