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Aswad -> RE: I had a crazy idea (8/8/2011 9:42:26 AM)
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The Big Bang?
See, recent inquiries into the CMB give a decent estimate of a diffraction event at a point in spacetime prior to the Big Bang, which would tend to indicate that there was something before it (if we disregard time, which is just a component of distance, it would probably be viable to say the event was a causal antecedent of an event in the Earth-observable spacetime region, though whether it was causal of the Big Bang isn't something one can gainfully speculate on).
That said, if one posits a transition in the "speed limit", a coherent beam of light entering a medium that has a lower absolute speed of light (not talking about refractive indices and such here), would presumably behave similarly to how physical transitions in speed do, which is by forming a toroidal structure that eventually tends to resemble a mushroom cloud (unless the toroid has soliton characteristics).
The common example is a smoke ring.
With a toroidal topology caused by a speed transition, perhaps due to moving against a "brick wall" gravity gradient, the universe would undergo a period of rapid inflation as the toroid forms, and then either grow more diffuse in the manner of a mushroom cloud, or stay in toroidal configuration if it was close to the soliton requirements. A slight deviation from soliton requirements would give an expanding or contracting universe, depending on which direction the deviation ran. Current observation favors an expanding universe, corresponding to an overshoot relative to the stable state.
Toroids are interesting structures, among other things because rotating around both axes means you have to turn 720 degrees to get back to where you started, just like electrons. Some physicists have done fringe work on a theory that this has implications for the fundamental behavior of the universe, ranging from models of excitations on a toroidal surface to "strips" having a toroidally closing curvature that gives rise to observed physical constants.
The best example of the rotation thing is something most people have made at some point: a möbius strip. Anyone that hasn't made one, is encouraged to take a strip of paper, twist it once and then glue the ends together. When you follow the surface of the strip, you will see that it actually only has one side from the perspective of an ant crawling along the surface. If you draw a line around a donut, starting on the near side top, moving to the far outside middle, then to the near side bottom, then to the far inside middle, and back to the near side top, that is the exact same path through space, and clearly visualizes a macroscopic spin-1/2 condition: you must turn 720 degrees about the donut to return to the outset, so long as you're rotating around the crossection of the donut (poloidal axis) with the same angular velocity as around the outline of the donut (toroidal axis).
For your edification, there's also a superconducting möbius train demo on YouTube showing a train moving around a track in this way by using something called flux pinning (which is way off topic, but WP covers it if you're interested).
Just some random thoughts.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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