Song 23: Inflation – the hatching of the Cosmic Egg

Yours truly, Dr. Pete, studying Alan Guth’s 1997 autobiographical account of his discovery of Cosmic Inflation in late 1979, with an excellent not-too-technical description of what it means, why it’s important, and how it’s supposed to work.

Continuing the Song of Everything’s story of how our Comfortable Universe began, the narrative has been proceeding along three different tracks, or story lines.

The first approach is to look to the most ancient stories from our faith traditions. This is the Spirit side of our balanced presentation. We’ve tapped into Hinduism’s Rig Veda,

the Judeo-Christian bible,

and especially the 2,500-year-old Tao-Te Ching and ancient Chinese legends of creation. A fundamental step-by-step process is laid out in Chapter 42 of this ancient Taoist ‘bible’. It’s pretty simple:

Here in Song 23, we will explore how ancient Chinese legend expounds on these simple enigmatic steps to paint a picture of Cosmic Inflation that is every bit as robust as today’s best scientific theories. Read on. That’s the punch line of this Song.

The second set of story lines focuses on the Cosmic Rabbit Hole, implying an emergence from a Lewis Carroll-style ‘Wonderland’ where rules of normal reality hold little or no sway. Our particular take on this brings forth a swarm of Pink Easter Bunnies as a metaphor for the first objects of creation.

There’s a purpose to such madness—a Sense to the nonsense, so to say. It’s a way of visualizing what can be difficult to visualize; and it shifts focus away from the cold, objective sciences of Particle Physics and Cosmology and toward the intimate and arguably crucial perspective of the thing that emerges—what does it ‘experience’ and does it make Sense … at every step along what may have been a very long and winding path from there to here.

Third and last, we work hard to make sense of the limited clues that Science has provided about these unobservable earliest moments of creation. There does seem to be enough evidence to piece together a simple sketch—perhaps only a ‘Song’, as we like to call it—that gets us across that paradoxical threshold between ‘nothing and something’.

Vital to the Science story is the strange phenomenon called “Inflation.” Here in Song 23 we’re continuing to drill down into this concept in new ways, but first we need to establish the basics of what science knows about this Inflation thing and what it doesn’t.

What we know: Something that is given the vague term “Inflation” caused the universe to look like it started as an unbelievably hot dense speck that ‘exploded’—becoming ridiculously huge in a tiny fraction of a second and sending everything hurtling apart from everything else in an expansion that is still continuing today.

That expansion was what Edwin Hubble first discovered less than 100 years ago, in 1929. It turns out that our reality doesn’t work if there isn’t an expansion like that. If stars weren’t moving away from us, eventually becoming invisible because they’re so far away that their light can no longer reach us, then there would have to be infinite stars out there, so that the entire sky would be as bright as the surface of the average star and we’d be burned to a crisp. It’s called the ‘Olbers Paradox’ and Hubble’s Expansion solved it.

Of course, that means that if you try playing the universe ‘video’ backwards, you see that everything was once all together in one spot, and that’s why it makes sense to talk about an origin—a start to our universe—rather than the idea that the universe just always existed.

Since Hubble’s discovery there have been many, many other discoveries and observations that all agree with that expansion story. Most significantly, just a little over 60 years ago (1964), Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were looking for bird poop in their microwave antenna in New Jersey, trying to figure out why it was giving them a hissing noise when looking at empty space. They were not far from Princeton where physicists at the time were thinking about what kind of radiation might be coming from the early universe when all the stars were packed together in a single spot. Long story short, Penzias learned about the Princeton research and invited the physicists to check out the hissing noise, and it turned out to be exactly what the physicists expected. It’s now called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (the CMB). It is light that has been travelling across the universe for 13.8 billion years, coming from that long-ago time when everything was packed together and hot, but by now the radiation has cooled down to just a couple degrees above absolute zero—easy to miss without sensitive instruments.

The CMB confirms the ‘Hot Big Bang’ expansion theory. There’s hardly any other reasonable way to explain why it is there. The story it tells is that there seems to have been a sort of hot explosion early in the universe’s life.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the CMB is its uniformity across the sky (we’ve previously talked about it—the observable universe seems almost perfectly “isotropic and homogeneous”). No matter what direction you look, the CMB’s light looks the same, down to one part in 100,000. This makes no sense at all when you think of an explosion of a bomb here on Earth, and especially when you realize that the CMB light that is reaching you from different parts of the sky cannot even have been causally connected. If you look at the CMB in the direction of the North Star and compare it to that coming from the sky above the South Pole—those two signals originated in parts of the sky that are moving apart from each other *way* faster than the speed of light. These two parts of the sky could never have had any contact or any way to share information, so how could they have exactly the same properties?

