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One Big Bang, Or Many?
butterwise writes "From the Guardian Unlimited: 'The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.'"
Created the universe in one giant gang bang
** I hope I don't get smited for that
And you know how quickly that kind of thing can ruin your day!
From TFA (emphasis mine): And also from TFA (again, emphasis mine):
Now, I'm no cosmologist, but these two descriptions of the theory seem to be in conflict...does the matter in the universe come together in the Big Crunch, or does it fly off into space forever, replenished by subsequent Big Bang events?
If the Guardian Unlimited doesn't even know what the theory is proposing, why are they reporting it?
Fortunately, we needn't depend upon Guardian Unlimited for our cosmology news...Nature.com happens to have a much more informative article on the subject. What's especially amusing is that they've had this article since April 26th of 2002.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
"...at least 986 billion years older ..."
I always found it amusing when people take scientific estimates at face value. The article says something along the lines of "the universe could be up to a trillion years old," so, obviously, the universe is precisely 1 trillion years old.
...or even news? The Big Crunch theory has been around for a long time.
I can leapfrog the next 7 years of angst I was planning for this event.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This is a new theory? I read about that theory in a space documentary book when I was 9 (ten years ago).
My Blog: "sum it up - News, emotions and science"
I've read similar things, where the cosmological constant changes over time, first expanding and then contracting the universe. In some ways it's more satisfying than having the universe as a one-shot deal that ends in cold nothingness.
It did trigger the beginnings of an idea for a science fiction novel. What if the current state of the universe was the result of tinkering from the previous big bang cycle? If you end up with constants that make life more difficult, blame those that came before. Sort of like global warming on a multi-universal scale.
I'm not very surprised that scientists are describing the universe as much older than previously thought. One of the fundimental problems of the big bang theroy was when incorperating the size of the universe it would have ment that it expanded much faster than the speed of light. (or at least this is my understanding of the big bang theory)
So sayeth the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
'Cyclic universe' can explain cosmological constant
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
So...This is all just deja vu all over again?
I just want BANG BANG BANG!
Fascinating? Yes.
Mind-boggling? Yes.
Good story to impress your wife or kids? Yes.
Scientific? No.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
very old universe ! :-)
Any way you can find in a lot of places informations about a lot of Galaxies that have been classified older than the big bang (15 billons years) !
The french magazine "Science et Vie" have some goods articles on the subject this mounth release.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Unfortunately, even Single Big Bang might not apply to the worst cases, where the best-fit theory is probably Eternal Stasis. :-)
I think "One Big Bang" is out of the question for most of the /. crowd. Therefore voting will indicate that one is the primary choice since many will be unobtainable.
Vista might be released before the next big bang.
sigpending(2)
In short, Hindu scriptures accept the Big Bang (and for that matter Evolution), but believe that it is cyclical in nature. Destruction follows creation, to be followed by creation again. Similarly, "devolution" follows evolution, in a cycle to be repeated endlessly.
While there are many links to back this up, here's the most relevant one I found on Hindu Cosmology (I'm not affiliated to it in any way, just happened to be one of the first sites that came up on a Google search). Among other prominent people, it also carries this quote from Carl Sagan's description of Hindu cosmology in his book Cosmos. To quote:
The late scientist, Carl Sagan, in his book, Cosmos asserts that the Dance of Nataraja (Tandava) signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory).
"It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of." Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of inorganic matter.
For modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artist created visual images of dancing Shiva's in a beautiful series of bronzes. Today, physicist have used the most advanced technology to portray the pattern of the cosmic dance. Thus, the metaphor of the cosmic dance unifies, ancient religious art and modern physics. The Hindus, according to Monier-Williams, were Spinozists more than 2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted by scientists of the present age.
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
"The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed."
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Time couldn't have had a beginning, by its very nature. So of course there was stuff happening before the Big Bang... a chain of Big Bangs is what I always assumed happened, or if not that, at least something.
But I'm not a physicist, or a scientist, so what do I know. Maybe time is limited, it did start there, and I've been thinking about it all wrong.
Space, on the other hand, is explained with all sorts of strange geometric diagrams that I don't even pretend to understand, so I won't touch that. But I'll never wrap my head around the idea of time having a beginning.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
freaky. as a recovering hindu, all i can think is either "maybe these scientists read the vedas".
:)
it's freaky sometimes when a religions answers, made up thousands of years ago match recent scientific discoveries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology
course the numbers are hugely different
but the idea of constant and cyclic universe w/ recurring big bangs matches.
--vat
There's always that possibility.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Scientists and Philosophers have been waving this theory around for at least 30 years. The problem in the past has always been that even though they really, really wanted this theory to be true, they didn't have any good evidence for it. As far as I can tell from TFA, that is still the case.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
It sounds to me like someone guessed the number 1 trillion (1,000 billion) as the age of the universe and now its being quoted as fact. You cant say the universe is 986 billion years older then previously thought becuase it makes people think your using an exact science becuase you are using exact numbers. This is sensationalist science at its worst.
