As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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While scientists are steadily gathering data about the inflationary and dark energy epochs of the universe, we really only know one thing about the pre-inflationary epoch—the time from which our universe arose.
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According to a new hypothesis, in the pre-inflationary era, before measurement-like events selected our known universe from the original “Schrödinger’s cat box,” many possible spacetimes existed in a superposition.
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Observations of hypothesized phenomena could support the idea that our universe is one of many possible spacetimes, but the pre-inflationary era may remain one of cosmology’s greatest mysteries.
Over the centuries, as direct observations of the universe have grown exponentially in number and precision, our knowledge has expanded to the point where we can ask increasingly difficult and fundamental questions. In 1610, Galileo Galilei discovered the first moon outside our planetary system using a crude telescope. About three hundred years later, Edwin Hubble discovered the first galaxy beyond our own (using many less primary telescope). Today, the James Webb Space Telescope can see direct evidence of the early universe (just 200 to 400 million years after the Big Bang), sensitive instruments like LIGO are revealing unprecedented data about black holes and gravitational waves, and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is providing scientists with very useful information about the Big Bang itself.
In other words, we have come a long way in our collective attempt to understand the nature of the universe. But one of the biggest and most mysterious mysteries of early cosmology remains unsolved: What happened before what we think of as “the universe” today? A new study in the journal universeThe paper, written by Konstantin Zloshchastiev, a physicist at Durban University of Technology, proposes the puzzling hypothesis that our universe is actually the product of a break in the linear superposition of a quantum multiverse that existed in the so-called “pre-inflationary” epoch, the extremely short period before the rapid inflation of the universe. While no telescopes have been able to see evidence of this period, Zloshchasteev claims that at least one piece of evidence exists at this critical moment in the universe’s history – the universe itself.
“In the time before these [dark energy and inflation] Zlosh Chasteev writes, “The pre-inflationary era remains largely a mystery, both empirically and theoretically.” However, there is a large and easily observable natural phenomenon that is directly related to the pre-inflationary period. This is our universe itself, with its diverse yet fairly ordered and mathematically predictable structure that allows us to exist and rationalize our reality by assigning laws to the world around us. “
Prior to the inflationary period of our known universe (the rapid expansion of the universe shortly after the Big Bang), matter as we know it did not exist. Instead, everything that exists is made up of indistinguishable particles in a quantum superposition. In a sense, all possibilities—indeed, all possible space-times—exist and It does not exist in what Zloshchastiev calls “the proverbial Schrödinger’s cat box.” Then at some critical moment, this linear superposition breaks down, reducing all possible universes to a single state – our universe.
Zlosh Chasteev described the collapse of quantum superpositions in the primordial universe as measurement-like Shannon information transfer (named after Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory). He hypothesized “what is the possibility” of information leaking from the original quantum superposition state into an external record-like environment, making one result actually a reality. According to Zlosh Chasteev, this Shannon information transfer ultimately led to the creation of logarithmic quantum liquids, which in turn created the physical vacuum of our universe. He explained that the vacuum was not really Empty, but actually a low energy quantum field – a ground state for all other quantum fields. Finally, Zloshchasteev noted that this hypothesis could also explain the transition of the universe from the post-inflationary era to the dark energy era that currently dominates the known universe, providing a stable clue connecting the pre-inflationary universe with today’s universe.
This may sound neat, but any hypothesis is only as good as its ability to be proven or disproven. Zloshchasteev claimed that astronomers could try to test this hypothesis by looking for hypothetical vacuum Cherenkov radiation (when particles move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum), which could lead to the energy production of blazars, quasars and fast radio bursts.
But for now, the pre-inflationary universe is a cosmic mystery that is nearly impossible to solve—at least without more data. But, as history shows, humans have an uncanny knack for finding this data and learning more and more about the universe and our place in it.
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