Recent content by Chalnoth

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    B What is meant by the size of the early observable universe?

    It's a relative statement rather than a statement about the overall size, since the overall size is not observed. What it means specifically is that objects in our universe that we observe today were much closer together.
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    I Plateau models of inflation after Planck

    I don't think eternal inflation says anything one way or another about a multiverse, at least not an interesting one. All that you get from eternal inflation is a huge universe. What you need to also get a multiverse that is more interesting than just being really big is some mechanism to have...
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    B Is the Expansion of the Universe Uniform?

    What are you talking about?
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    B Is the Expansion of the Universe Uniform?

    Not quite. From what we can tell, the rate of expansion has done nothing but decrease. Early-on it decreased very rapidly, and less so more recently. The rate has been slowing down slowly enough over the last few billion years that objects have started accelerating away from one another. If...
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    I Is the Force on a Particle in a Homogeneous Static Universe Always Zero?

    If you want to see the derivation, see here, for example: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~dhw/A5682/notes4.pdf The short version is that doing the calculation the way you did was incorrectly taking account of the symmetry of the system. When you use the symmetry of the system to make use...
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    I Is the Force on a Particle in a Homogeneous Static Universe Always Zero?

    One way you can do the Newtonian derivation, by the way, is to use Gauss's law. Since the universe is spherically-symmetric about every point, it's possible to simply reduce the problem to a single sphere: pick an origin and a radius, and you only need to consider the mass inside that sphere...
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    I Is the Force on a Particle in a Homogeneous Static Universe Always Zero?

    That's not true. Newton's laws recreate the first Friedmann equation exactly for the case of a uniform, matter-only fluid. If you modify Newton's laws to account for the cosmological constant, then that is included correctly as well. Radiation isn't included correctly, however.
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    A Is Dark Energy an Illusion? A Closer Look at Concordance Cosmology

    I don't see why the underdense regions should cause the overdense regions to recede from one another more rapidly.
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    A A cosmological expansion problem too difficult for me

    Probably a better way to tackle this problem would be to imagine an infinite, uniform grid of point masses as compared to the uniform fluid.
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    A Is Dark Energy an Illusion? A Closer Look at Concordance Cosmology

    I really don't see how this can work. It's certainly very much contrary to the way gravity works in most every other situation. With a spherically-symmetric mass distribution, for example, the gravitational attraction at some specific distance depends only upon the mass contained within a...
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    B How Does Space Expand? Understanding Universe Expansion

    Because the expansion doesn't involve creating matter. It's just existing matter getting further apart. That said, matter/mass can certainly be created or destroyed. Mass is a form of energy, and other forms of energy can be converted to mass under the right conditions. When heavy particles...
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    I Is there a relationship between dark matter and anti-matter?

    Anti-matter has all of the exact same properties of normal matter, except that its electric charge is opposite*. Dark matter has no electric charge at all, hence why it is dark. There's no reason to believe that normal matter and anti-matter are related in any sort of simple sense. There is...
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    I Is there a relationship between dark matter and anti-matter?

    Yes. CMB observations put the nail in that coffin, as the CMB was emitted before any compact objects would have formed, and the signature of dark matter in the CMB itself is very clear.
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    B Will eLISA have the potential to detect early universe GWs?

    Gravitational waves from the early universe? The short answer is yes. It should, to some extent, be able to measure the overall background of gravitational waves in the universe. Provided it reaches its design sensitivity and the background signals can be effectively separated from the...
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    I Math doesn't add up: stars + planets < particles in universe?

    It's not the number of planets times the number of stars. There aren't ##10^{24}## planets per star, but close to ##10^{24}## planets in the entire universe. So a (somewhat) more reasonable calculation would be: Atoms on Earth (##10^{50}##) * (number of planets (##10^{24}##) + number of stars...
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