Whether or not the theory will hold up in the future nobody knows but as for right now everyone needs to remember this is a theory like any and decieving people into thinking its otherwise is unfair.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Sorry to be off-topic, but articles like this throw around the word theory like every new hypothesis that's met with even a shred of success deserves to be called a theory. It's no wonder that so many people out there fail to realise that "It's just a theory, there's no proof" is a complete contradiction. I'm favoring, more and more, a redefinition of the terms used in biological science to match those in the physical sciences. Start calling hypotheses theories, and drop the whole "Theory" label from the theory of evolution. Teach it as a combination of evidence-driven research, and base principles (Natural Selection becomes "Darwin's Laws", Mendellian Inheritence becomes "Mendel's Laws", and so forth). Getting rid of the vague "theory" description will make it much easier to convey which parts of the modern theory of evolution should be considered fact, and which parts are still active areas of research.
To me the universe seems to act as a giant recycling system, everything within it gets reused over and over creating what we see around us as the systems evolve, evidence of it exists all around us on this planet so it makes sense that it would be the same out there in other areas of our universe.
Then why, pray tell, did you bother to enlighten us with your "theories?"
Common sense told Aristotle that objects fall because they are trying to return to a natural state of rest. Common sense and intuition are ridiculously bad tools for scientific inquiry. Esthetically-pleasing deductions with no empirical evidence are even worse.
English is easier said than done.
And a better question. The universe is isotropic, which means that it looks the same everywhere (or so I am told). Thus there is no "center." Imagine the surface of the Earth. Where is the center of the surface (no digging allowed). There IS none.
Well, if this property holds true for the universe, and eventually our universe will expand a whole lot and lead to a new bang, exactly where in the known universe will this bang occur?
Or, perhaps there IS a center to the universe. If this is true, what would this do for relativity, which states that ALL frames of reference are valid? If you could just fly in a rocket and see a bit red cement pole with "center of universe" painted on it, that would make a dandy absolute reference point.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
So basically, we're living in a computer. Where entropy is constantly increasing causing trash bits to be scattered throughout until everything is just so disorganized that the system freezes. And then someone pushes the reset button.
God should learn to defrag.
From wiki
"The early universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density and concomitantly huge temperatures and pressures. It expanded and cooled, going through phase transitions analogous to the condensation of steam or freezing of water as it cools, but related to elementary particles.
Approximately 10-35 seconds after the Planck epoch a phase transition caused the universe to experience exponential growth during a period called cosmic inflation. After inflation stopped, the material components of the universe were in the form of a quark-gluon plasma (also including all other particles--and perhaps experimentally produced recently as a quark-gluon liquid [3]) in which the constituent particles were all moving relativistically. As the universe continued growing in size, the temperature dropped. At a certain temperature, by an as-yet-unknown transition called baryogenesis, the quarks and gluons combined into baryons such as protons and neutrons, somehow producing the observed asymmetry between matter and antimatter. Still lower temperatures led to further symmetry breaking phase transitions that put the forces of physics and elementary particles into their present form. Later, some protons and neutrons combined to form the universe's deuterium and helium nuclei in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. As the universe cooled, matter gradually stopped moving relativistically and its rest mass energy density came to gravitationally dominate that of radiation. After about 300,000 years the electrons and nuclei combined into atoms (mostly hydrogen); hence the radiation decoupled from matter and continued through space largely unimpeded. This relic radiation is the cosmic microwave background."
It was energy first.
Just a word of warning. These claims about the universe are based on String theory. There are zero experiments that back up String theory. None. Zip. Nadda.
You CAN wrap your mind around time NOT having a beginning?
Neither a finite nor infinite universe are really within the ability of human comprehension as evidenced by the fact that every scientific, philosophical and religious argument out there basically boils down to "everything that exists was created by, erm, uhm, uh, this other thing...and this other thing... and oh, damn it, it just is, okay?"
The idea that the universe can be beginningless is astonishing. It hurts my brain. But there seem to be only two alternatives: either it is beginingless or it has a beginning. Maybe it was the FSM.
I think it was Hawking who proposed this well over 10 years ago before he realized it was impossible. Am I missing something or is this same bang to crunch to bang to crunch... theory. In any case it seems to clearly violate the second law of quantum mechanics. Forgive me for being skeptical.
I guess that makes the question "how many licks does it take" sort of moot, huh?
Assuming that:
1)The universe is cyclical in which all matter collapses to a single point and the big bang repeats an infinite number of times.
2)That when we die we have no perception of time.
Then:
Would it not stand to reason that we would experience everything in the universe moving from one existence to the next with no delay in the relative sense?
I'm flabbergasted!
Unfortunately, (as we currently understand things) we can not discover what existed before the big bang. This theory is only philosphical convecture that is not falsifiable.
Honestly, I've always thought basing everything on the assumption of some sort of start to time was foolish. This theory is the one that scientists have floated a couple of times before called Oscillating Universe.
I personally think both theories are far too limited in scope to describe the universe, but with only a BS in Astronomy, who among you would listen to my babblings?
