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Re: EM Radiation Without a Source



At 04:04 AM 11/30/2000 -0500, Ed Schweber wrote:
Hi all:

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who is an industrial
physicist and neither of us were current enough on our theory to answer the
following:

Do Maxwell's equations preclude the existence of electromagnetic
radiation that at some time in the past has not originated from an
accelerating charge (besides any vacuum fluctuations)? Could EM have been
created at the big bang without having first been "radiated" from a source.
Our guess was that this should have been possible.

Thanks's for any input.

There are no confirmed theories at this time for the very early phases of
the big bang. But the theory that details this that has the best chance of
being confirmed is one of the proposed Grand Unified Theories (GUTS). Under
a GUT, the Higgs field is responsible for the creation of the particles
that we see in the universe today. The symmetry of the Higgs field is
broken in a series of steps. It starts with a unified force consisting of
the strong, weak, and electromagnetic. The first symmetry break has the
strong force separated from the electroweak, and next the weak separates
from the electromagnetic. This last step is where electrons and photons are
born. So assuming a GUT is true, electromagnetic radiation (photons) come
from a field (or particle) from a more unified force that no longer exists
(except in certain accelerator experiments, where the electroweak force is
re-created. A GUT is partly confirmed to this extent.)


Ron Ebert
UCR Physics Department
ron.ebert@ucr.edu
http://phyld.ucr.edu