Enter Alan Guth with a brilliant solution: Inflation. Stretch the universe way faster than the speed of light. Before Inflation those two parts of the sky would have been right near each other.

His 1997 book, which your author is shown studying in the opening image, describes his research path, as a recently graduated post-doc, which led to the discovery of Inflation in December 1979. Inflation gives us a picture that explains how the CMB, and the distribution of stars and galaxies across the cosmos, can be so strikingly similar in every direction. Before Inflation, they were all packed together in a single spot. What did this spot look like? Where did it come from? We’ve given our version in previous songs, and we’ll reiterate it here in a little while.

Inflation, then, is the thing that spread the universe out. It is described as some stuff that is extremely densely packed and has a dominant property that does the heavy lifting—a large value of what’s called ‘Potential Energy.’ That energy has a specific single value, and when it somehow came into existence, the huge pressure that it contains causes a super-powerful gravitational repulsion.

The physics of this repulsion is described by a highly simplified solution to Einstein’s General Relativity equations. For those who care to delve a little deeper, we’re showing you the equation that gives a clear explanation of why the intense pressure causes the huge repulsion.

The Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric describes the expansion of a simple type of space containing a perfect fluid that is the same everywhere in the universe—smooth and continuous and featureless.  The equation shown explains how a negative pressure fluid produces a big gravitational repulsion.  To dig even further into the math and science, there's a good undergraduate physics major level tutorial by Syracuse U physics professor Gary Scott Watson on arXiv.

This gigantic, unchecked repulsion expanded the tiny initial germ particle into the vast expanse of our universe in way, WAY less than a second.

Then it stopped.

How? Why?

Physicists are still trying to figure out the logistics of what started Inflation, what stopped it, and what happened next. There is no known believable answer to that yet, and there are big gaps in the timeline where nobody has the slightest idea what was going on.

There isn’t even a solid explanation of what Inflation itself actually is. It is being called a paradigm rather than a theory.

People are speculating far and wide, exploring ideas, testing them when possible, or just making more calculations that do not yet have a way to be proven or disproven. Some of the early proponents of Inflation are even rejecting it, claiming that Inflation theories have proliferated so much that the concept can never be ‘falsified’ and so they’re looking for other ideas.

The Song of Everything enters the fray: What the heck is wrong with something that can never be falsified??? Science doesn’t like to deal with that kind of freedom, but simple common Sense sure can! No calculations here, just a story—a Song.

In previous Songs we addressed the initial conditions that might have preceded Inflation (totally speculatively). Here’s a quick reminder: start with a dipole quantum harmonic oscillator—two balls connected with a spring—that pops out of the Big-V Vacuum. That’s step one. In step two, the spring begins to oscillate when it interacts with a precursor General Relativity ‘particle pair’ that we’ve called the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ that fortuitously appears out of the Vacuum and interacts with the quantum oscillator. Here we’re going to elaborate on what happens next—what started the Inflationary Epoch.

We actually already hinted at our proposed way to start Inflation in Song 22. Flip a fair coin 1000 times. What are the odds of the coin coming up heads every single time? Well, write down a number with 300 figures before the decimal point.

It’s called ten to the 300^th power. That’s how many times you need to flip 1000 coins in order to have one chance of getting all heads. How big is that number? It’s a Googol times a Googol times a Googol. If we imagine that our universe extends far, *far* beyond the limits of what we can observe (because we’re limited by the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light), then there could perhaps be as many as Googol number of fundamental particles in that ‘Googolverse’.

This could be a version of the FLAT WORLD realm, or a piece of it containing only closely related universes, that we introduced in Song 21. This piece would contain hundreds of trillions of universes similar in size to our own—about 100 times as many universes as there are galaxies in our observable universe; and Inflation theory suggests that the existence of this much stuff is very likely—it is what science has called the multiverse, and Inflation theory says it almost has to exist even though we can never observe it.

Now … each of those individual fundamental particles in this Googolverse/multiverse/Flat World would have to actually secretly be a tiny Googolverse of its own with that many particles inside of it; and then you have to go down into a third layer of the onion where each of those particles would also have to be a mini-mini-Googolverse with that same number of particles.

Whew! Now, down on that third level inside the onion, you’ve finally assembled enough particles such that each one of them could do the 1000-coin flip test simultaneously; and (on average) just one of those particles, somewhere in all of that ridiculous expanse would be the winner.