What's 986 billion years between friends? Sounds like they were in the ballpark already. Any more sarcasm and I think my head will explode.
I think you mean the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For those who don't link to click links, that bascially says that the amount of usable energy in the universe is always decreasing, meaning that you can't have a perpetual motion machine (or a perpetual motion universe).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
This mammoth explosion... ;P
At least now we know why mammoths are extinct.
Considering that the universe shows every signs of expanding forever (based on observations), it's not hard to see why the idea of a cyclic universe was not considered a serious contender. In fact, it's difficult to see why it should be now.
But who needs data?
Basically, it's a quick way to get out of thinking and go back to watching nascar.
From TFA: With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it.
Shades of Babylon 5 there. From one of the Season 4 episodes, Into the Fire (I couldn't find the exact quotes online from work, this is my idea of what happened):
And at the end of the war, all of the remaining First Ones went Beyond the Rim, and were never heard from again.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well, the difference in explanations is obvious. In the first case (big bang, big crunch, rinse and repeat) they are referring to the standard big bang theory. The new theory (as far as TFA says) doesn't involve a crunch, just another big bang after the current matter in the universe dissipates.
How that part works out would be an interesting read. One aspect of the duality that binds the various aspects of M-Theory is that for certain branches of the theory, what is true at one geometric scale n is true in the opposing theory at the scale 1/n. Perhaps they are using relationship to argue that complete dissipation in one perspective constitutes absolute concentration (i.e. a big crunch) from a different perspective.
Beats me, I'm 15 years removed from my undergraduate physics courses, and I jumped ship on physics just before string theory started revving up big-time in the early 1990's.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This is an old idea that was proven wrong long time ago. The original theory stated that there were multiple Big Bangs due to slowing expansion, and then gravity pulling everything back together, and then causing another Big Bang.
This sounds all well and good but it was proven wrong when scientists found out the speed of galaxies moving apart actually increases as distance increases. The conclusion of this was that we will die all alone in an infinitely sized universe fully of entropy.
Enjoy.
There have been several thousands of years without any shred of proof of his existence.
I did a search with google and found Some scientists believe the bible still. Light could have been much faster in the beginning account for the so called light years between us and the stars. Light would have recently , thousands of years ago, turned to its current slower state of 186,000 miles/sec.
Dear God, please send me some mod points please oh please oh please.
can magically relocate to Maryland, all natural laws are suspect, and the so-called "constants", including the cosmological constant, aren't.
In other, related news, the big bang was not unique and the universe is at least a trillion years old. If you think Katrina was too much for FEMA, wait until the next big bang!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
This was all caused by Galactus, right? I think I read that somewhere...
"Hypothesis" actually. Until someone gathers some data to back it up. Which they may have, I just haven't bothered to look into it lately.
It almost sounds like you're saying that no one other than a scientist is allowed to posture about science. I guess we should all just accept whichever most common theory is spoonfed to us and not use our own intellect at all. They must be completely right, it's not like major scientific theories aren't re-written all the time or anything.
I'm not writing journal papers or teaching classes, so I'm allowed to form my own opinions and hypotheses about the way the universe works if I choose. And I'm free to share those ideas with others, even at the expense of being berated by people like you.
The cyclic model has been around for several years, and there is plenty I don't understand about it, but it is distinct from the old big bang-big crunch ideas. The "cycle" is the repeated collision between two sub-universes, called branes. We live in one of these sub-universes. Each collision resets our sub-universe with a new big bang... Our universe is constantly expanding; there is no crunch.
Importantly, the cyclic theory has detectable differences from the standard big bang scenario. For example, primordial gravity waves, detectable through their influence on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, are present in the standard big bang scenario and absent here. Thus their possible detection by a future microwave experiment could rule out this theory.
The purpose of this new work is to argue that the cosmological constant (the factor which make the expansion of the universe accelerate) is naturally small and positive in the cyclic model. This is as we observe it. The standard big bang theory does not make a prediction for the size of the cosmological constant (it's just a parameter), while in string theories the expected size of the constant is vastly larger.
Steinhardt has many materials (including a cartoon movie of the brane collision) on his homepage.
The relocation of the entire Tufts campus is just one of those college pranks pulled off by UMD or perhaps Johns Hopkins engineering students. The MIT kids have their work cut out to top that!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
A much better article on this subject can be found at New Scientist. (via digg).
I'm not an actor, but I play one on tv.
Unless there is a way to test this theory, it's just yet-another-untestable-hypothesis, and belongs to the realm of philosophy and religion more than hard science.
Let me know when they've got a good way to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
After all, I can say the universe was created "in progress" 30 seconds ago, and you can neither prove nor disprove it. It's an untestable theory. Even if I am right, it's scientifically useless to take such a theory seriously as a scientific theory.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The article is none too clear, but it seems that the major claims of this new theory are that the Cosmological Constant:
a) Might diminish over time, and
b) Might be able to survive a Big Crunch/Bang cycle, and
c) Seems to be smaller than it "should" be if the universe was created 14 billion years ago.
