Slashdot Mirror
New Evidence for Open Universe
Observations made by the Hubble telescope have produced evidence that the universe is full of "dark energy", stuff that has mass but does not emit nor block light, and that a disregarded theory first postulated by Einstein about "negative gravity" is actually valid. If true, this would provide firm evidence that the universe will not collapse in a "big crunch" but will expand indefinitely. See the SF Chronicle, New York Times, MSNBC, or CNN for stories (the Chronicle story is the best, IMHO). For background information, you may want to check out the cosmology FAQ or more information about negative gravity. (Update: 04/04 11:03 AM by michael : A couple of people have pointed out that this write-up is inaccurate; I'm not going to try to correct it, but read the comments for more information.)
We are made of atoms with electrons.
The sun is an atom, earth "electrons" (we become quarks?)
The galaxy is an atom, the solar system an "electron".
The universe is an atom, the galaxy an "electron"
Oh by the way, light behaves as a particle.
Space contains light.
Therefore space is never empty.
As for the Casimir effect, what we're really measuring is virtual particle contributions to real physical amplitudes, no different than (say) the higher-order corrections to QED processes like Lamb shift and such.
Yes, actually there is negative energy. When a electron tunnels through an energy barrier greater than its kinetic energy would normally allow, it has negative kinetic energy. However, the electron cannot have negative kinetic energy indefinitely and will tunnel to the other side of the barrier. This leads to interesting(but unlikely) posibilities such as having people walk through walls without breaking them, bullets passing through people without killing them, etc. etc.
Of course, "could" is a far cry from "does"... we don't really know what happens.
With the singularity there is no issue of the density becoming too low. The mass, and thus the radius of the event horizon, simply shrink as particles are radiated through the Hawking process.
Interestingly, the rate of radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the hole, so as it shrinks the process accelerates. Eventually you would get a flash as the last of the mass radiated away very fast. Unfortunately this process does not look like a big bang.
Of course, this is only the prediction of current theory. We have not watched a hole do this, that we know of.
then who created God?
Seriously. What was there before God?
Just wait till SGI hears about this :P
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I don't see how a big crunch or lack of the same makes life have a point. I belive life does have a point but that has nothing to do with science or the big bang. If you want to see a point to life I think you will have to look somewhere other than physics or biology. (Ok In biology there is a goal, reproduce but I digress). If you want to know what the point to life is ask your local priest, minister or rabbi. (Check the local pub they are probably having a drink together...)
Erlang Developer and podcaster
the problem is, infinite questions (questions about the nature of the universe, beyond measurable time) require infinite patience. Unfortunately, I have finite time to exist in this universe.
:)
If you find out the answer in the next one, look me up and let me know
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Birth
School
Work
Death
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If you want to feel less significant, look up at the sky on a clear night.
Most people generally think of what they are looking at as billions of billions of galaxies.
Not true. With the naked eye, you are looking at a few thousand local stars. There are only two galaxies that can be seen with the naked eye (outside of the Milky Way, our own). Andromeda, and Magellenic clouds.
Those billions upon billions of galaxies are not visible to the naked eye, nor even with your average consumer-grade telescope. They're out there. But too far away for you to see.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's turtles, all the way down man!
-
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Interesting, don't you think?
This leaves you with a singularity that exploded for no apparent reason and existed for no apparent reason. Where did it come from? Why did it explode?
How complex do things have to get before "God did it" becomes the best explanation?
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
I don't happen to have any moderator points just now, but thanks for a really clear and informative post.
I wouldn't fret too much. The lights won't be going out all over the universe until next Tuesday at the earliest ;-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Heh, Michael, doing a writeup that's inaccurate?
INCONCEIVABLE!
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
And that a good while ago too?
Closed = expands up to a certain point, then contracts
Flat = reaches a ceratin size then stops expanding but stays that size forever
Open = expands forever
Oh yes the aboriginal observations of an ancient tribe of desert shepherds... very convincing.
How is it any more valid than, for example, my pet theory that the Universe was created by the sneeze of a gigantic cosmic platypus?
Whoa... All that cryptic stuff that Lao Tze said was true. Science... the search for the obvious. Well, it keeps me employed and the benes are great.
42
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
check submission post submission
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
--
There IS a point to life.
"The wisest man who ever lived said it this way:
Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.
For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil."
God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you want to know more about this, please email me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com
One thing that has me wondering is this: if the universe can expand forever, how could there have been a Big Bang in the first place? Are the rules different for this universe than they were for the last one?
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Scientific theories are just that-- theories. No good scientist will claim that a theory is fact, just that it's the best match to reality they could come up with given the information, equipment, and methodologies they had access to at the time. If any of those things improve and a new perspective is gained, theories are revised in short order to be more accurate. When things prove wrong, they are scrapped.
This is a lot like you and I writing code-- these folks do their best to find answers that fit in with our (admittedly limited) knowledge of the universe, and they're not going to get it right at first. Unless you write perfect, bug-free code the first time every time, I suggest you cut the scientists some slack. At least they admit they were wrong, fix the theories to fit the new information, and try to improve. Using the willingness of science to admit and attempt to correct its mistakes against it hardly seems fair to me.
I suspect that if someone can find strong scientific evidence for the tale in Genesis, that you will find science quick to accept it. (I can certainly vouch for myself! Prove it, and I will see you in church 28 times a week.) On the other hand, just claiming something is true and being unwilling to budge hardly makes you more right than another person. Just more stubborn.
Science deals with it quite well...sort of.
It doesn't have a "beginning" or an "end" per se. Those words indicate an existence of a "time before" and a "time after", which there isn't, since time didn't exist until the universe "appeared" and probably won't exist after it either dies from miserable heat death*, or contracts back into the singularity whence it came. Time can only be measured by events. When there are no events, there can be no time. Simple as that.
* Do quantum laws allow for a "heat-dead" universe to truly be "dead"? That is to say there is absolutely zero random pair-generation/destruction going on in the vacuum? Can the energy density == zero? If not then there will always be some aspect of time. It's been a good 6 years since my last modern physics class (which we never got into advanced cosmological stuff like this anyhow...)!!
Blech. Signatures.
This whole 'dark energy' crap is just that... crap. "We can't explain why it keeps expanding so let's invent 'dark energy' containing 'reverse gravity'. Nobody will ask us what the fuck it is, or ask for proof of existance because were scientists and are not open to questioning."
I'm inventing upside-down energy with a multiple 'sideways' gravity. SO THERE!
(no, I don't have to prove anything, TAKE THAT!)
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
> there's one explanation for the origin of the universe (1 Genesis) that is still going strong.
Don't be a fool. Everyone knows that Genesis is wrong, and Homer gave the real explanation.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
For full disclosure, I am a physics graduate student working in the astronomy department at Berkeley. Although I am not a cosmologist, I heard the latest on the supernova searches from one of the key investigators yesterday at an informal brown bag lunch. As a regular /. reader, I thought I would put in my own two cents worth of corrections and additional info.
