"The Universe Began With a 'Big Chill' --Not Big Bang"

     

 

The start of the Universe should be modeled not as a Big Bang but more like water freezing into ice, according to a team of theoretical physicists at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University that could our revolutionized our understanding of the nature of the Universe. The key, they propose, is to be found in the cracks and crevices common to all crystals.

"Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales," said Project lead researcher James Q. Quach, of the University of Melbourne school of physics. “A new theory, known as quantum graphity, suggests that space may be made up of indivisible building blocks, like tiny atoms. These indivisible blocks can be thought about as similar to pixels that make up an image on a screen. The challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly.” 

“Think of the early universe as being like a liquid,” Quach added. “Then as the universe cools, it ‘crystallizes’ into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the Universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice.”

RMIT University research team member Associate Professor Andrew Greentree said some of these defects might be visible. “Light and other particles would bend or reflect off such defects, and therefore in theory we should be able to detect these effects."

These structures should have observable background-independent consequences, including scattering, double imaging, and gravitational lensing-like effects, the scientists wrote in their paper. The team has calculated some of these effects and if their predictions are experimentally verified, the question as to whether space is smooth or constructed out of tiny indivisible parts will be solved once and for all.

Source: The Daily Galaxy via http://www.kurzweilai.net, and Physical Review