**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[OngBonga]

Going back to the discussion about causality. In the very early universe, cosmic inflation was insanely fast... as in, much faster than the speed of light. It took a fraction of a second to go from near singularity to a massive universe. Furthermore, we observe spacetime expanding faster than c when we observe very distant galaxies.

If spacetime can expand faster than light, why should we assume it can't contract faster than light?

[MadMojoMonkey]

Going back to the discussion about causality. In the very early universe, cosmic inflation was insanely fast... as in, much faster than the speed of light. It took a fraction of a second to go from near singularity to a massive universe. Furthermore, we observe spacetime expanding faster than c when we observe very distant galaxies.

If spacetime can expand faster than light, why should we assume it can't contract faster than light?

IDK.

We don't have a model for the cause of inflation or the cause of the accelerating expansion of the universe we currently observe.

We don't have any good reason to assert that something like cosmic inflation but in reverse could never happen because we don't even know how it happens forward. All we know is that we do not observe anything moving faster than c, no matter how hard we try to. And we have to accept that as a fact and find the consequences, which bear out more facts. Those predictions are observed, so we're probably on to something, but we can never know how far from "finished" physics is because physics describes what we observe and we can never prove that we have observed all there is to observe.

So ... yeah.


I do like the idea that once it's a universe of photons, the expansion of the universe keeps stretching those photons to lower and lower frequencies, longer and longer wavelengths, and (if there is space and time) that is asymptotic behavior to a ground state like a Bose-Einstein condensate... where all the bosons (photons are bosons) in the system share the ground state. 'Cause there's an opposite effect on Bosons to Fermions - where fermions express what manifests as a force pushing out another identical particle from being in the same state at the same time, bosons actually express what manifests as a force pulling identical particles into the same state at the same time.

And if everything is tending toward that ground state where literally everything in the universe is in the same state at the same time... then I think we have your model though QM arguments without denying the existence of space or time in the universe.