This is part 4 of a series on topological defects. Read parts 1, 2 and 3.
That what? Yes, the Vortons. It’s not an anime monster hunting show. It is not an AI startup company. It’s a… it’s a thing. I find.
Listen, what I’m about to tell you is so hypothetical that even a string theorist might blush. Here we are deep in the annals of physics. I don’t want you to trust ANYTHING I’m about to say.
But that has never stopped us. So why stop now?
You see, cosmic string loops are supposed to be suicidal. They are these high voltage whips of spacetime that vibrate and oscillate so quickly that they SCREAM gravitational waves until they disappear into nothingness. Usually that’s the end of the story. The loop shrinks, it disappears and the universe is defective.
But that doesn’t HAVE to be the end of the story. I mean, cosmic strings are super hypothetical themselves, so we have a few possibilities.
Imagine a cosmic loop of strings that doesn’t just vibrate. It also rotates. Really, really fast. Why should they rotate? Why NOT, buddy? Who are you to say they could never turn? And when they spin, they have angular momentum (that’s kind of the definition). But as the loop releases energy, it becomes smaller. But you can’t just get rid of the angular momentum. This means that the smaller it gets, the faster it spins. And at a certain point, that internal spin is so strong that it begins to push OUTWARD.
That creates tension. The loop wants to shrink in on itself from its own tension. But the spinning mill wants to expand it again.
When these two forces find a perfect balance, shrinkage stops. The loop does not evaporate. It doesn’t disappear. It forms a permanent, indestructible, subatomic ring of pure field energy.
We call this a pretone. It is a small lump of cosmic thread, a defect that stubbornly refuses to disappear in this long night.
Oh, and it could be dark matter.
We don’t know what dark matter is, but we know what it does. It must be a particle or something like a particle. It must be hard. It has to be almost invisible. And it must have been there since the earliest moments of the Big Bang for it to take part in all the building of the cosmic web that it is so good at.
A pretone is…not a particle. But it’s small, about the size of a proton. It does not glow or emit light – it is a defect in space-time, not a “thing” in the usual sense of the word “thing”. There could be a billion of them passing through you and you would never notice… except that you would suddenly weigh more than a mountain. So I guess that counts as “noticing.” Because that’s the highlight. These things are sealed. They consist of the enclosed, high-energy vacuum of the early universe. And if the early universe was as chaotic as we think, then the Big Bang would have had to have been a presound-producing factory. A Vorton forge? I don’t know the right word – it just created a lot of buzz.
This is the story: phase transitions created many cosmic strings. Inflation has dragged it out. Then they vibrated against each other, creating an enormous number of loops that shrank until they became stuck as vortices. That would explain why we don’t see any cosmic strings anywhere. These missing defects are not really missing. They have just evolved into a nebula of dark matter that fills every galaxy.
This means that dark matter may not be an additional ingredient added to the cosmic recipe. It could simply be the remnants of the Big Bang. They are the scratch marks on the ground from when the universe was formed. It’s the construction debris we forgot to sweep up. The universe is anything but perfect. This is one of our reasons for existing. But do the imperfections stop with us – the dust and the stars – or do they extend to a much deeper, more fundamental level – a level so deep that it is frozen in the fabric of space-time? We don’t know if vortices exist, if they are responsible for dark matter, or if they even CAN exist. But that doesn’t matter. The truth is that we owe our existence to the fact that the universe is a bit messed up. If the Big Bang had been perfect, there would be no errors that could promote the growth of galaxies. There would be no branches in the field to provide the dark mass.
I don’t know about you, but I say it’s our mistakes that make us most beautiful.
