Complexity of Simplicity

Over the last 30 years in the field of cosmology, physicists have reached the consensus that our physical
Universe, which spans the size of 3000 Mega Parsecs (1 Parsec is on the order of 10 Trillion miles), began its life some 14 billion years ago from a primordial quantum soup. A few milliseconds before that epoch (known as the radiation dominated era) microwave data tells us that the universe underwent an extremely rapid expansion of space- from the size of an atom to the size we see today! The initial conditions during this so-called inflationary epoch were remarkably simpler than the universe, let alone world in which we inhabit.

I have spent the last 5 years of my research career working on the details of the inflationary epoch. I am still befuddled by the following question: How did all this complexity arise? In other words, was complexity
part of the blueprint of the universe. Surely, from the point of view of the inflationary paradigm the answer is no. Therefore, something is missing from my point of view in the study of the 'early universe'. I think that part of the problem is related to the conceptual problems in quantum mechanics in the context of inflation. For one thing, we know that the quantum fluctuations generated during inflation (which are responsible for the generation of galaxies), while having a simple description mathematically (they are scale invariant) suffer the same foundational problems of the collapse of the wavefunction. What is this problem?

Quantum mechanics tells us that all the information about a physical system is encoded in a wave pattern of potentiality. When this system is observed (and it could be observed in many different ways)
all of the potentiality is manifested into one singular observable. The physical system once coexisting in
a probability wave of all possibilities 'collapses' into (by the act of observation) into one thing. The only problem for inflation here is where or what is the observer?

Well enough of this, perhaps my friends in CogSci can help resolve this paradox-Whence the complexity.

Comments

[m.visaya]

i got the universe as a one dimensional jet at t=34.04255 x 10^(-35) order of a second. could you expound on this some more for everyone el
se?

[Paul Valletta]

The Order of the Universe, chaos from simplicity?

The initial conditions or simplicity of order,is a far more complex action than the following effect?

Simplictic systems are really more complex in their existence than a system that is dynamic, it takes a cosmological miracle to fetch everything into absolute order?

[m.visaya]

quality is by most, a problem of coherence at this point. (ALTD84)

[Paul Valletta]

m.visaya, please re-scan your thoughts, in a time ordered fashion?

[boreds]

Hi Stephon,

this question has bugged me for a long time, and cosmologists I know have never given me a completely satisfactory answer!

Basically they seem to say that as a wavenumber k
crosses the horizon, the quantum field mode associated with momentum k
"freezes in" as a classical perturbation.

But if that mode k falls back within the horizon (after inflation has stopped
and the horizon length has started increasing, say), it doesn't return to being a quantum fluctuation, right? It seems the process of this
classical "freezing in" is irreversible, something like a quantum measurement. Is that the cosmologists lore?