Hadronization vs. the Big Rip (Part One--The Big Rip)

An interesting question led to an interesting thought and another excuse to invite two of my friends from my grad school days, BH and DB, over for some coffee and physics.

DB: "So you're putting this in ATM. Why? Have you gone over to the woo side?"

Celestial Mechanic: "No, at least I don't think so. Ken G seems to think so, he seems to think this idea is pseudo-science. Of course dozens of pages of YAUPTs have been spent on arguing his definition of science, and if I'm not careful we could get sucked into dozens more trying to define pseudo-science."

BH: "What is a 'YAUPT'?"

CM: "Yet Another Unproductive Philosophy Thread."

BH: "Oh yes, I sure want to avoid those!"

DB: "So what is this ATM idea of yours?"

CM: "Very simply it is this: that if a Big Rip ever gets started, it will be stopped cold in its tracks when it starts ripping nucleons apart. The strong force will create more and more hadrons from the dark energy forcing the cosmological constant back to zero. In effect the Universe resets itself and starts over again."

DB: "That is a bit strange. Are you introducing any new forces here to bring this about?"

CM: "No, I'm just using ordinary QCD, at least as I understand it."

DB: "Are you declaring either of the relativities wrong and proposing a replacement?"

CM: "No, I pretty much accept the possibility that our Universe is heading for this big rip."

DB: "No new particles?"

CM: "Nope, just the usual fundamental fermions, force carriers, and higgs scalars. Oh, I have reason to believe there may be more than one higgs scalar, but that doesn't enter into any of my arguments here."

BH: "Well, it doesn't sound like much of an ATM theory then."

CM: "But Ken G seems to think so."

BH: "Enough of Ken G! I hate his saxophone playing! Get on with your theory!"

CM: "OK. One of the problems that many laypersons have with the expansion of the Universe is they ask, 'If space is expanding, why aren't galaxies, stars, planets, beachballs, atoms and nuclei expanding too?' When you explain that it is the space between clusters of galaxies that is expanding, they ask, 'But what about the space inside of the Solar System? What about the space inside the atom?'"

DB: "Well, that space is expanding, but the forces holding solar systems, atoms, etc. together are more than capable of compensating for it."

CM: "Exactly. But it is a big hurdle and some people never clear it. In recent years another phenomenon has come to light, namely that the expansion of the Universe is not only accelerating, but accelerating at a rate consistent with a non-zero 'cosmological constant'. It also appears that this constant isn't really constant, so I will call it the 'cosmological parameter' from now on, just as I use the term 'Hubble parameter' instead of 'Hubble constant'.

CM: "One of the consequences of an increasing cosmological parameter is the possibility of the universal expansion becoming so strong that it does overpower the forces holding various structures together. First clusters of galaxies, then the galaxies, then the stars, planets, and minor objects, then molecules, atoms, nuclei and finally even the nucleons themselves are ripped apart in what has come to be called 'The Big Rip'."

BH: "What a horrible way to go!"

CM: "Relax, this isn't due to happen for billions of years, if at all."

DB: "I'll sleep that much better knowing that, but what makes you think it won't happen?"

CM: "After a refill."

To be continued...

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The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Hadronization vs. the Big Rip (Part Two--Hadronization)

An interesting question led to an interesting thought and another excuse to invite two of my friends from my grad school days, BH and DB, over for some coffee and physics.

Celestial Mechanic: "When I was a grad student I regularly read Scientific American. One of the images that sticks with me was an ad that IBM ran for their Model 3081 mainframe systems. It showed an illustration of two alarm-clocks being smashed together and gears and springs flying everywhere. I'm talking about the classic spring-driven alarm clock with the two bells on top hit alternately by a hammer."

BH: "Like the one Garfield destroys all the time?"

CM: "Exactly! The ad used this image as a way of connecting with the use of the Model 3081 in particle physics laboratories to do the heavy number-crunching required. But there was one thing that disturbed me about that image. In particle physics we throw together the equivalent of alarm-clocks, but we never see any gears or springs. Let me put it this way: as an example in particle physics we throw an alarm-clock and an anti-alarm-clock together and get two alarm-clocks, two anti-alarm-clocks, and a whole bunch of wristwatches, but never any gears or springs. If we see a bunch of watches heading one way, we can infer that a spring started off in that direction, and if we see an alarm-clock and some wristwatches going another we might infer that a gear started off in that direction."

DB: "By 'gears and springs' you really mean quarks and gluons, right?"

CM: "Yes, I do."

DB: "So why don't we see free quarks and gluons?"