From these, they propose that:
d) The universe is actually much older and has gone through many Big Crunch/Bang cycles, allowing enough time for the CC to shrink to its current level.
However, I'd like to see some hard evidence for a), b), and c) before I accept that d) might be true.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
If I remember correctly Stephen Hawking gives this very theory in his book 'A Brief History of Time'. I believe he also states that it would be impossible to prove such a theory since all the particles are destroyed in every crunch/bang.
I think the Guardian's phrasing was confusing. The theory goes there is a big bang which sends matter flying in all directions at a very high velocity. Because of gravity eventually the velocity decreases to zero and then reverses, pulling everything in the universe back together, rinse, repeat.
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I once knew this young woman who dressed like white trash, liked NASCAR, and was actually pretty! I almost shit in my pants when I found out that she was finishing up her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at GA Tech!
Stereotypes are based on truth, but when someone doesn't fit a stereotype, it kind of makes me question my whole perception of things.
BTW, I agree with you. Now, I think I need to enter into some deep contemplation....
Om padme mani hum....
Q: Are we not men?
A: We are Devo!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Now, I know we all enjoy reading reporters vain attempts to understand complex scientific theories, and we all have a good laugh when they say things like "The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought..." when it's clear that they just took a rough estimate of 1 trillion and subtracted the accepted value of 14 billion, but can we please have useful links now and then? I mean it's not like there isn't a website that has every damn phyisics paper written since 1994 . If you can't add useful links, at least reject submissions that only link to the news reporters "interpretation" (and I use that term loosely) of the theory.
For those of you that want to see the real physics, the first paper I could find on the subject is here. It's from 2001, by the way.
I came here for a good argument
I read about this theory as a consequence of string theory a number of years ago in Dr. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. It's been a while since I've read it, but the idea is basically that once the universe reaches the size of the Planck length during contraction (Big Crunch), any decrease in size is indistinguishable from an increase in size. The same is, thusly, also true of any expansion (Big Bang). The universe, therefore, could as easily be said to be diminutive as enormous. There's simply no difference. Sounds goofy, I know, but Greene is very convincing.
Totally, kinda like when scientists act all surprised when they discover that the "elementary partical" that they thought was fundamental and indivisable turns out to be made of even smaller particles. Its a fractal, duh!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Is this not an appropriate name for this theory, given all the banging going on?
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
There is nothing magical about scientists that separates them from non-scientists. Science is a method anyone can use. Fanciful statements about the grand order of things and how natural phenomena are governed by laws inferred from common sense, however, do not science make. We should accept whatever theory is most consistent with the evidence, with a degree of reservation proportional to said theory's contradictions or shortcomings, be they internal inconsistencies or empirical evidence that it cannot explain.
Besides, if you want a common sense system to explain the universe, I recommend basing it on the Ptolemaic system--at least that one has had some pretty good mileage.
English is easier said than done.
The world is only 6,000 years old, right?
Maybe it should say the universe as we know it. How can you put a beginning on something like that... if it started with the big bang, then the material to make the big bang already existed, essentially our universe in a different form... and so on. Personally I think for the big bang to be true (assuming no external intervention) there could be no beginning... time would have to go infinitely backward. Is that possible? I guess that is something we each have to decide for ourselves.
Natural Selection becomes "Darwin's Laws", Mendellian Inheritence becomes "Mendel's Laws", and so forth.
I think calling scientific theories 'laws' is a big mistake. After all, it is not as if the earth goes round the sun because it obeys Newton's law of gravitation. But the way you hear people speaking sometimes you would be forgiven for thinking so.
There is a huge difference between 'law' in a prescriptive sense (which is how it is used most of the time) and 'law' in a descriptive sense (which is how scientists use it).
Considering that the universe shows every signs of expanding forever (based on observations), it's not hard to see why the idea of a cyclic universe was not considered a serious contender.
Only from the time of the last big bang until now. We don't really have any way to know what happened before that, or that the universe might not reverse course at some point in time in the future.
What you're saying is akin to the person who goes to the pond and only sees green ducks and therefore assumes that all ducks must be green, because he has only ever seen a green duck before.
being the optimist I am, wouldnt that mean there could be countless hyper-intelligent beings that night somehow be able to escape a big crunch? wouldnt that be novel? ;)
p r m t h s
Wow, this is even worse than I thought!
heh heh
"at least", "thought", "probably" "radical new theory", "study suggests", "cosmologists believe", - such verbage is used on the art bell show to proove the existance of aliens.
I dont see any fossil records, star charts, photos etc, to proove this. Is this just a bunch of nerds sitting around contemplating the cosmos?
We don't need no steenkin' data, man. Your eye-witness account is good enough for us, but if you did manage to get it on video, dude! that would be awesome to see. Did you?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
"The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory.
The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many."
986 billion + 14 billion = 1000 billion. What a coincidence. Happy 1,000,000,000,000th Birthday, Universe!
I dont think he was berating YOU. I guess he was against the basic idea of making theories without any empirical evidence to back your theory up.
