Cosmic Fun: Random Ramblings in Modern Cosmology: The Condensing Universe

The following ideas are primarily mine alone, the good, the bad and the ugly, albeit based on and influenced by reading multi volumes of tomes in modern cosmology. However, I’m also quite sure that numerous others have quite independently thought somewhat similar, if not exact, thoughts as well. Therefore, I’ll take no credit for being right, if I don’t get blamed for being wrong!

THE CONDENSING UNIVERSE

The complexity of the Universe is highly temperature dependent.

In the beginning (the Big Bang), the Universe was very hot and very dense. From that moment on, the Universe has expanded, become ever cooler. What happens in general when things become cooler? Well, on can say that complexity increases as things become cooler. Steam isn’t very complex, but cool it down to a liquid (a phase transition) and you’d have to conclude that water is a more complex physical substance than steam. Cool water down through another phase transition and complexity increases again – ice crystals are certainly more complex than drops of water.  In general, if you apply heat to something, inherent complexity decreases. For example, a human body at room temperature is much more complex than that same body post cremation! A rock is chemically more complex than the sun. A magnet loses its magnetism when heated. And so on.

If all you had were steam (water vapour), and you cooled things down, what would condense out would be liquid water: 100% water. If however you have your usual atmospheric mix of gases and cooled things down, you’d condense out the different components at different temperatures. Water might condense out first, the carbon dioxide, and then say oxygen or nitrogen, and probably lastly, hydrogen. What was a uniform chemical mixture has separated into the discrete chemicals that previously were all mixed up together.

Appling the above rules of thumb to the young Universe and I conclude that the Universe has gone from a simple uniform mixture of very hot stuff in the beginning (a ylem – to use George Gamow’s term for the ‘primordial substance from which all matter is formed’), stuff which then condensed out as unique entities (from the ylem-like-plasma to the various particles and forces, hence nucleosynthesis and matter, etc.) as the Universe expanded and cooled, and hence increased in complexity – atoms to molecules to stars and galaxies and planets and life. In other words, I suggest that the ‘in the beginning’ Universe was more akin to our atmosphere (a mixture) rather than just a 100% uniform stuff (like just water vapour).  This makes a sort of sense in particular if our Big Bang was somebody else’s Big Crunch. However, this seems to run against the grain of current thinking which (unless I’ve really misunderstood things) which suggests that ‘in the beginning’ the energy (temperature) was great enough that all the particles/forces were unified. However, I fail to see how a unified stuff (this ylem-like-plasma) could cool and ultimately condense out to produce un-unified stuffs! I’ve probably celebrated pass-over somewhere along the line in that the accepted concept (uniform stuff) has passed over my head!