Slashdot Mirror
Fermilab Reports Dark Energy Not Needed
An anonymous reader writes "A Fermilab press release
reports that the expansion of the universe may be
explainable without the need for dark energy or a
cosmological constant. Apparently, ripples from
inflation in the early universe may account for
the observed expansion rate of the universe."
Well, apparently the dark matter is still important on Slashdot.
From an earlier /.-linked article 13 things that do not make sense:
Also, in the same article, Dark Energy is discussed:They don't need somethings they invented to explain away what they didn't understand.
Can someone tell me, what's the difference between Dark Matter and Dark Energy?
If there was nothing to push against, what would cause something to be held back and "ripple" as if there were some sort of repulsive force?
Let's say we've reached the edge of the universe, what happens when we step beyond that boundary? What is out there that would possibly hold back further expansion of our universe?
"It requires only a proper accounting of the physical effects of the ripples beyond our cosmic horizon,"
Ripples of what? Is there space beyond the cosmic horizon? Or by horizon they meant observable part of Universe?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Hmm. Better check the exchange rates on Altairian Dollars, Flainian Pobble Beads and the Triganic Pu.
Has anyone contacted Alan Greenspan about this?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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Arthur : Oh, is he?
Nova did a great piece on the all of physics (a lot on the universe and big focus on Quantum Mechanics and String Theory). It's pretty good if you are trying to find commonplace explanations of some of the theories the article just mentions and doesn't explain.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
So it is like when Wile E. Coyote yanks the road up and down and the ripple gets bigger and bigger as it moves toward the Roadrunner? (and then bounces off a mountain side, comes back, and smashes Coyote.) Next you know they will find a giant U magnet at the edge of the universe.
Table-ized A.I.
"Do not be so proud of this cosmological terror you have created. Its existence pales when compared to the power of the Dark Side."
My digital rights don't need management.
but Sean Carroll is. And he's not convinced.
I've read another hypothesis recently: that gravity slowly "leaks" into other dimensions so that over long distances it's attractive force diminishes, and that is why the universe is flying apart. The average distances between the galaxies has now reached a threashold where the leakage makes a big difference, giving the appearence of a relatively sudden expansion speedup.
Table-ized A.I.
Heretic! Science is on the march, and it's coming to your doorstep to take you away!
My digital rights don't need management.
Does anyone still have one of those "WIN" buttons left? Perhaps if enough of us wear them, we can stop the catastrophic overexpansion of the universe.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Is it possible that all the energy coming from stars over all that time and distance has some effect on everything else?
eg.
If 10 billion light years worth of protons travelling from a galaxy had a mass, does it's own emitted energy pull it away from the bang? and do other stars' emitted energy push away at the accellerating galaxies?
What was that experiment confirming Earth's 'tearing' effect of gravity the sattelite?
I'm just wondering if emitted energy pushes away in the same way that 'tearing' mass pulls sattelites slightly more.
Sorry, I've so many questions like this, can you answer them slashdot?
-
yeh
Then there's no need for Branigan's Law.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate not because of some dark matter but because of the gravitational attraction of other universes in the local vicinity of our own. sheeshh why do folks want to believe we are special with our own little private universe.
Just like at various times in history, humans believed that our tribe was the center of the universe, then the earth, then the sun, and now no one wants to think "outside the box" so to speak, and so they invent dark matter to account for observations that don't match up.
The mystery of why the universe is expanding more rapidly rather that slowing down is explained easily with the following theory:
'Our' Universe actually resides within a red rubber ball that belongs to gigantic beings, and it is currently being inflated
I simply fear they will begin playing dodgeball soon.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
So either way, Einstein was right. Damn you Einstein!!!
Fermilab Reports Dark Energy Not Needed
Well, thank god! I was going crazy trying to find some.
No sig
Saw this article a few days ago and it talked about Alpha- raised all sorts of questions for me (being a non-enlightened individual) such as
a) What are the implications if Alpha is 'decaying' with time?
b) What are the implications if alpha is variable with graviational mass?
c) If enough photons were gathered in one location, would they have a 'gravitational' effect... and would that affect any known 'constants'?
Tantalizing and interesting, but I know I lack the education to understand all of the ramifications.
But I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night. And when the lights went out at midnight (power outage), I can assure you that there was more than a little energy going on in the room next door.
My digital rights don't need management.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
because EVERYTHING that we have a pretty firm grasp on has a very elegant solution... and in Physics kludge is not good. Super-Symetry is what is looked for.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
http://cyborgcentral.dynip.com/~pd/images/site/dar kforce.jpg
All your base are belong to Google.
In 1903 a French professor of physics, Rene Blondlot thought he had found a new form of radiation. He and many others did experiments and published papers on these new rays until an American physicist, R.W. Wood, came by and proved that N-Rays did not exist. Some what like cold fusion, but in a less media crazy time.
It would be funny if dark energy was another example of too little data and too big a theory.
The idea is that if two theories produce and predict the exact same results, the simpler one is to be preferred. If two theories produce and predict slightly different results, but the predictions only differ on matters which cannot be empirically tested, the simpler theory is to be preferred until such time as a way is found to empirically test which is more accurate.