First, the existence of a cosmological constant is NOT at all news. Prior observations by both the LBL group doing observations of supernovae type Ia (group page) and the BOOMERANG group doing observations of the cosmic microwave background (group page) verified the existence of a cosmological constant several years ago.
Second, as a previous poster has stated, the geometry of the universe is NOT necessarily open.
See especially this informative figure which shows the allowed region of parameter space based on both the SNIa and the BOOMERANG results. As you can easily see, the combined results are consistent with a flat universe with a cosmological constant, but the flat universe is a critical case, and one cannot exclude either an open or closed universe.
Third, what IS new is the detection of an extremely distant SN at redshift z = 1.6. The discovery, made largely by Adam Riess, who is now at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute, was largely serendipitous; it was detected in the Hubble Deep Field, and a number of prior observations allowed Riess to piece together a light curve from which he could infer the intrinsic luminosity. The NEW results are remarkable for two main reasons :
1) Critics have argued that a thin smattering of grey dust in intergalactic space could mimic the effect of a cosmological constant (ie, for a fixed redshift, objects seen are dimmer not due to an acceleration of the expansion of the universe, but instead due to obscuring dust along the line of sight, where the dust must absorb equally well at all frequencies). However, at very high redshift, the relative contribution of matter is higher, and so objects seen are BRIGHTER than what one expects in a freely coasting universe. This is not the trend predicted by the simplest dust model. So the recent evidence is one further advance for the non-zero cosmological constant model.
2) At such high redshifts, clocks appear to be moving faster because of the relative expansion of the universe since then (a photon wavelength is stretched out, but c remains constant, hence the photon frequency is also slowing in time in the universe, as are all clocks). The high redshift SNIa light curve exhibits this general relativistic time effect, and one cannot make sense of the curve without correcting for it.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
You're assuming that there exist no anti-entropic processes, which, while likely, may be not true, thanks to Hawking radiation. Not my belief, though, because I don't belief that one quantum process in the presence of a unique macroscopic object can fundamentally change the way the universe works. (Anti-entropic meaning they destroy information, which means they lower entropy, breaking the Second Law. This may be possible. Imagine a black hole sweeping through a cloud of lowest-energy state electrons and photons, and then in a large amount of time (10^100 yrs) turning those lowest-energy state electrons into a massive burst of high energy particles)
That, and I don't like the idea that the fate of the universe depends on whether or not enough black holes are created to constantly redistribute the amount of energy in the universe. This would mean that there is a 'critical black hole density', as of course, white dwarves don't have any antientropic process. Some sense of aesthetics prevents me from believing that the fate of the universe is affected by something as random (and affectable!) as star formation. This is just my indication that there are no real antientropic processes, and black holes do not 'consume' information.
I'm not sure I buy the reasoning on bounded dimensions including time: time is on a different footing than space altogether, and it's fully believable that we live in a universe with three bounded dimensions and one unbounded - I honestly wish I understood more about mixed-signature geometries, because it may be that you could determine this answer from something other than the energy content of the universe.
That's just me, however - I don't like the universe having *any* input parameters at all: after all, energy itself is just a manifestation of the fact that the universe is time-translation symmetric, and if the concept of "time" isn't well defined outside the universe, then the concept of "energy" isn't well defined outside the universe either. Therefore, the fate of our universe must be determinable from some basic property of the physics of the universe in which we live.
I digress: all I meant to point out is that while aesthetics may be a guide in this case, since 3+1 dimensional spacetime has some 'quirky' properties, it may be that 4 bounded dimensions may not be possible considering the symmetries that the 3+1 dim spacetime has to obey.
I'm beginning to think that this is simple miscommunication, but...
Yes. I am saying that a sufficiently good experimentalist can always invalidate his own experiment (at least initially), because a good experimentalist knows the weak points and what can be improved. If you don't, you're lying to yourself. A good experimentalist, faced with a result that is way the hell away from expectations, will immediately go back to the experiment and stare at it for hours and come up with a dozen reasons of what might've gone wrong. Then, after all of those have been checked, he'll go to colleagues and ask for assistance. Then, after THEY'VE checked, and confirmed that's what's going on, then they might publish a quiet paper (or more likely, give a talk at a conference) to see if anyone can come up with an intelligent answer that they've missed. Then they'll go to press. That's what I'm talking about. If you can't do that, don't bother going into the field, as you'll end up ruining your reputation. Monopoles in California (it was California, right?) and the Weber bar experiment. Both classic examples of "what the hell??" experiments that should guaranteedly have been checked more thoroughly before going to press.
I think you're talking about an experimentalist in the last stage of the game, where they've run out of every answer other than the "new physics" answer. But still, at least some of those questions will be unanswerable without a new experiment (or should be. Maybe it was a perfectly designed experiment. But every experiment I've seen always has compromises inside it) and that's what I mean.
And no, I'm *definitely* not suggesting that every repeatedly tested experimental effect can be explained away. I'm suggesting that any questionable result in an experiment can be explained away right after performing the experiment. Now, if the results stand after testing as many of the limitations of the experiment as you can think of, then it's real. But no experimentalist in his right mind would ever believe a bizarre result right away.
Let me put it another way. I'm working on an experiment right now that is designed to look at high energy cosmic rays. We have a guess at what their flux should be. If it's orders of magnitude above that, I can immediately give a dozen things to check. Without hesitation - those are mainly instrument failure things, however. If everything seems to be working, I'll go out and check things myself manually. And if everything still seems to be working, I'll run another experiment to check to see if I can confirm my results. Then, if everything's still wacko, I'll ask colleagues for help.
I'm confused, actually, as you seem to be supporting my point - you admit that a good experimentalist will be able to think of more problems with the experiment. That's what I'm trying to say - that a good experimentalist can explain a bizarre result without automatically resorting to new physics, and then in the same breath suggest an experiment to check that problem. His explanation might be totally wrong - maybe the new physics is there - but he'll always be able to come up with something that should be tested first. Compare this to the amount of time it took experimentalists to believe the Solar Neutrino Problem. It took years before anyone believed that, and experimenters were always saying "maybe there's a problem, but we need more statistics" (the cheapest out, but still an out). This is taking far less time - maybe a year - and I just don't buy it.
As for the semantics argument, that's my personal preference, because repetition is what makes things true in people's heads, not truth - and even scientists fall prey to this. You hear something over and over, and it becomes true. If you hear "there is now significant evidence for a cosmological constant", you begin to believe there's a cosmological constant. If you hear "there is now significant evidence suggesting that our understanding of the expansion of the universe is incorrect" you begin to believe that there's a problem in our current understanding.
Again, I'm not saying that the result isn't real. I'm saying that a good experimentalist can always come up with reasons that the experiment might not have worked.
You're using "invalidate" a little too strongly - I didn't say he would be able to invalidate it - I said he would be able to come up with reasons that would invalidate it. Whether or not any of those reasons pan out to be true is another question.
As for whether or not the presence of a cosmological constant is bizarre, it is bizarre. It's not what we've seen on a smaller scale, though granted our evidence on a smaller scale was much weaker. It's not what was expected - it implies significantly new physics.
