The Grand Statement: A quest to unravel the most sensational statement
A creature seeking its place in this vast creation.
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“We all are star stuffs!”
“We are biologically connected to this Earth, chemically connected to those giant stars and physically connected to all of space-time, as well.”
Well, these statements are one of the most intriguing statements ever done by humanity. These statements unified the whole cosmos, from a tiny brain to the enormously huge stars. Isn’t this so huge accomplishment? We unified the stars and their huge cores to our Origins. In some sense, it showed the mirror to ourselves only. How did we get our Origins? These statements, in some sense, has summarised the whole thing as one line that why do we explore science?
The matter of fact is that, Are these those grand statements we were pinning down for the title? Let’s get to the root of this!
When we talk about the universe, as a whole, we get an image of immense galaxies separated by space itself. When you look at the night sky, you see stars as sprinkled all over the night sky as you know, it is separated over light-years across distances. What’s left between them is nothing just stardust and empty space. Well, It is quite discriminatory that we don’t ever gaze at empty space!
A very effective and lucky conclusion we have got, from our observations, about our cosmos is that speed of light is something the ‘speed limit’ of our universe, by which any information can travel at and this limitation has its own benefits that led us to point out this statement!
Credits: NASA
“The farther will look in space, the deeper we go in time.”
Though this statement may be one of the nominees of the Grand statement title. But, let’s get into more analyses!
When we talk of space or time or energy, we treat them as ‘undefined’ terms in cosmology, but that does not mean that they have no implications, in fact, there are lots of it and there’s nothing left without these. How? Let’s see further!
The time before general relativity was introduced, Gravity was assumed as universal, invisible force field causing matter, with mass, to get into motion. Actually that time, it was also thought that space and time were absolute and static.
Nothing was changed until when Einstein came along with his beautiful, elegant and powerful theory, The General Theory of Relativity in 1916, the mess got cleared. Space and time were woven into a single constituent for any motion to exist called spacetime. The status of spacetime as being ‘inactive’, while any motion took place, was replaced by the word ‘active’ as it says that while any motion, there is a huge participation of spacetime and it says that any form of energy causes wraps, ripples and curvatures in space-time fabric. In other words, “In the presence of energy, the space-time fabric is destined to be wrapped or curved.” This exotic property of spacetime led John Wheeler, another giant in Cosmology of 20th century, to point out this famous statement:
“Matter/Energy tellls spacetime, how to curve and spacetime tells matter/energy, how to move!”
The coming of such elegant theory opens up a whole new bunch of questions and even some bit answers too. Some of them were:
• How did the concept of something come out from nothing?
• If we talk about stars stuff, then how did the stuff itself come out?
“These questions would lead us to the very beginning of everything, the big bang. Well, there is a lot of flaws in The Big Bang Theory (We will sure talk about this later.), but as a matter of time, another intellectual Revolution took place in the understanding of the Cosmos. This was the birth of ‘Inflationary Theory’.
Things to check upon:
In the standard Big Bang model structured by Friedmann and Lemaître in the ’20s and ’30s, it was so that the mass-energy has steadily decreased as the universe expanded but it couldn’t ever explain the enigma of origin of matter. But when the second revolution in the Big Bang Theory occurred in the ’60s, it somehow weaves Quantum world realisation to the most macroscopic sizes (I am sure we will talk about this later) to the galaxies and superclusters!
“But the concept was that when the universe was not even banged yet, at the time beyond everybody’s reasoning, it was incomplete symmetry between all forces and energies. It was also thought that at that much high, unbelievable Planck temperature i.e 10^ 32 kelvins, Gravity along with other 3 fundamental forces of nature was in perfect symmetry. The whole universe was permeated with a familiar quantum field known as ‘Higgs field’. At that energy, it was thought that the Higgs field might have fluctuated to the very high values at a very briefest moment of time, ruled by the uncertainty principle. In the standard Big Bang model, things started very normally, creating asymmetries between forces as it expanded slowly as compared to Inflationary expansion. But when this situation was zoomed in up to Inflationary Theory, we found some staggering results. It was so that the field, known to be Higgs field, that did all-of-a-sudden mishap! As it vigorously kept changing their values at that much high energies, there was a moment when spacetime gets that much energy to act like repulsive gravitational force. But, it was what that Big Bang model couldn’t explain, i.e, How the universe got that much push to form its existence and that much quantity of matter?
Well, we have got an answer for this and even why do we exist at all!
This is like so that, as the universe got that much push by Higgs field, well it was for the shortest interval of time but it gave that much pressure (negative pressure, precisely) of about unbelievable expansion rates, that is about 10³⁰ times in each dimension. In clear terms, the Higgs field which fluctuated to that energies has now got a fancy name as ‘Inflaton field’.
However, it only lasted for a brief instant of time but it became a reason behind all astrophysical observations. One of the famous enigmas was The uniformity of distribution of matter even in the Cosmic Microwave Background Image.
Look at such uniformity at distant scales even the Big Bang model couldn’t explain it to the best.
This was resolved by Inflationary Theory by introducing the known laws of the uncertainty principle. In some sense, the sudden burst of Inflationary expansion might have stretched space, by an enormous factor, that led the quantum differences to zoom out in a big picture. Governed by the Uncertainty principle, the universe might have formed all of the matter and antimatter at this brief period of inflation. After that, the model goes out coinciding with the Big Bang Model. This led to a realisation that maybe, the big bang what we were talking before the era of the ’60s, was just an after-picture of Inflationary Cosmology!
So, let’s get back to the title’s topic after getting to the origin of everything!
We were nominating the statements as giving them the title of ‘The Grand Statement’. We have covered many pieces of stuff out of the title as well and this is the time to nominate the winner of the title, “The Grand Statement”. So, here’s the winner overall famous statement:
“We all are ‘space’ stuff!”
What do you think about this? Send your reviews to me.
Love your universe! It’s quite important beyond all priorities!
The article is derived from the magazine, Cosmic Window, September Edition. The author is the same in both cases.
