Interesting, Eric. I've never heard of inflation being attributed to the Higg's boson. The concept of inflation was first cooked up as a fudge to explain the observed size of the fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation. I've never heard of anybody claiming to be able to explain the mechanism of inflation.
--Doug On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Eric Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Doug, > > I know this isn't the main point of the thread, and perhaps already stuff > you know, in which case apologies for redundancy: > > > Even the events after that instant of the big bang, where it is > postulated that our universe expanded from sub-atomic dimensions, through > inflation (inflation? WTF caused that?) > > I think current understanding of inflation and the cosmological constant > have all grown out of the way we think about the Higgs mechanism and the > energy in the vacuum. I did have a chance to ask a real cosmologist this > to be sure I wasn't mistaken, and I believe what I will say below is right. > > The point of Higgs was that the vacuum underwent a freezing transition as > it cooled, in one of the "bowl-to-mexican-hat" potentials that one always > sees illustrated in explanations of magnetization etc. (keyword for a > google search would be Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, and apologies that I > can't write more here, since I should be working). The general kind of > freezing mechanism is used for a lot of stuff and reasonably well > understood (understanding why pi mesons are "roughly" massless, how > magnetization forms, etc.) The interesting thing is that the massless > particle that should have been formed when the Higgs vacuum froze was > "eaten" (as they say in the jargon) by the previously-massless weak bosons > because it had weak charge, and that made them massive. (Keyword here > would be interaction of gauge fields with Goldstone bosons.) > > But all that is essentially background. The point for this discussion is > that when the vacuum could be frozen into the low-energy "rim" of the hat, > but starts out on the high-energy center (the part where the crown of your > head goes), it has energy to give. If it can succeed in freezing, that > creates a shower of massive matter. But if it is delayed in collapsing to > the frozen vacuum, like water that is supercooled before it can freeze into > its proper crystal, that excess vacuum energy becomes a source of stress > energy-momentum for gravitation. That stress energy momentum is the > cosmological constant, and it drives exponential expansion. Since the > Higgs is a very high-energy-scale field (on people-scales), the > cosmological constant associated with not-yet-having-relaxed is huge. I > don't know whether inflation people still think it was the Higgs of the > weak boson that drove initial inflation, but I believe that was the > proposal back when Alan Guth was working on these things. > > In that parlance, the current small-but-not-zero cosmological constant is > a tiny residual vacuum energy-momentum that hasn't succeeded in relaxing > away into a more stable, truly zero-energy, vacuum. > > This is probably not a great answer to the question of what caused > inflation, but to the extent that having melted the vacuum to see the > un-frozen Higgs as a particle seems to get everything right that we can > measure, from only this minimal model, it is hard to see from here what > would guide us to a more thorough characterization. > > It is remarkable, though, that the vacuum can have un-relaxed energy. I > should understand these things better than I do, but I was a bad student > when I should have been learning them. > > Eric > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > -- *Doug Roberts [email protected]* *http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins*<http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> * <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> 505-455-7333 - Office 505-672-8213 - Mobile*
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