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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.
do you get embarassed by publishing hype such as "Scientists...now know how the universe will end"?
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?
the Universe will end with a cliff hanger to set things up for Universe II
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Since we now know how the universe will end, would it be possible to set up some sort of restaurant there?
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!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Thank you for that pointless comment. You have taken usefull energy and turned it into a slashdot comment, thereby bringing the universe closer to heat death.
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?
Oh god (irony), not this crap again.
Haven't you got anything better to do that to keep 'refining' Creationism whenever in response to Evolution showing it to be unnecessary.
There is NO NEED for intelligent design. It's only purpose is to allow you justify your belief in God. I don't care if it's the Bombadier Beetle, the jinking Moth, whatever, it's just as sensible to think of a way it could've evolved than to allege that there is a God. And a God is a damn big hypothesis that only serves to abstract out the thing you can't explain.
Justin.
Bored of bloody desperate religionists arguing over who's got the best imaginary friend.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
IAALS.
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?
...only a theory.
Please, before you start arguing about science, try and understand its terminology at least a little.
Whoa there, no need to get nasty. We'll post them questions as soon as we thinks them up. What kind of name is Beck for a dog anyway.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Although OOGG caveman, OOGG not around during Big Bang, Pre-Cambrian era, dinosaurs, etc. However, OOGG old enough remember debate on Darwinian evolution.
You mention "continually reexamined in the light of new evidence" yet mention no new evidence. OOGG hear such comments many times. OOGG know Darwin think of many objections, answer with real evidence. Many observations on human breed pigeons, dogs, agriculture, etc., substantiate Darwin argument. Many more observations since Darwin's time substantiate evolutionary ideas. "Intelligent design" provide no observation other than "I don't believe in the alternative."
Perhaps try read Darwin's book?
(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
I will pay out 10 to 1 odds upon end of the universe that it ends in a different fashion they they propose. Please send me any amount of money and if I am wrong I will immediately pay out all winners upon destruction of everything.
Worst. Sig. Ever.
Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community
Woah, stop right there.
It's proponents claim that it has respect in the scientific community. You will find scientists who like the idea. But the fact is, so far as peer review and confirming experiments and the general scientific community, it is not considered really a viable theory. It's certainly not any competition for evolution amonst the sceintific community at all.
The proponents' PR claims it is, but that's just the PR.
See, for example, http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/inteloped.html.
-Rob
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 we all know, market forces are omniscient and omnivident. The market suffereth long, and is kind; the market envieth not; the market vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.
So, what we need is an online futures market in which cosmologists could put their money where their mouth is.
You say the universe will collapse in a big splat in 20 billion years? Fine, bet on it. 20 billion years if the universe hasn't collapsed, you'd better pay off. 20 billion years' worth of interest should make you think carefully before mouthing off!
You say there's a parallel universe nearby? OK, plunk down your money. If there is one, you win. (And your counterpart in the parallel universe, of course, loses. What point is there in parallel universes unless we can transfer money between them?)
An asteroid might slam into the Earth a year from now, destroying all human life, but if you manage to pick the exact day it happens, you could be rich!
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Possible scenarios include:
This fell out of favour a while back, when the need for a flat universe became apparent. In this scenario, the universe's espansion halts and it re-collapses. Once it was thought that this would involve time running backwards/entropy reversal during the crunch phase, but it was later shown that scenarios with increasing entropy also existed. There was much speculation about whether the universe would "bounce" after it crunched, forming a new expanding universe.
This scenario was popular when we'd made a detailed enough survey to know that that amount of bright matter in the universe was far too low to counteract the expansion. It fell out of favour when our estimates of the amount of dark matter got better.
In this scenario, the universe keeps expanding quickly, and all matter that isn't gravitationally bound into clusters is separated by vast empty regions of space. As the universe's expansion represents the expansion of space itself, sufficiently large gravitationally bound clusters might still be disrupted, due to distances changing internally. Galaxies burn out as stars exhaust their fuel, stellar corpses eventually merge with each other and with the central black hole, which finally decays after a mind-bogglingly huge length of time.