This principle is often referred to as "Occam's Razor", as it is seen to be similar to an argument a 14th-century theologian named William of Ockham employed. His words, as Wikipedia quotes them, were something closer to "If two things are sufficient for the purpose of truth, it is superfluous to suppose another."
While this principle is technically not guaranteed to pick the "correct" theory, this is reasonable; would it be better, given two theories, to pick the one with more arbitrary complexity? Anyway, the only standard we have for "correct" is that it is consistent with evidence. Satisfying all collectable evidence is a worthwhile persuit in itself.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
...eddies in the space time continuum.
The opposite of progress is congress
Dark matter is so named because we literally cannot see it - it's dark at all wavelengths. Dark energy, on the other hand, is dark in the intellectual sense - we don't know what it is. They're two entirely different things.
Are you implying that we know what dark matter is? And if so, how do we know, considering that we can't detect it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
sometimes, that these silly physicists just over-think everything?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Their budget has been slashed almost in half. After all, low quality bombs are far more important than high quality science. In fact, spending on basic research is dropping at an alarming rate through all the national laboratories. This does not bode well for our future.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Thanks for point that out. I was all set to register for cosmetology school, thinking it would be a growing field with lots of opportunities.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
But what if the constants aren't and the "laws" are convoluted, contingent, or stochastic?
Studied QM much?
Less snarkily, the neat thing about physics-in-the-small is even the convoluted (brutally counter-intuitive) and stochastic laws we've developed are still fairly simple and elegant, and even though we aren't done there is no particular reason to believe the final iteration won't have elegance, either. The complexity comes from the sheer quantity of things; how many quarks are in your body, again?
(The elegance probably won't be comprehensible to the Man on the Street, though; physics is about 300 years ahead of him.)
is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
This anti-intellectualism stain in /. responders is saddening. Basically it seems to be, "I don't understand what they're talking about, so I think I'll make fun of them" or "I don't understand the thousands of papers that have been published, so I'm going to shout something superior-sounding from the cheap seats". Dismissing a beautiful and maturing field of physics with "we don't really know anything, so give up" is a sophomoric and pretentious reaction.
Sure, there's a bunch that we don't understand, but please realize that this is the way science works. Nature is too subtle for us to have canned and precise answers for her behavior. Cosmologists are rightly invigorated by the new data, and ought to be encouraged to research and refute each other's ideas.
Dark matter is "dark" in that it does not emit its own radiation. There's a big difference between "doesn't emit its own radiation" and "cannot see it".
The former is dark matter. The latter would be a black hole.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Seriously, how did this get a mod as Interesting? He bitches about the arrogance of humans thinking we are the center of everything, then is INSANELY arrogant in stating his own theory as if it were an indisputable fact, while providing NO evidence to support it.
The whole POINT of the term "dark energy" is to say "there's something funny here and we don't know what it is". I'd say that's one regulation shitload less arrogant than camel pilot's claim.
By the way, I'm far from a cosmologist, but the poster clearly has no grasp on the difference between dark matter and dark energy, and therefore has proven he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
The producers of Startrek Enterprise gave themselves concusions from repeated blows of their heads to their desks. One producer cried "Ripples in space time explain the universe, WHY COULDNT WE GET THESE GUYS AS WRITERS!'
what's odd: Ding! you hit the nail on the head... *if* the universe was made up of only light particles. We know (at least assume...) that normal objects with mass (planets, stars... you!) cannot travel at the speed of light. For the universe to have a diameter of 28billion light years, and have only existed for 14billion years, is indeed very strange. It suggests that the average speed of the universe as it expands has been the speed of light. But we already know this shouldn't be true because the universe is made up of more than just light. :D
I agree. Lets face it, the moon is as far as a human has ever travelled in space (ie in terms of distance away from the earth) and that was 30 odd years ago. How can we sit here on this planet and think that we can just work it all out like that.
I always like to think of the start of the last centuary - around 1900 - victorian scientists had it all worked out, think dalton sphere and then think 50 years in the further on when we'd seen the atom split.
I'm not going to claim that anyone's wrong and i'm no expert myself but isn't it just possible that we really don't understand in any way what we're talking about?? I mean are you really sure that if you take all the matter and light and heat and energy in the entire universe and compress it into a little ball so that it explodes that photons won't go 4x10^8 m/s??
Reinventing the wheel since 1979
Well, im not really up to date, but there are 2 canditates for dark matter:
:)
Machos (massive compact halo objects) and Wimps (weakly interacting massive particles).
The latter are suppossed to be particles not being affected by any force but gravity (just like neutrinos are not affected by strong force or electromagnetic forces). Creation could have happened during the big band (those mysterious first 3 minutes).
Machos OTOH would be normal matter, but "dark" in the sense of "no active emission". What you would normally expect from the name. Could be cold dust nebula, primordial black holes, all that stuff.
Dark matter is suspected because it HAS to be there in order for the physical rules to work (if you think that kind of reasoning is invalid, well, it served us well with the neutrino...). For example spiral galaxies differential rotation just couldnt be the way it is with the visible matter. There HAS to be something else. Or lots of cosmologic stuff that nobody really understands
About detection: Machos have been detected (there was a slashdot story a while back). Prime candidate for detection is gravitational microlensing.
