Starship Asterisk*

Can it be deduced that the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light in the very beginning or is it simply hyper velocities and if it is that what are we calling hyper / what would the normal rate of expansion be.
I have always kind of taken it for granted that it was expanding faster than C at the start

OK I'll take that as a no, its wasn't.
It just seems to me that if it was to hot to form elementary particles at the very beginning then why couldn't it, there was no mass to anything

THX1138 wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 8:52 am OK I'll take that as a no, its wasn't.
It just seems to me that if it was to hot to form elementary particles at the very beginning then why couldn't it, there was no mass to anything

What does it mean to expand faster than the speed of light? Are you asking if there were 3D points within the Universe that were moving away from each other at greater than c?

THX1138 wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 8:52 am OK I'll take that as a no, its wasn't.
It just seems to me that if it was to hot to form elementary particles at the very beginning then why couldn't it, there was no mass to anything

I've been thinking of how to answer your question, but I couldn't find an answer by searching Wikipedia.

Wikipedia wrote::
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10−36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to some time between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the singularity.

So Wikipedia told us how long the cosmic inflation lasted, but not how big the Universe grew during inflation. And it didn't give us much of an estimate of the acceleration rate of the Universe during this time, either.

However, other sources were more forthcoming:

The Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology wrote:
During inflation, the Universe expanded by a factor of about e⁶⁰=10²⁶. This number is a one followed by 26 zeros.

BBC Sky at Night Magazine wrote:

(The general theory of relativity) reveals space-time to be a kind of backdrop to which the galaxies are effectively nailed.

That ‘backdrop’ – not being a material thing – can expand at any rate it likes. And it certainly did.

That was during the epoch of inflation, during the first split-second of the Universe’s existence, when the expansion of the Universe occurred at a rate that was effectively far faster than the speed of light.

So, basically, things in the Universe can't move faster than light, but the Universe itself is not constrained by any such speed limit. And it did move faster than light during inflation, according to Marcus Chown of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

And from our point of view, some galaxies are indeed moving faster than light. As the Universe expands and indeed accelerates, it carries the galaxies with it. As it does so, the galaxies move farther and farther away from us, and they also seemingly pick up speed - after all, that is what Hubble's law is all about.


So if the expansion of the Universe carries the galaxies with it, and if galaxies recede from us faster the farther away they are, then there will be a point at which the galaxies recede from us faster than the speed of light. After that, we can never again observe them, because their light will never reach us. (Or if somehow their light does reach us anyway, it will be so redshifted that we can't detect it.)

Admittedly, exactly what happens at the cosmic event horizon is a tricky question, and not one I should try to explain. If you want to, you can find an explanation here. Good luck understanding it.

That's the best I can do for you.

Ann

I posted this question because of an article that I read (which I'm having problems with trying to find again) That stated that its possible that the speed of light was faster in the beginning of the universe and has been slowing down every since but doing so, so slowly that our instruments are unable to detect it. I should have posted the article right away as I can't remember what it was that led them to believe that this was a possible explanation a observation of one kind or another. Darn it, I'm still trying to find it though

THX1138 wrote: ↑Fri Dec 23, 2022 2:14 pm I posted this question because of an article that I read (which I'm having problems with trying to find again) That stated that its possible that the speed of light was faster in the beginning of the universe and has been slowing down every since but doing so, so slowly that our instruments are unable to detect it. I should have posted the article right away as I can't remember what it was that led them to believe that this was a possible explanation a observation of one kind or another. Darn it, I'm still trying to find it though

We don't know for certain that any of the fundamental constants have stayed the same over time, although they all have experimentally determined bounds on the range they could have varied over. There's a good Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-vari ... _constants