Panel Discussion, continued...
Q: This whole concept of evolution and what's life and where does it start, leads back to the very beginning of thought where it allows all this energy to take place for us to be able to be doing this kind of thing. As someone was talking about earlier, about the origin of the universe, all this material comes from one particular fossil. The question that I very often get from my students is how big is that rock? It's a very popular question.
MULLER: It depends on whether the universe is finite or infinite. Let's consider the two cases separately. If the original universe were finite, then the answer is zero. In other words, it's very, very small. If the universe were originally infinite, then the answer is basically that it always was infinite. That causes some conceptual problems because there are regions of space that are not in causal connection with the regional space that we're in. But that doesn't matter because we haven't had time to observe them yet. So the universe breaks up into little bubbles and our known universe is one of these bubbles. And this bubble, the known universe in all of these models, is the universe that we see out to the background radiation, the universe that we see out to the most distant quasar, that known universe in all of these models. The size initially was essentially zero, less than a cubic micron. That's the easy answer.
Q: I was wondering why you don't like the idea that the universe rotated and caused fluctuation? Is that pretty probable?
MULLER: It seems pretty probable but quantum fluctuations have to do with uncertainty and not with things actually jumping around. That's what always bothers me about that. When you have a quantum fluctuation, it means there is a lack of knowledge of the result of a measurement. But the energy is always conserved, momentum is always conserved in quantum mechanics. You don't get sudden jumps occurring in quantum mechanics and if you're going to postulate a quantum fluctuation, the way all the present theories do, it is simply by postulating fluctuations. To me that doesn't solve the problem. If you look into the theories in detail you see built into them is a postulate about what the magnitude of the fluctuation was. That's just redefining the problem and hiding it. It doesn't really solve it. That's why I don't like it.
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