As for the final comment, that's just plain wrong - flat out. The flaws in an experiment don't widen error bars - error bars come mainly from statistical considerations and uncertainties in known quantities. They provide a measure of precision, not a measure of accuracy. Going back to the cosmic ray example, for instance, those experiments were way off - but they had great precision. Their error bars were extremely tiny - it just happened that their experiments weren't measuring the right thing, though they didn't know it right at the time (they guessed it afterwards). Depending on the flaw in the experiment, it could be fatal - there are plenty, honestly plenty of those.
Considering the astro data, I know one group was using SN 1a's, which, when you look at the data, are not wonderfully consistent. In fact, there are several astronomers who are beginning to say we don't really know what SN 1a's are (conventional knowledge says that they're white dwarves that exceeded the Chandra limit). Several possibilities jump to mind, including evolutionary concerns and not understanding the physics quite right. These can all be checked, and in the few papers I've read, I haven't seen enough checking to convince me. Again, that could be just me - I'm notoriously hard to convince.
So maybe what I am suggesting is that the teams actually look and see what would have to be true in order for lambda=0 to be within error bounds. Is this bad science, since you're shooting for a specific value? Not really - it's a sanity check. You're just making sure that what you're saying is *guaranteedly* true, and if you have a detractor - someone who insists lambda=0, for instance - you can tell them "well, if lambda=0, then such and such would have to be true."
Weber's measurement of gravitational waves wasn't within two sigma of zero either. I personally don't think that the mass of a few thousand stars is being turned into gravitational waves at the center of the galaxy, though.
Argh. I replied to this before, but Slashdot ate it. What a pain.
I don't agree with your first argument - it's very weak, considering that GR is not a QFT. There's no reason to believe that the vacuum has anything but zero energy, and Mach's principle makes you want to believe that it is zero (Einstein was quite distressed to find out that an empty (Friedmann) universe was a solvable solution of the equations) since in this case you don't have a global matter field to define any of the physical parameters such as mass, etc, and you're essentially defining them in this case via an external field, which is exactly what Mach's principle tries to avoid.
In some sense, you expect the GR limit to have a zero vacuum, since GR should be a 'smoothed over' limit of whatever a QFT of gravity is, if one exists - in some sense, you expect quantum fluctuations to not strongly affect the GR limit (although it very well might). This argument is weak, granted, but GR deals with stress-energy density, not with the gravity of spacetime itself, which is a distinctly quantum process. My gut reaction is still that using vacuum energy to justify a cosmological constant isn't proper, as you're stretching the bounds of where GR is valid.
The second argument is perfectly valid - kindof. The whole idea of "it's going through several phase transitions, so it should be absolutely huge!" is weak, especially with the whole idea of renormalizability. I have little doubt that a final QFT of gravity (again: if there is one) will have an infinite bare cosmological constant.
To be honest, I don't know. My instinct re: the cosmological constant is the same as it is re: dark matter. I don't think we understand gravity at these scales - I really don't. Galaxies look like they have too much mass, galaxy clusters look like they have even more excess mass, all makes me wonder whether or not it's a scaling effect rather than a 'missing mass' effect. With the cosmological constant, it could be the same sort of thing. Again, I could be wrong, but I've always tended towards "the universe is simple" rather than "the universe is bizarre".
It's not silly to explain it away - if the explanation is testable, then it's a valid concern. If you're a good experimentalist, you can *always* come up with a better explanation than "bad physics" - especially because you know the portions of your research that were hacks - and there are *ALWAYS* hacks. :) So if you can't find a problem with your experiment that might explain something, honestly, you're fooling yourself. It might be that all of the explanations you can come up with are crap - I'm not suggesting that any experimental effect can be explained away - I'm just saying any good experimentalist can come up with problems with their own experiment, even if they're not real.
Anyway, take something from my field: in the 80s and 90s, a bunch of experiments all seemed to confirm that the positron fraction in cosmic rays increased at high energies. This made no sense - and fundamentally you don't want to believe it at all. But they all confirmed it, until the next class of experiments came along and showed "oh, wait, you didn't have good enough rejection."
The fact is that in a good experiment, they should've immediately guessed "um, we might not have good enough rejection" and in fact, some of them did suggest that, and that's what led to the better experiments. It might've been that what they saw was real, and their concerns were baseless, but they came up with the concerns, which is the important part.
I agree that the fact that several groups got consistent answers is suggestive, but far space astrophysics relies on far too many assumptions to suggest redefining physics on a small scale until you get a huge swath of data to back it up. Everyone nowadays seems to be hinting in every talk and paper that I read that "evidence is mounting for a cosmological constant": no. Evidence is mounting for a systematic problem in our data regarding the expansion of the universe. The fact that it MAY be explained by a cosmological constant is unimportant. The cosmological constant is a 'fudge factor' in these cases: you can't disprove it because you can fit it to the data. The fact that you can fit it to all the data just says that the experiments are all measuring the same thing precisely - not necessarily accurately.
It was a psuedo-mistake. It was thrown in because it *can* exist.
Historically it was set to zero because it doesn't look pretty in the equations, but there's no reason it should be zero, and in fact, current astronomical observations say that it's probably not zero.
Of course, I'll state my opinion flat out and say that I think the astronomical observations are flawed in the first place, for many fundamental reasons (especially the supernova observations. Trust me. Supernovae are anything *but* reliable observations). I've seen too much duplicity in reporting of astronomical data (see also the Hubble Constant war) to believe anything 'surprising' like this.
It's possible, but the researchers IMHO are trusting their own data too much to suggest something like this. Start from the assumption that the cosmological constant is zero, then try to see if there's anything in your data that would explain the problem OTHER than a cosmological constant. If you can't find anything, you're a bad scientist - talk to some other ones and get some ideas. Check those ideas, check your instruments, run the experiment again. Repeat. Only when you've exhausted everything you can think of can you say "well... we might want to consider a cosmological constant."
The "bad scientist" comment up there implied that a good scientist can always come up with a problem in his/her experiment that will cause a systematic error, not that a cosmological constant is inherently bad.
I don't know. IMHO they haven't done enough checking yet to convince me. Supernova data doesn't convince me - they're way too variable, and they are NOT standard candles, regardless of what anyone tells you.
Open is _not_ Free!~
It's been ported to Lisp and is an Emacs package. Just type M-x big-! and start your own universe.
First of all, these data do _not_ suggest that the universe is open, but rather that it is flat. This is a key cosmological difference.
Secondly, dark energy does _not_ have mass (you're probably thinking of dark matter). Dark Energy is thought to be (by some) the vaccuum energy density of the universe. At the current time, it appears that dark energy is accelerating the outward motion of the universe. This, in fact, is what the supernova observations are showing: given our expansion rate now, we would expect the supernova to be moving away from us more quickly than the actual motion we observe. This suggests that the universe was expanding more slowly in the past than it is now; that is, the universe is accelerating in its expansion.
