Before The Big Bang: An Outrageous New Perspective And Its Implications For Particle Physics

THE BASIC CONUNDRUM

Proposals for describing the initial state of the universe has a fundamental conundrum [1] – the Second Law of thermodynamics.

It says that the entropy or disorder of the universe increases with time. So it decreases backwards in time.

Any proposal for the nature of the universe’s initial state must account for its extreme specialness.

Inflationary models have suggested that the initial state was “random”. This is the conundrum.

Sometimes theorists think that the early universe:

• was very “small” which allowed only a few alternative initial states, or
• had the anthropic principle, which is a selection principle in favour of certain special initial states that allow the eventual evolution of intelligent life.

Neither of these suggested explanations gets close to resolving the issue, however.

With time-symmetrical dynamical laws, the mere smallness of the early universe does not provide a restriction on its degrees of freedom.

For we may contemplate a universe model in the final stages of collapse.

I expect it to collapse to some sort of complicated space-time singularity which has as many degrees of freedom as were already present in its earlier non-singular collapsing phase.

Time-reversing this situation, we see that an initial singular state could also contain as many degrees of freedom as such a collapsing one.

But in our actual universe, almost all of those degrees of freedom were somehow not activated.

What about the anthropic principle?

Life arose via complicated evolutionary processes which required particular conditions and particular physical laws, including the Second Law.

The Second Law says that the universe more special at an earlier stage when life was not present.

From the purely anthropic point of view, this earlier far more special phase was not needed; it would have been much more likely that our present “improbable” stage came about simply by chance, rather than coming about via an earlier even more improbable stage.

When the Second Law is a crucial component, there is always a far more probable set of initial conditions that would lead to this same state of affairs, namely one in which the Second Law was violated prior to the situation now!

As another aspect of this same issue, we may think of the vastness of our actual universe, most of which had no actual bearing on our existence.

Though very special initial conditions were indeed required for our existence in our particular spatial location, we did not actually need these same special conditions at distant places in the universe. Yet as we look out at the universe, we see the same kind of conditions, acting according to the same Second Law of thermodynamics, no matter how far out we look.

If we take the view that the Second Law was introduced in our vicinity merely for our own benefit, then we are left with no explanation for the extravagance of this same Second Law having to be invoked uniformly throughout the universe, as it appears to be as far as our powerful instruments are able to probe.