About wimps... i personally like the philosophical concept, but dont have any idea how you could detect them if they are really not interacting exept with gravity. Maybe if we could meassure gravity waves, there could be dispersions caused by them in otherwise matterfree space, but we cant even detect those at all...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Shouldn't this read "Four scientists at Fermilab report..." rather than "Fermilab reports..."?
/., and the NYT reporting that "Slashdot says that..."
Fermilab is a big organization. Saying that "Ferilab reports" implies that the whole organization reports this, and I'm absolutely positive that there are many people within Fermilab who would dispute these results/conjectures/hypotheses.
Imagine someone reading something one of us says in a comment on
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
There's a decent amount of evidence that has been mounting over the past few years that a large component of redshift is in fact intrinsic, i.e. not attributed to the Doppler effect.
In some ways, it seems related to the much-glossed-over "K Effect" of a few decades ago, where it was found that bright, bright blue stars seemed to be systematically redshifted.
Researchers like M. B. Bell are of the opinion that the intrinsic redshifts are superimposed on a Big Bang flow (reducing the actual velocity we should be measuring). Others, like Arp, believe that the Hubble Flow is an illusion, and that the universe is actually relatively static once you take away the intrinsic redshifts.
David Russell's paper that just came out supports either view, and shows that other explanations (like Tully-Fisher Relationship errors or rotational velocities) are far too small to account for the large discrepancies.
(Some more hubbub on the topic.)
In either case, intrinsic redshifts will take a lot of pressure off researchers to find 'dark energy', because the discrepancies of speed/distance are much reduced.
Then, perhaps, we can stop looking for something that isn't there? :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
For anyone that can actually understand it click here (in pdf format)
Can't we just admit we don't have a freakin' clue and move along?
...but he was right. He took a stab in the dark, figured out an explanation that worked (even though it sounded insane from a "common sense" point of view), and the evidence proved him right. Time and space are relative--we know this for a fact now, because other scientists set out to prove (or disprove) Einstein's crazy ideas. We're not so sure about Dark Energy/inflation ripples/mystical tomatoes, and hell, we might never know for sure, but it's obvious that SOMETHING is going on here, and I for one am glad that the scientists of today are coming up with these all of these cheesy, crazy explanations.
Move along to what? Above all else, science is supposed to try to explain these mysteries. To give up because we don't have a (seemingly) elegant or simple explanation is, well, the anthesis of the scientific method. You've got to come up with a theory. Maybe it sounds good, and maybe it doesn't--the only real question is, does it explain the phenomenon being observed?
If I knew Einstein back in 1905, I would've told him he needed to lay off the crack pipe. "Matter bending space? Relative velocity creating differing timeframes? Dude, what a fantasy, what a KLUDGE! You can't just go ripping apart some of the basic assumptions of science just because you want Maxwell's and Newton's ideas to play nicely together."
Dark matter is, well, matter. Some of it is probably ordinary baryonic matter that's cold, like brown dwarves and such; some of it is probably weakly-interacting elementary particles. Dark matter, like all matter, produces an attractive gravitational force.
Dark energy is not what we think of as "matter" at all. One of its key physical properties is that, unlike matter, it has negative pressure. This is what causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate: in general relativity, not only mass-energy but pressure (and other things, like stress/strain) gravitate. Positive pressure is attractive; negative pressure is repulsive.
(Incidentally, this is why black holes form when a star undergoes gravitational collapse. You might think that it would collapse a bit and then the collapse would halt, as the star's internal pressure resists further collapse. But for a sufficiently massive collapsing star, the internal pressure builds up so strongly that its gravitational attraction outweighs the force of its repulsion, and further increases in pressure actually hasten the collapse instead of slowing or halting it.)
There have been various theories of what dark energy is; the simplest is that it's Einstein's cosmological constant, a term Einstein introduced into general relativity in order to have a static universe (a repulsion that exactly balanced the gravitational attraction of the matter in the universe, so space neither expands or contracts). Einstein retracted this idea when it was shown that space is expanding, but it was resurrected to explain how the expansion could accelerate.
It's possible to rewrite Einstein's field equation to put the cosmological term, which is ordinarily on the left-hand "curvature" side of the equation, onto the right-hand "source of gravity" side. In that case, it's interpreted as the mass-energy/pressure/etc. contributed by the vacuum itself (which is possible in quantum field theory, with the zero-point energy). Unfortunately, quantum field theory predicts the wrong value for this by over 100 orders of magnitude, leading to the "cosmological constant problem". Other approaches to dark energy involve dynamical quantum fields -- which can be sort of treated as a time-varying cosmological constant, although there can be additional differences -- with exotic properties, like negative pressure.
Wikipedia on dark matter and dark energy.
"Apparently, ripples from inflation in the early universe may account for the observed expansion rate of the universe."
Would you all please just shut up about that? Do you realize what Greenspan is going to do when he hears about this?
I had not seen anyone raise this point, so I wanted to bring it up.
With the vast amount of data at physicists fingertips, and many theories to test against this data set, how confident are physicists that the theories on which they base other theories are in fact true?
How can we be sure that the data we receive from galaxies 10 billion light years away has not been diluted or compromised in a way we could not detect? If that happens, would not our theories then also be diluted or compromised and thus destabilize whole sections of theory?
