Late Night Philosophy

The Cosmological Constant

It just occured to me today at work, almost out of thin air, that the idea of a force that repels all the time could explain the Big Bang theory. Now, I was aware of this mysterious fifth force before today and obviously, so did the discoverers that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This constantly repelling force, which is alagous to Albert Einstien's cosmological constant, is what theoriest think is accelerating the expansion.

Assuming that this force is one of the fundamental forces, one could also assume that it existed at the start of the universe. So if this force is accelerating the universe now, it might have started the expansion in the first place. Maybe there is some sort of critical mass at which the cosmological constant acts on a singularity to cause it to expand. In the case of the Big Bang, the forces of gravity might have been enough to overcome every other expansive force (if those forces exist in a singularity), but not enough to overcome this mysterious cosmological constant, this opposite of gravity.

Of course, within a singularity (if there is such a thing), there is no volume, but there is mass, so the CC might only require the presence of mass and no space-time itself? Or just gravity caused by mass. Maybe by the sheer fact that gravity exists, there is a force to oppose it. Of course, considering that it is not a balanced force implies to me that there is some other factor. Some sort of undiscovered elementary particle (of the sort in which gravitons lie).

The point is, the CC could explain the initial rapid expansion of the universe (and the present accelerated expansion as well), if not the actual Big Bang (since there are several other theories that make sense to me). But if the Big Bang theory were correct, it would make sense to me to say that a singularity does not just explode on its own. Keep in mind, also, that time and space didn't even exist "before" the Big Bang. So what caused this ultra-massive singularity to suddenly detonate and create our space-time continum?

Obviously, I am not an expert, but I do feel that the only two forces that could exist before the Big Bang are gravity and the force of the CC. Everything else is based on phyiscal mass. Since a singularity within the present universe has mass, and therefore gravity, I must also assume that the force of the CC is related in some way to the proportion of a mass. Either that or the CC is a property of the very fabirc of space-time. Anyway, if those were the only two that existed at the time and assuming that the singularity was stable for some indefinte "time", there must have been some point at which the balance between them were tipped and the Big Bang was the result.

There are two explainations that I can think of. The first is that a previous universe, which had no CC to keep it expanding (it probably has slightly different phyiscs), collapsed into a singularity. The compression violates and somehow surpasses of the limits of that universe and in the process creates something new, the CC, which unbalances gravity and that singularity starts expanding. Somehow, that does't seem satisfactory. I'm open to other theories of course; I can't think of everything.

Second; God tipped the balance between gravity and the CC in the singularity. Probably to some exponential factor like 999/1000. Just enough so that the expansion would begin. I say an exponential factor because the CC is causing the accelerated expanstion of the universe.

I see it as some sort of trigger, a switch even, to creating a universe. When God is ready to begin a universe, all that has to be done is to flick a switch to start it all. Or if the CC was bulit into the universe when God created it, then it would have started all on its on. Kind of like a program that starts running as soon as the program is finished being written because a self-starting mechanism was placed inside it. The programmer didn't have to expressly command the program to start, just to finish it, since he already knows that the program will start as soon as it's done.

"I can't imagine a God who would care."
"Every moment we are alive is a moment that we have cheated Death."
Myself}
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