Category Archives: Physics

Did the Universe Begin? II: Singularity Theorems

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Our best theory of gravity is classical General Relativity.  “Classical” is physics-speak for not taking into account quantum mechanics.  So we know that classical GR has to break down during the Planck era, if not later.

Classical Big Bang cosmology predicts that there is an initial singularity at the first moment of time.  In fact, there are some theorems to that effect.  These are the Penrose and Hawking singularity theorems, which will be the subject of this post.

In GR, attractive gravity is caused by the energy or pressure of matter.  Tension (which is negative pressure) produces antigravity (repulsion rather than attraction).

Very crudely speaking, the singularity theorems say that if you assume that matter obeys some energy condition restricting the amount of energy and/or pressure, then you can deduce that under certain conditions there has to be a place where your spacetime has an edge and cannot be extended any further.  This we call a singularity.  Typically, some component of the curvature becomes infinite at the singularity.

There are several different singularity theorems, pioneered by Hawking and Penrose.  One of them says that singularity theorem says that all expanding cosmologies like our own have to begin with a singularity.  Roughly speaking, it says that if there is only gravity and no antigravity, then tracing the universe backwards in time there is no way to stop it from crunching down to zero size.   Hence there must exist an initial singularity (at least somewhere, perhaps everywhere).

However, this Hawking-Penrose theorem uses something called strong energy condition, which says that the repulsive antigravity from tension is not allowed to be greater than the gravity from energy.  It turns out that the strong energy condition can be violated by lots of different types of otherwise reasonable physics theories.  In particular, it was violated during inflation, and it is violated by the cosmological constant today.  So no one really takes this theorem very seriously anymore.

There is another singularity theorem (proven originally by Penrose) which is better, because it only uses the null energy condition, which says that nearby lightrays are always focused by gravity.  This turns out to be a much weaker condition, which is satisfied by most respectable classical matter theories (although it is violated quantum mechanically).  However the Penrose singularity theorem only says that there has to be a singularity if space at one time is infinite.

If space at one time is finite in size (for example, if it is shaped like a 3-sphere) then there might be a “bounce” where the universe contracts to a small size and then starts expanding again.  The de Sitter cosmology is an example of this, although there are also examples of finite cosmologies that begin with singularities.  We don’t really know whether space is finite or infinite, since inflation stretched it out so much that even if it were a giant sphere, the radius is so large that it seems flat today.

A few years ago I wrote an article in which I argued that the conclusions of the Penrose singularity theorem should continue to hold in quantum gravitational situations.  Even though the null energy condition can be violated by quantum fields, it turns out that you can get the same conclusions if you instead assume something called the “Generalized Second Law” (GSL), which says that the Second Law of thermodynamics applies to black holes and similar types of horizons.

(I described the application of this result to time travel in a  recent Scientific American blog post.  Technically, you have to use the time-reverse of the GSL, which I mentioned in the comments here, but if the GSL is true, its time-reverse should also be.  This may seem weird because normally we think of the Second Law as something which only works in one time direction, but I promise you that one can make sense of it.)

The advantage of using the GSL is that it makes it more plausible that the conclusions of the Penrose singularity theorem apply even in fully quantum-gravitational situations, e.g. during the Planck era.  In my article, I showed that the results apply “semiclassically”, meaning when the quantum corrections to spacetime are small but still taken into account.   I then argued (and not everyone would find this part of my article persuasive) that under certain assumptions one might expect the result to hold even in full quantum gravity, when these quantum fluctuations are large.  But remember, all statements about quantum gravity are speculative.

I am a little reluctant to even bring up my own work, since personally I think it is more persuasive that clearly established (but incomplete) physics predicts a beginning, than that speculative new physics says this.  I think of it more as laying the groundwork for a possible future understanding, then a totally conclusive result.  Still, I think that the Penrose theorem is connected to enough other deep principles of physics that something like it will probably be true and important in the final theory of physics.  Other physicists think that singularities are so disturbing that any “complete” theory of physics should eliminate them.

Funny story.  One time I was arguing with an atheist grad student about God and the question of the universe’s beginning came up.  I mentioned my own work (and I am quite sure that I put in some caveats about the potential limitations, since I always do this).  A few weeks later I found him posting on some atheist website cocky statements along the lines of “Theists believe that the universe had a beginning because of the GSL, but this is silly for the following reasons…”.  And this at a time when practically no one else had even heard of my work!  So just in case it isn’t clear: many smart people believed in God before I came along, and the case for Theism is hardly dependent on my tiny contributions to physics!