Well, guess what? A number that big is chump change to the Big-V Vacuum. Remember that Big-V is a realm without time—inexhaustibly patient—and without space. It just lets things that are possible sort-of ‘happen’. And among those things that are possible are the very unlikely statistical ‘outlier’ events like a flip of 1000 coins all producing heads.

Now, the key attribute of Inflation is that it takes all the kinks and wrinkles of space and smooths them out. In its simplest description, it is what’s called a scalar field—like a weather map showing the temperature across the land—only one in which the temperature is the same everywhere in this Inflation object’s ‘sight’ (its internal perspective) …

… like a map of coin flips that all came up heads …

… smooth. Homogeneous and isotropic.

This is our Song of Everything’s story of how the first ‘something’ popped out of the mysterious ‘nothing’ that is the Big-V Vacuum. Still sticking with the physics story, the Balloon-Squeezer had squeezed the quantum dipole into a highly gravitationally repulsive state just as a rare zone of Vacuum smoothness came along to interact with it. The zone of smoothness did not have to be endless. In order to match the observed smoothness of the CMB, it only had to enable Inflation to explosively expand space through about 85 doublings in size ‘*before*’ the Vacuum’s frothing randomness returned and slammed it down.

Note well that that term ‘*before*’ applies only within the internal perspective of the repulsive-gravity Inflation field. And here’s where our Easter Bunny analogy-metaphor comes in handy to improve our understanding.

In Song 22 (our last post), our pink Easter Bunny was playing the role of the mole in the Whac-a-Mole arcade game.

We added a few twists to the game, saying that the Bunny’s goal was to escape the game entirely before the monstrous Big-V Vacuum, with its big black mallet, could whack it out of existence.

But here’s the thing. You can’t really escape the Game. We notice the ‘little-v’ evidence of the Big-boy Vacuum all around us all the time. Remember, this monster doesn’t abide rules or limitations. That new space-time realm that Inflation is manufacturing, represented by the speed that our Bunny is running, is like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. It’s a dream. It’s all inside the Bunny’s head.

What that means to us, in practical terms, is that we’re going to get Whacked in the end. Nothing lasts forever; and since Big-V is the poster-boy for nothing … well, our universe is stamped with an expiration date.

But thanks to that 1000-flip zone of smoothness, and the 85 or more doublings that it has allowed Inflation to achieve, the end doesn’t come for a very long time (as we measure it); and here’s why: Current estimates are that at the time Inflation ended (a process that we’ll be discussing in a bit), the universe we can now see was just a few centimeters across but the whole ‘FLAT WORLD’ realm that Inflation manufactured would have been bigger than the size of today’s universe, possibly much bigger. We (our Comfortable Earth and all the stars and galaxies that we can observe—everything all the way out to the Cosmic horizon billions of light years away) are a precious little package wrapped in cellophane deep inside a ridiculously gargantuan shipping crate filled with a helluva lotta packing peanuts. We seem to be just about totally Whack-proof.

(It’s getting just a little ahead of the Story, but that moment when we get hit with the mallet will not hurt. It’s far more likely to be a ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ story where our universe just expands and expands and expands until it just effectively dissolves back into the Vacuum.)

Now we come to the shocking punch-line. Ancient sages knew about Inflation millennia before science did. It’s time to tell the story from that Spirit perspective.

We’ve already begun that tale. In Song 20 we showed the correspondence between the first lines of Chapter 42 of the Tao-Te Ching and the proposed physics of the first emerging particles. And way back in Song 8, we used that same quote along with others to introduce the Cosmic Egg story—the story of the primordial Giant, Pangu:

“In the beginning …” —Genesis 1:1

“… there was neither non-existence nor existence …” —Rig Veda, 10:129

“… The Tao (the ineffable) gave rise to One” (the Tao that can be spoken).

“The One begat Two, ...

All emergent things seethe with the conflicting properties of Yin and Yang—desperately desiring to endure yet desperately seeking to return to the Womb of their creation. From modern quantum mechanics, this fits the interpretation of the “quantum froth,” detected even in a complete vacuum as a cloud of virtual particle pairs [a particle and its anti-matter counterpart] that are constantly appearing and self-annihilating. Here is our quantum harmonic oscillator—two balls with a spring. To give it a particle name, let’s start calling it the ‘Yin-Yangon.’

“... The Two begat Three.

“And the Three gave birth to all the things that we find around us.”

