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Find Out About the Future of Science
Science magazine writer Charles Seife has written a new book, Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. According to Publishers Weekly, Charles claims, "Scientists...now know how the universe will end and are on the brink of understanding its beginning. Their findings will be among the greatest triumphs of science, even towering above the deciphering of the human genome." A brave statement! Charles is happy to answer your questions about ongoing research that is busily revealing the basic nature of life, the universe, and everything in a serious (as opposed to humorous) sense, so ask away. One question per post, please. We'll post the answers as soon as we get them beck.
You're quoted as saying, "Scientists...now know how the universe will end and are on the brink of understanding its beginning. Their findings will be among the greatest triumphs of science, even towering above the deciphering of the human genome." Is it also your belief that the consequences of understanding the beginning of the universe will approach the transformation of living that we're just beginning to see from the deciphering of the genome?
So... How will the Universe end? Big Crunch, Dark & Cold, Equilibrium, Giant Black Holes, Act of God, or... what?
And, of course, how can you be so sure of that? [Add "You, Insensitive Clod!" to this last question for the humorous touch...]
Whatever theory you build today will only be validated in, what? A dozen billion years? More? So what makes you so sure you know the ned of the Universe today?
Please note: this is really a serious question. I am interested in the End of the Universe as we know it. Thanks for your answers!
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Can we explain the expansion of the universe and why the rate is changing? Can we claim to know how the universe will end if we can't answer that?
It's a question I've had for a long time and I sometimes think about it and it freaks me out :) no really. Ok, we "know" (until someone else proves it's wrong) how the universe is going to end. We are about to "know" how it really started. Great! However, when we are talking about the universe... we are assuming that it is infinite. I just have a hard time with this Infinite Universe concept... the universe NEEDS to be contained within something... however, even if we discover the container... it will end up being a part of our definition of universe and then we'll need to search for the container's container. Anyway, any thoughts on that?
It just twists complexity in order to show the existence of God. Think about it - if an ony of your gazillion variables were different, would we be here to comment? It's the Anthropic principle - the universe seems conducive to life since there is life around to observe it. We don't see any of the other places because there's nobody there to watch. And on earth, we evolved to fit the environment - it's no surprise that it's good for us.
You don't need a God to make the universe work. Although you may say that there's no concrete evidence against one, there's also no evidence to suggest that our whole universe isn't an elaborate 5D shadow puppet show run by unicorns. Occam's razor must be applied.
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Since it is something of an open issue, what is the current understanding of the nature of dark matter in our universe? What kinds of questions are still being investigated? What kinds of hypotheses do we have now, and what do they imply?
(I realise this work is more than jsut Lee Smolin's, but he wrote the book I read about it a few years ago.)
As I understand it, there is a serious strand of thought in cosmology that suggests that our universe may be only one of (an infinite number of) alternatives. A small finite area in a parent universe undergoes inflation and blows up like a very fast balloon; for observers within this bubble, theirs is the only universe. Smolin also talks about how this hypothesis might tie in with the six magic physical constants which, if their values were even slightly different, would cause totally different physical conditions within our universe. If the inflationary bubbles occur within singularities, they would also be unknowable to their parent universe. A universe with lots of black holes would tend to give rise to offspring that would also have lots of black holes, and vice versa. I'm badly mangling his explanation of this ! but he provides an IMHO elegant explanation for the phenomena of these numbers' values appearing to have been tuned very precisely to the values neccessary for "our" sort of universe, and hence, life, and ultimately us and any other observers out there.
What's your opinion of this? It seems to me that this hypothesis makes no testable predictions and so falls beyond the remit of the scientific method. Is it just a smart way of talking around the anthropic principle, or might this be one of the key concepts to help tie up the loose ends in the standard model?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
It's well known that our view of the world around us was radically changed by Einstein, Heisenberg, and other scientists of their day. Einstein gave us relativity, and Heisenberg ushered in quantum mechanics (of course Einstein and his explanation of the photo-electric effect). Both of these thoeries led to radical departures from well established theories. However, there were, at the time, known physical effects that could not be explained by then current theories, i.e. the above mentioned photo-electric effect, blackbody radiation, Michelson's measurement of the speed of light, etc. etc. that make it clear in hindsight that the a profound shift in understanding was required.
