The Standard Big Bang model, the Λ-CDM model, considers that there was Dark Matter from the start. What is it made of? No answer so far; both speculative theory and experiments have come up empty. The Big Bang is supposed to fabricate a number of things, none of them behave like Dark Matter. According to specialists, there seems to be a few exotic possibilities left (“Axions”, etc.) So this looks tenuous: their reasonings are too convoluted and depend upon too many axioms.
The Big Bang model exhibits a plethora of axioms, thus the Big Bang itself is not beyond any suspicion, In My Not So Humble Opinion (IMNSHO).
The most blatant case is this. Right, there is a cosmic expansion going on, and also a cosmic ageing: these are obvious facts easily established with powerful telescopes. But there is a blatant philosophical problem: a couple of independent axioms doing the same thing at different times. We have TWO cosmic expansions, none of which is explained by deeper considerations.
The one which came first was the expansion caused by the Big Bang, initially observed first more than a century ago. It just is: by 1920, astronomers were busy showing that groups of galaxies were flying away from each other, and the more away, the faster (that they could discover that from their grainy and messy pictures is amazing; the guy with the biggest scope, Hubble, carried the prize of eternal renown).
The other cosmic expansion was a complete surprise. The first inkling of it were found in refined mathematical analysis in the 1960s (mathematician Segal pointed out that the expansion looked quadratic, not linear; he was ignored by the masses). The universe is expanding at an accelerated pace: there is surplus of energy out there. It is called “Dark Energy”. The obvious question I have asked is why would there be two inflation mechanisms, both unexplained? Maybe there is just one. And the Big Bang is an illusion, just a snapshot of Dark Energy applied over 100 billion years or so. (There are inklings this could be true as some stars are nearly as old as the universe…)
The observed cosmic vacuum energy is roughly zero. Here by “observed” is meant observed as interpreted by using a theory of gravitation, aka “General Relativity” (GR). Roughly the main equation of GR is: Curvature = Energy. If energy is huge, so is curvature, and light beams (which define geodesics in GR spacetime) would immediately converge. They don’t.
We have to think about what this means. Spacetime is highly curved around masses, but not so on the largest size. Why should we think it was ever different? Because of the “Big Bang”? That’s a circular argument.
The Paucity of hypothesis philosophy will go on assuming there is only one cosmic inflation, Dark Energy, and that the Big Bang is an illusion driven by a desire to believe our times are special. (I know some will say Helium was created in the Big Bang… But I am not sure: given enough duration, couldn’t stars make all of it?
As Einstein himself pointed out, the curvature is precisely defined, but the right hand, energy side of the GR equation is not. He was imminently qualified to say so, as by 1912 he and colleagues (starting with Planck himself!) had discovered vacuum energy.
It is traditional to brandish 10^120 as the energy of the vacuum. But that’s obtained by cutting the universe into Planck size boxes first. Then one gets a mass of 10^96 kilograms per cubic meter, 10^46 times the mass of the Sun. Basically all Black Holes, shoulder to shoulder. The ultimate high explosive. Silly stuff.
In SQPR, the number of oscillations of the Pilot Wave is de facto bounded. This also limits the QFT analysis independently of the Planck size, and at a much bigger scale. It also can be all computed. But nobody in the rest of academia was ever interested, aside from… Feynman and De Broglie (whereas my ultra-finite approach to math attracted the attention of a number of top mathematicians, who bothered to check whether their own work would be immune to it…)
To come back to the initial question, Dark Energy answers it: the universe is flat because its engine is Dark Energy, and it’s not that mighty an engine. No “inflaton” there (the short period of inflation of space at 10^23 times the speed of light that Soviet and then US cosmologists suggested to try to reconcile theory and observations). As I pointed out in the past, given enough time, we don’t need the Big Bang. If the Universe is one hundred billion years old, many cosmic riddles vanish. But right now the official truth is that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago (thanks to heavy fudging of cosmic, and comic, proportions). It reminds me of when Lamarck was looking through his microscope at fossils of mollusks million of years old, and the Christian church proclaimed that the universe was only 6,000 years old (that was less old than some oral traditions, let alone Hindu mythology or Persian history)…
Patrice Ayme
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SQPR assumes that the wave function collapse is a force, the Quantum Interaction (QI). That means first that the definition of force of Buridan, something which modifies trajectory, is extended to just having something which causes an effect (that was already the case with the weak force…) Second anything having an effect is retarded. So QI goes at speed, say 10^23 c… Now, third, the nature of the quantum collapse is to shrink the quantum wave W onto itself (namely the quantum wave goes from all over the Hilbert space H, to an eigenvector within it, so collapse: W–> {*}) if the energy of the wave is the sum of the square root of the square of its curvature, it can be extended only to a limited number of cycles before it goes non linear, thus collapses, by interacting with another stray quantum wave, W’…