Where did the matter and energy come from?

One of the things that cavediver has threatened to sort out or clear up for us is Guth's doctrine of a Free Lunch. http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Guth/Guth3.htmlIn philosophical terms, something does come out of nothing. In fact, this is the only place it can come from. The reason we do not see this happening now, is because we do not actually see nothing anywhere. But when we do our best to approximate a real manifestation of nothingness, we do in fact immediately see something come right out of it. Vacuum energy - Wikipedia

So matter isn't frozen energy, it's actually boiling space?And the reason that m amount of matter disappears when c² worth of e energy is released, is not because they are the same dealie in different forms, but rather because the energy that was being used to stir up the matter out of these underlying fields is now doing a different job, ie propping up electromagnetic radiation instead?

Yes, sort of, in the sense that he continually argued against the validity of the quantum mechanics from which these field descriptions are derived. But you have to keep in mind also that, a lot of the time, the absent-minded professor wasn't really talking about physics per se at all. He was campaigning for genocide. Much of the nonsense we hear about e=mc² somehow describing what is happening in nuclear chemistry is derived from this three-quarter-century-old propaganda push, and he cooperated in this huge smudging of concepts voluntarily, for a reason.If he had succeeded in achieving his goal, which was actually blocked by our allies in Europe, then nowadays when we might say "Hiroshima" or else "Dresden", and be talking about different contexts, instead we would just say "Berlin" and roll our eyes twice as hard. The most recent discussion of M-theory and related string/superstring GUTs is String! Theory! What is it good for ?!?.It's where I earned most of these stripes I now wear (on my back.) Edited by Iblis, : sideline

Yep, I led with my clash of cliches and then tried to explain what I meant in the second paragraph.But I do like the thermal analogy to describe energy, it has a lot going for it. Energy is the potential to do work, expressed as heat it is a measurement of the vibration of the molecules of air or water or whatever being heated. This is a nice macro example of the same sort of thing the quantum energy is really describing, isn't it?But frozen means having less energy, and "frozen energy" is thus an oxymoron.

Yeah! Ain't it coool?There's whatever, a mild confusion here which I will talk through while we wait for the brainiacs to smite you.Relativity observes the expansion, works its way backwards to the alleged singularity where this no-space no-time infinite-density no-outside stuff might apply, which is really the place where their rewind would arrive at a division-by-zero buffer overflow. And they say Well, we certainly have to stop short of that. Then they step back, look at their 4d spacetime, visualize a hypersphere, and say Ok, that's not really an origin, it's just an arbitrary point on the supersurface like the North Pole. "God does not play Secret Santa with the universe!"A philosopher at this point can imagine himself standing "outside" the universe and interfering with the past present and future, shaping whatever he wants out of it in his own sweet time, if he wants to. But seriously, he has no place to stand and no time to waste, and no way to reach in and do stuff. Hold that thought, though.Quantum Mechanics laughs, looks at the alleged singularity, and says Well, we certainly have to start sometime after that. Then they do some awesome Free Lunch math, make Something out of Nothing, and requisition another trillion dollars to light their Very Large Ganja Collider with. Does that mean we don't have to divide by zero? Dunno, why do you ask that? Geez man, that question is so 10^-36 seconds ago.Here's Son Goku's awesome chronology again from Why Is Stuff Round? Notice what the very first bit says. Message 27That's right, We Don't Have A Clue. Now M-Theory and its relatives go beyond this, they postulate other spacetimes or "branes" and 11 dimensions worth of manifold for them to interact in. This is super-duper-awesome stuff, it will probably require a Jumbo Ultra Cheech&Chong Stellar Collider to actually test. But it does say stuff about the alleged singularity and/or brane collision thingie, but it gets by by giving up this no-outside no-spacetime divide-by-infinity boondoggle and replacing it with, wellIf you would like to discuss earth as one brane (earth in the sense of a universe) and heaven as another brane having different natural laws and being able to somehow interfere with us in a non-linear extra-dimensional fashion, you are welcome to launch such ruminations in String! Theory! What is it good for ?!?. Do read along first though, so you understand how it works a bit. Good luck!