CM: "That's the $106,000 question right there. The mainstream answer is this: unlike electromagnetism or gravity, the strong force gets stronger when particles are drawn apart and weaker, in fact, it vanishes at zero distance.

CM: "So let's try a thought-experiment. Let's try to pull a quark out of a proton. As the target quark gets farther away, something strange happens. The chromodynamic fields between the target quark and the other two get stronger and they also get collimated into a tube-like structure. More and more energy must be expended as the quark is pulled away. Eventually enough energy has been added that there is enough to create a quark/antiquark pair. Well, more properly, there is enough energy to create the final state of a baryon and a meson, and the quark/antiquark pair to make it so is created along the flux tube which snaps, pulling the newly-created quark toward the other two and the newly-created antiquark towards our target quark. We tried to pull out a quark, but instead we end up pulling out a meson."

DB: "And that is why we never see free quarks and gluons: freeing one requires more than the energy required to create final states with more quark/antiquark pairs in them."

CM: "Exactly. And this process by which momentarily scattered quarks, antiquarks, and gluons regroup into the observed baryons and mesons, or hadrons as they are both called, is called hadronization."

BH: "And this is what you think will stop the big rip?"

CM: "Correct. The big rip scenario calls for the cosmological parameter to gradually increase until it becomes strong enough to overcome gravity at the galactic cluster level, then at the galactic level, then at the solar system level and finally it overwhelms gravity at the planetary and electromagnetism at the molecular level. At this time, it may even be strong enough to perturb the interiors of the nucleons, causing the masses of the proton and neutron to differ from their current values."

BH: "Will the masses increase or decrease? How will this affect the stability of nuclei?"

CM: "I'm not sure. Perhaps a simulation could be run with QCD on an expanding lattice."

DB: "Well, you've got a small network here. Maybe you could ditch OS/2 for Linux, turn your network into a Beowulf cluster and compute it yourself!"

CM: "Not likely. The computers are quite mismatched; the fastest machine is about 20 times faster than the slowest, an aging 486 system. I don't expect to be doing any massively parallel supercomputing any time soon. Still, this is a lot better than the Commodore 128 I had in college."

BH: "How time flies when you're having a good time!"

CM: "Right. Well, I'm going to need refill. How about you?"

DB: "Yes, time for another."

To be continued...

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

CM, how does this fit with the new information from the Big Bounce theroy arising from Loop Quantum Gravity?

It seems that it might mesh with that exactly, if the strong force eventally takes over after the 'rip' and pulls the univers back to the point of another bounce.

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Hadronization vs. the Big Rip (Part Three--Cosmological Considerations)

An interesting question led to an interesting thought and another excuse to invite two of my friends from my grad school days, BH and DB, over for some coffee and physics.

Celestial Mechanic: "Now I'd like to say a few words about cosmology, since it is recent developments in cosmology that has led to the 'Big Rip' scenario. Do you remember what the 'Cosmological Principle' is?"

BH: "That the Universe is homogeneous."

DB: "And isotropic. Don't forget isotropic!"

CM: "And don't forget to qualify both with 'at large scales, namely above 100 megaparsecs'. These are the assumptions that allow us to simplify the Einstein equations to where we can solve them. Instead of having to solve for the ten components of the Einstein tensor, we only have to solve for one parameter, the scale factor.

CM: "The scale factor, a(t), since by homogeneity and isotropy it can only be a function of time, is not directly observable, but several of its derivatives are. In particular, the Hubble parameter (not constant!) (da/dt)/a and the deceleration parameter -a*(d²a/dt²)/(da/dt)² can be inferred from the relation between redshift and distance -- for distances measured by means other than redshift, of course.

CM: "There is one variant of the 'Cosmological Principle' that you sometimes hear about called the 'Perfect Cosmological Principle'. Do you remember what that one is?"

DB: "That the Universe is unchanging in time as well as homogeneous and isotropic at large scales."

CM: "More or less, with the understanding that as stars and galaxies grow old and die that new matter appears and new galaxies take their place."

BH: "But that's just Steady State cosmology. That's more or less been disproven by now."

CM: "Well, I don't want to say 'disproven', nothing in science is ever really proven ..."

BH: "You've been reading Ken G and Disinfo Agent too much, haven't you?"

CM: "I think they have a point about the limitations of our knowledge, they just harp about it too much. False modesty is just as bad as false pride. But anyway, yes, the great mass of evidence points to a Universe that has been evolving, not one in a steady state."

DB: "And there doesn't seem to be any evidence in favor of a Universe that expands and contracts over and over?"