See, if you look at it that way, there is nothing against the theory of FSM creating the world too. When there is a really good correlation between theories and data (that too after applying occams razor).
that is all.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
linkage
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
...that the big bang is a dupe?
This too, will end.
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Look it up for yourself.
It should now be called The Big Boing!
For anyone that overlooked it in the parent: "postur[ing] about science" indeed
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
More scary, of all the life forms in the universe, what if Earth is the most advanced?
...on whose back is the Discworld.
Great A'Tuin's sex is unknown, but is the subject of much speculation by some of the Disc's finest scientific minds - in an analogy to astrophysicists, specialists in this field are called astrochelonians. The sex of the World Turtle is pivotal in proving or disproving a number of conflicting theories about the destination of Great A'Tuin's journey through the cosmos. If (as one popular theory states) Great A'Tuin is moving to his (or her) mating grounds, (this is known as the "big bang" theory) then at the point of mating might the civilisations of the Disc be crushed or simply slide off? Attempts by telepaths to learn more about Great A'Tuin's intents have not met with much success, mainly because they did not realise that its brain functions on such a slow timescale. All they've been able to discern is that the Great A'Tuin is looking forward to something.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Just because it isn't scientific doesn't mean it isn't interesting news. Nor does it mean that the theory is necessarily bunk.
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
The idea of multiple big bangs, one after the other, was around back when I was doing my physics degree (so 20+ years ago). It is no longer widely accepted because it conflicts with some parts of current string theory (IIRC).
#DeleteChrome
Indeed. However, "Newton's Axioms" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Greatest post ever!
Sting Theory or M-Theory postulates that matter arrives by collisions of dimensions in other Universes.
I thought Sting Theory was that boring solo careers arrive from explosions of innovative bands.
"Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his mother. And he lay down upon his neighbor, and behold! she bore him in tears an oak tree, which grew all day and then fell over -- like a bridge. And lo! underneath this bridge there came a catfish. And he was very big. And he was walking. And he was the biggest he had seen. And so were the fiery balls of this fish, one of which was the sun, and the other, they called the moon." Firesign Theater, I Think We Are All Bozo's On This Bus
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0506 10arptest.htm
This is one of the two theroies I was taught in grade school. There was the "Big Bang" theory and the "Cyclic" theory that said that the universe would eventually contract and the whole thing would start over.
Did someone forget about this? Perhaps I have shifted realities since I went to school, but you'd think I'd remember that happening.
Or did TFA (Which, I'm afraid I didn't read) say that this is subtly different from the "Old" cyclic theory in some subtle way?
BTW, the other strange thing is that the general concept of an expanding/changing/contracting universe wasn't challenged when I went to school in the 70's, not in the slightest.
Perhaps there is also a "Cyclic" theory about how we allow religion to destroy our scientific progress, and the expansion/contraction of ignorance?
Now, I'm no cosmologist, but these two descriptions of the theory seem to be in conflict...does the matter in the universe come together in the Big Crunch, or does it fly off into space forever, replenished by subsequent Big Bang events?
Personally, the Big Crunch leaves the reason that that the universe will recycle itself in another Big Bang while Heat Death just means an everlasting permanent dead universe.
Personally, I'd like localized big crunches and big bangs better than the other two because that means if I were to live long enough to where a Technological singularity did happen in my life time and I did get to live for millions of years, I'd have a better chance of avoiding the End of the Universe by just moving my being away from any big crunches or big bangs going on at that moment.
Of course... I've got a lot more to be worried about than trying to figure where I'm going to be in 100 billion years (if at all) and even then I doubt I will have much say in how the universe ends or doesn't end.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
There is a huge difference between 'law' in a prescriptive sense (which is how it is used most of the time)
Most laws are proscriptive.
What?
The idea that there have been more than one big bang/big crunch cycles already is far from new. It was first proposed by Richard Tolman - in 1934. Similar theories have been presented by many others, including Stephen Hawking.
/.ers have.
I'm sure there are some new ideas in this theory, but the notion of an oscillatory/cyclical universe has been around longer than I or most other
I used to agree with you about the whole scientific law nomenclature issue, but since people already take laws to mean "Absolutely true" and theories to mean "Wild guesses", it makes a lot of sense to break apart the theory of evolution, and name individual components to drive home the aspects that are absolutely unquestioned by modern biologists.
I think a lot of scientists (myself included) are horrible idealists. We don't like doing things unless we can do them right. However, in times like these, it seems that taking some questionable baby steps (such as the renaming scheme I mentioned earlier) will buy us time to work towards the loftier goal of improving science literacy. We can't expect everyone to suddenly become so interested in science that the popular menaing of theory will change overnight. We can, on the other hand, play on their existing vocabularies to combat anti-scientific rhetoric in the short term.
Almost all revolutionary scientific theories reported mainstream
1) were already proposed and discredited a long time ago, and
2) are nothing more than blatant attention whorism.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
How the hell does this qualify as a radical new theory. It's as old as the hills.
Hell, it forms the underpinnings of Buddhist/Hindu cosmology -- the universe is in a constant state of being created, existing, being wiped out, and being re-created again.
