Amazing stuff! However, the abstract of the paper is anything but interpretable for a layperson.
I personally think the Big Bang theory is bogus like deus ex machina! E.g. what came before the Big Bang?
That the new theory appears to depend on dark energy may not instill much confidence, as dark energy is another unexplained obscurity.
"A team of scientists ... has presented a revolutionary theory about the origins of the universe. The study ... introduces a radical change in the understanding of the first moments after the Big Bang, without relying on the speculative assumptions that physicists have traditionally assumed.
For decades, cosmologists have worked under the inflationary paradigm, a model that suggests that the universe expanded extremely rapidly, in a fraction of a second, thus paving the way for everything we observe today. But this model includes too many adjustable parameters—the free parameters—which can be modified. Scientifically, this poses a problem, as it makes it difficult to know whether a model is truly predicting or simply adapting to the data.
In a significant breakthrough, the team has proposed a model in which the early universe does not require any of these arbitrary parameters. Instead, it begins with a well-established cosmic state called De Sitter space, which is consistent with current observations of dark energy.
Gravitational Waves: the key to cosmic structure
The new model doesn’t rely on hypothetical fields or particles such as the inflaton. Rather, it suggests that natural quantum oscillations of space-time itself, gravitational waves, were enough to seed the tiny differences in density that eventually grew into galaxies, stars, and planets. These gravitational ripples evolve nonlinearly, meaning they interact and build complexity over time, leading to testable predictions that researchers can now compare with real-world data. ..."
From the abstract:
"We propose a novel scenario in which scalar perturbations, which seed the large-scale structure of the universe, are generated without relying on a scalar field (the inflaton).
In this framework, inflation is driven by a de Sitter space time, where tensor metric fluctuations (i.e., gravitational waves) naturally arise from quantum vacuum oscillations, and scalar fluctuations are generated via second-order tensor effects. We compute the power spectrum of such scalar fluctuations and show it to be consistent with near scale invariance. We derive the necessary conditions under which scalar perturbations become significant and much larger than the tensor modes, and we identify a natural mechanism to end inflation via a transition to a radiation-dominated phase. Our proposed mechanism could remove the need for a model-dependent scenario: the choice of a scalar field, as the inflaton, to drive inflation."
A bold leap in understanding the origins of the Universe: Scientists propose a new model for Cosmic Inflation (original news release) "This new simpler, testable model removes speculative elements like the inflaton field and shows that gravitational waves alone could explain how cosmic structures formed, reshaping our understanding of the early Universe."
Inflation without an inflaton (open access, this is a very short paper filled with mathematical formulas)
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