Thinking About Cosmology
Or, I may have just solved cosmic inflation while driving in my car
I’ve read so many general science books on cosmology. They are fascinating and — when well written and not overly precise — entertaining and approachable. Thank you Brian Greene, Carl Sagan, Sean Carroll, Katie Mack, etc.
The mathematics are way beyond me. That’s why I’m a science writer and not colliding protons at CERN. And, as Stephen Hawking noted in his best-selling A Brief History of Time, “Each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.” He may be right. I want to intuitively grasp a topic, not publish a paper on it.
But why not? In my 40 odd (very odd) years as a science writer, I’ve read probably hundreds of papers that had little in the way of scientific merit. Some lacked any grounding in reality at all.
My personal favorite was a paper I read while working for the American Geological Institute immediately after undergrad. It was about limestone mineral inclusions that were actually miniture humans reclining on couches. I indexed it and went on to my next assignment.
Part of my job as a communicator and frequent public speaker on popular science is to find analogies for seemingly insurmountably complicated concepts. ** Warning, do not attempt this as a party game if you value your friendships.
In March 2014, Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach wrote what I believe is the best example of taking the most complex and unfathomable subject in all of science and introducing it to the reader by extending a truly elegant “helping hand.” Though the result (the BICEP2 result) failed peer review (science is messy at times), the paragraph he crafted still stands as a fantastic bit of simplifying without dumbing down.
“In the beginning, the universe got very big very fast, transforming itself in a fraction of an instant from something almost infinitesimally small to something imponderably vast, a cosmos so huge that no one will ever be able to see it all.
“This is the premise of an idea called cosmic inflation — a powerful twist on the big-bang theory…”
Nice and clean. No jargon. No reaching for the “big number swoon” by trying to explain the precise “10 to the negative 16" second blip in time.
Since reading that bit of reporting, I have aspired to it. And, sometimes, I like to think about the big topics in science at the same level of simplicity.
I also apply it when trying out new ways of looking at things and wondering if some of my half-baked ideas actually held water.
So this past weekend, I was listening to some science podcasts and pondering cosmic inflation and the electroweak force. This led me to looking a bit more at topics I was only loosely familiar with: Kaluza-Klein mechanisms, scalar field phase transitions, and higher-dimensional inflation.
This mental exercise eventually took me down dark paths of the standard model of cosmology, which treats inflation and the Higgs field/boson as separate temporal events.
The general thrust of my inquisitive conjectures uncovered a ongoing quest at the frontiers of theoretical physics to link inflation to the geometry of extra dimensions and the behavior of vacuum energy fields.
The devil in the details in this area of speculative research is that the universe may have had a few extra spatial dimensions that collapsed in the first “fraction of a second.”
In string theory, these dimensions (anywhere for 5 to 11 total spacetime dimensions) became curled up at the Planck length, allowing cosmic strings to vibrate in multiple dimenions and give rise to the particles and forces we see today.
So, in the hot, dense early universe, all these dimensions were free to expand — Inflationary Big Bang Theory. However, at a certain critical point, three of them kept growing to become our macroscopic universe, while the others stopped expanding and curled up (compactified) into sizes so infinitesimally small we can no longer perceive them.
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The problem with this hypothesis is a collapsing spatial dimension is not a gentle process. It would release energies that, even 13.8 billion years later, would be observable on the grandest cosmic scales.
Bring on the Higgs
Where my wild speculation seems to depart from at least modestly championed ideas is tying the loss of spatial dimensions, even just one extra, to a Higgs field phase transition.
Hold on. The ride gets a bit bumpy from hereon out.
It’s theorized that sometime after cosmic inflation ended, the Higgs field (the unvisible field that kicks out a boson if you spend enough effort and have an LHC in your back yard) underwent a phase transition. Particles finally had mass and gravity and could start to do their thing.
There is a well-known model called Higgs Inflation (proposed by physicists Bezrukov and Shaposhnikov) that suggests that the Higgs field itself, heavily coupled to gravity, drove inflation before settling into its current phase.
There are also theoretical models exploring “spontaneous compactification,” where a scalar field undergoing a phase transition releases energy that triggers the extra dimensions to curl up and lock into place.
In the Standard Model of particle physics, scientists only talk about one Higgs field. But in Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), physicists propose that there isn’t just one Higgs field, but a whole family of them, or a single complex Higgs field with a highly intricate “potential energy landscape.”
I wondered, however, what if there was a multi-step transition. Instead of a simple bowl with one bottom where the Higgs settles down for all eternity, the early universe’s energy landscape looks more like a mountain range with multiple valleys.
So, instead of the dimension physically collapsing into nothing (which releases a catastrophic amount of geometric energy), a Higgs field phase transition might have changed the universe’s connection to a higher fourth dimension that once drove inflation.
If the Higgs-like field is what dictates how matter and forces interact with the geometry of space, a phase transition could effectively “turn off” the gravity or the fields that allow information and energy to flow into that fourth dimension.
The dimension doesn’t have to vanish or shrink to zero; it simply becomes completely inaccessible to our three-dimensional physics. It is structurally “walled off” because the field holding the door open changed its state.
When Alan Guth first proposed inflation in 1980, it had a problem dubbed the “graceful exit problem. The universe couldn’t stop inflating uniformly.
To patch the hole, physicists realized inflation couldn’t be a simple, one-stop phase transition. They had to introduce more complex fields that could slowly roll, trigger secondary transitions, or couple to gravity in dynamic ways.
What if the solution were a bit more elegant? What if it didn’t happen all at once?
To wrap things up, my speculation does need a simple analogy. Something akin to Achenbach’s pithy summary. Here’s my attempt:
Phase 1: The 4D Inflation and the Higgs Plasma: In the very earliest moments of the universe, fractions of a second too small to conceive, the Higgs field was like a super hot, swirling jumble of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. At such high energies, the Higgs field could drift freely into other spatial dimentions, dragging space and time with it billions of times faster and farther than the speed of light.
Phase 2: The Steam / Vapor (Electroweek Era): Eventually, the universe became cold enough that the Higgs field went through its first phase transition, forever shutting the door to higher dimensions and putting the brakes on cosmic inflation. Back to the hydrogen and oxygen analogy, the individual atoms had now formed water molecules — like a dense scorching steam for the water analogy. In cosmology, there is where we get the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces instead of the unified electroweak force.
Phase 3: The Universe (and the Higgs field) as we see it today: The next transition “freezes” the steam into liquid water. Suddenly, the universe has buoyancy, sinking, and resistance — a Higgs field can now impart mass and inertia.
If I were to write this up as an abstract, I’d say:
Standard cosmological models rely on a brief period of hyper-expansion called “cosmic inflation” to account for the uniform distribution of matter and energy observed in the early universe. However, the precise mechanism that drove inflation and caused it to shut off abruptly — known as the “graceful exit” problem — remains an open debate. I present a synthesized theoretical framework: the Cascading Scalar Field Hypothesis. This model proposes that an underlying energetic field (a grand-unified Higgs field) underwent a series of successive phase transitions in the early universe. The first transition triggered the dynamical decoupling — rather than a physical collapse — of a fourth spatial dimension. A subsequent phase transition at a lower energy scale corresponds to the standard freezing out of the forces of nature, which eventually allowed particles to acquire mass.
Now all I need is a PhD in particle physics and enough money to finally build the Superconducting Supercollider.