This scenario assumes that the amount of matter - light and dark - is perfectly balanced with the expansion of the universe. There was strong circumstantial evidence for a scenario like this, due to the fact that deviations from flatness amplify over time and that our universe was still _roughly_ flat - but the linchpin was a variety of models for the early universe - and the big bang - that required the universe to be flat. More detailed measurements of the amount of dark matter in the universe seemed to be consistent with this model.
In this scenario, the rate of expansion slows, approaching zero as time goes to infinity. Distance still goes to infinity as time goes to infinity, but not as rapidly. From a local point of view this looks a lot like Whimper Version 1.
This model arose when evidence for dark energy was discovered by observations of distant parts of the universe. In this model, the universe started out as flat, but a weak repulsive effect comes into play that causes expansion to accelerate. The effect is small enough that we haven't diverged that greatly from flatness yet, but in the end, it'll be Whimper Version 1 all over again. This is one of the two currently plausible scenarios.
This model was the result of closer examination of the scalar field models used to drive inflation in the early universe. In the inflationary model - which itself was proposed to solve the problem of the universe's matter distribution being so smooth - a "scalar field" existed in the early universe that permeated space and caused vast amounts of new space to be created. In the original version of the inflationary model, this scalar field's effects died out shortly after the big bang. A later model, however, proposed that the field was not cancelled everywhere - in some regions of the universe, constructive interference would cause it to be strong enough for inflation to continue.
Thus, we have a model where the universe looks mostly like our own, except for regions where it "buds" to form new universes. This process continues forever. This is the second scenario currently considered plausible (with the scalar field taking on the role of "dark energy").
This is the model proposed by
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
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.
The existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically. As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
Err... if a theory is not falsifiable, it is certainly not a useful theory, scientifically speaking.
And if, as you assert, the existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically, then God is not a topic of science. So....
What I am trying to say is that you can believe what you want, but don't force it on others. Eliminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution.
You can keep intelligent design in your curriculum. But it should be a part of a religion or comparative world faiths class, not a part of a science class, because it is not science. It is wrong to claim that it is, and it is dogmatic interference to insist that it be taught as such.
-Rob
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".
From the HyperDictionary: scientific theory - a theory that explains scientific observations; "scientific theories must be falsifiable"
Proponents of ID and other some such notions love to brutally abuse the term theory to confuse the issues. For something to rise to the accepted level of theory, it must be based on scientific observations. It must have passed through the hypothesis stage of initial concept deliniation. It must be tested repeatedly, succeeding each time (or the initial hypothesis must be reworked). It has to pass peer review.
ID and other notions don't even rise to the level of hypothesis.
> Yes, so-called "Intelligent Design" is inherently a religious concept. So what? How does that invalidate it? The existence of God cannot be disproven scientifically. As long as something cannot be disproven, it is a valid theory.
The fact that it can't be disproven shows its worthlessness as a theory. There is no conceivable observation that isn't compatible with 'goddidit', which makes 'goddidit' completely useless as an explanation for anything.
[Snip fantasia on Genesis I]
> For having been written thousands of years ago by a man (Moses) who knew nothing about science, it seems pretty close to me.
Regardless who wrote it and when, it sounds pretty wrong to me.
> I understand why some people refuse to believe in a God. It takes a very open mind to believe in something you have no evidence of.
Alas, it takes an open mind to believe in things we do have evidence of, such as the big bang and biological evolution.
And if you're so keen on believing stuff without any supporting evidence, why don't you believe in all the other gods and unicorns that people have professed throughout the ages? You're merely engaging in special pleading.
> Eliminating Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, from school curriculum amounts to nothing more than censorship, just like eliminating evolution.
No, omitting ID is just like omitting other pseudosciences based on bad arguments.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade