Once Upon a Time, the Universe Was Really Weird

[Geriatrix]

http://news.discovery.com/space/once-upon-a-time-the-universe-was-really-weird-110321.html

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it's easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago.

As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see?

My instinct would be to say "energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy," but according to some mind-bending work by Jonas Mureika from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., and Dejan Stojkovic from SUNY at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, the answer may be a little more complicated than that. In fact, it may be so weird that we can't even imagine what it would have been like.

According to an interview with PhysOrg.com, Mureika and Stojkovic have calculated that the early universe didn't only possess a hot, energetic primordial state of matter, but it also had a primordial state of dimensions.

If they're correct, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make the four-dimensional spacetime we live in today isn't how it's always been -- the Universe may have existed in a lower dimensional state in the past.

RELATED: Are We Living in a Hologram?


The Universe, But Not As We Know It

The thinking goes like this: Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe possessed only one dimension of space and one dimension of time. It was basically a straight line. As the Universe began to cool, and expanded, this one dimension of space became "wrapped up" in such a way to create two dimensions of space and one of time -- a plane, like a sheet of flat paper.

The transition from one to two dimensions of space was calculated by the researchers to occur when the Universe "cooled" to an energy level of 100 TeV (tera-electron volts, a measurement of energy commonly used in particle physics). A period of time after that, the Universe continued to expand and cool until it reached an energy of 1 TeV. At this point, the Universe got promoted to a higher dimension; three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, i.e., the Universe we live in today.

Mureika and Stojkovic think the Universe will eventually be promoted again, to a five-dimensional state, at some point in the future.

ANALYSIS: Black Holes on a String in the Fifth Dimension


Evidence in Cosmic Rays?

This is all well and good, but isn't it just a fanciful notion that our universal dimensions are evolving to higher and higher states? Even though string theory predicts there could be many dimensions and those weird hypothetical Higgs singlets (yes, the ones that kill grandfathers) need to travel through a fifth dimension for their time-traveling shena****ns, what's the evidence for the Universe existing at lower dimensional states?

It turns out that Mureika and Stojkovic may have found some of that much needed evidence: When measuring cosmic ray particles with energies above 1 TeV, they appear to align themselves to a two-dimensional plane. "This means that, above a certain energy level, particles propagate in two dimensions rather than three dimensions," the PhysOrg.com article clarifies.

This effect would suggest these very high energy cosmic rays originated from a period of time before the Universe acquired three spatial dimensions.

So What?

Apart from trying to prove the early Universe was a very weird one-dimensional straight line, how else would this research be useful?

There are a huge number of cosmological conundrums that don't seem to "fit" with our current knowledge of the Universe (hint: dark energy and dark matter), so the dimensional "evolution" of our Universe might be able to help.

 

[Ancalagon]

Very interesting. if true, I think it would have profound implications for theories on conditions at the start of the universe.

 

[wrathex]

Once upon a time the universe was very weird and it's getting weirder:

Q. Do you have a favorite among the theories?
A. Prof Brian Greene

All of the ideas are compelling and come from a sober assessment of certain mathematical developments.

Which do I think has a chance of being experimentally verified in the next few decades or within our lifetime?

I would suggest the brane multiverse, in which our universe is envisioned to reside on a giant membrane, an ingredient that comes out of string theory.

It’s actually a three-dimensional membrane, but thinking in two-dimensional terms is easier.

Think of our universe as if it were a huge slice of bread, with all the stars and all the galaxies sprinkled across its surface. The math of string theory suggests this picture, along with the possibility that there are other universes, other slices of bread, all constituting a big cosmic loaf.

This is an idea that might be testable at the Large Hadron Collider, the big accelerator in Geneva, where protons are slammed against each other at fantastically high velocity. Calculations show that some of the debris created in those collisions might be ejected off our universe, off our slice of bread, and if so, that debris would carry away some energy. Scientists will look for these missing energy signatures for evidence that we live on one of these membranes and that there are other membranes out there.

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So you take some dough and inflate it with gasses by heating and you get string theory
oh wait a minute, you have to pre-slice the dough to get branes