Because it adds to the overall energy density of the universe, however, it is thought to suggest that it makes the universe flat, cosmologically speaking.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Sol is far too small to become a supernova. A type II supernova would have to be at least 8 times the mass of Sol. A type Ib or Ic is at least 20 times, and a Type Ia requires a binary system.
Is that Homer, the writer of a Greek Epic, or Homer, yellow-skinned consumer of D'OHnuts?
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
While it is good that the universe will not crunch back in on itself destroying everything, the neverending expansion of the universe is not good either. Eventually, the universe will be spread so thin that it will be nothing more than an inconsistent soup of matter. Stars and galaxies will burn out, with nothing left to generate new stars.
Eventually, all the light will die out, and leave the universe a cold, dark, and lonely place. Hopefully by this time we (whoever and whatever we are) will be able to generate a new universe, or escape to an alternate one.
Execute? [Y/N] _
I know some of you think you will ride the technological asymptote to immortality but at this moment there isn't a shred of real evidence that suggests anything other than that we are all gonna die in the very, very, very near term compared to the heat death/big crunch/infinite expansion/who cares of the universe. In the context of that kind of deep time any assumptions on what we will be, or our capabilities, are pure science fiction.
There also isn't a shred of real evidence that suggest we *will* all die in the very near term. The technology one society possesses is always "pure science fiction" to a less advanced civilization. Someone along the way has to dream up the ideas that evolve into usable technology.
Why must you be so close minded? I frequently had the same argument with a fellow classmate in college. He was a History major and had a complete lack of imagination. It's ignorant to say "we will never acheive this because...". We live in a universe of nearly infinite possibilities. Sure we have more immediate problems we need to deal with. Sure these problems will be extremely difficult to overcome. That being said, why should it stop me from looking past the immediate and focusing on what is beyond?
That's the definition of short-sighted.
Execute? [Y/N] _
You don't have to put up with that kind of harassment. Tell the deity firmly and clearly that you are not interested in a relationship and to cease the unwanted contact.
If She/He/They/It still does not stop the harassment, a court injunction may be the next step....
8^)
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Well, there is at least one that has life. Although possibly not intelligent life.
On the plus side, this will take care of that pesky global warming problem.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
I'd even say in the hundred trillions or hundred quadrilion years.
"Great ! Does that mean I can change its source and recompile it ?"
No because the universe isn't code
Well, we'll just have to reverse engineer it then.
---
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/
Today's Astronomy Picture of the day is all about this, too. It's got a bunch of links at the bottom for people wanting to read more.
--
Type 1a Supernovae can be used as a error prone standard candle. I have seen them treated well. I have been to conferences. I know their limitations. The fact is that they are the best standard candles observable at anything approaching the distances necessary to determine the structure of the universe.
You can always add a constant, because that constant can be set to zero with no effect. The reasoning behind the cosmological constant might have been a mistake, but I'm not contending that it was bad science.
Type 1a Supernovae are very tricky to work with, but I think they can be used as stancard candles (that term is jargon for a source of light where we can figure out its actual brightness) if the varances between spectra are taken very seriously.
An "open" universe is not one that will expand forever. "Open" refers to the geometry of the universe.
Here is a link to a good website about it. It is a bit technical, but just look at the first graph. It's well labeled.
SW
The best research I have seen on using supernovae to determine structure of the universe, suggested a "flat" universe that expanded forever due to the cosmoligical constant.
The cosmological constant was a mistake in an equation by Einstein. His equation predicted an expanding universe, and he threw this constant in because he believed that the universe was static and needed a force to compensate.
Info about it here.
SW
This leaves you with a singularity that exploded for no apparent reason and existed for no apparent reason. Where did it come from? Why did it explode?
;-)
After skimming through The Elegant Universe I became a subscriber to the theory that there are multiple 'universes', so I don't see ours as a singularity, but rather an offspring of any one of millions of other 'universes'...
While that may answer you on one level, you could then ask where the MegaMultiverse came from. Can't help you there. But if God had anything to do with it, I think s/he was on some good blotter at the time.
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I believe the earth is following up with evidence of prior art, dating to 12 billions years before SGI.
I guess Elliot is now a more fitting epitaph for this sort of universe: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper As opposed to the more uncertain Frost: Some say the world will end in fire; Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To know that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
Eternal life is much less desirable when you lack the usuable energy to do anything (assuming that these miracle workers manage to keep you alive without consuming energy).
~~~~~~
under-paid karma whore
That's just an "implementation"
If you stop your clock having "events" (i.e. moving, calculating, etc) time still moves ahead.
> Time can only be measured by events. When there are no events, there can be no time. Simple as that.
I don't buy that. Time is meta-physical. It's existance doesn't depend on the physical.
but there's no contradiction :)
:)
Genesis says "God spoke and the Universe was created" or something like that, while the first part is not provable, nor falsifiable; the latter part is proven true. God/Zeus/whomever could have used a big bang, and if he also likes science probably did, or else went through a lot of trouble faking evidence
Grades, Social Life, Sleep... pick two.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
well, we _know_ the Universe had a beginning. And there's no way to know anything outside of the universe (okay, there are a few ways, but not that we can do without something meta-physical doing something). Time before/after the big bang? time was _created_ at the big bang, it can't be before. (okay, it _can_, but again, that's not provable).
Grades, Social Life, Sleep... pick two.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
Actually, Scientific American had an atricle about this a while ago. Figuring you'd always need a slight bit of energy to live, and making that some number of BTUs per some span of time, they figuring out that from right now, you could live about 30 trillion years, a long time, but not forever.
:)
Kinda depressing, I always wanted to be a good 31 trillion yeas old myself
Grades, Social Life, Sleep... pick two.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
I fount the one in Astronomy Magazine a bit better, myself. I'm thinking February, maybe January, though.
Grades, Social Life, Sleep... pick two.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
Too late, SGI already has a trademark.
Can your IM do this?
yeah but a supernova anywhere within a 1000 light years could make Earth uninhabitable.
As someone who plans on living forever, this is *such* a relief.
(Insert sarcasm as necessary)
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Actually, yes you can:
http://www.openuniverse.org/
I think that this rates up there among those deep questions, like
"Is there a god?",
"What is the ultimate fate of humanity?", and
"What should I eat for lunch?"
-----
Michael wrote:
"(Update: 04/04 11:03 AM by michael: A couple of people have pointed out that this write-up is inaccurate; I'm not going to try to correct it, but read the comments for more information"
Apparently the only thing really expanding forever is Slashdot's ambivalence toward accuracy.
I don't find this remotely depressing. First of all, let's get something straight: A "purpose" in life is not the responsibility of the Universe. The Universe is a thing. It doesn't care if we have a purpose or not. We're simply a small part of it.
Borrowing from Contact (the book, not the movie), there was a great part where the aliens in our galaxy were collaborating with aliens from another galaxy actually creating a new galaxy from raw materials.