In conclusion, to the extent that the singularity theorems are relevant, they tend to point to a Beginning, although it might be possible to evade this conclusion either by (a) having space be finite, or else (b) through quantum gravity effects, if my speculative arguments for a quantum singularity theorem are wrong.

Did the Universe Begin? I: Big Bang Cosmology

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The next topic from the Carroll-Craig debate which I wish to discuss is what Science has to say about whether or not there was a beginning.  Was there a first moment of time, before which the universe did not exist?  What does Modern Cosmology have to say about this question?

I think that Modern Cosmology gives a fairly clear answer: probably, but not almost certainly.  But, rather than try to argue only for one particular conclusion, I will instead try to provide the evidence in both directions, on which my opinions are based.

The reason why I say probably is that, given our current best theories of the universe, there are some decent reasons to think that the universe had some type of beginning at the so-called “Big Bang”.  However, once you get to an early enough moment of time, we don’t really understand anything anymore, so really anything might have happened.  That is why the term “Big Bang Model” refers to the (very well-confirmed) theory of the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang, rather than to the Big Bang singularity itself.

Given our current best understanding of particle physics, we think we can describe fairly well the history of the universe starting at around \(10^{-6}\) seconds after the Big Bang.  We’re certainly on-base in the period from about 10 seconds to 20 minutes, since this is when Big Bang nucleosythesis occurred (creating the first atomic nuclei), and we can check that the current abundances of H, He, and Li atoms are in agreement with what our theory of nucleosynthesis predicts.

Inflation (which would have happened at a much earlier time) is somewhat less certain, but it makes pretty good predictions so almost everyone believes in it these days.  The recent BICEP2 results indicate that the energy scale of inflation was just a couple orders of magnitude below the Planck scale seem to have been contaminated by too much dust to be reliable, although most models of inflation still place it at a ridiculously high energy scale.  This is a much higher energy scale than anything else we can measure in physics, although it is comparable to the GUT scale (where most particle physicists, but not I, believe that the forces probably unify into one force).  During the inflation era, the universe grew in an extremely rapid way, stretching out and diluting any information about what the universe was like before inflation.

The Planck era was approximately the first \(10^{-43}\) “seconds after” the “Big Bang”.  This is the era where strong quantum gravity effects become important.  In other words, the quantum uncertainty in concepts of “space” and “time” become so large that our classical concepts break down.  That’s why I put scare-quotes around things in this paragraph—we no longer know what on earth (or in the heavens) we are talking about.  This is the point when everything is pretty much up for grabs.

So, even if we can say there appears to have been a beginning based on an extrapolation of the Big Bang Model to early times, there are also reasons why we can’t be completely sure, so long as we don’t completely understand quantum spacetime (or the initial conditions for inflation).  Certainly the universe as we know it began, but we cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a pre-Big-Bang stage.

Nevertheless, in the next few posts I will discuss the limited evidence which we do have, especially those points which were mentioned in the debate.  In particular I will cover singularity theorems, the BGV theorem, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the quantum eternity theorem.  Oh, and the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal.  That too.

[Updated description of BICEP2 results]

Time Machines and Event Horizons

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I’ve written a pop-article about Time Machines and Event Horizons, which has appeared on the Scientific American blog Critical Opalescence.  George Musser, my host, is an editor at Scientific American, and kindly gave me this opportunity to talk about some of my ideas in my article, The Generalized Second Law implies a Quantum Singularity Theorem.

If you have any questions about the physics in the article, please feel free to leave comments on this post here.  (Questions left on the Scientific American website will be answered in the comments to this post, if anywhere.)

A Question about the Multiverse

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Another question from St. Paul, the reader from New Zealand:

I hope that you are well and that you are having fun with your work. I see that you posted our email exchange on your blog, it was a great answer and much appreciated.

I actually have another question I would like to ask, (although I realise that you may well be planning on writing about it already) but as always I completely understand if you don’t have the time!

I’ve been reading about the recent detection of gravitational waves and how they confirm the theory of inflation. What I have found interesting is that there have been quite a few articles reporting that most models of inflation imply the existence of a multiverse, with quotes from Alan Guth, etc. I realise that the term “multiverse” can be used for several quite different situations, but they seem to be referring to one with variation of the laws of physics, meaning the anthropic principle can be invoked.

