owing is easier. Eventually the “vacuum” becomes so energy dense and hot that the virtual particles don’t have to borrow energy at all, they can exist as “real” particles in their own right because the environment is so “energy rich” it can support or materialize them all the time. It then becomes the more complex question of which and how many particles the environment can materialize, not just for how long.
In our imagination we can see a whole new reality emerging from the energized “vacuum”, materializing out of the virtual particle “sea”, like ghosts raised from the dead: the lightest particles surface first, always in particle-antiparticle pairs, and as the temperature continues to rise, heavier (and fewer) particles materialize, particles whose names we do not know because they have not yet been discovered. We know that among this carnival of particles there are at least 6 types of quarks and 6 types of leptons, and that they can transform into one another, not only within types (quark-quark and lepton-lepton) but also (at much higher temperatures) between types (quark-lepton) as well. How do they do it?
If our imaginary spacetime “vacuum” is hot enough (or equivalently, early or young enough relative to the “moment of creation”), we will see the IVB catalysts as well as the particles they help to interact. Transformations will become easier and more common until a temperature and energy density is reached at which the IVBs are materialized. At this point a “phase transition” takes place because the metric itself becomes the IVB – spacetime becomes dense and energetic enough to act as a cosmic-sized IVB and all particles transform freely into one another. At this energy density particles are so close together they can swap charges and energies without “concern” for the conservation laws, simply due to their extreme closeness and the high energy density of this very compressed metric. (The lowest energy phase transition occurrs at the energy density of the electroweak force unification era - a symmetric energy state of the early universe reproduced by the large mass of the “W” family of IVBs.) In the electroweak symmetric energy state the separate leptonic “species” (electrons, electron neutrinos, and their heavier kin) are collected into their common “generic” identity (“leptons”), and likewise the quark species into their generic identity (“hadrons”). Within each “genus”, transformations of “species” identity take place naturally, simply as a matter of course betweem congeneric members. This is the general principle underlying the IVB transformation mechanism. (See: “The ‘W’ IVB and the Weak Force Mechanism”.)
As the temperature continues to rise, spacetime goes through several more “phase transitions” which are symmetry states of successive unifications of the four forces. The “W” IVB mass “family” is gauged or scaled (by the Higgs boson) to the lowest or first in this hierarchy of force unification symmetry regimes, the electroweak unification energy level. (See: “The “Higgs” Boson and the Weak Force IVBs: Part I.)
Now in our imagination let us reverse the process and allow the “Big Bang” to proceed normally, expanding and cooling spacetime. Spacetime quickly cools below the point where it can act like a cosmic-sized IVB, and particles can only transform if they get caught in local “knots”, eddies, or fluctuations of sufficient metric energetic density. As spacetime continues to expand and cool, all the virtual particle-antiparticle pairs slowly disappear back beneath the “surface” of the virtual sea, the heaviest ones first and the lightest ones lingering the longest. The IVBs are among the first to go, and as the spacetime metric cools and expands, transformations among or between elementary particles become rarer and rarer because these very heavy metric particles or quantized “knots” of spacetime (the IVBs) are very expensive and hence very difficult to materialize, depending entirely on the temperature and energy density of the local spacetime metric. As spacetime passes through the phase transitions betwe