Inflation — How Did Matter Scatter?
matter never outran light — spacetime itself expanded, carrying everything with it
What you're seeing
- The lattice is spacetime itself — the substrate everything sits on. It begins
as a speck "dense with pure energy", then space expands; nothing here is an
explosion into space.
- Dots A and B never move through
the grid — they keep their grid positions for the whole story, like dots drawn on
an inflating balloon. Yet during inflation they recede faster than light,
because there is no speed limit on the expansion of space itself.
- The early jitter is quantum fluctuation wrinkling the fabric; inflation
stretches those wrinkles to enormous scales, where they become the faint seeds
of structure.
- Once things cool, matter precipitates — and only then does anything move
through space: mass curves spacetime (same warping as the black-hole pages)
and gravity slowly gathers matter into clumps and webs.
- The black void around the lattice isn't "outside the universe" — the lattice is
just the patch of space we're watching.
- Based on How did matter scatter? — exaggerated and
compressed for visibility, as ever.
drag — orbit · scroll — zoom · space — play / pause
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