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Phy: Cosmos has been expanding eternally + Throwing an ‘axion bomb’ into a black hole

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Physicist: the universe has likely been expanding “eternally”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/physicist-...-eternally

EXCERPT: . . . But that idea is subject to increasing scrutiny, University of New Hampshire physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wrote in New Scientist. Instead of beginning with a Big Bang — more of a rapid expansion than an explosion — she suggests that the universe has no definite starting point. Instead, she says, it may have been expanding for all of eternity.

The Big Bang hasn’t actually been disproven, it’s important to note. But if the new line of thinking is correct, then any sudden and rapid expansion marking the beginning of the universe would have more likely occurred during a time period rather than an infinitely-short moment.

But Prescod-Weinstein suggests that the universe was probably already growing even before that moment, in some unknown form. “There have been two changes to the way physicists think about this cosmological timeline,” Prescod-Weinstein wrote in New Scientist. “The first is that research on inflationary models, which study the exponential expansion of space-time, indicate that inflation may be an eternal process.”

“As in, the universe may not have had a beginning moment, and we may live in what is called an eternally inflating universe,” she continued, “one that was expanding exponentially even before what we call the big bang. Mathematically, this seems the most likely scenario — assuming inflation is correct.” (MORE - details)


Throwing an ‘axion bomb’ into a black hole challenges fundamental law of physics
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/224854/t...lack-hole/

RELEASE: Singularities, such as those at the centre of black holes, where density becomes infinite, are often said to be places where physics ‘breaks down’. However, this doesn’t mean that ‘anything’ could happen, and physicists are interested in which laws could break down, and how.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London, the Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University have proposed a way that singularities could violate the law of conservation of charge. Their theory is published in Annalen der Physik.

Co-author Professor Martin McCall, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “’Physics breaks down at a singularity' is one of the most famous statements in pop-physics. But by showing how this might actually happen, we take aim at one of the most cherished laws of physics: the conservation of charge.”
Destroying charge

The conservation of charge says that the total electric charge of any isolated system – including the Universe as a whole – never changes. This means that if negatively or positively charged particles move into one area, the same amount of respectively charged particles must move out.

This has been shown at the very smallest scales: when different particles are created or eliminated in experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, the same amount of negatively and positively charged particles are always produced or destroyed, respectively.

Now, by modifying classic physics equations to include axions, a candidate for dark matter, the team have been able to show that temporary singularities – such as black holes that appear and then later evaporate – could destroy charge when they come to the end of their life.

Axions are hypothetical particles that may explain dark matter – the ‘missing’ 85 percent of the matter of the Universe. Their predicted properties could form a field that would interact with the kind of fields physicists have known about for centuries – electromagnetic fields, which are described by a set of equations called Maxwell’s equations.

Using a branch of mathematics called differential geometry, the team found out how to create or destroy charge, violating the charge conservation of the Universe.

Philosophical implications. Co-author Dr Jonathan Gratus, from the Department of Physics at Lancaster University, said: "You can imagine creating an ‘axion bomb' that holds charge by combining coupled axion and electromagnetic fields; and then dropping it into an evaporating black hole. As the construction shrinks and disappears into the singularity, it takes electrical charge with it.  It is the combination of a temporary singularity and a newly proposed type of axion field that is crucial to its success."

Co-author Dr Paul Kinsler, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “There are also philosophical implications. Although people often like to say that physics ‘breaks down’, here we show that although exotic phenomena might occur, what actually happens is nevertheless constrained by the still-working laws of physics around the singularity.”

The team say the axion phenomenon would only occur under extreme conditions that currently cannot be created in a lab, but that future advances in intense laser fields might allow the theory to be tested in a terrestrial environment.
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