A lot of people have postulated about this. Most of the cosmologists tell us the universe it expanding ad infinitum and will never collapse in upon itsself.
This is anything BUT a new theory. This guy may have a bit more modern science upon which to make his claim, but I would categorically say it's nothing which can be called a new theory. He's taken an old theory and thrown in the words "cosmological constant".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Your only half right...
Common sense, intuition, and deduction are OFTEN used to come up with new ways at looking at existing and yet discovered problems.
Do you REALLY THINK ALL science is OBSERVATION ONLY??
Observation might also be pretty useless if you don't have common sense, intuition, and deduction to understand WHAT YOU ARE DOING and WHAT YOU ARE OBSERVING!!!!
Most laws are proscriptive.
Ah. I looked it up. You're right, but I think I am too in this case.
proscribe To prohibit; forbid prescribe To order the use of
To my way of thinking, Newton's laws would never be thought of as prohibiting that the earth goes round the sun, even if they are sometimes erroneously thought of as mandating the same.
But yes, laws are usually prescriptive as you say - "Do not murder" etc.
"It's just a theory, there's no proof" is a complete contradiction
You mean "tautology." If it's a scientific theory then by definition it cannot be proved, only disproved.
From the article it's hard to say whether this is a theory, a modification to an existing theory, or a hypothesis.
A theory isn't just an accepted hypothesis, it's a descriptive edifice that lets you make predictions. Those predictions are hypotheses.
A bit hard to prove though, as it was posted past the cusp of the last Big Bang.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
You only have the "standard big bang theory" - what you want is the "unlimited big bang theory", sure, the milage isn't as good, but damn, no other physicists will leave you in their [cosmic] dust!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Wow another scientist comes up with a non-testable theory.
When a religion does the same thing we start making jokes about noodley appendages.
Since this is the Sixth version of the Universe, wherein the fundamental flaw is revealed as both the beginning and end of the universe, the universe is inexorabley 84 billion years old.
Sweet ...................... eh'
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
I was just telling my wife that I thought this was the case due to a philosophy class. In this class, we had to watch a video discussing the reasons behind intelligent design and why they thought there was a creator. This "physicist" (who taught at a religious college) was saying something along the lines of "the possibilities of life existing were extremely small" because had the big bang occurred with more force, gas would have expanded forever, and with less force it would have quickly shrunk back into a dense mass. Basically he said to look at it as a spectrum, with the possibility of ending up where we were being infinitely small, while the possibility of too little (or too much)force was infinitely high in comparisson. I thought his argument was stupid because if the explosion occurred with too little force, there was the possibility of the mass exploding again and again until it got to where we are now. Still, good to have someone back up my uneducated argument :)
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
since people already take laws to mean "Absolutely true"...
But that in itself is wrong, isn't it? No 'law' of science is absolutely true. A scientific law is (just?) a generalisation and an approximation that describes a set of observations. We know that Newton's laws of motion are not "Absolutely true", although they are a good approximation.
(Slightly off-topic, I think it is also important to get over the idea that the 'laws of nature' are not inevitable either. There's nothing to say they have to be as they are, other than real observations of the real universe.)
I do though fully agree with your sentiments about better communicating science to the public. I wish I could think of a better word to use. What about the "Principle of natural selection"?
P.S. Interesting beta tagging of this article as 'oldnews'. :^)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
i'm ready when you are!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
... universes in it.
...
Theoritically seems the only possible way it is aint it ?
To be infinite, infinity has to be infinite in all aspects, dimensionally, timewise (dont take time as a dimension here), inwards, outwards, conceptually, any quantity and quality we can name
And this is only possible if the existence we dwell in is infinite, but universes are finite in the area they occupy, but infinite in number through the infinity.
What do we have ? An endless amount of infinity with infinite expanding universes in it - an infinity for which the universes in it will need an infinite time to fill it up.
Read radical news here
1) A black hole is mathematically defined as a singularity. As far as this universe is concerned a black hole is a theoretical point - no width, height, or depth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singula rity
2) "Space" in it's purest form is that which is defined by at least four non-coplanar points. This is the basis for special relativity. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space
Those with any physics background should immediately see where I'm headed but I'll spell it out for mere mortals. Consider the model of the universe as theorized in the article. Regardless of how long it takes and discounting any effects of Hawking radiation, everything will eventually fall into a black hole. Imagine a dance of supermassive black holes stripping each other's accreation disks and eventually combining one into another as their orbits about their common gravitational centers degrade. The most massive of the black holes will behave much like cosmic vacuum cleaners as their Schwarzschild Radius expand and atttract their brethren.
Given that the model of the universe as theorized in the article hold true (which happens to be THE assumption in this exercise) we will start to realize the mathematical death of the universe. Consider the final four supermassive black holes in the universe have eaten everything else as exist in a non-coplanar configuration in Minkowski space. We say that in the presence of gravity, spacetime is described by a curved 4-dimensional manifold for which the tangent space to any point is a 4-dimensional Minkowski space. Under these conditions there is only one possible tangent and the concept of the "spatial curvature" of general relativity falls away since all space is now Minkowski space.