Yep, got it long since, in elementary physics, hence my fondness for Maxwell and his patron.Energy isn't a real noun at all, it's a verb form, similar to infinitives like "vibrating" and "propagating" but more general; which is useful since the vibrating of the hydrogen turning into helium can become the propagating of the light can become the vibrating and propagating of the electricity can become the vibrating of the grill can become the propagating of the heat can become the vibrating of my soup, mmmm good.Energy in a sense is a generic infinitive for all real-world verbs: not just doing verbs like running and hitting and shoveling and exploding but also being verbs as well, as you are demonstrating here. But the stuff a lot of people think of as energy, like light and electricity and gasoline, actually does consist of stuff (the photon, the electron, the exxon) so you may want to sort that out when you get the chance.Edited by Iblis, : e = mc hawking

Might another good analogy be to think of them as different "frequencies" of the original single field? This seems to be the implication of the various points of symmetry-breaking in Son Goku's calendar.

Very good! You seem to be grasping much of what I'm trying to communicate to you. I'm still going to whack at you pretty hard, but note that I think your attacks / analyses are moving away from a "not even wrong" position in an encouraging way. Yep. It's very good that you see that it is only relative uniformity. Uniformity in science isn't a total blinders-on law, just a remarkably reliable starting position. We see the "speed of light" c as a seriously uniform number; not because it would overthrow all our theories, but rather because we have tested it and tested it every which way we could come up with and new ways every year. Last I heard people were working on ways to test alpha, the underlying dimensionless constant, to see if it could be changeable in ways we might not notice by testing c directly. And so far, no way it is changing over time or space.Nevertheless, in this discussion it is going to appear to be changing or being broken or screwed with in several different ways. The fact that these are just appearances actually upholds the math; nevertheless, uniformity is certainly in the eye of the beholder, yes? In the same sense, the expansion of the universe seemed to be pretty uniform when this math started. We can see back more than 12 billion years, we can see expansions at each time-period and check our figures, we can be pretty confident of uniformity where we see it. But as we look closely, about 4 or 5 billion years back, we see something funny. We see closer stuff, expanding faster, than farther / older views. This is that "Dark Energy" bit, we don't see those areas / periods crashing into the ones beyond / behind them, so it looks like things got faster all over.Think about that for a minute, there. Something happened all through the spacetime. That certainly sounds like a c violation, doesn't it? We will come back to this. Minor corrections here. Relativity (macro physics) actually stops well short of T=0, except in simple calculation. The theory can't well describe anything very close, it pretty much isn't valid until at least a few seconds afterward. And in reality, in terms of what is observable, it stops millions of years later, when it gets to a point before the quasars when there are no radiant bodies. Without light, relativity can't observe anything, you follow?It also doesn't know it's that close, less than a billion years. Just using the expansion figures, it thinks it's whatever, 3 to 6 billion years after the alleged t=0. It can only work its way back from there in theory, and guess what? No one really likes what the theory says at this point. As we proceed on back, well short of t=0, we arrive at a point where everything is densely packed, at least down to raw neutronium level. This stuff ought to be collapsing into a black hole, a singularity, yes. But it ought to be doing it going forwards, not backwards. Any further back, any more like a black hole, there's no way we know of that anything is coming out of it. Except maybe some info for Steve Hawking, little note from Cthulhu or something, but we don't know even that at the time.Beyond this, there are all sorts of other things we don't like about a straight relativity Big Bang, it just doesn't make sense, it seriously needs work. But this is because relativity physics works best at the macro level, and we are really getting too small for it. This is where quantum mechanics becomes useful.Key Point: The Big Bang, doesn't tell us anything, about the origin of the universe. This is part of why Einstein didn't like it. It looks like it does, but it doesn't. This is annoying. Einstein, like you, feels a lot more comfortable living in an eternal universe, with absolute conservation of matter and energy. And maybe he does, maybe we do. But if so, it is a much larger universe than the little spacetime we can observe, which appears to come to a point there in the distant past. Maybe.So qm feels comfortable quite a bit closer to the supposed t=0 than relativity does. But in terms of the units they use, they still start a long time afterward. 