Expert: Tom Whiting - 6/4/2009

Question
QUESTION: do scientists have any idea as to what exploded, or expanded?

ANSWER: Hi Brian,
The short answer is no, we as yet, don't know how or what happened. I hate to use the word "explosion" because it really wasn't an explosion in the normal sense, even though people use that word.
It was more a "happening" or an event, that produced a tremendous amount of energy, plus space and time at that instant - a conventional explosion does NOT produce space and time.  But common sense seems to indicate that it may have been more a sub-atomic event, down at the quantum level. And then just expanded rapidly from there.  Even in today's cyclotrons (atom smashers) we see virtual particles appear virtually out of nothing, a matter and anti-matter particle, and immediately annihilate each other, leaving only energy.  So it's just a short stretch of the imagination to the view that "something" occurred in the primordial Void that existed prior to the Big Bang, perhaps some random fluctuation at the quantum level (very small)...perhaps two very massive particles burst onto the scene, and annihilated each other, releasing all the latent vacuum energy, into and forming, our known Universe.  But this is just a theory, the truth is we just don't know as yet.

We do know that there had to be a slight excess of normal matter over anti-matter, because our Universe contains 4% normal matter, the other 96% is dark matter and dark energy, and we have no idea what those are, as yet.  In fact we just use those "dark" terms right now because we have no idea what they are...all we know for now is that they don't emit any radiation (so they are dark) and so they are, so far, undetectable, but we know they are there from other confirmed studies.  But of course, new data is always being obtained, so we could know more later, so stand by...but that's as much as we can say, for now.
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting
Erie, PA

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: thank you, i have an unrelated question pertaining to black holes and how light can not escape its effects,

Let's say that a black hole pulls light into it because the area of space/time that the light occupies is moving faster toward the black hole than C. If space is contracting into the black hole, near the black hole, then it must be expanding somewhere else to balance the effect, mustn't it?

Suppose there are two gravitational bodies, each pulling space into itself. At the (gravitational) midpoint between the two, space would have to be expanding, in order for this not to lead to a contradiction. If you park your star ship at that midpoint, it stays put because space is expanding equally in both directions.

Midpoints between gravitational bodies, of course, follow a different geometry than gravitational bodies themselves, because they're more like lines than points (though they're probably not exactly lines either). It's possible that any area of space far from a particular gravity well would be in a constant state of expansion, to counter the contractions of the gravitational bodies around it.

This could potentially lead to the same result as the Hubble observations. It might appear that space expands in all directions because all the light that reaches us spends a great deal of time in the outer reaches where space is expanding to make up for the contractions near the gravity wells.

However: this does not necessarily mean that the universe as a whole ever expands at all. Maybe all the contractions add up to countering all the expansions, and space is left at the same size.

something that just popped into my head, i would be gratedul if you would disect my thought. thank you.

Answer
Hi Brian,
I'm afraid your initial premises are not correct.  A black hole
does not "pull" light (or anything else) into it.  The space is not
"contracting" in, or near a black hole. Gravity is not a force as
Newton thought, gravity is a curvature of space caused by presence
of a mass. With a black hole, space is completely curved spherically
around the black hole. There is no "sucking, pulling, or contracting"
going on...the space-time continuum is simply a closed curve
all the way around the black hole....thus it is completely cut off
from our Universe.  And anything, even light, entering the
virutal boundary of that curvature...called the event horizon....
enters the black hole region and cannot escape because the event horizon marks the outer boundary where it would take a speed faster than light, to escape from inside that boundary.  And since speeds
in excess of light are not possible, the body is lost forever and
never heard from again.  It's that simple...don't complicate it
with "National Enquirer" reports.  Black holes are very simple, as
they only have mass, spin, and charge (which is thought to be equal
to zero)....there is no other physical characteristics to a black
hole, as they are quite a simple "animal".
So your initial premises are flawed....there is no "contraction"
of space going on in, or around, a black hole...on the large
Universal scale it's all accelerating expansion of space at the
current Hubble value of about 74 Km/sec per Megaparsec.
A megaparsec is = 3.26 million lightyears).

Space is expanding (and would be expanding even if there were no
such thing as black holes) as a result of the expansion since the
inflationary period of the Big Bang.  Initially, the first 5-6 billion years, ths expansion was decelerating as the presence of matter slowed the expansion rate. But then the matter became so diluted for the amount of space, the Universe...the dark energy in the Universe, overrode the matter component, and the Universe began, once again, accelerating it's spacial expansion.
And will continue to accelerate it's expansion as time goes by.
(We will die from either a "Big Rip Apart" or a total heat death....
in hundreds of trillions of years...one or the other. No Big Crunch,
no contraction, it's either the Big Rip or the no energy left to
warm us up...a slow heat death down to absolute zero. We don't know
which will occur first, because both are such a long time away.
(We have only just begun...like last month on a Universal time
scale...only 13.7 billion years ago, with hundreds of trillions
of years ahead of us...us, the Universe, not the Solar System).

Black holes have nothing to do with this spacial expansion.
Gravity does not suck, it simply curves the space-time continuum.
In effect, as Einstein said of his General Relativity (Circa 1917),
matter tells space how much to curve, and space tells matter how to
move. There is zero correlation between black holes and the general
spacial expansion, no matter what the "National Enquirer" says.
You could have figured that out because black holes are small and
very local in nature (10 miles in diameter?), whereas the general expansion of the Universe IS the entire Universe...they aren't anywhere near each other the size scale.
Hope this helps,
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting
Erie, PA