“[The] universe is only a vast automatic machine.”
John William Draper
If one considers that mass may be appearing in the universe, the natural question that arises is “How?” If mass is not appearing, then any further speculation is pointless and a waste of time and energy. Furthermore, I am not the best qualified person to raise the question and certainly not the best to answer it, but I will gladly borrow from the scientists who have speculated about how mass can be created.
As noted, whether one embraces the Big Bang theory or the, what shall I call it, Dynamic Universe hypothesis, mass must appear or be created in the universe. The expansion of space implies that either mass is created, or the universe will die a slow heat death.
The Big Bang theory’s advocates have determined several possible mechanisms for the creation of matter, most of which do not (necessarily) require that there is no other mass in the universe, but rather that the conditions are “ripe” for the phenomenon. Hawking wrote,
“[The] universe may contain what is called ‘vacuum energy,’ energy that is present even in apparently empty space. By Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, this vacuum energy has mass. This means that it has a gravitational effect on the expansion of the universe. But, remarkably enough, the effect of vacuum energy is the opposite of that of matter.”
A vacuum is not nothing. Virtual particles, also called (quantum) vacuum fluctuations, are massless particles with opposite spin that appear and annihilate one another. They have been experimentally demonstrated by the Casimir Effect and, if they exist on Earth, then they probably exist in all vacuums, including intergalactic space. It has been suggested that virtual particles provide a mechanism for converting Dark Energy into matter.
For me, the solution would seem to lie in the conditions of intergalactic space. The expansion of space is a truly unearthly phenomenon that, it would seem, could affect virtual particle interaction. Intergalactic space is a virtual “plasma” of massless particles. “Other characteristics of virtual particles are electric charge, spin, baryon charge, and others, such as those of the corresponding real particles.” To go from virtual particles to matter has also been considered: From Wikipedia, “At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present Universe.”
Basically, if the conditions are right, the interaction of virtual particles in an expanding vacuum may lead to the production of matter. The matter produced would be the simplest form of matter, and the single proton-electron pair would predominate. Or, to rephrase, matter came into being somehow and somewhere, but there is no absolute requirement that it only happen once upon a universe in a single location. If a vacuum is a necessary requirement, then there may be other requirements, but at the least this would explain why intergalactic space contains large masses of hydrogen gas and why galaxies tend to be remote from one another.
Thus, you can see the slow oscillation that I was referring to earlier. Galaxies separate, intergalactic space enlarges, matter forms, the presence of matter suppresses intergalactic expansion locally, and a galaxy forms – thus maintaining the density of galaxies required by the Cosmological Principle. All of the matter would not have had to have been in one location, and there is no need for such a hypothesis.
