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Tell me more about the "popped" phase of the big bang?

Those who believe in the big bang say that there was an inflationary epoch during which particles traveled faster than light - just like the Standard Model virtual particles within collider experiments which temporarily violate conservation of energy. Then, all of a sudden, for no discernible reason, we are supposed to believe that the laws of physics suddenly changed and everything that happened since must travel at less than the speed of light. Wild story. I saw Andre Linde tell it in a SLAC conference room when I was just a child. I've since been amazed by how much sand castle empire building resulted from this lark. Some of those who founded the theory have since abandoned it. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-s... The man who stood by it won the 2019 Nobel Prize (James Peebles). Loyalty to the group pays off.

The steady state universe, or perhaps a slowly changing universe, is where I am placing my bet. I think scientists have really dropped the ball on supermassive black hole science. It seems logical that instead of a singularity, the core would reach Planck scale and that core could breach at the poles under sufficient conditions, thus generating those massive high energy jets. Isotropy in the universe would be explained by the same physics process governing all SMBH. Then there is no need for a big bang origin.

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