CM: "Positive curvature is required for that, and the evidence mostly supports zero curvature, that is an asymptotically flat spacetime, one that will expand forever."

BH: "So we're stuck in a Universe that expands until it's ripped apart, or at least ripped up into a bunch of hadrons."

CM: "But that won't the first time the Universe experiences exponential expansion. Remember, the current consensus is that the Universe suffered a similar exponential expansion called 'Inflation'. My question is this: could the earlier inflationary epoch and the future 'Big Rip' be the same phenomenon? Could our present Universe be at the quiescent stage where galaxies, stars, planets and life can exist, a respite between phases of expansion?"

DB: "What about entropy? That's usually been the deal-breaker for oscillating/recycling universes, hasn't it?"

CM: "I think that the effect of a 'big rip' will be to lower the entropy per unit volume, though I can't prove that yet. Think of the 'Big Rip' not as the end but as a reset."

BH: "I don't see any new baryons being created by hadronization -- just lots of mesons and baryon/antibaryon pairs."

CM: "Yes, each baryon can only give rise to N+1 baryons and N antibaryons and M mesons, where N and M are subject to the amount of energy supplied by the big rip. After the antibaryons are annihilated by baryons and the mesons decay, we're left with our original baryon plus a bunch of photons. And note how one of the key quantities in Weinberg's First Three Minutes happens to be the ratio of photons to baryons, which is about 10¹⁰ to one, which is testimony to this expected annihilation. This conjecture of mine doesn't explain where baryons came from in the first place -- in the current Universe or any of its predecessors. Baryogenesis remains a mystery."

BH: "Well, this hardly sounds like pseudo-science to me. Granted you didn't throw out any equations and try to solve them, but I'm sure you could if it comes to that. How do you answer Ken G's objections here?"

CM: "Oh, you mean the 'I Have No Idea' post? I'll take that up after another refill."

To be continued...

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I haven't had time to look at it closely, I've only read the Bad Astronomer's blog.
In my scenario hadronization stops the rip, it doesn't pull anything back. The universe continues on after the rip which is viewed as an inflationary episode by the future inhabitants (if any) of the newly reset universe.

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Well it's something you might want to consider.

Reading your idea's on hadronization it sort of jumped out at me that in the final stages of it, the Dark Matter/Energy driving acceleration would stop. At that point not only does gravity take, over, but the strong force as well.

The strong force after the rip initially starts the momentum in the direction of collapse, and gravity makes sure that it continues.

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What's ATM about this idea, CM?

I'm sort of wondering this myself, it seems a solid extension of the Big Rip senerio. Perhaps it should be upgraded to a Hadronization Hypothisis thread?

I'm caffing at the bit to see him start posting some predictions based on his idea.

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"After the antibaryons are annihilated by baryons and the mesons decay, we're left with our original baryon plus a bunch of photons"
CMB?

ATM or not, it's interesting reading.

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I'm not buying it yet. But I will wait to read the rest of the story. I'm going to have my own coffee meanwhile. I'll be back.


CC

Hadronization vs. the Big Rip (Part Four--Reply to Critics)

An interesting question led to an interesting thought and another excuse to invite two of my friends from my grad school days, BH and DB, over for some coffee and physics.

DB: "Why do you call this the 'I Have No Idea' post?"

Celestial Mechanic: "Because Ken G uses that phrase or a variant of it six times in that post. Here are the quotes, with a little context left in:"
Instance #1:
Instances #2 and #3:
Instances #4 and #5:
Instance #6:
CM: "Emphasis mine, of course."

DB: "Well, with that attitude, I don't expect to be getting ideas from Ken G."

CM: "At least nothing of use for physicists. Let's look closer at some of his arguments in that post."
CM: "I actually agree with this. There cannot be matter without events. That is why I have to say to BISMARCK that his hypothetical question about a universe with just a single photon in it is meaningless, sort of like trying to imagine the sound of one hand clapping."

BH: "I never understood that silly koan."

CM: "But contemplating it sure keeps the navel-gazers engrossed for hours!"
CM: "Not true. Even at low densities, there would still be interactions, it would just take an unimaginable amount of time for the interactions to propagate from one particle to another."
CM: "Well, I don't know, when does a particle of matter that finds itself in a big rip scenario stop being matter and becomes -- what? All the dictionaries may be ripped up but matter will still go on being matter."

BH: "No matter what!"

CM: "Right, no matter what. What follows is a bunch of solipsism that I will skip over, then we have this:"
BH: "There's nothing 'virtual' about any of the mesons and other particles created as the original baryons are pulled apart. They are as real as any other particle and not virtual at all."