I was wondering what you make of this new discovery and what your take on the idea of the multiverse is? I have always felt that the fine-tuning argument was a helpful pointer to God, so I am curious about the implications of confirming inflation (although the existence of multiple universes certainly doesn’t rule Him out).

Thank you for your time,
Paul

A quick explanation concerning “fine-tuning” and the “multiverse”.   Fine-tuning refers to the observation that the fundamental constants of Nature seem to take special values which appear to be necessary to the existence of life.   The fine-tuning argument is a theistic argument which claims that this is good evidence for the existence of God.

One common atheistic retort is to say that maybe there are lots and lots of universes—with different laws of physics in each universe—and that any observers would therefore have to live in the universes which permit life.  This idea is a called the multiverse.

This may sound like crazy science fiction thinking, but I actually think it is the most plausible naturalistic response, given what we now know about physics.  Although there is no really good reason to believe in the multiverse, it seems much more plausible then any of the attempts to construct physical mechanisms to account for this fine-tuning.

However, it is not really clear to me that the multiverse is the sort of thing that ought to count as an explanation for fine-tuning.  In some moods it seems to me like cheating.  Science normally works by postulating theories to fit the observed data, not by postulating (new and unobservable) data to make the theories we have seem less weird.

In fact, there are in fact some serious controversies as to how to properly do Bayesian reasoning in the context of a multiverse.  Pretty much all viewpoints lead to some horrendous paradoxes.  Since the proper way to do probabilistic reasoning in this context is unclear, it is also unclear to what extent the multiverse would be an explanation for fine-tuning.  But this is a complicated question I don’t have time to go into right now.

Instead, Paul asks the different question of to what extent the multiverse is supported by real, actual Science.  In particular, the very recent results from last March about inflation.  For those of you who have been living under a rock, there was a recently announced experimental result in cosmology.  The BICEP2 experiment claims to have seen the gravitational waves resulting from inflation, a very early period in our universe’s history where the size of the universe expanded at an extremely quick, exponential pace.

[Update: the BICEP2 results have since been discredited.]

I wrote to Paul roughly as follows:

Most models of inflation predict “eternal inflation”, meaning not that there wasn’t a beginning, but that in some regions of the universe, inflation continues forever towards the future.

In order to have a multiverse of the sort that might be conceivably relevant to fine-tuning, you need to meet two criteria: (a) a mechanism for producing gazillions of different universes (at least \(10^{150}\) without supersymmetry, or \(10^{60}\) with supersymmetry), and (b) in these different universes, there are an equally large number of different effective parameters describing the low energy physics in each of the universes.

Eternal inflation is conducive to (a) insofar as it would result in widely separated regions which can never causally communicate with each other even at the speed of light.  But it does not by itself do anything to meet condition (b).  The best argument for (b) is probably string theory, which seems to have gazillions of different types of metastable vacua, but there is currently no successful experimental predictions for string theory.  (String theory does seem to imply the existence of gravity, but that’s more of a retrodiction, and isn’t unique to string theory…)

My take on Loop Quantum Gravity

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A friend of mine from St. John’s College, who was recently accepted to a physics doctoral program at Penn State, asked me what my opinion of Loop Quantum Gravity is.  I replied be email, and then I decided, why not tell the world!

Now, Loop Quantum Gravity is the main rival to String Theory as an attempt to quantize gravity, although it only commands about a tenth of the resources that String Theory does.  The people who work on it tend to have more of a General Relativity background than a Particle Physics background, and this tends to influence what types of problems they are trying to solve.

Warning: Unlike my other physics posts, I have made no attempt to make my commentary here accessible to non-physics people.  (Yes, that means every other time I wrote a physics post and nobody understood it, I was the one to blame for not making it accessible enough!)

Einstein’s theory of general relativity is background free, meaning that it does not start with any absolute background space or time, but instead allows the spacetime geometry to be dynamically constructed from the evolution of the metric.  A theory of quantum gravity ought to be similar—it ought to be expressed in a way which doesn’t depend on the prior specification of any spacetime metric.  I think this is really important, but no one really knows how to do this.  There are many ideas, but they all have various difficulties.

