Big Bang Was Actually a Phase Change, New Theory Says
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From space.com ( http://www.space.com/17217-big-bang-phase-change-theory.html? ) :
Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice.
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“Think of the early universe as being like a liquid,” Quach said in a statement. “Then as the universe cools, it ‘crystallises’ into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice.”
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The notion that space and time are emergent properties that suddenly materialized out of an amorphous state was first put forth by physicists at Canada’s Perimeter Institute in 2006. Called “quantum graphity,” the theory holds that the four-dimensional geometry of space-time discovered by Albert Einstein is not fundamental; instead, space-time is more like a lattice constructed of discrete space-time building blocks, just like matter looks continuous, but is actually made of building blocks called atoms.
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They start with points ("vertices"
in an environment with unspecified dimensions. A vertex represents the presence of a particle of matter, with matter-related degrees of freedom being possible within a vertex. A vertex is not the same as a position, as of yet, no distances/dimensions/metric have been defined.
Vertices are connected by an "edge", which is treated as a quantum degree of freedom, as a superposition of |0> and |1>.
Next he constructs a Hilbert-space from those edge-states. A group state containing all of the edges contains the info, how all of the vertices are interconnected.
The chaotic state of the early universe is represented by a "complete graph", which means, everything is connected to everything.
Next he uses an Hamiltonian-operator to enforce attributes on the edges. An important attribute is locality, which is represented by a circular loop of edges. He also introduces a punitive potential to ensure that vertices close to each other connect preferably.
The balance between the need to form loops and the need to stay local has a stable state in an energy-minimum. The geometrical representation is a honeycomb lattice. (This is not 2D! The dimensionality of the space the edges represent isn't restricted so far!)
This is a summary of pages 1-3. 8 more pages to go.
