Thursday, September 29, 2016

12. THE DILEMMA OF SPACE

The universe is essentially a zero energy universe meaning that the total energy of the universe (positive energy) is balanced by an equal amount of negative gravitational potential energy. So the law of conservation is satisfied in the case of energy and we have law of conservation of energy. But this is not the case with space. If we assume that the initial patch of space with almost infinite density of space appeared from regions of no space at all or to say an enormous positive density of space appeared from zero density of space, we cannot formulate a conservation law for space. In other words, we cannot formulate a law of conservation of space...


There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to assume that to balance the positive density of space, there are regions of space with negative density of space. That of course does not seem a practical solution as the concept of negative space seems ridiculous. Then comes the second viable solution. In this second case, we assume that space does not have any density. That is to say, we assume that the space before big bang and the space after big bang are the same except in the case of their energy content...


The space before big bang had no energy while the space after big bang had energy. Thus the case of a positive density of space or in other words the case of quantifying space is ruled out. This concept rules out a conservation law for space and also gives us a great advantage in the case of trying to solve the problem of the origin of the universe. We just need to account for the appearance of positive energy (the total energy of the universe) and an equal amount of negative gravitational energy out of initial zero energy of the universe which seems explicable. It is no more required to explain the creation of space from "nothing", instead we just need to explain the appearance of positive and negative energies from zero energy or "nothing". That simplifies the problem of origin of the universe a great deal as we don't need to explain the appearance of space anymore and just need to account for the appearance of the energy which can be explained by the law of conservation of energy. What we call space in our universe is actually space with energy. It is the amount of energy contained within that space, which distinguishes that space from the space before big bang. If we don't consider that energy (like the zero-point energy), the space of post-big bang universe and the space of pre-big bang universe are the same.

No comments: