Can one understand the transparency of the early Universe without a thorough revolution in cosmology?

There is a highly interesting post by Ethan Siegel in Bigh-Think talking about the somewhat mysterious transparency of the Early Universe to radiation (see (see this). The views are especially interesting also from the point of view of TGD narrative about cosmology (see this and this).

If the primordial plasma is neutralized and forms atoms, the radiation from the very early Universe in the energy range of atoms would not reach us. The neutralization process would have meant the generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) since the photons would have decoupled from the thermal equilibrium.

This raises a question: How does the radiation from the early Universe reach us? The findings of JWST have made the problem even worse than it was before JWST.

One can imagine several explanations.

1. Reionization took place by some mechanism. This is not a well-understood problem. The formation of stars and galaxies should have made this possible somehow. Ions did not absorb and propagation became possible.
2. A more radical explanation explaining how JWST was able to observed very early galaxies, considered by Ethan Siegel in Big-Think (see this), is that there was no dust consisting of neutral atoms so that no absorption occurred! But what about CMB? If there was no neutral matter, there should have been no CMB generated in its formation!

   Very interestingly, the recent findings of JWST suggest that the CMB might have an origin different from what has been assumed in the standard cosmology. JWST has identified very early large galaxies and stars, whose formation is not understood in the standard cosmology. They could have generated dust and radiation in thermal equilibrium with it. The radiation would have decoupled from the thermal equilibrium and given rise to the observed CMB.

   This option forces us to completely reconsider the cosmological narrative before this event. Was there any primordial plasma? Was there any formation of hadrons from quarks? Were nuclei produced by cosmic nucleosynthesis? Were they able to form a considerable amount of atoms? Was there any need for reionization? Could the narrative of the standard cosmology be completely wrong?

What is the TGD based narrative? The newest piece in this story is the observation that the origin of cosmic microwave background need not be what it is though to be, that is the decoupling of radiation from matter as ions formed neutral atoms (see this).

A very brief summary of the TGD view of cosmology (see this) is first in order.

1. The primordial phase would have been dominated by cosmic strings, which are 4-surfaces with 2-D M⁴ and CP₂ projections. This phase could have been in Hagedorn temperature of the order of CP₂ mass defining the mass scale of color partial waves of quarks and leptons.
2. Galaxies and stars would have been produced as cosmic strings collided, thickened and liberated matter giving rise to the ordinary matter. This process would have served as the TGD counterpart for inflation and would have lasted much longer than 10^-32 seconds (see this and this). Therefore it might be better to talk about the TGD counterpart of eternal inflation. Cosmic string tangles decaying to ordinary would correspond to the bubbles of the inflationary scenario.

This view allows us to consider two basic options explaining the transparency.

1. The formation of very early large galaxies and stars generated ions as solar wind. The stars would have produced ions as solar wind. Was this enough to preserve the charged plasma state and prevent neutralization leading to a loss of transparency? Did this give rise to charged plasma so that the radiation could propagate freely in this plasma?

   Note however that if there was no neutral matter (dust) present before this event, the Universe was transparent also before it.

2. The second option is that the propagation took place along a network of monopole flux tubes as dark photons. The network would have acted like a communication network making precisely targeted propagation without dissipative losses and without 1/r² weakening of the signal associated with 3-D propagation.

See the article About the recent TGD based view concerning cosmology and astrophysics or the chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.