—Tao-Te Ching, Chapter 42

When an unusually strong ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ fluctuation in the ‘ether,’ the ‘void,’ the ‘first Nothing,’ the ‘Tao’ begins to actualize a separation between Yin and Yang, the Quantum Oscillator begins to sing.  The two opposing forces increasingly clarify and balance as they oscillate back and forth; but to keep them apart a third entity is needed. Thus, according to Chinese folklore recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas from about the 4^th century BCE, there emerged a legendary primordial being named Pangu. He hatched from this cosmic Yin-Yang egg brimming with strength and resolve: with 氣 (qì, meaning vital energy).  In honor of Pangu we’re naming the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ particle the ‘Qion.’

'Baby' Pangu escapes from the Cosmic Egg ...

As the macroscopic world materialized, Pangu was tasked with keeping the two opposing influences physically separated. Legend says that with his immense strength, he stood holding up the sky and keeping it separated from the ground. Each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the earth stretched ten feet wider, and Pangu grew ten feet taller; and this continued for eighteen thousand years!

... tasked with keeping sky and earth separated, he stuck to his task for 18,000 years, growing ten feet in height every day.

Here is the vast expansion that we now call Inflation, described wonderfully by the Taoist sages two thousand years before Alan Guth.

How and why did Inflation stop? In the Chinese myth, Pangu was so exhausted from his 18,000-year vigil holding up the sky that he laid down to take a nap. It would be his last conscious act. As he settled onto a soft bed of grass, his breathing stilled and his heart stopped beating. And yet the real power of his being was just beginning to stir.

It was a sad, sad moment. Suddenly all the world fell into a great silence—a mournful stillness of such majestic proportion that it has never been seen again.

And out of that stillness, Pangu’s material form started to change. His last breath became the clouds. His arms and legs became great mountain ranges. His left eye became the sun and his right eye became the moon. Pangu’s flesh spread out to become the soil. His arteries became deep ravines and canyons and his blood poured out of his body and became the rivers that would fill them. His hair drifted on the wind and rose to become the stars filling the heavens. His teeth and bones turned into metals, his bone marrow into precious gems.

The Three had given birth to all particular things. There is a great illustrated video that recaps the entire story of Pangu—a fun 8-minute journey:

Again, the Legend of Pangu is just about as good of an explanation of Inflation as any that science has come up with, and here’s a figure from a modern peer-reviewed scientific journal that explains why. It comes from a recent comprehensive 67-page paper that reviews the current research on the very early universe (Allahverdi, et al., 29 January 2021: “The first three seconds: A Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the early Universe”. The Open Journal of Astrophysics. 4 (1): 1. arXiv:2006.16182. Bibcode:2021OJAp....4E...1A. doi:10.21105/astro.2006.16182.).

BBN = Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, RD = Radiation Dominated epoch, meaning that more energy was in the form of light than in the form of solid matter, MD = Matter Dominated epoch, which happened as space stretched and the light cooled but the solid matter stayed steadfast.  The dark black line represents how much of the whole realm of space we can see compared to how much we can see today.  That line begins to dip at the end—the right side of the graph, because the mysterious Dark Energy has begun to cause our universes expansion to accelerate.  Note that the left and right ends of that line could be matched up—both having the same direction and height on the chart.  There’s a big implication here that Dark Energy could be the same thing as Inflation, and it suggests a more speculative possibility that we’ve entered into the very early stages of the next Inflation cycle.  What would that imply for our future?  What does that say about the opportunity for our universe to spawn baby universes that start with an Inflation of their own?  These are subjects for many future Songs!

The horizontal axis of the graph is effectively a timeline, but it’s on a logarithmic scale, so that the actual beginning (time = 0) is infinitely far off the chart to the left. Everything that came before Inflation isn’t shown and isn't being discussed much (by Science) because it is so completely beyond the reach of observations and experiments. Inflation ends a tiny, tiny fraction of a second after the Beginning—specifically 10^-32 seconds (0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds) after the moment time began. BBN, which means Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (coalescing of the first atoms out of a hot plasma of free-flowing quarks and gluons), began about 20 seconds later. In terms of temperature, the difference between those two moments is way more than the difference between an ice cube in your freezer and the thermonuclear furnace in the middle of the sun. It’s a HUGE gap, during which Science can only offer a question mark.

What happened during that time is so completely unknown, and yet so critical to how our universe works, that there is room for many, MANY stories.

Our version, our Song of Everything, fearlessly plunges into that mysterious gap with Song 24. Stay tuned.