Viraj's Weblog

There's a really interesting article in the April 2008 issue of Discover magazine about the time before the Big Bang. All of the common theories seek to explain what happens right after the Big Bang, but what about before it? There are a couple of new theories floating about. One of them has to do with entropy. A condensed universe has very little entropy, but its explosion, and all that comes of that, including life, is the increase of that entropy. From the article:

In any such large groups of objects, the system tends toward equilibrium. Physicists use the term entropy to describe how far a system is from equilibrium. The closer it is, the higher its entropy; full equilibrium is, by definition, the maximum value. So the path from low entropy (all the molecules in one corner of the room, unstable) to maximum entropy (the molecules evenly distributed in the room, stable) defines the arrow of time. The route to equilibrium separates before from after. Once you hit equilibrium the arrow of time no longer matters, because change is no longer possible.

"Our universe has been evolving for 13 billion years," Carroll says, "so it clearly did not start in equilibrium." Rather, all the matter, energy, space, and even time in the universe must have started in a state of extraordinarily low entropy. That is the only way we could begin with a Big Bang and end up with the wonderfully diverse cosmos of today. Understand how that happened, Carroll argues, and you will understand the bigger process that brought our universe into being.

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These high-entropy universes would be boring and inert; evolution and change would not be possible. Such a universe could not produce galaxies and stars, and it certainly could not support life.

This furthers the idea that life as we know it is simply the dissolution from a high-energy, low-entropic state to the dispersal of that energy. It's as if life is actually decay, or rather the steps along the way as energy decays towards the equilibrium state. Life is like the burning of a flame, and the process is really just these molecules and atoms heading towards the high-entropic state. In other words, it seems life is really the process of death! Death of energy.

Another intriguing idea in the article is that there is no time at all. Our idea of time is simply the result of different arrangements of matter. That is, at one point there is one configuration of matter in a universe, then what we define as a second, or minute, or hour later is another configuration of matter. If that configuration were not changing, there would be no time. This actually makes sense to me, because if you think of life a progression of energy, if that energy is static, you would not age, no cells would change in your body, and time would stand still.

In Platonia all possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom, exist simultaneously. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment; the question of what came before the Big Bang never arises because Barbour's cosmology has no time. The Big Bang is not an event in the distant past; it is just one special place in Platonia.

Our illusion of the past comes because each Now in Platonia containts objects that appear as "records," in Barbour's language. "The only evidence you have of last week is your memory - but memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the earth's past are rocks and fossils - but these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. All we have are these records, and we only have them in this Now," Barbour says. In his theory, some Nows are linked to others in Platonia's landscape even though they all exist simultaneously. Those links create the appearance of a sequence from past to future, but there is no actual flow of time from one Now to another.

Very interesting stuff!