Wiccan_Child
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- Mar 21, 2005
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Good question. It's analogous to calculating when abiogenesis occurred, and working out just how close to that event we can model - that is, we can adequately explain how organisms behave a billion years after abiogenesis, but not after only one year.Hope it doesn't seem like I'm bickering, but I really would like to know. How do you measure time from the start of something, and still say that there wasn't necessarily a start?
Likewise, we can work out how long ago the singularity existed, and we can work out how long it would take that singularity to expand and cool until it settles down into 'regular' physics.
QM and GR, as good as they are, ultimately rest upon foundational assumptions that might very well not be true. At the incredible densities found 13.5 billion years ago, the errors in these theories become apparent. That is, at low energies, QM and GR are very good at predicting behaviour. But at very high energies, they're less accurate, due to fundamental errors in how QM and GR model reality.
So. We have the singularity at t = 0 (for argument's sake). At t = 10[sup]-43[/sup], the singularity has expanded and cooled to sufficiently low levels that QM and GR can begin to make accurate predictions - forces behave normally, particles stabilise and form orbits and shells, etc (this wouldn't happen until later, but you get my jist).
So this moment in time (t = 10[sup]-43[/sup] s), which occurred around 13.5 billion years ago, is effectively how long it would take the singularity to expand and cool to be able to be modelled accurately.
Hopefully that makes sense
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