I recently read Hawking's Brief History and enjoyed it.

A few things perplexed me. There was no discussion about the nature of the universe prior to the "big bang", BB.

Did there necessarily need to be matter a "Very Long Time", VLT, before the BB?

As a chemical engineer, I was facinated by this omission of "nucleation." So much so, that I wonder that if a VLT before the BB all stuff was dissolved into free space at 0 Kelvin. Sound absurd? Maybe not considering the theory that positive and negative energy pairs can nucleate at the fringe of a black hole.

What would the universe look like at that time? That seems to be easy. There was nothing but free space at 0 K.

Would this be ordered or unorderd? That would also seem to be easy. It would be considered perfectly ordered with a huge potential for a very large change in entropy.

Would there then be a driving force for the nucleation of stuff? Perhaps.

Did Heisenberg give us a clue that nucleation would eventually take place? And presuming that nucleation happened, what was the rate of growth of stuff to form a sum equal to the current mass of the universe? What would the first nucleated particle pair be?

Does this satisfy that the total energy of the universe is zero?

Finally, if gravitons exist, do other small particles have no gravity or must a graviton be paired with every particle/wave?

What thermodynamic laws have I violated in the above questions and obvious assumptions?

These are just some perplexing thoughts that I have and would appreciate your thoughtful responses.

Thanks.

• Re: Before the Big Bang - ray - July 20, 1999 - 18:01 UTC
• Re: Before the Big Bang - Slavko_Mae/">Slavko Mae - September 23, 1999 - 19:53 UTC