I ask these questions because of my observations about physics and theorizations in general. There are of course some things that locally we can easily prove or disprove, but when you start using data that is so difficult to reliably receive from extremely distant points in the universe, I just worry how much time and effort goes into the wrong idea.
Don't get me wrong, physicists are doing a GREAT job and have benefitted the world tremendously. I hope this work does not stop and indeed increases!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
Just as an example, the HEP program at FermiLab is budgeted at $737 million for FY 2005. That's an increase over 2004 of a few million dollars. Science spending is up all over the place.
You can never rule out the existence of a phenomenon that's screwing things up in an undetectable way. Indeed, if it has no detectable effect, who cares? But you can rule out alternatives that have side effects. For instance, you could postulate that the redshifting of light from distant galaxies is not due to recession in an expanding universe, but is instead due to some other mechanism which causes light to lose energy as it travels ("tired light"). But there are many ways that various specific tired-light models fail to be consistent with other observations. If two explanations give the same predictions for all observations that we can perform, we can never tell the difference between them, but often that's not the case, and we can rule out alternatives.
Maybe somebody can help me out here.
I am looking at the Fermilab press release and it states, "When in 1929 Edwin Hubble proved that the universe is in fact expanding, Einstein repudiated his cosmological constant, calling it 'the greatest blunder of my life.'"
I may be mistaken here, but I thought that Einstein's Cosmological Constant was introduced to modify His theory so that it would not predict an expansion in the Universe? Then that would explain why the article from Fermilab says that He later repudiated His Cosmological Constant after Edwin Hubble verified the expansion experimentally.
After reading it over and over again, I still get from the article that Einstein's Cosmological Constant was added to the theory to explain the expansion. But didn't His theory already explain expansion? And if so, why would He "repudiate" something that was experimentally verified a few years later by Edwin Hubble? Then if His theory already predicted expansion, then the only purpose of introducing the Cosmological Constant that explains expansion would be to enhance the prediction in expansion rate, would it not?
Is there a contradiction in the article? Am I missing something?
Can I have it? Can I, Can I?
Perl Programmer for hire
I don't know what you're thinking when you say "data ... diluted or compromised," but it's a lot more difficult than you may realize to come up with a scheme which has something funky happpening over long distances of space without us being able to detect side-effects.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
I guess this proves that dark energy cannot be created nor destroyed...but can change.
[1]
When his own Theory of General Relativity clearly showed that the universe should expand or contract, Einstein chose to introduce a new ingredient into his theory.
[2]
His "cosmological constant" represented a mass density of empty space that drove the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate.
[3]
"We realized that you simply need to add this new key ingredient, the ripples of spacetime generated during the epoch of inflation, to Einstein's General Relativity to explain why the universe is accelerating today," Riotto says
Their budget has been slashed almost in half. After all, low quality bombs are far more important than high quality science. In fact, spending on basic research is dropping at an alarming rate through all the national laboratories. This does not bode well for our future.
This isn't quite true. DOE's funding for High Energy Physics Programs (basically, Fermilab and SLAC) is down 3.1%, or $22.5 million, from $736.4 million to $713.9 million. (I couldn't find out exactly how much Fermilab lost from those cuts, but I recall seeing a figure of about a 4% decrease w/inflation, which is pretty consistent over the past 5 years) Furthermore, run times of the accelerators would be increased over FY 2005 levels at the Fermilab Tevatron (6% more operating hours) and SLAC (54% more hours).
Along with the budget cuts, the BTeV project at Fermilab was canceled. With HEP experiments at SLAC and Brookhaven going offline in a couple of years, Fermilab will soon be the only HEP lab in the nation. Currently the CDF/D0 experiments (the two main detectors) on the Tevatron are scheduled to run until 2009 or 2010. And MINOS/NuMI will run at least that long as well.
Fermilab is going through a 5% workforce reduction, voluntary at first... The saving grace for Fermilab right now will come in the form of the International Linear Collider, the Next Big Thing(tm) in HEP. More info at http://www.interactions.org/linearcollider/ and http://ilc.fnal.gov
More insider info upon request, heh.
Theories about what "dark matter" and "dark energy" were came later.
I was lead to believe that FY2006 was being cut by $107M, and the cancellation of BTeV and voluntary force reduction was done in anticipation of this. I was very sad to hear that BTeV was cancelled, there was some damn good science that could have come out of it. Good to see that MINOS is rocking, though.
Enjoy your time at Fermi, it is a great place to work in.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Have you ever read Einstein's Relativity: The special and general theory? Ok, I didn't think so. Most people assume that it's full of equations that a normal (read non-genius) person wouldn't have a chance of understanding. But its not. Pop over to Project Gutenberg and pick up a copy. It's quite readable and full of examples about poles and clouds and railroad cars and embankments and lightning. Sure there's some math, but less than the typical high school calculus book.
What I'm trying to say is that if Einstein had posted on slashdot, you'd probably have made fun of his examples and said he didn't know what he was talking about. But its exactly the kind of speculative thinking that is exhibited in this thread that led to the theory of relativity.
The preprint is here.
Find free books.