Here's where the math starts getting interesting.
I'll state this as the Wikipedia article so eruditely expressed:
"An orthonormal basis for Minkowski space necessarily consists of one timelike and three spacelike unit vectors. If one wishes to work with non-orthonormal bases it is possible to have other combinations of vectors. For example, one can easily construct a (non-orthonormal) basis consisting entirely of null vectors, called a null basis."
This is precisely what we have in the final dance of the four supermassive black holes -- the final orthonormal basis. When two of the final four combine then we need to consider space to be collapsing by a dimension. We are now in a flat universe. When the two remaining combine we are in a one-dimensional universe.
When the final two mate, we have the inner product of the remaining vector = 0. Which relativity considered "lightlike" and we've lost the tensor basis for gravity.
All of the mass of the universe converted to pure energy and gravity rendered meaningless.
Big bang.
What I consider to be the really interesting physics is at that moment of cosmic singularity we have no "timelike" vectors left. Is that an artifact of the math breaking down and not describing the physics or is it and effective paradox to the the model of the universe as theorized in the article?
You be the judge.
As soon as someone actually understands the universe, it is taken away and replaced with something more complicated. Evidently this has happened before, probably 42 times.
... is the consequenses if the universes truly exsist in linked cyclical nature. Imagine this:
- You scramble the universe every now and then
- You keep scrambeling forever
- If time is infinite, and the possible combinations of matter and energy are not (even if unimaginably many) you will end up with the same combination occuring over and over again infinitly.
So, if our mind is truly is just a part of this physical world, and arise from the energy/matter combinations mentioned above, we will end up living this life an infinite number of times, and in an uthinabkle amount of alternative varieties...
Hello Buddha....
Kind of makes me regret I was late submiting my tax return, again...
The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still
How old is the universe, and I don't want estimates. I need to know. Now!
I don't know how people can expect me to get any work done.
"This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many."
This is also known as the Snap, Crackle, Pop theory of cosmology.
The unvierse has design and a design needs a designer... (blah blah)... So that leads me to this conclusion:
If a creator made a creation as smart as himself, then he would be as stupid as us.
"'Hypothesis' actually. Until someone gathers some data to back it up. Which they may have, I just haven't bothered to look into it lately."
You see, real hypotheses actually have theoretical grounding in actually science. As opposed to what you, someone who has no background or understanding of the way black holes and the universe are understood to function, pull out of your ass.
"I guess we should all just accept whichever most common theory is spoonfed to us and not use our own intellect at all."
Maybe you should actually understand what the scientists are saying before you try to apply your own intellect? Many thousands of man-years have already been spent tackling these issues before you considered them...
"They must be completely right, it's not like major scientific theories aren't re-written all the time or anything."
And exactly which major scientific theories have been "re-written" all the time? I think you're making a common mistake: relativity, for instance, was not a "re-writing" of classic mechanics, no more than "string theory" is an alleged re-writing of quantum mechanics. Theories are valid in different limits and different realms -- some greater than others. That doesn't make the previous work "wrong."
Well, they did say "... at least 986 billion years..." -- that gave them some "wiggle room" to say they weren't trying to be "precise"...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
For all we know, the only thing keeping our Universe from Big Crunching -->> Big Banging into another parallel/oposite/mirror universe is global warming.
What if we had passed Kyoto and we all got crushed to death? Might be familiar to some people packed in like sardines in an Asian country, but us Americans like to stretch out.
The perfect size SUV is so big, you just get in at your house then slide the seat forward until you get to your destination! Now that would be cool... ok enough rant.
Time to do my part in fighting global warming... going to kill some poor farting cow and eat him before he CO2's up the whole environment!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Albert Einstein might disagree with you. Regarding intuition, special relativity was primarily the result of intuition regarding Maxwell's equations in different velocity frames. There was absolutely no empirical evidence to support this at the time, nor was there any reason to suppose 'c' is constant in any frame.
Taking it even further and more esoteric, his theory of General Relativity was formulated as a 'beautiful', yet simple, field theory that incorporated gravity and non-inertial frames of reference to special relativity. Now Einstein did suggest that one could perhaps measure a star's deviation during a solar eclipse, so at least he proposed a future experiment that could validate or invalidate GR. But the theory itself was just formulated as being aesthetically pleasing, in the physical-mathematical sense.
In fact, it goes back further. Maxwell's correction to Ampere's Law, for instance, made Maxwell's Equations look more symmetric, and also mandated charge continuity (ie, that charge is conserved). But at the time this wasn't really supported empirically.
God invented Mexican food first... that caused the BIG BANG!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
After reading a more informative article refered to in this post, my guess is that the researchers arrrived at the figure of 986 billion years by figuring out how fast the cosmological constant decays over time from the value posited by normal partical physics and that which we observe today, then worked backwards to figure out when the predicated cosmological constant = calculated actual. The precision is farily impressive, though. IANA_cosmologist.