A few million years from now, there's no reason why we might not have that kind of technology (assuming we survive the millions of years). Assuming an ever-expanding Universe, I would imagine that our goal as a species would be to take a few galaxies that we would engineer to stay in a group as the Universe as a whole expands. From the dying stars, we would somehow break the fused elements back down into hydrogen to create new stars in and new galaxies, so that we could continue to exist.
It's an optimistic outlook, but certainly a goal and a purpose to strive for. If the Universe collapses into a new big bang, our only purpose could be to survive until then, at which point, we'd be destroyed. I don't particularly like that. That seems more pointless.
But that's just my opinion.
If we can't move to a new solar system in a few million years, we deserve to get wiped out by a supernova.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Why do you need a purpose? The "purposes" you list for other discoveries seem like they were concocted after the fact to justify it for people who prefer to believe in a supreme being guiding the Universe.
If you really need a purpose, here's one: to provide us with a challenge. If the Universe continues to expand indefinitely, there will be a time when the average density of the Universe is low enough that the formation of news stars becomes unlikely, and the fuel for those stars will begin to be burned up. Survival of the human race will be almost impossible in those conditions. The fight to survive will be the last remaining challenge for a race that will have had more than enough time to uncover a set of physical laws that describe the Universe. We'll need something to do.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Science is getting closer and closer to the truth. Most Christians I know (and I am one, btw) sit back and make fun of the scientists. They make me almost ashamed to be a Christian.
If you want to disprove the idea of an old Earth, roll up your sleeves and start working. Find all the young earth arguments you can, then find out how most of them have been disproved long ago. Do some research, find out which young earth arguments still work, and quote them, not any others.
When a Christian starts talking about how entropy disproves evolution, I start laughing bitterly. Christians who want to be believed in the scientific crowd need to become scientifically literate. They need to humble themselves and learn. Until then, there is very little that they will say about evolution that is worth listening to.
Yeah, I've been very hard on Christians. That's because I am one and I'm disgusted.
That said, I'm perfectly willing to accept the idea of a young earth. Of course, there is something that I'd like to see first. Evidence. It helps. I've seen some already, but not quite enough to convince me yet.
I'm not talking about a religious issue. I'm talking about the Young Earth question, which, sadly, some people call a religious issue. If the Earth is young, there will be evidence. If that evidence is found, the Earth is young. If the evidence says the Earth is old, the Earth is old.
Creationism is an entirely different thing. There are a lot of Old Earth Creationists and some Young Earth Naturalists (Paul Hogan, for one.) Personally, I don't see what the two issues have to do with each other.
The Young Earth question is a matter of science and evidence. Creationism is a matter of faith.
The Heechee Saga was written by Frederick Pohl, and is, IMHO, both his best work and better than anything I've read by Poul Anderson. Although I haven't read Anderson's future history, which is supposed to be his best, so my opinion may not be real valuable, here.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
String theory predicts 11 dimensions, 7 of which are rolled up too small to see. I note the co-incidence that the matter fraction in the interesting figure of the previous post is centered on the same fraction (4/11) as the number of visible dimensions to total dimensions. Daniel
--
RMS
Rich
Since:
:P
A. the universe is getting larger
B. Matter/Engery cannot be created or Destroyed, only covert states
Therefore, We are we infact destine to Heat Death or Cold Death of the Universe?
now THATS depressing
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
So can anyone elaborate (intellegently) on how all of these theories of Dark Energy/Dark Matter/negative gravity/etc are different from previously conceived notions of Ether and/or Orgone?
-shpoffo
Actually, Einstein called it the second biggest mistake of his life. The biggest, he said, was coming up with the theoretical basis for atomic bombs.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Take a good look at the Universe... Its too perfect. Galaxies, with nice little stars orbiting the centers and planets orbiting the stars... and then life, and chances are we will eventually find life on numerous other planets. What does this suggest? Obviously, with our current understanding of Physics and the laws of thermodynamics, namely the principle of "Entropy" we can see that it doesn't make any more sense for our galaxy to naturally come together and form such a complex system of stars and planets anymore than it makes sense for copper ore to come together and form a new penny.
My conclusion, is that some (many) supreme beings, with knowledge far in advance of ours and power far in advance of ours are responsible for everything we see. They created or at least organized our planet, and seeded it with life. Call them Gods or are creators if you like, but in my opinion our universe and especially our world is to "perfect" to be the result of some random explosion of a singularity.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
Domain Names for $13
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Will OpenUniverse 1.0 beta be avaliable under the GPL?
Any reader of Poul Anderson's Gateway series knows about the Heechee investigating black holes and the cosmological constant, not to mention the unmentionables hiding out in the Kugelblitz at the edge of the galaxy. Now THEY know that energy can be massive.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Darn. I knew it was one of those names kinda like Paul, but not really.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Maybe the negative energy that forces space apart is a mechanism that makes room for big bangs.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
-- flossie
http telnet
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
I hereby nominate UE as "cleverest troll on slashdot".
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Looking around the office it's easy to see the universe is expanding. Take my co-worker George, he gained 40 pounds last year.
Of course there is occasional shrinkage, but the universe always bounces back....over time, I forsee a large stationary universe, where the georges of the world can expand till the hearts explode.
:D
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Today it's going to end as freezing desolation of dead stars ...
I never seem to get the right clothes for the ocasion!
Scientific hypotheses are based upon the evidence available at the time. Sometimes there will be different interpretations of the same evidence (competing theories) and it is then up to scientists to devise experiments to try to figure out which interpretation is correct.
As new evidence comes along the theories evolve to reflect this. But that doesn't mean all the old theories were wrong, maybe they just described a particular subset of something, and they needed to be expanded for a more general case.
A good example of this is Newton's Laws of motion, which were superceeded by Einstein's theories of relativity. It doesn't mean that Newton was wrong, just that his theories were a very very good approximation for objects travelling at 'everyday' speeds. In Newton's time they didn't have any way of observing objects travelling at relativistic speeds, as the fastest things around were cannon balls !
Of course you could argue that since Newton and Einstein are in 'disagreement', they are obviously both wrong, and of course God moves everything around by hand.
Great ! Does that mean I can change its source and recompile it ?
I would much prefer an open universe to a propriatairy one where one company has exclusive rights to charge whatever they want....
What? Oh, never mind.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
There was a pretty big multipage read on quintessance in the January issue of Scientific American.
While the evidence does suggest that the universe is flat, when you plug in all the numbers, omega (a nifty number involving lots of fun constants and the total mass/energy of the univers), which should be exactly, precisely, not even a teeny weeny bit off of 1 if the universe is, in fact flat, comes out to .3. Well, if the universe isn't flat, calculation of omega becomes a function of time, so by now (assuming we know the age of the universe reasonably well) omega would be dramatically different than it was at the time of the big bang. (Thus the need for not even a teeny weeny bit of being off of 1). if it was just a teeny weeny bit larger than one at the big bang, it would be huge by now, a teeny weeny bit smaller, and omega would be almost 0. the problem is, this is an energy/time calculation, which brings Heisenburg uncertainty into the picture. so, given the lower end of what "1" means taking uncertainty into account, you get .3 for the current value.
So, according to astronomers, .3 = 1.
While this is important in terms of the field, as far as day to day life goes, it is not very important. After all, we have billions and billions of years before the wrap party.
Actually, this sort of research is extremely important - understanding this stuff is key to finding a way to go faster than the speed of light (taking as a given that the narrow view of Einstinian relativity is not valid and that FTL travel is not impossible)
I want to know if we have neighbors, and if we have to worry about them
If FTL travel is impossible, you don't have to worry about them. If it's possible, you still don't have to worry about them since if they could have done anything, and would have done anything, it would already have happened.
For the Luddites of the world who resist computers, consider using computers to resist.
They both found, independently and shockingly to both, that not only is the universe expanding rapidly, but it's expanding with an increasing rate.
The point in all this is that the density could be anything it could be 300 g/cm^3 or 10^-100 g/cm^3, but it happens to fall very close to the value needed for a flat universe. And with all the possibilities out there, having a flat universe would be like balancing a pencil on its tip. Since, when we check the numbers, it seems like the pencil wobbles a bit(doesn't perfectly stand on its tip, but doesn't fall into open or closed territory very much), it suggests that we do live in a very finely tuned universe.
I can deal with flat though. Its unique. Its got character. If we ever got into a fight with another universe, flat would kick ass!
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
I like the fact that we're not special, it doesn't give us any pressure to get something accomplished here.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
What's this? Slashdot editors actually reading the stories they post about?
what if "Love" is the reason (and answer) to why we're here? if it is, then we've learned very little proving that humans are both insincere and inferior (apparently) to some "lower" animals. whatever, take care.
Ø-----ØØ-----ØØ-----ØØ-----ØØ-----ØØ-----ØØ-----Ø
Off par slightly put if the universe is thought to expand for ever and that physics says the energy/mass are finite (i.e. I mean they can interchange but the total is always the same) that eventually the universe will end in being an infinitly big yet cold place?
Cheap UK and US VPS
Remember moderators, Concentrate on Promoting more than Demoting.
--Don't mind me, I just spent the last 2 hours in alt.beer
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
The word "Flat" is not the better word, as a flat universe expands itself, but slows down as it losts energy. It hasn't any boundaries, simply it decreases velocity when it grows.
We, in this universe don't see any difference, as our velocity decreases in synchronicity with this universe.
This is the same paradox as event horizon in black holes : you fall in for eternity, here we grow up slowly, for eternity.
Whoops... meant to link to the space.com article on the hubble seeing the supernova (the background on all the links for this story). You're right, that's an entirely different article (also a fun read, might I add). My bad.
Its still morning for me...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here it is. That's the space.com article that started this "Dark Energy" story.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Observations made by the Hubble telescope have produced evidence that the universe is full of "dark energy", stuff that has mass but does not emit nor block light,
Your dark energy explaination is actually the definition of "Dark Matter". Dark energy is the repulsive force in space that accelerates the already spreading galaxies.
Another theory that supports this "Dark Energy" is the theory of a second sun Nemesis
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
> Update: 04/04 11:03 AM by michael: A couple
> of people have pointed out that this
> write-up is inaccurate; I'm not going to
> try to correct it, but read the comments
> for more information.)
That's what I love about Slashdot journalism. No time is wasted correcting innacuracies. "We're on internet time -- we can't bother." The truth is, there is no immediate benefit from checking the facts before doing a writeup, so *why* bother? The hoardes of people will still come, and the advertisers will still shell out the bucks.
From now on, my news comes from moreover.com -- or (tongue-in-cheek) better yet, the slashdot story generator: http://bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/
can be found here:
Blast from the Past: Farthest Supernova Ever Seen Sheds Light on Dark Universe
... and some more information, why this should tell us, that the universe is expanding faster.
I don't know about anybody else, but did anyone else say "whew" when you read this? I was always worried that if, by some miracle, cryogenics was ever perfected and we could live forever, we would be stilted by a crunching universe (not a terribly fun way to die). At least now we have some extra time.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The only way that we can measure time is by events. If you want to try to extend the definition of a physical quantity beyond that which can ever be observed, directly or indirectly, you may as well call it religion.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Shouldn't that be Wanted: Schrodinger's Cat. Dead and alive?
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
- Douglas Adams
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I was gonna post an explanation here, but then I decided to check that "1 reply below your current threshold," and found a decent explanation that had been modded down to "-1, Offtopic." Normally, I'm not one to bitch about moderation. But this was a plain, accurate, on-topic reply to an on-topic post, and this was a blatant abuse by that moderator. So if you want to see the reply, just click that link, and hope that moderator meets a humorously unpleasant end in the near future.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
;-)
While this is important in terms of the field, as far as day to day life goes, it is not very important. After all, we have billions and billions of years before the wrap party.
Other areas of research, like the search for planets are slightly more relevant. I want to know if we have neighbors, and if we have to worry about them
The rest is somewhat abstract for my taste.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That's because the scientists can admit that they are wrong, but the religious fruitcakes can't. :)
Heck... I don't think that either one are correct, but that is just me thinking about what would seem logical...
It is fairly analogous, actually.
Without the cosmological constant, Einstein's field equations in index-free form are G = kT. This equation is constrained by the vanishing divergence (covariant derivative) of the energy-momentum stress tensor on the right hand side. The Einstein tensor on the left hand side is designed to have a vanishing derivative, in order to satisfy this condition. In addition, it has to reduce to Newtonian gravity in the weak field limit. We can add a cosmological constant Ag because its derivative also vanishes; if it is small enough, the weak field limit is unaffected.
This is very similar to a constant of integration. When you take the derivative of a constant, it vanishes, so the differential equation remains satisfied.
The cosmological constant, which provides a repulsion on the cosmological scale, was famously declared by Einstein to be the biggest mistake of his life. However, it has been known for many decades now that the it is a very valid part of the theory - it's not so much a fudge factor as a constant of integration.
and yet, what science has only proved in the last few centuries, was already recorded in the Bible 1000 or so years before... see the book of Isaiah about "circle of the earth" and so forth...
Great. And I thought my last relationship was the only thing with no closure...
---
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
YES! About time we had a creation-vs-big-bang flame war in here!
You know what they say: Once you go dark matter, you'll never go back.
Several words: Douglas Adams and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series. If you read that six book trilogy I think most of your questions may have answers. It deals with the meaning of life, the Universe, (un)intelligent lifeforms et al. The "Guide" may not be the Bible but it outsells the Universal Encyclopedias by a huge margin.
--
Blessed are the geeks for they shall Internet the Earth.
Read more Hawking, especially about space and time lacking boundaries. You'll see him write often that, "...it [the universe] would just BE."
Doesn't "Open Universe" sound confusingly similar to OpenGL? We are just lucky that "Universe" has no "L", or SGI would sue the entire Universe for being open.
Perhaps it's not the universe that's expanding; perhaps we, and everything inside of it are shrinking.
It's all relative.
