0

I've been trying to figure out what scientists believe to have been infinitely condensed in initial singularity. It is claimed that all mass existed before the big bang, this leads me to many questions to which I can't find the answer, with all of them relating to one big question: What is the most basic building block of all matter that was present during initial singularity?

I also outlined my own reasoning below. The questions below don't have to be answered; they just serve to better explain my question about what was present within the mass of initial singularity.

  • How is mass defined in this situation?

  • Was it just size assigned to space, size assigned to nothing, or size assigned to particles already?

  • Were they quantum fields holding mass that only generate particles when they interact with energy (which kind of brings me back to the question about whether this is size assigned to nothing until it interacts with energy)?

user3776022
  • 103
  • The Big Bang didn't happen at a point. You need to read that question and the answers to it to understand what we mean by the Big Bang. – John Rennie Aug 30 '17 at 13:09
  • I know that it did not have a point because it would require space to exist outside of the universe. However, what I ask is whether everything already existed in singularity from the start, meaning that particles, atoms, and other matter already existed in their various forms from the very beginning? – user3776022 Aug 30 '17 at 13:52

1 Answers1

0

Here is the current accepted model of the history of the universe, in the big bang model:

historyof universe

It is based on General Relativity augmented by an effective quantization and uses extensively the knowledge from the elementary particle models .

General Relativity includes special relativity, there is no matter separate from the concept of the four dimensional stress energy tensor, which in flat spaces reduces to the energy momentum vector which describes both energy and masses in flat spaces.

You ask:

What is the most basic building block of all matter that was present during initial singularity?

the answer is, the stress energy tensor of General Relativity which developed in the universe we observe.

The fuzziness at the beginning of the history illustrates that quantum mechanical indeterminacy gives a region in space time and not a point singularity. All the energy that will form our universe existed in the stress energy tensor of that initial sincularity. When a definitive model of the quantization of gravity is decided upon, what existed in that region will become clearer.

Up to 10^-32 seconds after the initial singularity a quantum mechanical model of inflation is proposed, which seems to fit the observations. All elementary particles have mass zero till then because the symmetries are unbroken. There are the special relativity energy momentum vectors which added will give an invariant mass, but particles as we know them in the standard model appear after the universe expands and cools down ( i.e. the average energy momentum vector becomes statistically smaller) and particle symmetries are broken by Higgs fields.

It aint simple, needs a course or two in advanced physics.

anna v
  • 233,453
  • So did particles with zero mass exist during initial singularity, or is it a technical term for them not existing yet due to having no mass? Or did only the stress-energy tensor exist? – user3776022 Aug 30 '17 at 14:24
  • This will be answered when a consistent rigorous quantization of gravity model is decided upon. If it is strings, then it will be strings that existed then in the bubble. The current model populates the inflation period with inflatons. It is after the original inflation period that particles as we know them ( but with unbroken symmetries ) appear. this link treats at the end strings in inflation – anna v Aug 30 '17 at 14:33