10^{-35 to -34} seconds, is many many chronons, basic time units; call it well over a gizillionth of a second, it's a long time for people who think in planck units however you slice it. And they don't start with the singularity, they can't, they don't have any math and would rather not have any singularity anyway, as if they do they have to get us out of it somehow. Spacetime coming to a point isn't such a problem if there's no matter, you see?So they start with something they do have, which bears a reasonably strong resemblance to what we would have to have after t=0 at some point in order to get to what we have now; which is the false vacuum, a particular condition of potentially densely packed "virtual particles" in which they could tip over out of the quantum fog into relatively real reality. When they do this, start there, they find that the energy involved can step up their expansion figure at an inordinate rate. Cavediver hinted that he could explain about this "free lunch" better than I can, so let's see how that works out. In the meantime note that expansion speed in reality, and c at least in appearance, both are getting their uniform ripped off by drunken sailors here in the wee dark moments of the cosmic morning.Key Point: Inflation may be telling us something about where all the matter came from. It may be telling us it came from a stepped-up version of gravity or anti-gravity. It may not. But it still isn't telling us anything about where the actual spacetime itself, unmediated by the expansion, the alleged t=0, ever came from. It may imply that there is no t=0, that there was some other kind of spacetime going on before inflation, that we can't describe using the current math in any effective way. But it knows, that we will do better, when we get smarter.This is where string theory starts to come in. I don't understand it properly, so anything I say is really just a speculative hint for cavediver and Son Goku to come crop my ears for me. Basic string theory seems to be talking about our universe as a higher-dimensional manifestation of a flat 2-d process. I don't know, but recent comments give me hope, that it may give us determinism back. In normal qm, what appear to be single units appear to act in a statistical manner that is really only appropriate for groups of things. String theory, may, explain what the real items are, grouped together, that are being expressed in our microverse as apparent single units. Cross your fingers!But the point where it really starts applying to this discussion, is when we go to understand how this manifestation process actually works, that is to say superstring, the current best guess of which is M-theory. Maybe. M-theory gives us other spacetimes, places outside the observable universe, other dimensions to move through to interact with our spacetime directly without being stuck standing nowhere and having no time to do things. You follow? It may tell us, what was before, the point that we in our limited view would think of t as = 0.This is exactly the sort of thing you have been asking for in your recent explorations of what could be "outside the universe". Not the real universe, of course, which is everything, however deep and wide and far and long and uhm, 6 or 7 other things too. But this alleged reality, our little limited bit of space and time and observability-thus-far, this it could yank around and know from beginning to end and shape to suit itself. Maybe. String! Theory! What is it good for ?!?Edited by Iblis, : beware of greeks bearing letters

We paid for our two drinks, now where's the buffet? Message 25You have laid the groundwork at least, for understanding that the fields extend throughout spacetime and that energy is just a quality of the fields, though a conserved one. What else do we need before we can discuss where "matter and energy" came from in the first place? Alan Guth - Wikipedia

I explain waveforms and the Delayed-Choice experiment in totally non-murky terms at Message 188. Since then cavediver has explained EPR in Quantum Entanglement - what is it?, to the point where eventually even me and Percy got it (Message 207 and thereabouts), and also covered solitonics at Message 36, a clue to how matter appears to form out of fields.I'm not chasing you off, feel free to ask questions about matter and energy here based on what you find there, and/or slap around anything that still seems "murky".

Oh I don't like this! You just went to some trouble to at least lay the groundwork for an understanding that energy isn't a thing at all, but rather a measurement. Now you are treating it like something, something which has qualities like mass. You are at least going to have to explain what mass is now.My bet is that an even better title would be "mass is energy."* from Message 90Edited by Iblis, : topic hop

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