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
a disregarded theory first postulated by Einstein...
Unfortunately Einstein wasnt around to see Star Wars. Plenty of people showing "negative gravity" all around.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
Isn't this precisely the point of science and it's everlasting quest to prove educated guesses wrong? And a theory is just that, an educated guess, or a hypothesis. Science would be pretty pathetic is we didn't practice this way, the world would still be flat, the earth the center of the universe, ......
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
1.There is no dearth of "dark forces" on earth either.
2.The problem of housing and dearth of land and space is a myth, the universe is expanding you see.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
You might be interested to know that researchers in Japan are discovering more and more evidence that neutrinos might have mass (albeit very small). If this is true, and as neutrinos are the most abundant particle in the universe, this will no doubt affect the expansion of the universe somehow, though how I haven't done enough thought on yet. My personal theory is that both the 'ever expanding universe' and the 'big bang, big crunch' theories can co-exist. If we imagine the universe like a ring donut shape, the hole in the middle is the place where the 'big bang' happened. On one half of the donut, the whole acts as the 'energy emitter' we expect from the big bang. It appears as if we are moving away from other objects in our galaxy because the 'energy emitter' is pushing us away. Simple enough. Now here is where my theory gets a little strange, either in a symbiotic alternative universe, or in something I will explain in minute, is the other side of the 'donut'. Here the 'object' that produces the 'big bang' is acting like a 'black hole'. This kind of link between 'big bang' and 'black holes' comes from some of the work that Steven Hawking has done, that suggests such a link could exist. All of the matter in this universe is being sucked in, coming out on the other side of the 'black hole', i.e. where the big bang took place. Here's the hard bit to swallow. When the matter in the normal side of the universe, i.e. the 'big bang' side, gets to the 'edge' of the donut, it does not go on getting further away from the 'donut hole', but instead gets pulled in by the 'black hole side', and so the loop continues. I have not decided yet whether the donut gets bigger or not, because I have not looked at this from the point of view of conservation of energy, but I will do soon. Again, I must stress this is only a theory, but you can't admit it is not bad for someone who is only 16! Please no flaming. When was the last time any of the rest of you put anything as radical up as this? Never, I bet, so you cannot criticise. (Sorry!)
The bozo has spoken!
A common misconception, left over from decades of cosmology textbooks which implicitly assumed a zero cosmological constant (equivalently, no dark energy). These textbooks all make the equation that closed geometry = universe recollapses, open geometry = universe expands forever, flat geometry = borderline case.
In fact, if you have a cosmological constant (or dark energy), you can have a closed univere which expands at an accelerating rate.
The best evidence about the geometry of the universe currently comes from cosmic microwave background observations, which suggests that the geometry is *flat*. The supernova evidence suggests that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
It is a mistake to state that an eternal expansion, or an accelerating expansion, is an "open" universe.
-Rob
For a closed universe, for a (non-existent ?) outside observer, the final collape will be quite fast, while for an observer within the universe the final collapse will stretch infinitely (this is a relativistic effect), and energy will not be a problem. If there is some way for an information processing (eventually intelligent) system to survive under such conditions, it may become immortal (and eternally entraped) in the final microsecond of the collapse.
This is basically the Omega-Point theory of Tipler and Barrow (read 'The anthropic principle' by F.J. Tipler and J.D. Barrow, or 'The physics of immortality' by F.J. Tipler).
For an open universe, there is a paper from 1979 by Freeman J. Dyson (Review of Modern Physics, Vol 21, Nr. 3), which is also available online. Basically, he shows that life may exist forever by using an activity/hibernation cycle. If a proper hibernating strategy is used, where the relative length of the hibernating phase is increased with time, subjective time can become infinite, while the total energy required will remain finite.
-----
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Sir Fred Hoyle announced a simular idea 50 (?) years ago, called the steady state theory. It was proven wrong when a constant cosmic radioation was found everywhere. (Hoyle's theory predicted variations in radiation).
Hoyle also wrote som kickass scifi stories (e.i. "The Black Cloud")
Sorry, couldn't resist it :-)
Beware of the dark side of the Force...
"...Fear the people who fear your computer"
But come on: All this is interesting in a "what a strange and complex universe we live in" sort of way, but can anyone really come up with an ultimate end to the universe that convincingly reads as "good" or "bad?" Guess what - I know some of you think you will ride the technological asymptote to immortality but at this moment there isn't a shred of real evidence that suggests anything other than that we are all gonna die in the very, very, very near term compared to the heat death/big crunch/infinite expansion/who cares of the universe. In the context of that kind of deep time any assumptions on what we will be, or our capabilities, are pure science fiction. It's much more realistic to fret about how we'll escape the galaxy as our sun dies out/expands to engulf us in a red giant/annihilates the galaxy in a supernova... And even more realistic to talk about how the human race will avoid a technological dark age brought on by overpopulation/resource depletion/massive climate change/destruction of arable land/meteor impact/nuclear warfare/ozone depletion/genetic tampering... and so on and so on and so on... Flat? Open? Closed? Whatever.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I wrote the original comment and I wanted to say this is unfair moderation. This person corrects me on both counts. Of course, the earth is still screwed.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Ok so my postings so far for the day will come to a halt, but I figured this should be included in the topic, or... You could just read it anyways...
Two British astronomers have counted up to 20 "free floating" planets, drifting in the constellation of Orion. They told the National Astronomy Meeting in Cambridge yesterday that they had identified the "signature" of water vapour in the infrared spectrum of faint points of light in the Orion nebula. This is a vast cloud of gas and dust 1,300 light years from Earth, but visible as the middle "star" in the sword of the constellation of Orion.
Read on
360 degrees of Karma
I'd hoped that the universe would slow in its expansion and then reverse until it all collected into one central mass again, then exploded outwards again.
;)
Not only would this be like really COOL and CIRCULAR and make the universe seem more like a LISP universe than an ALGOL-60 one. (Algol programs- they just keep expanding until eventually they fade and disapate!), but I was rather hoping, like the stoics, that combined with determinism, it would mean that I would get to lead an infinite amount of lives- all of them the same.
I mean yeah, parts of my life have sucked muchly, but most of it has been really cool and I'm really enjoying it at the moment since I have no girlfriend and 12 computers in the house.
Also it just seemed RIGHT that this life I lead was the first, and also the last, in fact there would be no way of telling which iteration of the universe we were on because they would all be identical. (How can you have a static variable to keep track of the iteration when there's no place to put it where it won't be reset?)
Oh well, guess I'll have to find a religion to prop me up in my old age. It'll have to be one of those where you get to end up in "heaven" or some otherwise freakily cosmic namespace completely separate from the main universe, 'cos like, what's the point in getting reincarnated all the time if the universe will eventually die anyway? Good grief, entropy is a big downer! Even Buffy-style vampires are mortal in this universe, since they can't escape the death of the universe. (DOTU).
You can just tell I'm supposed to be working, can't you?
Graspee
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
The universe is all that there is.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
There is nothing "outside" the universe.