My question is what, if any then, are the areas where we need similar paradigm shifts to answer current outstanding questions? It seems to me, at least, that maybe there aren't any, and today's scientists are left working harder and harder simply to add a few significant digits to existing theories. What are your thoughts?
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As a layperson with an interest in cosmology and physics, I seem to hear about an increasing number of hacks to the Standard Model. By hacks I mean things like dark energy, whose value apparently fluctuates over (cosmological) timescales; there's another idea that the speed of light(I think?) ha varied over time, and that this is the only way to explain the cepheid data (supernovae of known brightness) as we get to see supernovae from further and further away (which occured further and further back in time of course.)
Isn't the use of ugly hacks to prop up an established theory in the face of contradictory observations an indicator of a theory which needs to be chucked out en masse and reformulated in the light of a more fundamental description of physics?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Do you think the evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating is concrete? And, what effect do you think this conclusion should/will have on humans?
There are two points to be made here, methinks: /now/ how the universe started and will end, but in a lot of the details - and possible the final outcomes - they're almost certainly wrong. A few short years ago we know exactly how Jupiter was formed; then Galileo dropped a probe into the atmosphere, and suddenly more questions arose. Now no-one knows why its atmosphere or its winds are the way they are. Science is littered with such examples; particularly cosmology. How recently is it that we didn't even know gamma ray bursts existed? There'll always be stuff we haven't accounted for, so theories will always be based on incomplete data.
1. Scientists may know
Which brings me nicely to point two: supposing our Brainiacs are right? That's hardly the mystery taken out of everything; questions abound, and always will. Maybe when we're all in our Vorlon-like encounter suits we'll have a decent understanding of the part of the universe that we can see; before then, there'll always be questions.
Is this universe actually capable of creating true near-infinite randomness, or are all the sources fundamentally affected by characteristics relating to the beginning (and/or end) and basic properties underlying them?
ObDisclosure: yes, I am a Christian. No, I am not an Intelligent Design or Creation Science advocate. I object to both ID and CS on theological grounds rather than scientific ones, for reasons I hope will be clear.
There is NO NEED for intelligent design.
On the contrary: if there was no need for the idea of intelligent design (note that I didn't call it a theory), nobody would've come up with it. It's pretty well-understood that there are a large number of fundamental constants which are balanced just perfectly to allow complex systems to arise in the Universe. This creates a question: how did this perfect balance come to be? Some people feel the need to have an answer, and for these people, ID fills a genuine need.
On the other hand, ID isn't science. Science is concerned with empirical observations and testable hypotheses. You can't empirically test God. Theologically speaking, we can't test God because he exists on such a level beyond us that we can't conceive of a test. (There are many other theological problems with testing God, but leave those alone for now.) And scientifically speaking, God defies all attempts at making testable hypotheses. So either way, you're screwed by introducing ID into a scientific curriculum. If you want to believe in ID, great; just please don't call it science.
Interestingly, the Catholic Church doesn't believe in ID except in a very abstract way. The Catholic Church has, amazingly enough, learned from Galileo and Copernicus and all the rest. Many times in the past the Church said such-and-such a physical phenomenon is the direct handiwork of God, only to have it shown that it's not God's direct handiwork anyway. At that point, what do you do? Redefine God so that "well, God's still directly handling the other things, just not that"? And what happens when natural processes are discovered for the other things?
The Catholic Church has become so cognizant of this that they've assigned it a name: the God Of The Gaps. If every unexplainable instance is attributed to God, the Catholic theology goes, then whenever a previously unexplainable instance is discovered to have an explanation, God's glory is diminished by the explaining.
ID is a God Of The Gaps argument. We don't understand how the finely-balanced nature of the cosmos is possible, therefore God must have done it... well, what happens if/when we discover there's a natural phenomenon behind it?
Re: why I object to ID and CS on theological grounds instead of scientific ones... ID and CS are both theological models of the world. As such, they can't be refuted with science. They stand entirely apart from it.
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I read last week that it IS possible for this really be a two-dimensional "holographic" universe with time added. Then, just a couple of days ago, I read of Mr Lynd, the young Australian thinker(maybe Einstein calibre?) who now proposes there is no basis for time being a physical fact. This leads me to envision, and PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, a simple two dimensional universe, WITHOUT time, "holographically" projected as our universe. That brings us to the proposition we MAY actually be "shadows in the mind of God"? Was the beginning of the universe possible given such parameters, and once "GOD" stops thinking about us will we just disappear(the END of the Cosmic Movie?). Or is this line of reasoning COMPLETELY out of line? Thanks for any comments in advance? Bruce
Bruce
If we are in one universe of many in the multiverse, what would the effects of another universe colliding with ours? Could the unseen others be causing the excelleration of the expansion that is now being seen?
