Posted by rpcman on July 14, 1998 at 17:44:35:
In Reply to: Before Creation posted by Walker on July 14, 1998 at 17:22:53:
: Star mass can as great as 100 times our sun; yet such stars don’t burns their fuel in 1 day. How do two hydrogen atoms on the verge of fusing know whether the universal gravitational constant has increased or they’re near a lot of mass? He must be referring to the gravitational attraction between sub atomic particles; but that is almost zero relative to other forces. Hmmm.
You have to remember that he is talking about time soon after the Big Bang. The physics were a bit different. Had the mass been very different things would have quickly "run away" or "crunched" and we couldn't be sitting here 16 billion years later talking about it. Inflation explains why the mass is so close to this magic number (along with several other 'features' of our universe). This book is very good on the subject and includes the numbers you are looking for.
At the same time, there also had to be slight distortions in the mass for gravity to pull things together and created the galaxies we view (otherwise the universe would just be filled with particles equally spaced and equally unattracted to each other). Some interesting work has been done in this area recently. The July 4, 1998 issue of Science News had some interesting footage on this.