The section "Interview with Lawrence Krauss" brought a few things to mind.

The 3-part "Interview with Lawrence Krauss"

(https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:ANUx+ANU-ASTRO4x+2T2016/courseware/74f87d270ff646e3927beb1c697a0086/5747ef2a90f849d196ae2c4e75b3306c/13?activate_block_id=block-v1%3AANUx%2BANU-ASTRO4x%2B2T2016%2Btype%40vertical%2Bblock%406fb88feb70234981b6bbdbf81312ef69,

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:ANUx+ANU-ASTRO4x+2T2016/courseware/74f87d270ff646e3927beb1c697a0086/5747ef2a90f849d196ae2c4e75b3306c/15?activate_block_id=block-v1%3AANUx%2BANU-ASTRO4x%2B2T2016%2Btype%40vertical%2Bblock%40235055acdf634940a0d3005ddeb05c21,

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:ANUx+ANU-ASTRO4x+2T2016/courseware/74f87d270ff646e3927beb1c697a0086/5747ef2a90f849d196ae2c4e75b3306c/15?activate_block_id=block-v1%3AANUx%2BANU-ASTRO4x%2B2T2016%2Btype%40vertical%2Bblock%40235055acdf634940a0d3005ddeb05c21)

brought a few things to mind. I've found it very helpful to consult Wikipedia and World Book Encyclopedia for definitions and extra information during this course. In this latest part, looking up the words "adiabatic", "gaussian", and "false vacuum" have given me greater understanding of how early-21st-century scientists think.

Adiabatic (I can't remember it being defined in the course) refers to no heat being transferred. It comes from the fact that gases expand or compress so fast that hardly any heat is transferred. The difference between no heat, and hardly any heat, being transferred may seem too trivial to bother with. But if adiabatic processes are being used as evidence for inflation, those trivialities exponentially expand into cosmic significance. I guess the statement "the Higgs field unexpectedly seems to carry no energy" means the Higgs is adiabatic (adiabatic doesn't just refer to electromagnetism and the infrared rays associated with heat - interaction of electromagnetism with gravity, which can be related to the supposedly unrelated Higgs field, can produce the mass and quantum spin of the Higgs boson). (see Vector-Tensor-Scalar Geometry below)

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Vector-Tensor-Scalar Geometry

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FIGURE 1: WAVE-PACKET FRONT AS QUANTUM SPIN

Two adjoining sides of a parallelogram represent the vectors of the photon’s spin 1 and the graviton’s spin 2. The resultant diagonal represents the interaction of the sides/vectors (1÷2 = the spin ½ of every matter particle). Tensor calculus changes the coordinates of the sides into the coordinates of a position on a line (a single point on the diagonal). This scalar point is associated with particles of spin 0. If the mass produced during the 1÷2 interaction - the energy and momentum of the photons and presently hypothetical gravitons^ exert a pressure we call mass - happens to be 125 GeV/c2, its union with spin 0 produces the Higgs boson. 125 GeV/c2 united with spin 0 means the central scalar point of the Higgs boson is related to the vector of the graviton’s spin 2, and the Higgs field is therefore united with the supposedly unrelated gravitational field (together with the latter’s constant interaction with the electromagnetic field).

^ Material from a star could fall onto a neutron star, heating it up and causing it to emit radiation. Now suppose the paragraph above is true. Then, the energy and momentum of the photons and presently hypothetical gravitons would be the interaction of electromagnetism (the charged particles and strong magnetism) with the neutron star's powerful gravity. The heating could produce gravitational and electromagnetic radiation which would produce the mass and quantum spin of subatomic particles - instead of only radiation being emitted, jets of matter would be emitted too (the matter would be emitted as beams or jets from the neutron star’s magnetic poles).

It must be remembered that referring to space alone is incomplete. Living in space-time, it’s necessary to add some sentences about the time factor. The photon must interact with the graviton to produce the mass of the weak nuclear force’s W and Z bosons. To produce their quantum spin, the photon’s spin 1 needs to react with the graviton’s spin 2. That is, the photon’s turning through one complete revolution needs to be combined with the graviton’s being turned through two half-revolutions.^ Incorporating the time factor as a reversal of time in the middle of the interaction: a gravitonic half revolution is subtracted from the photonic full revolution then the graviton’s time-reversal adds a half revolution (1-½+½ = the spin 1 of W and Z bosons). The strong nuclear force’s gluon’s quantum spin of 1 could arise in the same way as the spin 1 of weak-force bosons.

