I watched a Veritasium video awhile back and he made it sound like the heterogeneity of the universe is due to virtual particles (field fluctuations as he called them) being stretched during the inflationary epoch. That doesn't make sense to me. What's the real reason?
Inflationary epoch
Ayden Hall
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Jonathan Smith
>heterogeneity of the universe
The universe homogeneous. Quite astoundingly so.
Josiah Martinez
Inflationary Period is theory saving of highest highest order.
If you understand that the fact that the Universe is expanding does not necessarily mean it started out as a point, a lot of the nonsense infecting astrophysics disappears.
When you have an expanding nebula of gas and debris after a super nova, are you going to conclude that you can trace the path of the constituent particles back to a point source? Of course not.
Evan Peterson
Virtual particles being stretched during the inflationary epoch.
Joseph Sullivan
>hurr durr
Brainlets make me kek.
Leo Nelson
How? If that was the case wouldn't there be uniform matter distribution instead of what we currently have?
Jonathan Ortiz
It's the cosmological principle user. On it's largest scales, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic.
en.wikipedia.org
Noah Sanchez
virtual particles are not real. they are just a mathematical artifact due to a linearization
Gavin Lee
>On scales of 250 million light years or more
Okay, but on smaller scales it's still not homogenous.
In the video I am referencing the guy makes the argument that somehow inflation and "field fluctuations" are responsible for allowing that heterogeneity at smaller scales at all, and that if those two events did not occur the universe would have been effectively static. What I don't understand is how inflation influenced this or allowed for smaller scale densities to differ.
Wikipedia says this on quantum fluctuations:
>Quantum fluctuations may have been very important in the origin of the structure of the universe: according to the model ofinflationthe ones that existed when inflation began were amplified and formed the seed of all current observed structure.
Which is confusing because I was under the assumption that these virtual particles were both not "real" and always self-annihilated. Did inflation literally just scale their energies up or something? I don't understand what exactly they did.
Levi Thomas
>are responsible for allowing that heterogeneity at smaller scales at all
That's wrong. It's more to do with dark matter clustering.
Ethan Davis
'Virtual particles' is a crap name.
They're real, and they aren't particles.
profmattstrassler.com
Cameron Green
Would you mind explaining further? Specifically on why it's wrong and how dark matter clustering influenced it?
Jonathan Russell
>Dark matter clusters together
>Increased gravitational pull in those regions
>Causes galaxies to form in those same regions
Dominic Lee
Inflation would have spread all of that dark matter apart though, wouldn't it?
Easton Powell
Gravity has an infinite range.
Jaxson Cooper
Are you taking about the horizon problem?
Brody Peterson
But unless that dark matter had the same kind of thing I'm talking about with virtual particles happen during inflation the dark matter would have been spread uniformly and have the same force of gravity on it from every direction, right?
Ayden Ross
Hmmm, maybe.
Michael Hernandez
He's right. A perfectly homogenous universe would not allow for any matter to form. Fluctuations created local pockets of slightly more dense and sparse regions, which then got inflated.
Landon Roberts
>Which then got inflated
Yes, but what the hell does that actually mean? What was the actual mechanism? How and why did the virtual particles matter when they usually annihilate immediately? Did inflation literally pull them apart so they couldn't annihilate?
Asher Stewart
>Did inflation literally pull them apart so they couldn't annihilate?
Yep, that's what happened. Inflation was kind of ridiculous. Pulled things apart faster than light-speed. Sounds like it doesn't make any sense but it fits the models perfectly, and it's not like we understand how dark energy behaves at all anyway.
Liam Bailey
inflation only lasted for 1E-35 sec
this is crazy fast so the virtual particle foam at the beginning of the inflation would swell it pretty much unchanged
Noah Campbell
Angel Ramirez
That's actually very well made, can't believe i've never seen that channel before