Big bang as spontaneous demixing event
All of this might be complete bogus - I strongly advise the reader to treat this just as food for thought!
Contents
Clearing misconceptions
By the way:
The big bang was not an "explosion" starting at some "point" as often is believed.
Due to the limit of light speed when wee look out we see into the past.
We can see only back till the time when our universe finally became transparent for light.
Beyond that spherical horizon (the ancient microwave background) we cannot see.
What we can see is actually only a tiny part of the universe.
This tiny part indeed was compressed to almost a "point".
The actual universe beyond our horizon of visibility has no known border.
In the local vicinity of our tiny bubble that we can see it would most likely have to look consistent with what we see inside.
But what is beyond that?
Actually being outside the light cone is pretty much the best isolation to spacetime events that one could think of.
And quantum mechanics gets the more active the better one isolates an experiment.
So if one accepts quantum mechanics madness that two contradictory things can be true at the same time and transposes this to universal scales then one can think of the far outskirts of the universe far beyond our visibility horizon as areas where all possible universes "exist" placeless and timeless jumbled up into - what shall we call it - the multiverse (?).
Universe a closed system?
Assuming the universe as is an isolated system (which may makes sense when we define the universe as everything we can possibly interact with) then according to the second law of thermodynamics when looking back in time we must see entropy decreasing. This leaves the big bang as the state with lowest entropy and highest order. By assuming something "before" the big bang one just defers the problem of where the low entropy stems from. Instead let us check whether the big bang could have been a spontaneous demixing event.
Demixing by Poincaret recurrence - small and large
Demixing does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics since it is just a statistical law. Don't worry no perpetual motion machines upcoming - (except the whole multiverse as only exception maybe). Isolated microscopic systems (like e.g. a microscopic gas chamber) that start with a highly ordered state (all gas molecules on one side) will after a while of mixing (entropy increases to the point the molecules have no bias to one side) spontaneously demix (entropy decrease to the point the molecules are on one side again - arbitrarily close to the initial state). This is called the poincaret recurrence theorem. At nano-scales this recurrence happens frequently and is e.g. responsible for thermal jerks that cause jumps of atoms in different lattice points in the slower diffusion processes (e.g. in earths mantle movements over geologic times).
In principle there is no size limit to poincaret demixing recurrence but with every molecule (or whatever other degree of freedom) added the time for the recurrence doubles. At human scales recurrence times already are many many orders of magnitude beyond the age of the universe. It's rather rare that e.g. the air molecules around you "decide" to knock you over. But in principle they can. At universal scales (spontaneous generation of the low entropy state at the big bang) recurrence times are even greater.
lack of information processing time perceiving observers makes time "nonexistent"
So why seriously considering a spontaneous demixing event as the explanation for the big bang is recurrence times are mindboggling uber astronomical?
Lets assume that time that is not experienced by information processing conscious observers does not "exist". It is not sampled by any information processing frame-rate.
Any universe in a state nearing complete thermal death (maximal entropy) the "arrow of time" is lost. If one is given a sample of perfect white noise it is indistinguishable from its reverse. In fact all different possible universes become indistinguishable when nearing thermal death.
Without flow of time and without the availability of thermodynamic free energy there is no support for information processing entities and thus there cannot be any time perceiving consciousness.
So whatever ginormous (directionless) pseudo timescales there are "before" a big bang - they are shrunk down to zero. This is closely related to the anthropic principle. We can only observe those parts of the the universal "evolution" where the laws allow information processing entities like us to exist. This is also related to what happens before birth and after death of information processing conscious entities like me and you. And why we stay we. Or do we ?
Consequence
Demixing is extremely costly (every additional demixed degree of freedom halves the "probability of existence") so it seems more than a bit likely that most universes (including ours) did just spent the very bare minimum amount of demixing to create to allow information processing conscious entities to be possible (simple universes strongly preferred - fine tuning).
One may imagine to plot a graph with "universe demixing complexity" on the x-axis and "consciously perceived time in these universes" at the y-axis. Integrating/summing over that infinite distribution gives a finite probability of 1 (normed - an infinite but convergent sum). (TODO: maybe add some fantasy graphs) Judging from the minimalism of our universe (low dimensional in space (3D) => two eyed life forms; number of stable elements not more than necessary) one might suspect that this distribution has a sharp peak at the bare minimum complexity for "life".
- Is fighting thermal death theoretically possible? - universe really closed system? - QM measurements fixate not yet defined amount of demixing?
Related
- quantum computing
External links
- Second law of thermodynamics (leave to Wikipedia - please come back again)
- Poincaré recurrence theorem (leave to Wikipedia - please come back again)
- Anthropic_principle (leave to Wikipedia - please come back again)