CM: "Yes Ken G has a fundamental misunderstanding of virtual particles and what they are, as I will comment on in a bit."
DB: "Has anything been tested in a big rip scenario? Has even the big rip scenario been tested? How can it be tested?"
CM: "This is the place where Ken G demonstrates his misunderstanding of energy conservation and virtual particles. He is referring to the four beta decays that occur in the process of fusing four protons into a helium-4 nucleus, whether by p-p or carbon cycle. Energy and momentum is conserved at every step: for example the total energy and momentum of the deuteron, positron and neutrino is equal to the total energy and momentum of the two protons that collided. The virtual particle in this interaction is the W⁺ emitted by one of the up quarks when it changes to a down quark. Energy and momentum were conserved absolutely when it was emitted, and conserved again when the W⁺ decayed into the positron and neutrino. What makes the W⁺ a virtual particle is that it does not satisfy E²-p²=m², where m is the mass of the W-boson. (Units where c=1 used here.)

CM: "Ken G's time would be better spent reading Weinberg than Wittgenstein. Ken G continues:"
CM: "Is the Big Rip one of these 'global processes'? Is the Big Rip tearing a hadron into more hadrons a global process? Certainly not. And why is my hypothesis an 'over-extrapolation' and the Big Rip is not? There are some that would argue that our entire edifice of cosmology is one of these 'over-extrapolations'. After a bit we have:"
BH: "Surprising that someone steeped in philosophy who claims that it gives us possibilities, has no ideas whatsoever. I see no reason why dark energy cannot generate particles. What is dark energy? What sort of particle carries it? How does it get generated without other particles generating it? As for phase changes, he gives two possibilities that seemingly exhaust the possibilities, either it changes phase or it doesn't, so we can expect one of them to occur, even if we can't figure out which one."

CM: "Good point. Next we have this:"
DB: "Should someone with not even 'the least idea' even be discussing such things?"

CM: "More to the point brought up here though, is the fact that not all carrier particles are virtual. The photons that reach us from a distant galaxy are not virtual, the W's and Z's we've created in particle accelerators are not virtual. Another misunderstanding about the roles of real and virtual particles. And finally there is this:"
BH: "If anyone here has been doing any 'bludgeoning', clearly it's been Ken G, and Disinfo Agent, occasionally assisted by Len Moran and Warren Platts. This was pointed out by EDG_ in the Science and Religion thread, for example. Endless nitpicks over the definitions of words, such as four definitions of 'Objective Reality', the insistence that any scientific idea be subjected to the most minute and rigorous examination while exempting the philosophical and the religious."

CM: "That's a bit harsh, BH, even for me. I will grant that certain people here do tend to go off into philosophy and to do so in a way that is not particularly helpful to the scientific discussion at hand. We have to avoid more threads becoming YAUPTs."

DB: "But you still haven't really answered my question, and I see others are asking it too, namely, why are you posting this in the ATM section?"

CM: "Well, because Ken G seems to think it is, and he is so well-versed in philosophy and knows exactly what science is and how it should be done that if he sees my speculations are pseudoscience, well, I've just got to believe him and take my lumps."

BH: "You don't actually believe that, do you?"

CM: "Not a word of it. This isn't really that against the mainstream, as I'm not starting from a conviction that relativity and quantum mechanics is wrong or any of the weird misconceptions at the root of so many of the ATM theories we deconstruct here."

BH: "With enthusiasm and glee, don't forget!"

CM: "I'm not sure if I could come up with a true ATM theory, I'm more likely to consider some little side-eddy of the mainstream, and that's what this hypothesis is.

CM: "You see, that is the difference between me and Ken G and the others: I have ideas, and they have no idea, not the least idea, and so forth. They can hold forth for page after page and edify each other with how much they don't know; I would rather add to what I know and possibly extend it to find out new things. That is my 'philosophy', make of it what you will."

To be continued...

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Do you understand it? It is based on actual math and physics.

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Interesting side-eddy, CM. There's something I just don't get about the big rip scenario. It's probably just an elementary breakdown in my visualization processes, but in any case, maybe you can clarify the situation for me.

As I understand the accelerating expansion in terms of the cosmological constant, the vacuum energy of space adds more space - space expands - but the "level" or amount of such vacuum energy always stays the same per unit volume of space. It is odd that the density of the vacuum energy does not go down or get "diluted" as space expands (as the matter density does), but I do get that. What I don't get is, I note that my atoms are not currently getting ripped apart; if the vacuum energy always stays the same per unit volume of space, how can it be any different in the distant future?

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