So much for the dark-matter factory I spent so much money building. I just hope I can get my current inventory liquidated on eBay.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I can't tell if you're merely sarcastic, but yes, being an astrophysicist as well as a Christian, I am equally annoyed by those all too dismissive of theological arguments that they are unacquainted with.
do I need to say more?
yo yo, what u doing?
Einsteiiiinnnnnnnn!!!!!!! (shakes fists in the air)
It isn't the universe that has to be elegant, but our theory of it. The reason why is that we aren't very smart, and theories with fewer free parameters are a lot easier for us to understand.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Or do physicists still think everything is doomed to continue flying apart until the heat death of the universe in the distant future? Is the Big Crunch back in the picture?
-Joe G.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
That's pretty good. I wish they'd modded you up instead of me.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
for Fermilab to announce some scientific result by press release, but if some other institution does it they get slammed for it.
Shouldn't they at least wait until the paper is peer reviewed and accepted before doing a public announcement like this?
It seems to me that the rationale for constructing ever larger and more expensive high energy physics labs sooner rather than later(i.e. by diverting defense spending to pure physics) is that we're just around the corner from producing the grand unified theory and since this is the holy grail of science it is the only human activity that really matters. The reality is that simply building bigger colliders isn't going to produce a solution. An analogy that I once read that referred to studying particle physics using colliders goes as follows: it is like trying to figure out how a car works by accelerating two cars into each other and looking at the pieces that are left(we are talking about very small pieces remaining).
We currently have no way of observing the behavior of subatomic particles operating in their natural environment(see Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).
Also, there is a truly enormous amount of data which has been generated by older and existing colliders which has yet to be fully analyzed. It might be reasonable to not operate the existing colliders for, say, a year, and devote those dollars to paying physicists to crunch the already existing data.
Given the above, I don't see maintaining high energy physics budgets for the next few years at existing levels or even with some cuts as a serious detriment to the progress of the US or the world. I'm sure that some physicists would be upset as this tips over the applecart of their plans for fame as the next Bohr or Einstein.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Well, the universe seems rather uniform irregardless of the direction we look. If there were something messing with observations, then I imagine it would have to be damn close to us, if not right on top of us. The mapping of the CMBR rather indicates that these are reliable observations.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Very well put! What really shocks me is that the cowboy mentality is even so prevalent here on slashdot, where many people interested in technology seem to believe that science is of no worth, but God and bombs are.
I find it simply frightening, because I think it poses a very significant threat to the future of the USA, which is heading down the road of becoming a military power without the brains needed to steer it in a wise direction.
You have a valid underlieng point. A lot of this research involves data that passes through many man-made intermediaries before it becomes something a human mind can work with, and is about conditions where normal common sense and intuition are not at all reliable guides.
On the other hand, some of your rhetoric is an answer of sorts to your own questions.
It's not usually stated as an explicit rule of science, but for a working scientist, phrases like "in a way we cannot detect" are themselves something that requires exceptionally strong proof. By default she would mostly first try to test for "in a way that we have not yet detected". Even if she had a few failures working along that line, she would probably try to find other new methods of possibly detecting something, or move on to some other problem.
If a problem seems stagnant for a very long time, usually a whole generation of researchers or more, someone may try to prove there's a fundamental reason we just can't do something, but even then, it's usually part of developing a theory that has some more positive aspects.
In the same way, she might first look for explanations that might require minor reframing of a single small section of theory, and not major rewrites of multiple whole sections. Most Cosmologists are very wary of claiming they have done something huge until the first Nobel or getting Einstein's old office.
You might Google for (Sir) Karl Popper. He wrote a lot (and well) on what things like 'testability' or 'proof' mean to a scientist. I'm just trying to adapt some of his arguements to the way you phrased your questions. You might also Google for Thomas Khun, but I recommend reading a bit of Popper first. A lot of Khun's writings have been thrown around too freely of late.
Who is John Cabal?
Since everyone seems to have there own theory about this... here is mine.
Our universe is just a bubble in a glass of soft drink and when we reach the top everything well be made clear(or bigger or something.. err)
Who says God works by magic? He has power, but we do not understand it, the same way you and I don't understand this big bang/dark matter/dark energy conundrum. Depending on who you ask, some religions have proven and forecasted a lot of stuff.
What would it take to prove the existence of God from nature? Maybe something in nature that doesn't appear possible or make sense in nature, yet exists anyway? Wouldn't this Horizon problem be something to point out? What about all those cosmic rays that impossibly are higher than the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit? It just doesn't make sense, there has to be something creating that sort of order and miracles from chaos.
It's fire.
In the beginning was nothing right? Then a Bang.
I'm thinking about this Bang. Nothing, not absence of something nothing, but Nothing. Nothing exploding.
Fire. An explosion is fire, burning combustible materials and releasing hot gases that expand.
In the middle of Nothing, there was an Explosion.
Is it possible that our universe is bounded, instead of Nothing, by Anti-Energy? The quantum equivalent of reverse-charged light?
Could a single, "mutated" quark, quasar, or thing, become charged the wrong way from subtle interaction with it's surrounding particles?
Matter and Anti-Matter. Touch one to another, and stand well back.
The universe is expanding, and it encompasses all space and time as we know it.