There are no limits.
The human brain was not designed to comprehend the nature of the universe- so don't try.
Go play Fallout Tactics instead. It's life-affirming, in a romantic comedy sort of a way.
Graspee.
(Completely baked).
Their should be no flame war, bliss(who should have got a 2 or something) is right, the evidence is outstanding for a non-genesis theory for this non-debate. Radiation, moving galaxies, how much more evidence do you people need?
-----
You stupid bastard, you don't have no arms left. It's just a flesh wound.
> The entire body of science points towards there being a directional purpose to life.
Either that, or some creatures in another type of reality created a gigantic random simulation and said, "Hey, let's see if something in there talks back to us eventually."
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I'd be worried about no useable energy being left but the odd decaying proton long before distance becomes a problem.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Heat death and entropy are completely based on probabilities.
Yet, "forever" is an awfully long time. There will always be the rare quarks that ram together and produce a subatomic particle. Eventually enough will just happen to be created together to create an atom.
How, as we go out multiple 10^^googleplex years, how long do we wait until a new star is born, purely by this random chance?
We're talking time periods so long an Atari 2600 can play a perfect game of Chess in the first 0.000000000001% of it.
That, I think, is the flaw in the heat death argument and the entropy argument, in an ever-expanding universe.
If anyone writes a paper analyzing the statistics on this, include Bobo as a co-researcher.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I read an interesting sf story, probably based on that theory, where some star-being (this was a side-plot, but integral to the origin of the main plot) had ultimately survived many additional sets of ",000,"'s beyond the paltry ten billion or so years the universe has been alive. Indeed, the current universe was a brief, energetic memory in his incalculable age, driven on with the equivalent of one bit of information in his brain changing every century in that distant, distant future as a proton or something decayed.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Ellie from Contact: "Which is more likely? That the universe is only 6000 years old, and that some trickster God created it to look like it was billions of years old. OR.
"OR that the Bible is a bunch of made up crap! Palmer, dammit! I can't believe you voted for Drumlin! Those aliens will have super-advanced technology, probably be able to read every atom in my, I mean, his brain, and they'll see we sent a power-hungry, lying, political weasle as our representative?"
Curious, isn't it? Jake Busey may have actually done this planet a gigantic favor...
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I've taken enough physics to wonder how this plays in with the whole Entropy Theory about the Universe's future. The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, the entropy of that system will always increase. The Universe is a closed system (to the best of my knowledge). How is it that these two ideas do not contradict?
That's interesting... I too always have rooted for a universe that collapsed. It seems more cyclical that way, more tidy.
and on the subject of manifest destiny, or directional progress, perhaps you've read The Reflexive Universe by the guy who invented the bell helicopter. If not, it's a very interesting book, well worth the read (even if a lot of the quantum mechanics are well out of date).
If the latest is true, I guess we'll just have to rely on the last question
Don't you think this is kinda wishful this is kidna wishful thinking on your part? If, as you say, you are an existentialist, then this does not jibe. Life is what you make of it. You wouldn'tbe around long enough to catch the end of the universe if it were closed. In a practical as well as realistic sense, it pays to just enjoy life, and not try to find a higher meaning. If you truly need one though, ponder this: "What is six times 9?" A:"42"
In fact, this really means that I doubt what the scientists say on this matter very much. Everything else in nature has a greater purpose and direction, a manifest destiny if you will, whether it be evolution or consciousness or even life itself. Scientists have always prided them on showing the point of life since the days of Euclid, through Newton (who was a very spiritual man) and onwards.
The entire body of science points towards there being a directional purpose to life. This discovery flies in the face of everything we have learned, and I for one am sceptical. Not until they show the higher purpose (multiuniverses?) will I be convinced of this.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
If you ask me, NetUniverse is a much better platform for developing inter-galactic life forms.
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
you seem to have the terms "dark matter" and "black hole" confused.
© 2001 Anusmouth_Cowherd.
© 2001 Anusmouth_Cowherd.
(just looking for some -k)
Dark energy? Is anyone reminded of Pokemon?
~ Sera
"People who play with hazardous materials often die." Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
ok - one thing, space is full of "space" right? and while there is stuff (particles, dark matter, whatever else) in it, its all very spread out, so if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?? more space?? surely there must be space for it to expand into ?? and if there is space for it to expand into then how is that space different from the space right at the edge of the universe? and how would you know the difference?? and if there isnt any space at the edge then what happens if you send something past the end? (unrealistic in terms of distance and time but hey im just curious to any answers somemone may have) answers on a post card to.... :)
Take even the "best" glass (that which distorts and blocks the least amount of light) will appear to be opaque if you make it thick enough. Look at a large pane of glass lenght wise. It may be clear through the thin section, but not down the length.
Therefore, Glass != Dark Matter since glass blocks light and dark matter does not.
Why bother.
And in a related story, SGI systems has filed legal proceedings for copyright infringment against the entire fucking universe.
Thier copyright must be protected.
The One,
The Only,
--The Kid
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com
Warp drive here we come! That is, if there is such a thing as negative energy...
If God gave us curiosity
"shows that their old theories are nothing but bunk. "
Yeah, we keep on changing our tune every few years or so. It's amazing how far off-the-mark Newton was with his laws of motion and gravitation. It's a miracle that the Saturn V reached the moon using his laws.
"science sings a different song every couple of years or so,"
At least in science we CAN change our minds. That's the whole point of it. We can accept other peoples' points of view when they're able to back it up with undeniable proof (note the use of the word 'undeniable.') When was the last time somebody argued with the Bible and won? It took the Catholic Church almost 400 years to admit Galileo was right, almost 20 years after the Apollo missions.
On the other hand, if science is so weak as to change drasticly every few months, then explain how your monitor works when it's based on a century-old theory like relativity. If Einstein was completely off-the-mark, then the electrons in your cathode ray tube would really be travelling faster than light, the formulas the monitor's manufacturer used to make your monitor would all be off, the circuitry would be aiming electrons at the wrong pixels, and you wouldn't have your precious 1600x1200 resolution.
And that's before we start talking about how old the electron theory that allows your computer to work is. If 150+ year-old theory that says electricity is delivered in particles is all wrong, then transistors and even diodes shouldn't work. So much for the internet. I hope you know how to use a sliderule...
But, hey, if you think science is all bunk, that's your perrogative. Just don't try to force your "If it's in the book, it must be right" POV on the rest of us. And try not to be such a hipocrite about it next time.
will this information ever help mankind get of this crummy planet?
--- Hajotkaa siihen, kapitalistit!
Berk Watkins
Surely everyone must remember `dark matter'. I held my breath over MACHOS and WIMPS... that is until the Hubble telescope was up and running properly, and thousands upon thousands of previously undiscovered galaxies were observed. This new data explained the `mising mass' of the universe much better than the Dark Matter theory ever did. Obviously this situation isn't identical, but still I think any `unknown factor' solution to scientific problems should be avoided... surely there's a more down to earth solution to this problem, which we just haven't come across the evidence for yet?