The Littlest Big Bang

Scientists are building ultra-cold systems that mimic the most extreme edges of the universe. Can these analogues help solve the big bang’s mysteries?

By James Owen Weatherall Posted 05.07.2008 at 3:30 pm 9 Comments

What did they find? One of the characteristic features of brane inflation involves its answer to another cosmological problem: How did clumps of matter, in the form of galaxies, grow out of what was a smooth universe? Brane inflation predicts that, after the branes collide, small defects ripple through the universe. These defects, sometimes called cosmic strings, were points around which matter coalesced; as the universe expanded, these little mass centers grew too, ultimately becoming clusters of galaxies.

In the aftermath of the Lancaster group’s experiment, little vortices lingered in the helium, much like the defects in spacetime predicted by brane inflation. And though they don’t quite prove that brane inflation occurred, they offer tantalizing insight into what might have occurred 13 billion years ago. “What we have done is to show that an analogue system with a similar underlying mathematical language behaves in a certain way,” says Richard Haley, a member of the group. But if branes are real, and two of them collided shortly after the big bang, then this experiment is a new reason to believe that branes created cosmic strings, and thus help explain how the universe came to be the way it is.

Chunky Universe: Inflation imprinted minuscule defects onto the smooth universe. These defects grew over time, eventually forming the large-scale structure of the universe we observe today. Information from galaxies in a 2-D image [right] can be converted into a 3-D map [left] that shows how galaxies clump together into clusters. Max Tegmark/the SDSS Collaboration

Down the Dumb Hole

In 1972, William Unruh, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia, gave a presentation on black holes to an audience of non-specialists at the University of Oxford. He told a story about a community of fish living near the top of a waterfall. As far as the fish were concerned, the waterfall was a boundary—if you ventured too close to the lip, you would pass a point of no return and never be heard from again. Moreover, since this boundary marked the point where the speed of the rushing water grew faster than the speed of sound, any pleas for help by the doomed fish would fail to get out. Unruh called this silent abyss a “dumb hole.”

For eight years, this story remained a quirky explanatory device, an analogy he used with undergrads to introduce how light behaves near a black hole. Then, in 1980, Unruh was assigned to teach a fluid-mechanics course. “While preparing my lecture notes one evening, my mind made the connection,” he recalls. It turned out the analogy wasn’t just qualitative, an approximation. “I realized that the equations were identical,” Unruh says—the analogy was exact. Substitute sound for light, rushing fluid for the curvature of spacetime, and an ill-fated screaming fish for an equally unlucky astronaut with a radio, and the two situations are indistinguishable. Mathematically speaking, your shower drain is a black hole.

But there’s more to the story. One of the biggest mysteries about black holes is whether they’re really, truly black. In 1974, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes have a finite, though very small, temperature, which means they radiate. “Hawking radiation,” if it exists, means that black holes are more of a charcoal-gray.

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9 Comments

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fromagesfondus

05/08/08 at 10:10 am

This quandtum stuff is very interesting but remains very confusing to me. Good article though,

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jmnowell

05/09/08 at 1:02 am

I think you mean 0.0003 K above absolute zero. At about 4 K, liquid helium has a boiling point well below 0.0003 F, which is around 255 K, where it would only exist in its gaseous state.

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Toomanytoys

05/09/08 at 12:15 pm

In the article, the author writes: "The trouble is in the details—no one knows why it happened, nor quite how. It takes an awful lot of energy to make a universe accelerate, and pretty powerful brakes to get it to slow down again."

The answer is simple. God did it. He knows why and how it happened.

Just kidding! I would be a fool to try to explain science with religion or try to support religion with science.

Religion is "Faith".

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pernicious

05/09/08 at 1:39 pm

could someone please explain to me how it is they "watched" this process as stated in the article? also, as i understand it, wouldn't their observation of the experiment actually change the results and also render it different from the true Big Bang which one can only assume was absent of the "observer"?

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paulkruger

05/09/08 at 2:15 pm

Imagine the original big bang as a tiny singularity and look at it today. Then imagine an experiment like this gone wrong.

A new "little bang" as a singularity. Of course that would fit in the space of this little gadget. But how big and how fast would it grow if the results were similar to the real thing?

Obvious lack of mass aside...this could make for a chilling SciFi story, right?

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philbert

05/09/08 at 4:54 pm

jmnowell said:
> I think you mean 0.0003 K above absolute zero. At about 4 K, liquid helium has a boiling point well below 0.0003 F, which is around 255 K, where it would only exist in its gaseous state.

0 °F is about 255 K, as you say. Absolute zero is 0 K, or about -460 °F. So 0.0003 °F above absolute zero is still very nearly -460 °F.

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librtyship

05/09/08 at 6:43 pm

Yes things do get more and more complex the deeper we go. For instance Darwin theory seemed pretty reasonable as individual live cells in the body were assumed to be litle gelatinous globs. Now it has been discovered that they contain millions of intricate tiny components which means that each one is a complete tiny factory, then all these cells make up a human body which is an organizm of mind boggling complexity which renders the theory of evolution totally invalid and has to lead to the conclusion that life is created by an extremely high intelligence that we really can't grasp with our limited mental capabilities, then we also have all the other wonders of the universe to ponder, yes Toomanytoys had the right answer, all of these marvels were indeed the handiwork of God and he understands us and understands all else in the universe as he is the creator.

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pastkev

05/09/08 at 10:17 pm

It would be really nice to hear about evidence without the spin of religious atheists. Atheism is just as much a religion as anyone who believes in God. Atheism is based on faith and cannot be proved.

It is fine to have a worldview, but please keep your worldview out of the science, it has no place in real science and is offensive to those interested in the facts to have to hear your worldview about them.

Evidence is evidence, let it speak for itself and leave your religious worldview to discuss with your friends who will probably think you are smart; the rest of us do not care.

As he said in Dragnet, just the facts please.

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Alex R.

05/16/08 at 6:27 pm

"Evidence" is a very twistable term to use, as it can go more than one way.

Atheism is like a religion! It implies faith in supposed "evidence", does'nt it?