Could it be like a big sheet of paper (paper == anti-energy) and someone (rogue element) "ignites", switches polarity, triggers a "burn"?
When you light the centre of a sheet of paper, it expands, sometimes uniformly.
Are the boundaries of our universe a massive bluish-white of fire? Masses of matter reacting against the inverse Nothing of anti-matter, burning, accelerating like a brush-fire on a hot day.
If the universe is all time and space then it doesn't necessarily have to be planets and stars out there on the boundaries.
It could be the Burn, already moving faster then light from the instant it started, expanding constantly, releasing energy that is recycled back into matter in our own space-time.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Christianity != science
In science, you have to back up your theories with evidence, and all your work is under constant peer review. Someone might come out tomorrow proving that your work is incorrect, and have a better theory.
In Christianity, you accept things based on faith. Proof doesn't enter the equation - it can't, since the whole point of the religion is to have faith. Having faith despite proof is what the game's all about.
They're not related! They have nothing in common!
Why the hell do people bring this crap up? Do christians believe they'll convert people by it? Are non-christians just wanting to be assholes? What the hell?
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
It has the dark side and it has the light side. It holds the universe together...
"I am your duct-tape, Luke."
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I am not an expert, here, but I believe that there are no directions you can move in space that cross the boundary.
In the balloon analogy, the 2D space is expanding, but there is no direction, in that 2D space, that moves off the balloon.
Interestingly, everywhere on the balloon is just next to outside the balloon. If this is true in our 3D space, everywhere is just as close as everywhere else to the edge of the universe.
Actually, come to think about it, this makes sense - if there is no epicenter of expansion, there is no where that is farthest out.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Whew! It's a good thing we've got lots of folks here at Slashdot that have the answers to all this incredibly complex stuff. Uhhuh. Right. :-b
Heard any good sigs lately?
No, something that does not appear possible or make sense in nature does not prove that god exists. You cannot put everything that you do not understand down to god, jesus christ!
Does a camel pilot get shot down by a mustardman.
Sounds like a They Might Be Giants song.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Dark Energy is not the same as the cosmological constant. There are other theories like k-essence and quintessence which also are used to describe dark energy. The difference between this theories is, that the cosmological contant is, well, a constant, whereas the two other types of theories are dynamic.
cu
--== Jerri ==--
Homepage: http://www.jerri.de/
Now all those scientists that believed in dark matter will have to be fired or start working on the more traditional and understandable light matter.
"Yes I did think dark matter was involved.. would you like fries with that?"
It really is just eddies in the space-time continuum....
Well, thank goodness science is so sure about cosmology. I was beginning to feel a bit ashamed of all the creationist-bashing I was doing. So it's epicyc ... I mean, "inflation". Got it.
What you're missing is that science has theories that make predictions about observable things in the real world.
General Relativity, for instance, led to predictions of 1) longer particle decay times for moving subatomic particles, 2) different orbital period for Mercury than Newtonian mechanics predicted and 3) bending of starlight due to intervening gravitational fields. There are quite famous observations confirming these predictions.
Similarly, there are quite convincing observations that lend support to the Big Bang theory. Cosmic backround radiation measurements, observed Hubble expansion and observations of galactic evolution as we look further away (further into the past) come to mind as examples.
That is the difference between religion and science. Science attempts to verify its theories with observed phenomena and experiments. Religion accepts its theories based on blind faith.
All that said, there is nothing incompatible between science and religion really, as long as your religion doesn't dogmatically insist its wisdom about the real world subsumes observed scientific knowledge (the big trap into which some Christian sects seem to have fallen). In fact, I would argue that quantum mechanics provides an interesting "out" for religion - quantum randomness versus "Gods will". After all, quantum randomness is neither knowable or predictable for us, but it might be exactly enacting Gods will...
I've often wondered why Einstein said "God would never play dice with the Universe". Perhaps Gods dice are loaded. :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
so THATS what it is like living in a plane of existance governed by mr. stretch.. ..I'm sure all the religious folk are feeling kinda bumed that the higher power isn't something cooler..
Astrophysicist Allen Lasenby gave the keynote lecture at SIGGRAPH last year suggesting dark energy was really intrinsic elliptical curvature in space. (He gave the keynote talk because he is an expert in computational geometry used both in graphics and physics.) Other physicists agree that space may be curved, but claim that the curvature is caused by dark matter or dark energy in the cosmos.
Your lose a great deal of credibity, in my estimation, when your proclaimed profession and religion are fundamentally in conflict.
Across the Universe - The Beatles
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
An artist's signature. Surely if the universe were created by some being, it would be very simple to such a being to provide obvious evidence of this.
If it doesn't make sense under our theories, then we change our theories. When the orbit of Mercury didn't obey Newton's predictions, we didn't say, "ooops, must be divine intervention!"; we posited new theories, until Einstein came up with general relativity to explain it.
Then there would have to be something creating that creator, since that creator has even more order. And something creating that creator-creator. And something creating that creator-creator-creator. And so on. Sorry, but positing a creator-being doesn't explain anything.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Of course my answer is, then, that there is no fundamental conflict. Hopefully that can restore some credibility. Any conflict between the two can be ascribed to an imperfect understanding of either (or both).
