[b]Alan Guth
The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.[/b]
Let alone the banging of dasein.
It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
You know, for 70 odd years.
It turns out that the energy of a gravitational field—any gravitational field—is negative. During inflation, as the universe gets bigger and bigger and more and more matter is created, the total energy of matter goes upward by an enormous amount. Meanwhile, however, the energy of gravity becomes more and more negative. The negative gravitational energy cancels the energy in matter, so the total energy of the system remains whatever it was when inflation started—presumably something very small. …This capability for producing matter in the universe is one crucial difference between the inflationary model and the previous model.
Of course that’s just common sense.
We should not act like we know that the universe began with the Big Bang…we’ll see that there are strong suggestions that the Big Bang was perhaps not really the beginning of existence, but really just the beginning of our local universe, often called a pocket universe.
I know: What was God thinking?!
The conventional Big Bang theory says nothing about where all the matter came from. The theory really assumes that for every particle that we see in the universe today, there was, at the very beginning, at least some precursor particle, if not the same particle, with no explanation of where all those particles came from.
Obviously: the Christian God.
A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories…which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction. We’re talking about energies which are about 1016 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. The initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10-28 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it.
Let’s get out our slide rules.