^ Professor Stephen Hawking writes, "What the spin of a particle really tells us is what the particle looks like from different directions." (Stephen Hawking, 1988, 'A Brief History of Time', pp.66-67 - Bantam Press) Spin 1 is like an arrow-tip pointing, say, up. A photon has to be turned round a full revolution of 360 degrees to look the same. Spin 2 is like an arrow with 2 tips - 1 pointing up, 1 down. A graviton has to be turned half a revolution (180 degrees) to look the same. Spin 0 is like a ball of arrows having no spaces. A Higgs boson looks like a dot: the same from every direction. Spin ½ is logically like a Mobius strip, though Hawking doesn’t specifically say so. This is because a particle of matter has to be turned through two complete revolutions to look the same, and you must travel around a Mobius strip twice to reach the starting point. Spin 1/2 being like a Mobius strip, plus photons being composed of nothing except trillions of Mobius strips,^ are the reasons that the last paragraph says the phenomenon of adaptive Wick rotation must be built in to the strips and not into figure-8 Klein bottles.

^ For explanation of this point plus a supporting reference from "Physical Review Letters", see pages 6-7 of "Bartlett, Rodney, Unifying Gravity with Electromagnetism, the Atomic Nuclear Forces, and the Higgs Eliminates the Universe's Big Bang (January 21, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3376418 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3376418"

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I initially had trouble understanding what was meant by the analogy in previous videos to a skier dropping from a plane onto the bump in the middle of the hat, then sliding down to the left or right. But it made sense to me after I read that a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum that is somewhat, but not entirely, stable. It may last for a very long time in that state, and might eventually move to a more stable state.

Gaussian (was that word defined in the course?) is a term named after the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). It seems to indicate similarities between the Gaussian function and the Mexican hat. A Gaussian has the form f(x)=ae⁻⁽⁽ˣ⁻ᵇ⁾²⁾/²ᶜ² for constants a, b and non zero c. The graph of a Gaussian is a characteristic symmetric "bell curve" shape (a large rounded peak tapering away at each end). The parameter a is the height of the curve's peak (similar to the top ends of the Mexican Hat), b is the position of the center of the peak (similar to the energy level at the false vacuum) and c describes the width of the "bell" (similar to the range of energy values which have an average of zero).

Just to be clear - I'm not supporting the the ideas of the Big Bang, an expanding universe, or a multiverse. I see science approximating mathematical calculations to the point of being misleading. And I see it (unintentionally) misinterpreting data to fit established patterns of thinking - in the final words of these reference notes, " you just have to fudge it to fit the data." Cosmology needs the revolution of going back 200 years to the time of Carl Gauss - before his bell-curve distribution was associated with the Mexican Hat; and when there were no ideas of the Big Bang, an expanding universe, or a multiverse.

The universe's redshift could be seen not as galaxies receding from each other, but in the revolutionary terms of all space-time being a gravitational field in which gravitational redshift causes electromagnetic waves to become increasingly redshifted as distance increases. A large, close galaxy like M31 (Andromeda) would appear to be approaching us because it isn't far enough away to send us light that's significantly redshifted; but a huge number of its stars are currently approaching us as they orbit Andromeda's centre, and therefore sending us blueshifted light.

The photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background could be quantum-entangled with every other particle existing in space as well as time. Then the Background would be radiated from every direction in the sky without requiring a Big Bang. Particles of matter separated by 27 billion light years or more would interact, and experience similar temperatures and densities and curvature (or flatness) of space because of quantum entanglement - not because they were once in contact in a pre-inflationary universe. And if gravitons are entangled with microwave photons (they would be if entanglement exists everywhere and everywhen), imprints in the Microwave background caused by gravitational waves must be unavoidable.

The quantum fluctuations that became you, me, and everything in the universe could be the binary digits (BITS) used in electronics (the fluctuating would be the switching between 1 and 0). In this case, binary digits are the Hidden Variables spoken of by Einstein and others and probabilistic quantum mechanics will one day be discovered to actually be deterministic, containing a hidden order like meteorology's chaos theory.To make a universe, we could draw a two-dimensional (2D) Mobius strip with the BITS, combine 2 strips into a 3D figure-8 Klein bottle, and give the bottles the 4 dimensions of space-time by incorporating adaptive Wick rotation - and thus a 4th dimension of time agreeing with Special Relativity's time dilation - into its component Mobius strips.