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THE FABRIC of the COSMOS, Brian Greene, 2004
```(annotated and with added bold highlights by Epsilon=One)
```(annotated and with added bold highlights by Epsilon=One)
Chapter 11 - Quanta in the Sky with Diamonds
Quantum Skywriting
Inflationary cosmology's solution to the horizon and flatness problems was its initial claim to fame, and rightly so. As we've seen, these were major accomplishments. But in the years since, many physicists have come to believe that another of inflation's achievements shares the top spot on the list of the theory's most important contributions.
The lauded insight concerns an issue that, to this point, I have encouraged you not to think about: How is it that there are galaxies, stars, planets, and other clumpy things in the universe? In the last three chapters, I asked you to focus on astronomically large scales — scales on which the universe appears homogeneous, scales so large that entire galaxies can be thought of as single H2O molecules, while the universe itself is the whole, uniform glass of water. But sooner or later cosmology has to come to grips with the fact that when you examine the cosmos on "finer" scales you discover clumpy structures such as galaxies. And here, once again, we are faced with a puzzle.
If the universe is indeed smooth, uniform, and homogeneous on large scales — features that are supported by observation and that lie at the heart of all cosmological analyses — where could the smaller-scale lumpiness have come from? The staunch believer in standard big bang cosmology can, once again, shrug off this question by appealing to highly favorable and mysteriously tuned conditions in the early universe: "Near the very beginning," such a believer can say, "things were, by and large, smooth and uniform, but not perfectly uniform. How conditions got that way, I can't say. That's just how it was back then. Over time, this tiny lumpiness grew, since a lump has greater gravitational pull, being denser than its surroundings, and therefore grabs hold of more nearby material, growing larger still. Ultimately, the lumps got big enough to form stars and galaxies." This would be a convincing story were it not for two deficiencies: the utter lack of an explanation for either the initial overall homogeneity or these important tiny nonuniformities. That's where inflationary cosmology provides gratifying progress. We've already seen that inflation offers an explanation for the large-scale uniformity, and as we'll now learn, the explanatory power of the theory goes even further. According to inflationary cosmology, the initial nonuniformity that ultimately resulted in the formation of stars and galaxies came from quantum mechanics.
This magnificent idea arises from an interplay between two seemingly disparate areas of physics: the inflationary expansion of space and the quantum uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle tells us that there are always trade-offs in how sharply various complementary physical features in the cosmos can be determined. The most familiar example (see Chapter 4) involves matter: the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its velocity can be determined. But the uncertainty principle also applies to fields. By essentially the same reasoning we used in its application to particles, the uncertainty principle implies that the more precisely the value of a field is determined at one location in space, the less precisely its rate of change at that location can be determined. (The position of a particle and the rate of change of its position — its velocity — play analogous roles in quantum mechanics to the value of a field and the rate of change of the field value, at a given location in space.)
I like to summarize the uncertainty principle by saying, roughly speaking, that quantum mechanics makes things jittery and turbulent. If the velocity of a particle can't be delineated with total precision, we also can't delineate where the particle will be located even a fraction of a second later, since velocity now determines position then. In a sense, the particle is free to take on this or that velocity, or more precisely, to assume a mixture of many different velocities, and hence it will jitter frantically, haphazardly going this way and that. For fields, the situation is similar. If a field's rate of change can't be delineated with total precision, then we also can't delineate what the value of the field will be, at any location, even a moment later. In a sense, the field will undulate up or down at this or that speed, or, more precisely, it will assume a strange mixture of many different rates of change, and hence its value will undergo a frenzied, fuzzy, random jitter.
In daily life we aren't directly aware of the jitters, either for particles or fields, because they take place on subatomic scales. But that's where inflation makes a big impact. The sudden burst of inflationary expansion stretched space by such an enormous factor that what initially inhabited the microscopic was drawn out to the macroscopic. As a key example, pioneers 1 of inflationary cosmology realized that random differences between the quantum jitters in one spatial location and another would have generated slight inhomogeneities in the microscopic realm; because of the indiscriminate quantum agitation, the amount of energy in one location would have been a bit different from what it was in another. Then, through the subsequent inflationary swelling of space, these tiny variations would have been stretched to scales far larger than the quantum domain, yielding a small amount of lumpiness, much as tiny wiggles drawn on a balloon with a Magic Marker are stretched clear across the balloon's surface when you blow it up. This, physicists believe, is the origin of the lumpiness that the staunch believer in the standard big bang model simply declares, without justification, to be "how it was back then." Through the enormous stretching of inevitable quantum fluctuations, inflationary cosmology provides an explanation: inflationary expansion stretches tiny, inhomogeneous quantum jitters and smears them clear across the sky.
