JanGrebenAbstracts
Jan Greben, Principal Scientist, CSIR Pretoria, South Africa
Greben, Jan. 2009. The Role of Energy Conservation and Vacuum Energy in the Evolution of the Universe. Foundations of Science, no. Special Issue of the Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe (EDU-2008). In press. http://evodevouniverse.com/EDU2008Papers/GrebenEConservVacuumEinEvolofUnivEDU2008.pdf.
We discuss a new theory of the universe in which the vacuum energy is of classical origin and dominates the energy content of the universe. As usual the Einstein equations determine the simple metric of this universe, however, the scale factor is controlled by total energy conservation in contrast to the practice in the Robertson-Walker formulation. This theory naturally leads to an explanation for the Big Bang and is not plagued by the horizon and cosmological constant problem. It naturally accommodates the notion of dark energy, and proposes a possible explanation for dark matter. It leads to a dual description of the universe: on the one hand one can describe the universe in terms of the original Einstein coordinates in which the universe is expanding, on the other hand one can describe it in terms of co-moving time and spatial coordinates in which the universe looks stationary and the lifetime of the universe appears constant (a new type of relativity property or scale invariance).
The paper describes the evolution of this universe. It starts out in a classical state with perfect symmetry and zero entropy. Due to the vacuum metric the effective energy density is infinite at the beginning, but diminishes rapidly. Once it reaches the Planck energy density of elementary particles, the formation of particles can commence. Due to the quantum nature of creation and annihilation processes inhomogeneities appear in the matter distributions and residual proton (neutron) and electron densities result. Hence, quantum uncertainty plays an essential role in the creation of a diversified complex universe with increasing entropy. It thus seems that quantum fluctuations play a similar role in cosmology as random mutations do in biology.