How can a claim to be a scientist and not subscribe to natural philosophy, the basis of all science? I don't mean this question in a patronizing way for I truely find it difficult to understand your position.
Disgruntled Defence Signals Directorate employee, am no longer allowed to exchange secrets for diet coke.
You used to didn't you?
What happened, Dude?
Did you get caught exchanging secrets? Is your garage filled up with diet coke and your wife won't let you get any more until you drink it?
What's the deal?
I admit to not understanding your difficulty. Why would I not subscribe to natural philosophy? I freely embrace science as our best method to understand natural phenomena. Where's the problem?
If you use natural philosophy for all matters in the natural world, what then does that leave for Chistianity to say? It is popular among Christians to assume that humans are more than merely natural beings having something spirital as well. Then do you deny that you are a member of the natural world? Would your use of natural philosophy in science stop at scientific matters influenced by humans? And what fields of science are not thusly influnced by humans? If not, then what use is Christianity if it has nothing to say about our world? Why not some more abstract religion which has less dogmatic law?
My Christianity is not terribly dogmatic, I don't think. What dogma bothers you? I like Christianity in that I feel it is a more precise and correct theological formulation than other religions, sort of similarly to how GR is a more precise and correct model of gravitational behavior. I could be wrong, though I must follow my conscience.
This idea would ultimately be a limit to God. What would happen when, after confronting something mysterious for years, Science suddenly renders up a rather mundane, but accurate solution to the mystery? If a proof of God depended on this mystery, what becomes of it?
Consider this instance. We have two deep mysteries, the smoothness of the background radiation and the seeming presence of dark energy. Both, you argue, don't quite make sense under our current understanding and are, therefore, candidates as proof of a higher power.
Now along come these chaps from Fermilab and demonstrate, using some really neat math, that dark energy is just inflation, the solution to the smoothness problem, writ large. Nothing here that isn't predicted by old theory. We just weren't thinking about it clever enough. Suppose this is all born out. Where does this leave your God?
This is the problem with the God of Gaps. If you go looking at each gap in our scientific understanding and cry, "Here be God!" you are likely to get a nasty shock if the gap is filled.
This has already happened with Creationists who accept some evolution. First, God dwelt in the gaps between species. Microevolution is possible, but speciation requires God. Then speciation is demonstrated in bacteria. Okay, well God is required for multicellular speciation. Then its demonstrated in fruit flies. Okay, well God is required for higher life forms. Then genus level evolution is demonstrated. Okay, nothing can change phylum without God. And so it goes. God is narrowed and narrowed by each burst of science, becoming a pitiful God of Gaps, living in the few spaces left between the known science.
Better, I think, is a reexamination of one's needs and demand for Proof. Or, more precisely, a need for the Proof to fit one's preconceived notions of the nature and identity of God.
You may suggest that a person is both natural and supernatural but I would not be incorrect, either, to suggest that that is a paradox. If we were to believe this assertion, as scientists, then indeed any science where the human is the subject of research would be permanently fallible, would it not? And indeed, if we say that supernatural phenomenon can be exposed in one natural body -- namely humans -- who's to say that other natural objects would not expose providence at the whim of God or other supernatural intelligence? What use is science in this world ruled by the supernatural's will?
I only brought it up to give visibility to the claim that Christianity's text (the Bible) makes many claims about the natural world including assertions about the history of the world which clearly contradict the findings of science. The question I have here is if you can pick and choose the parts of the Bible that you want to believe, are you even a Christian, more accurately a Unitarian or something else entirely?
What about all those cosmic rays that impossibly are higher than the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit? It just doesn't make sense, there has to be something creating that sort of order and miracles from chaos.
You're suggesting God created this increadible machine we know as the universe, with stars and planets and light and complex chemistry and superconductors and quantum field effect transistors and life and us... and God in his Ineffable wisdom sticks his hand in and throw around Super-Duper cosmic rays? That he creates this increadible machine where EVERYTHING ELSE works just like He designed it to, according to the laws and mechanisms He established, and then there's this one little bizzare thing that He decides to stand around constantly creating? He had his Six Days of Creation, he Rested on the Seventh Day, and then he decided to come back and spend the rest of eternity just Creating Super-Duper Cosmic Rays that wouldn't otherwise exist? That the natural cosmic rays weren't good enough for him? This single thing to muck up an otherwise perfect creation?
Urk?
prove the existence of God from nature? Maybe something in nature that doesn't appear possible or make sense in nature, yet exists anyway?
God of the Gaps.
If someone wants a God of the Gaps, a God who created a Flawed Universe with Gaps, a God who lives and hides inside these Gaps and Flaws, a God you suggest may be prooven by these unexplained cosmic rays... well they're welcome to him.
If you look for God *hiding* in the Gaps then eventually science will evict him from that gap. It has happened a hundred times before. These cosmic rays will be explained in a year or in ten years or in a hundred years. *That* God will have been slain by science. Slain again and again in gap after gap, even as he is continually reborn in new gaps. That is is a very poor God of an ever diminishing realm, a God locked in a constant war with science. I do not have much respect for the notion of a constantly shriveling God of the Gaps proping up a broken universe.