Over the few billion years following the end of the brief inflationary phase, these tiny lumps continued to grow through gravitational clumping. Just as in the standard big bang picture, lumps have slightly higher gravitational pull than their surroundings, so they draw in nearby material, growing larger still. In time, the lumps grew large enough to yield the matter making up galaxies and the stars that inhabit them. Certainly, there are numerous steps of detail in going from a little lump to a galaxy, and many still need elucidation. But the overall framework is clear: in a quantum world, nothing is ever perfectly uniform because of the jitteriness inherent to the uncertainty principle. And, in a quantum world that experienced inflationary expansion, such nonuniformity can be stretched from the microworld to far larger scales, providing the seeds for the formation of large astrophysical bodies like galaxies.
That's the basic idea, so feel free to skip over the next paragraph. But for those who are interested, I'd like to make the discussion a bit more precise. Recall that inflationary expansion came to an end when the inflaton field's value slid down its potential energy bowl and the field relinquished all its pent-up energy and negative pressure. We described this as happening uniformly throughout space — the inflaton value here, there, and everywhere experienced the same evolution — as that's what naturally emerges from the governing equations. However, this is strictly true only if we ignore the effects of quantum mechanics. On average, the inflaton field value did indeed slide down the bowl, as we expect from thinking about a simple classical object like a marble rolling down an incline. But just as a frog sliding down the bowl is likely to jump and jiggle along the way, quantum mechanics tells us that the inflaton field experienced quivers and jitters. On its way down, the value may have suddenly jumped up a little bit over there or jiggled down a little bit over there. And because of this jittering, the inflaton reached the value of lowest energy at different places at slightly different moments. In turn, inflationary expansion shut off at slightly different times at different locations in space, so that the amount of spatial expansion at different locations varied slightly, giving rise to inhomogeneities — wrinkles — similar to the kind you see when the pizza maker stretches the dough a bit more in one place than another and creates a little bump. Now the normal intuition is that jitters arising from quantum mechanics would be too small to be relevant on astrophysical scales. But with inflation, space expanded at such a colossal rate, doubling in size every 10^-37 seconds, that even a slightly different duration of inflation at nearby locations resulted in a significant wrinkle. In fact, calculations undertaken in specific realizations of inflation have shown that the inhomogeneities produced in this way have a tendency to be too large; researchers often have to adjust details in a given inflationary model (the precise shape of the inflaton field's potential energy bowl) to ensure that the quantum jitters don't predict a universe that's too lumpy. And so inflationary cosmology supplies a ready-made mechanism for understanding how the small-scale nonuniformity responsible for lumpy structures like stars and galaxies emerged in a universe that on the largest of scales appears thoroughly homogeneous.
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
The lauded insight concerns an issue that, to this point, I have encouraged you not to think about: How is it that there are galaxies, stars, planets, and other clumpy things in the universe? In the last three chapters, I asked you to focus on astronomically large scales — scales on which the universe appears homogeneous, scales so large that entire galaxies can be thought of as single H2O molecules, while the universe itself is the whole, uniform glass of water. But sooner or later cosmology has to come to grips with the fact that when you examine the cosmos on "finer" scales you discover clumpy structures such as galaxies. And here, once again, we are faced with a puzzle.
If the universe is indeed smooth, uniform, and homogeneous on large scales — features that are supported by observation and that lie at the heart of all cosmological analyses — where could the smaller-scale lumpiness have come from? The staunch believer in standard big bang cosmology can, once again, shrug off this question by appealing to highly favorable and mysteriously tuned conditions in the early universe: "Near the very beginning," such a believer can say, "things were, by and large, smooth and uniform, but not perfectly uniform. How conditions got that way, I can't say. That's just how it was back then. Over time, this tiny lumpiness grew, since a lump has greater gravitational pull, being denser than its surroundings, and therefore grabs hold of more nearby material, growing larger still. Ultimately, the lumps got big enough to form stars and galaxies." This would be a convincing story were it not for two deficiencies: the utter lack of an explanation for either the initial overall homogeneity or these important tiny nonuniformities. That's where inflationary cosmology provides gratifying progress. We've already seen that inflation offers an explanation for the large-scale uniformity, and as we'll now learn, the explanatory power of the theory goes even further. According to inflationary cosmology, the initial nonuniformity that ultimately resulted in the formation of stars and galaxies came from quantum mechanics.
This magnificent idea arises from an interplay between two seemingly disparate areas of physics: the inflationary expansion of space and the quantum uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle tells us that there are always trade-offs in how sharply various complementary physical features in the cosmos can be determined. The most familiar example (see Chapter 4) involves matter: the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its velocity can be determined. But the uncertainty principle also applies to fields. By essentially the same reasoning we used in its application to particles, the uncertainty principle implies that the more precisely the value of a field is determined at one location in space, the less precisely its rate of change at that location can be determined. (The position of a particle and the rate of change of its position — its velocity — play analogous roles in quantum mechanics to the value of a field and the rate of change of the field value, at a given location in space.)
