Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: katieHaylor on 22/06/2017 10:23:56
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Erik says:
Which came first - gravity or matter?
What do you think?
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It depends upon how you define matter, but gravity as we know it today would not have existed at the Big Bang. Instead, a unified super-force would have existed in its place until temperatures dropped low enough for gravity to split off from the other three unified forces. Matter composed of atoms certainly did not exist at such high temperatures, but more exotic forms of matter may have.
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Erik says:
Which came first - gravity or matter?
Re - ...but gravity as we know it today would not have existed at the Big Bang. Instead, a unified super-force...
That's not entirely correct. Unification of forces doesn't mean that the forces don't separately exist. E.g. Maxwell united electricity and magnetism. Today they can be thought of as elements of one field, the electromagnetic field and form a tensor called the Faraday tensor. That doesn't mean that the electric field and the magnetic field no longer exist though. That would be a misinterpretation of electrodynamics. In fact even today there are objects called the electric field 4-vector and the magnetic field 4-vector. These objects are observer dependent but they still exist.
What do you think?
They came into existence simultaneously.