> survival-oriented species out there in spacetime will not find a means to intervene in the death of the universe?
That's a good point you have hidden in there. Wouldn't it be ironic if, despite all the gloom & doom lovers out there, that we all died because of some race even more ignorant than ourselves? Or, perhaps, even more brilliant than ourselves.
There have been some recent experiments, mostly spearheaded by Roger Nelson of the Princeton Global Consciousness Project, that show a correlation between human consciousness and quantum events. Some have speculated that consciousness may lay outside of what we know about physics.
Do you think there will be any fruitful (i.e., predictive) experimentation in this matter? Could we someday develop a theory that will unite physics and consciousness?
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I am a physics graduate student in theoretical cosmology and these types of claims irritate me. Sure, after WMAP measurements of the CMB combined with Lyman break galaxy data we have determined the cosmological parameters today such as lamda, omega_matter, sigma8, but we are far from understanding how the universe will end. For example, the dark energy (lambda) is what is forcing the expansion of the universe at present, but we don't know what the nature of the field driving the expansion is or even if it is constant or accelerating (quintessence theory).
Even when we understand the dark energy it can not be hailed as a triumph above all other discoveries, because we don't know how galaxies form? How massive (primordial?) black holes at the centers of galaxies form? What re-ionized the universe? How even a single star forms?
Unfortunately, this is also a view held by many older astronomers and physicists in academia, because they have pushed so hard for so long for the values of these fundamental parameters.
None the less, the book looks interesting. I always enjoy books about science and scientists. My question for Chris Seife, which is related to his phenomenal statement, is: As a science writer, do you attempt to explain the hard science to people and if so do you feel it is important for scientist to try and explain their work to the public, or is it better to skip the details and just show them pretty pictures and cool stories? We all know that's what gets science funded.
Censorship rests on the child's delusion that "If I shut my eyes so I can't see it, it isn't there".
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.
-Robert Frost
A few quick replies... overall, I'd urge you to try moving towards the attitude of the parent post to yours a bit more. I'm personally an atheist, but I'm very comfortable dealing with "believers" who know what it is they're choosing, and how it relates to science.
I defy anyone to explain to me how one species ever evolves into a completely different species.
What do you mean by "completely different species"? All it means when a different species appears is that members of the new group are different enough that they can't reproduce with the original species anymore. We still have something like 98% of our DNA exactly like that of a chimp... but our reproductive details are different enough that we can't produce a natural hybrid. It's silly to say we're completely different.
Now, suppose I'm right... The Bible talks about a time when everyone answers to God for what they've done.
Where do you fit in the atheist who volunteers for public services, gives to charities, etc.? There are plenty of people out there who don't believe in God but who follow the same ethical rules as you do, for different reasons.
And where do you fit in people who lived before monotheistic religions were even an option? Are they all still in hell? Poor suckers.
Just my thoughts on this... I think you'll find that the average atheist didn't choose that path to "permit" them to break the rules. For me, at least, all of the human religions that I know about just seem... well, really unlikely. The only idea that comes close is the suggestion that there's some force that started the whole ball rolling... but we know nothing about it, and praying to it or worshipping it as about as useful as praying to my own foot.
I'd probably sleep better if I believed that I would move on to some kind of pleasant afterlife after I die, but I'd rather live my life based on the best assumptions I can come up with -- not the most comfortable ones.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
For example, methods for restoring telomere length, reversing the effects of glucose binding, correcting genetic damage, and promoting the growth of new neurons.
How long do you think life can be extended by these and other methods? And to step briefly away from the science aspect, how do you think the results of this research will be offered to the public? Will it be available as part of the average health plan, or only for the uber-wealthy?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
You know, I flipped a coin 30 times the other day and came out with the following result: HTHHTTTHHTHHTHTTHHTHHTTTHHTHTT
Now I ask you: what is the likelihood of my getting exactly this sequence of heads and tails? And to think I got exactly this, without a single mistake! I can't believe my luck! Clearly the result of divine intervention!
(Message: Be careful trying to apply probability theory when the result is a priori known.)