Mon, Oct 24, 2011
4:00pm - 5:00pm
Room 120
Physics Building
Columbia, MO
Nikodem Poplawski
Visiting Research Associate
Department of Physics
Indiana University-Bloomington
“Does our universe live inside a wormhole?”
Big-bang cosmology with inflation, based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, successfully describes primordial nucleosynthesis and predicts the observed cosmic microwave background radiation. However, it does not address several fundamental problems such as the big-bang singularity, the origin of the rapid expansion of the Universe from an extremely hot and dense state, the arrow of time, and dark energy. We show that the solution to these problems may come from an old adaptation of general relativity, called the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble gravity. This theory naturally extends general relativity to account for the intrinsic spin of elementary particles, causing spacetime to exhibit a geometric property called torsion.
In fermionic matter, at densities much larger than the nuclear density, torsion manifests itself as a repulsive force that counters gravity. Such a repulsion replaces unphysical singularities in black holes with nonsingular bounces. Accordingly, every black hole produces a new universe behind its event horizon and becomes a wormhole. Our own Universe was then born from a big bounce inside a black hole existing in another universe. We also show that torsion provides an alternative to inflation. Finally, the spin-torsion coupling may address some unresolved issues in particle physics such as the matter-antimatter imbalance and dark matter.
Host: Sergei Kopeikin