I understand that we build models and do calculations but aren’t there any potential errors/assumptions? That accumulate over multiple calculations and grow bigger the further we go back or over distance?
I.e. “At approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially, unconstrained by the light speed invariance, and temperatures dropped by a factor of 100,000.”
In: Physics
[Warning, I’m only a university physics student taking some higher-level undergrad astronomy courses]
the way we see the universe now is dependant on how the universe acted when it first formed.
If you see a car flipped over on the road, that tells you a car was driving, and then crashed.
In the same way, we look out and see for example a given ratio of protons to neutrons in our universe. We know from experimental data that neutrons can interact with some other given elementary particle at a certain temperature. For us to have the ratio of protons to neutrons that we have today, the universe would have to have a temperature shift at those critical moments in it’s early stages.
Thats just one example, but most all of cosmology is a fascinating puzzle of reversing effect to find cause.
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