In principle, I think the idea of LQG—to build spacetime out of a discrete, quantum structure—is a very elegant and moving idea.  (I first got interested in quantum gravity by reading the online writings of John Baez, who used to work on LQG.)  Also, the LQG people have a very beautiful quantization of space at one time, in terms of spin networks.  Essentially, by doing a step-by-step quantization of GR at one time (minus the dynamics), making only a few arbitrary choices, they were able to obtain spin networks.  I’m sure you [i.e. the friend I was writing to—AW] know what these are, but let me assure you that they are beautiful and have some deep connections to geometrical ideas.

The next step in the construction of LQG is to decide what the dynamics are.  Technically, this is done either (A) by choosing a “Hamiltonian constraint” in parallel with the Hamiltonian formulation of GR, or (B) in the spin-foam formalism, by postulating some sort of sum over histories assigning an action to each spin foam.  It is here which we encounter the major problem: There is no agreement over how to implement the dynamics!  There are many ideas, but no consensus on what to do.  Implementing dynamics seems to involve some arbitrary choices.  Some of the proposed solutions seem to me obviously wrong (e.g. see Smolin’s criticism of Thiemann’s Hamiltonian constraint: arXiv:gr-qc/9609034).  There is also a serious danger that by choosing the wrong dynamics, one breaks the diffeomorphism invariance of the theory.  In the Hamiltonian approach this manifests itself in so-called “anomalies in the constraint algebra”, while in the spin foam approach it is unclear whether the inner product obtained from the sum over histories really has the necessary gauge invariance.  I summarized these problems in passing, with citations, in the Introduction to this article of mine: arxiv:1201.2489.

Thus—even leaving aside the critical hard problem of whether and how a continuum spacetime can emerge from a discrete description (a problem aggravated by the fact that it is difficult to see how any discrete model of spacetime besides causal sets could possibly preserve Lorentz invariance, see arXiv:gr-qc/0605006)—I would say that LQG really doesn’t exist yet as a well-defined theory.  Unless you consider dynamics to be an unimportant part of a theory.  And finding sensible dynamics is a really hard problem, perhaps impossible.

Yet, despite the lack of dynamics, there’s no end of papers where people do specific applications, like count black hole entropy, or even attempt to do quantum cosmology (basically by truncating the theory to a finite number of degrees of freedom, and then quantizing those degrees of freedom in a way which is “loopy” in spirit).  But all of these things are totally provisional until one can embed them in an actual theory with dynamics.   People used to be really interested in solving these hard problems, but I feel like a lot of them have now given up and are seeking more limited goals.  This is a shame, since I think progress can only come by facing the hard issues head on.  And maybe by showing some flexibility in how the theory is formulated.

Once one has the dynamics, again one can say nothing about the real world until one has identified the correct vacuum state.  An arbitrarily constructed “weave” state that happens to look like some Riemannian geometry doesn’t cut it.  You have to figure out how to identify the right vacuum state—the one with lowest energy (once you figure out how to define that!).  Many deep questions here!  I think most people in LQG are asking all the wrong questions.

One can put too much emphasis on quantizing gravity—really that’s backwards, we need the classical theory to emerge from the quantum theory, not vice versa.  When people calculate discrete area and volume spectra for spin network edges and vertices, they’ve got things backwards.  These are just some operators at the Planck scale.  The really interesting question is not, how much “area” is associated with each spin, but how many of each type of spin crosses a given area of the vacuum state (if such a thing even exists).

I despise the ignorant bigotry which most string theorists show towards LQG, even though LQG barely exists as a theory.  Their contempt is undeserved.  The LQG people are trying to do something genuinely harder—to reconstruct spacetime from first principles.  We don’t know how to formulate string theory except by means of strings propagating in some background spacetime, or via dualities like AdS/CFT.  Since the theory has gravitons, with a diffeomorphism gauge symmetry, it’s clear to me there has to be some background free formulation of string theory, but no one has any idea what this would look like.  And most string theorists don’t even understand why it is important.

Personally (and unexpectedly for me) I’ve found that as someone who studies black hole theormodynamics, I can interface better with string theorists than with LQG people—the ones who are really interested in fundamental concepts, like Don Marolf and others at UCSB, for example—even though I don’t really consider myself a string theorist.  This may be a bit of a conceit at this point, since I’ve now written multiple papers on AdS/CFT.  My heart is more strongly devoted to the types of ideas LQG people explore, but my mind recognizes that they really haven’t made all that much progress.