the Heisenberg spacetime limit for virtual reality, or if there is enough energy in the IVB’s immediate vicinity to momentarily bring it into existence.
“Virtual” particles are the creation/discovery of quantum mechanics. The “vacuum” of spacetime is actually full of photons left over from the “Big Bang” – resulting in the 2.7K “cosmic background radiation”. Traveling at velocity “c”, photons are “non-local”, which means they are effectively everywhere simultaneously. Due to the Heisenberg “Uncertainty Principle”, the energy associated with these photons (or with any chosen point in space), will vary due to “quantum fluctuations” – depending on the time scale one chooses to associate with a specific photon or spacetime point. The shorter the time scale, the more energy one is allowed to associate with a particular photon or spacetime point and its “quantum energy fluctuation”. Pick a small enough time and you can associate almost any amount of energy with a specific point or photon, energy sufficient to materialize almost any particle you choose (usually a particle-antiparticle pair due to symmetry conservation). This brief time interval is the “Heisenberg Interval” of “virtual” reality. The energy to produce these virtual particles must be borrowed from the vacuum surrounding their point of manifestation, and this energy must be paid back to the vacuum before its loss is “noticed” by the “police” – the conservation laws – particularly the conservation of energy. (“Cinderella” is one example of a folk tale involving virtual reality and its time limit. Indeed, almost every aspect of modern physics has an intuitively realized cultural counterpart, whether in art, mythology, religion, or the occult and mystical traditions.)
As we go back in time toward the “Big Bang”, the cosmic background radiation (the effective temperature of spacetime) gets hotter and virtual particles become easier to materialize, because there is more energy nearer at hand available to be borrowed – the energy “economy” becomes richer, so borrowing 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 ene