Steven wrote, "Space can expand faster than light." This is oft-said and not-so oft explained. Why should space have a property which is essentially nonphysical until something physical expands to occupy it? Why, too, did space abruptly expand at at specific point in time, achieve the expansion velocity that it did, and slow to approx its present rate at a point in time so briefly after it began? What set the initial and ending boundaries? These issues have been floating without definition in my awareness for some time and this is a good occasion to address them. They are also very relevant: I’m comparing data re today’s cosmic matter-energy inventory (
Fukugita et al) and Brian Lacki’s
“CMD” of the energy sky (Fig 4), with a recent group of papers devoted to the properties of cosmic voids and filaments,
Rieder,
Alpaslan,
Tempel,
Libeskind. These introduce important issues, e.g., the large- to small-scale granularity of the products of inflation. But I note that all of these and others I’ve come across interpret space in terms of the interaction of mass density and energy density. Theirs is of course not the place to address what properties existed when there was space very high in potential energy density which endured an era 10 orders of magnitude in time in which no commensurate matter density existed. My question is not the hoary “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is space so small?” Steven, could you elaborate on some of these issues? It would help me no end.
And oh yes, since we are on matters of great magnificence and enormity, could you enlighten this non-Ozzie what the dickens a “Gish Gallop” is? =Thanks, Dana in S A