
Physicists Hunt for the Big Bang’s Triangles - digital55
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160419-string-inflation-triangles/
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daveloyall
I don't speak the language used in this article.

But, are they talking about data structures in a block of storage, or what?

Are they talking about patterns on the surface (volume?) of a cellular
automata?

Look at this sentence:

> "With each tick, it doubled the size of the universe, keeping nearly perfect
> time - until it stopped."

...What? Double the size every tick? As in... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64?

Don't explain it to me like I'm five. Explain it to me like I'm a developer.
Please?

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JadeNB
> ...What? Double the size every tick? As in... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64?

> Don't explain it to me like I'm five. Explain it to me like I'm a developer.
> Please?

It doesn't seem you need it explained to you; what you say is exactly what it
means. For example, if you imagine a cube whose side increases by
approximately 26% each clock tick, then each tick increases its volume by
approximately (1.26)^3 = 2.00 (to 3 significant figures).

(I am not a physicist, so I may be misrepresenting, but, as far as I know, it
is backwards to imply that it is somehow the ticking of a clock that _causes_
the expansion. Rather, in the early universe one can use the logarithm of the
size of the universe as a measure of time: "the universe is currently 64 times
its original size, so it's log_2(64) = 6 ticks since the beginning of the
universe." This is much like how the equation `E = m c^2` allows one to speak
of the _mass_ of a particle as a certain number of electron-Volts, which
naïvely would be units of _energy_.)

~~~
lomnakkus
I think that you're probably _technically_ right (the best kind!) and probably
aligned with mainstream Physics, but...

I'm really surprised that Inflation got such a "foothold"... in that it's
quite wobbly as a therory, AFAICT. For a kick-off it's pretty hard
(impossible?) to falsify. Yes, we can all agree that something _like_ the Big
Bang happened; just by looking at the expansion, everything was obviously a
_lot_ more squished up. (Extrapolate backwards and you get 'silliness' like
the Singularity... which is just a photosynthesis[1] way of saying NaN.)

[1] Shamelessly stolen from a redditor: "I like to use difficult words so
people think I'm photosynthesis.".

EDIT: Honestly, I'm not a kook! Neil Turok usually has good introductory
lectures for this field...

~~~
aroberge
Without an inflationary era in the early universe, you would be left with
having to explain 1) the fact that we see very few (none so far) magnetic
monopoles; 2) the cosmic horizon problem; 3) the flatness problem.

Without inflation, how would you solve these?

Inflationary models make predictions about higher moments distribution of
fluctations in the cosmic microwave background. These can be measured; so
specific models can be falsified.