Do not seek a God of the Gaps. Do not look for God in the gaps.
A God who either set a Perfect Universe in motion (and all of the laws and mechanisms of science/nature) and need not interfere with it, or who created the Universe (and all of the laws and mechanisms of science/nature) and does intervene to preform miracles, that is a God. A God that that cannot be diminished or threatened by science.
This next part isn't neccesarily targeted at you, it is targted at those who follow a God of the Gaps and find themselves led into a battle against science...
Religion should celebrate science, the exploration and understanding of the universe He Created. Science is hardly perfect. Science is a constant struggle for a better and more accurate understanding of the universe. Sceence makes occational missteps, but anyone who believes in a God who would plant false evidence and deliberately lead science astray... they cannot believe anything. If there is a malicious deciving God then we can beleive nothing, nothing we see, nothing we feel, nothing we think we know. Absolute nihlism. If we reject a deceiving God, if we reject nihlism, then we can only believe in a God that supports science. A science that is the best known understanding and explanation of the universe. A God that has nothing to fear from scientific exploration of the universe. Do not seek a Lord of the Gaps, do not follow a god that has anything to fear from science.
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Interestingly, I was raised Unitarian, though now I'm a member of a Methodist church and was fairly recently baptized. True, the literal readings of biblical history contradict my own professional field, but I must assume that these contradictions arise from an imperfect understanding of the text. They are brought in harmony in the realization that the Genesis stories are truly mythic in nature, communicating truths of the right relationship between God, man, and His creation. It is not necessary for me that they are literal history. It is not that I'm picking which parts I want to believe, but that I must struggle to interpret correctly those parts that are in conflict. A passage may contain spiritual or theological truth, as the parables do, and yet no historical truth. The pleasure is in the struggle for interpretation.
Well, at the very least I now understand your assertions and perspective. It seems that there are two points upon which we disagree where no progress will be made through argumentation:
Yes, we obviously disagree as to what a Christian is. I am a follower of Christ's teachings, as I understand them, and believe him to be a human manifestation of God incarnate. I also believe in the Apostle's Creed, which by many accounts is a sufficiently small set of axioms to "test" for Christianity. Perhaps I don't pass fundamentalist muster, but I'm comfortable with that. In any case, thanks for the conversation.
While I don't remotely agree with you, I think it's horrid that you've been modded a troll. An act of blatant prejudice (of the intellectual flavor) that only proves your point about many who claim science as rational *and* moral high ground.
The irony is that science involves just as much faith as any religion (from a philosopher's point of view [i.e. my own], science and religion are hardly different systems at all). As you point out (awkwardly), the theories require a belief structure that eventually boils down to an epistomological faith in observation and testing. Too many ignorantly claim science is somehow deviod of or superior to faith systems like religions, when in truth it's just another example of one.
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
a red rubber ball that belongs to gigantic beings,
I simply fear they will begin playing dodgeball soon.
They may have other plans.
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The razing of cities isn't exactly an inexplicable phenomenon, and neither is the "parting of the red sea," if you accept the "Reed Sea" explanation.
There's little point in producing theories that are impossible to prove. They contribute nothing to a scientific discussion. Nothing wrong with being religious, but if you aren't going to pose valid questions that further the discussion, sod off.
This signature does not exist. It has never existed. It is all a figment of your imagination.
You're asking the wrong question. What would be needed would be to put the existence of God into a falsifiable hypothesis. Once you know how to disprove the existence of God, you can keep performing experiments to disprove God's existence. If even one of these experiments succeeded in disproving God, we'd definitely know He didn't exist.
On the other hand, the more experiments failed to disprove God's existence, the more faith we could have that his existence had been confirmed by scientific tests.
The biggest problem with addressing God's existence through science is coming up with a type of experimental test that believers could accept as disproving His existence.
Here's an analogy: you can't prove that the speed of light in vacuum is equal to all inertial observers. Any finite number of measurements of c does not prove that it's always the same for all observers. However, it would only take one reproducible experiment in which c is different for one inertial observer to disprove relativity.
The reason we believe the "laws" of physics is because they've withstood so many experimental tests that were capable of falsifying incorrect laws. Proving the existence of God would be similar: He'd have to survive a large number of experiments that were capable of disproving his existence.
I kind of look at this kind of research in the same vein as the old questions...
;-)
When did you stop beating your wife?
Interesting, but not particularly useful. Of course if somehow they can use this knowledge to age Scotch Whiskey a little faster, maybe I can get a little more juiced.
mdw
On the contrary. You do not have to have an explanation in hand. Dark energy, for example, has a name, but not an explanation (calling it Einstein's cosmological constant doesn't help much either :) Yet it can be used to generate hypotheses and tested, given certain assumptions.
In this case, we have an existing theory, and some disparate observations (e.g. at their measured redshift distances, older galaxies in any cluster seem to group on the near side, which is anti-Copernican) that have raised suspicions.
Having a hypothesis that expansion of space cannot statistically account for the observed redshift is a perfectly valid, and scientific, premise for experimentation.
That said, there are some theorists working on the problem.
Contenders for a mechanism:
Some of these have got to be wrong, of course, (and this doesn't rule out other mechanisms) but those will show up on further experiments.
Cheers :)
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