Saturday, 1 May 2010

Strength of gravity during the big bang?

The truth is we do not have a working or widely accepted "theory of everything" that unifies gravitation with the other fundamental, and quantum, field theories. What we do have is strong evidence that the other field theories - electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear - are unified at high energies (indeed the evidence is so strong that I doubt it is widely disputed at all).



We do have a theory of gravitation - general relativity - that appears to work well in "most" circumstances, though it also has a singularity (black holes) and there is a fundamental difference between it and the quantum theories about vacuum energy (the so-called vacuum catastrophe).



What we also know is that gravitation appears to much weaker than the other forces, though it can act over very large distances and so is fundamental in shaping the nature of our universe.



There are various arguments about how/why our universe is able to support life/is the way it is. Perhaps it is just one of many/an infinite number of universes that have a range of physical properties and we just happen to be in one that "works" for life - obviously there could be no life in a universe that had physical properties that didn't support life.



At another extreme perhaps we are all inside a computer simulation.



I'd suggest hunting down works by Max Tegmark or Brian Greene for more information.

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