The inflationary universe
by Alan H. Guth · first published 1997
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The classic big bang theory is great at describing what happened after the bang. Yet until recently, particle physicists and cosmologists were stuck on many questions that the big bang theory couldn't answer, including: What made the big bang BANG in the first place? If matter can be neither created nor destroyed, how could so much matter arise from nothing at all? Why can we only see a minute part of the mega-universe? In 1979, a young particle physicist named Alan Guth answered these questions and made front-page news with one of the greatest discoveries in modern cosmology: cosmic inflatio
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…(to answer your question). That caused enormously fast expansion of the universe. Very shortly afterwards, the false vacuum "decayed", and gravity started behaving as you know it. Check out Alan Guth's inflationary universe - a surprisingly accessible book on a deeply complex subject. Someone please correct me where I'm wrong!
on “Black holes ruled out as universe’s missing dark matter” ↗…not difficult to derive why the gravitational potential energy must be negative.[0] For the cosmological implications of this fact, there's Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing", also "The Inflationary Universe" by Alan Guth, and Stephen Hawking touches on it in "A Brief History of Time." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_energy
on “Scientists are searching for a mirror universe” ↗…Inflation is currently the best model for what happened before the Big Bang. Space expanded until the false vacuum state decayed, releasing all this free energy to create the big bang. Alan Guth's book, The Inflationary Universe, is a great book on the topic that is very readable. [0] https://youtu.be/lcjdwSY2AzM?si=2rzLCFk5me8V6D_t
on “Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics” ↗…our visible universe occupying less than 10^-23 of the shell's thickness. This is from a family of ideas tossed around a bit before Alan Guth published his 1997 book <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inflationary_Universe>. One could imagine a reflector onto which the shell fell, and that reflector could resemble a white hole; you can get a cyclic cosmology by having the entire shell eventually reconverge on the central…
on “New black hole visualization takes viewers beyond the brink” ↗