I like to summarize the uncertainty principle by saying, roughly speaking, that quantum mechanics makes things jittery and turbulent. If the velocity of a particle can't be delineated with total precision, we also can't delineate where the particle will be located even a fraction of a second later, since velocity now determines position then. In a sense, the particle is free to take on this or that velocity, or more precisely, to assume a mixture of many different velocities, and hence it will jitter frantically, haphazardly going this way and that. For fields, the situation is similar. If a field's rate of change can't be delineated with total precision, then we also can't delineate what the value of the field will be, at any location, even a moment later. In a sense, the field will undulate up or down at this or that speed, or, more precisely, it will assume a strange mixture of many different rates of change, and hence its value will undergo a frenzied, fuzzy, random jitter.
In daily life we aren't directly aware of the jitters, either for particles or fields, because they take place on subatomic scales. But that's where inflation makes a big impact. The sudden burst of inflationary expansion stretched space by such an enormous factor that what initially inhabited the microscopic was drawn out to the macroscopic. As a key example, pioneers 1 of inflationary cosmology realized that random differences between the quantum jitters in one spatial location and another would have generated slight inhomogeneities in the microscopic realm; because of the indiscriminate quantum agitation, the amount of energy in one location would have been a bit different from what it was in another. Then, through the subsequent inflationary swelling of space, these tiny variations would have been stretched to scales far larger than the quantum domain, yielding a small amount of lumpiness, much as tiny wiggles drawn on a balloon with a Magic Marker are stretched clear across the balloon's surface when you blow it up. This, physicists believe, is the origin of the lumpiness that the staunch believer in the standard big bang model simply declares, without justification, to be "how it was back then." Through the enormous stretching of inevitable quantum fluctuations, inflationary cosmology provides an explanation: inflationary expansion stretches tiny, inhomogeneous quantum jitters and smears them clear across the sky.
Over the few billion years following the end of the brief inflationary phase, these tiny lumps continued to grow through gravitational clumping. Just as in the standard big bang picture, lumps have slightly higher gravitational pull than their surroundings, so they draw in nearby material, growing larger still. In time, the lumps grew large enough to yield the matter making up galaxies and the stars that inhabit them. Certainly, there are numerous steps of detail in going from a little lump to a galaxy, and many still need elucidation. But the overall framework is clear: in a quantum world, nothing is ever perfectly uniform because of the jitteriness inherent to the uncertainty principle. And, in a quantum world that experienced inflationary expansion, such nonuniformity can be stretched from the microworld to far larger scales, providing the seeds for the formation of large astrophysical bodies like galaxies.
That's the basic idea, so feel free to skip over the next paragraph. But for those who are interested, I'd like to make the discussion a bit more precise. Recall that inflationary expansion came to an end when the inflaton field's value slid down its potential energy bowl and the field relinquished all its pent-up energy and negative pressure. We described this as happening uniformly throughout space — the inflaton value here, there, and everywhere experienced the same evolution — as that's what naturally emerges from the governing equations. However, this is strictly true only if we ignore the effects of quantum mechanics. On average, the inflaton field value did indeed slide down the bowl, as we expect from thinking about a simple classical object like a marble rolling down an incline. But just as a frog sliding down the bowl is likely to jump and jiggle along the way, quantum mechanics tells us that the inflaton field experienced quivers and jitters. On its way down, the value may have suddenly jumped up a little bit over there or jiggled down a little bit over there. And because of this jittering, the inflaton reached the value of lowest energy at different places at slightly different moments. In turn, inflationary expansion shut off at slightly different times at different locations in space, so that the amount of spatial expansion at different locations varied slightly, giving rise to inhomogeneities — wrinkles — similar to the kind you see when the pizza maker stretches the dough a bit more in one place than another and creates a little bump. Now the normal intuition is that jitters arising from quantum mechanics would be too small to be relevant on astrophysical scales. But with inflation, space expanded at such a colossal rate, doubling in size every 10^-37 seconds, that even a slightly different duration of inflation at nearby locations resulted in a significant wrinkle. In fact, calculations undertaken in specific realizations of inflation have shown that the inhomogeneities produced in this way have a tendency to be too large; researchers often have to adjust details in a given inflationary model (the precise shape of the inflaton field's potential energy bowl) to ensure that the quantum jitters don't predict a universe that's too lumpy. And so inflationary cosmology supplies a ready-made mechanism for understanding how the small-scale nonuniformity responsible for lumpy structures like stars and galaxies emerged in a universe that on the largest of scales appears thoroughly homogeneous.
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.