Brent Allsop wrote:
>
> Thanks for the info Damien <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>:
>
> > > So we are now expanding faster than the first few seconds of
> > >the big bang,
>
> > No - they're speaking of the expansion rate since the abrupt end of
> > the catastrophically explosive and incredibly brief (putative)
> > inflation epoch.
>
> The "abrupt end"? Is brief a million years, a femtosecond...?
> So the speed slowed very rapidly for a "brief" pirioud and now were
> speeding back up again? If things are speeding up, then we'll
> eventually overttake the initial speed right? Or is the rate of speed
> up ever decreasing such that there is still a final speed limit?
>
> And what and why is there this 'boundary' where things change
> so dramtically? And who is to say their might not be other
> "boundaries" when the speed changes dramatically in the future?
At first guess, the speed slowed down because the mass of the universe was still
close enough that gravitational attraction was in excess of the expansion
pressure for a while, enough to slow down the rate of expansion, but not enough
to stop or reverse it completely before the universe expanded enough to allow
the expansion forces to exceed the gravitational attraction ...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:35:12 MDT