Hmm, interesting idea. Maybe in a few more years I'll have enough physics under my belt to form a more valid criticism. One point though, is what if there was a particle(s) that entirely escaped the gravity of the black holes? What effect would this particle have on the dimensionality of space, since a particle is not in fact a point, but a 3-dimensional object. It would seem to me that the universe would no longer collapse dimensionally, since the singularities would no longer form the only possible basis.
We looked at atoms and believed that nothing can be smaller. Then someone figured out you can split an atom and found they were made of simple subatomic particles like electrons and neutrans, etc., and they kept splitting and smashing them further and further unstill their knives, hammers, and microscopes couldn't get any smaller.
Well, get this, our universe is a subatomic particle in some insignificant atom composing an uncomprehensably larger universe. When we split protons into quarks, neutrinos and other "stuff", we're actually wrecking an inconceivable number of tiny universes.
Instead of dealing with all of this science/religion, it's much easier to just do my job, love my wife, raise my kids, and maybe help out the human race a little before I myself die (or recycle or whatever). Long live the "high scientists", may God save their soul.
God created Mexican food first. That caused the BIG BANG!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I prefer many Big Bangs, myself. Followed by a smoke.
* It must move at the speed of light
* It must travel in a direction directly perpendicular to the surface of the event horizon.
Under these gravitationally "crowded" conditions your particle would be very lucky to escape at all and even luckier to avoid the other black holes. It would be like the old adage, "out of the frying pan into the fire."
Your nitpicking is exactly what I was talking about.
Just because a scientific law isn't an absolute (as there is no such thing in science), doesn't mean we shouldn't try to take advantage of the fact that most people think that a law is something that's absolute. To draw an analogy, imagine that science is a germophobe and intellegent design (and other anti-science movements) have cut a big gash in science's side. It's much better to stop the flow of blood with a dirty rag and risk some minor infection, than to bleed to death while trying to figure out a better solution. Playing into the common vocabulary is that dirty rag, and I really think it's worth using it if it stops some people from abandoning the sciences over religious and political issues.
In short, an embarrassing load of shit that everyone involved in the publication of should be rightfully appalled by. Welcome to the high quality world of "science correspondent".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You're right, but only up to a point. Infering that all ducks are green, in your example, isn't a bad inference. As long as you're willing to allow for new data to disprove the hypothesis, it's actually the most reasonable conclusion you could draw from that case.
In the real world, all we have is what we can observe. What we observe now is a universe with too little mass and energy to recollapse. (In fact, it's accelerating even now.) What would have changed on this iteration and why are we in the special one? You can posit all kinds of things, but that's just speculation. The most reasonable conclusion with this data is that this is the only iteration of the Big Bang in this universe. (Note carefully that this isn't to say that it's *accurate*, just the best guess we could make at the moment. That's all science can ever do for you.)
That means the "first" big bang was a dupe, right?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
You're right about Big Crunch being out of date (at least according to wikipedia). But, from TFA: With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it.
This seems to indicate that a bang might occur by some other means than a crunch.
L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.
"What we are proposing is very radical. It's saying there was time before the big bang." Time for what?
But you'll notice that in all of your examples the intution was backed up by long, careful scientific analysis. Einstein spend years on both Special and General Relativities after his initial inklings about what to persue before he was able to present workable theories.
I'll totally agree that intuition is useful in science, but ONLY if you follow up on it with the real labor required.
After all, he said that the original galactic confederation was around for some 80 trillion years. Give or take a few, I'd guess.
So that's your theory?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
My grandfather believed--I mean, really, really, REALLY belived--that this was just one iteration in an unendind stream of universes started by "big bang" type events. Nothing new here. Just glad to know gramps wasn't just crazy, or others are equally so.
Well, it IS a theory. It's an explanation for observed data. The fact that "Theory of Evolution" is less impressive-sounding than "The Word Of God Almighty" is sort of a different problem.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
I wouldn't say "absolutely no emperical evidence". Didn't the Michelson-Morley experiments indicate "c" was constant in various reference frames?
>"The anthropic explanations are very controversial and many people
>do not like them," said Alexander Vilenkin a professor of
>theoretical physics at Tufts University in Maryland.
And many people aren't going to like an infinite cycle of big bangs, either.
>Rather than making precise predictions for features of the
>universe the anthropic principle gives a vague range of values so
>it is difficult for physicists to test, he added.
Sure, but that's true for almost any cosmological theory. Really, it's unfair to but the anthropic principle on the same "level" as the other theories, because it's really not meant to provide specifics on the actual big bang itself. Moreover, the anthropic principle RELIES on other scientific theories to fill in the very details of how things happened. So it's not like it's the anthropic principle vs. other, more scientific theories.
>"It's absolutely terrible, it really is giving up," said Prof
>Turok, "It's saying that we are never going to understand the state
>of the universe. It just has to be that way for us to exist." His
>explanation by contrast is built up from first principles.
I don't think a modernized version of the "steady state" model, where time just goes on forever into the past, is in any way less of a "giving up". Frankly, it's more so. The guy is bashing the anthropic principle by completely mischaracterizing it... it doesn't state that we can't understand the state of the universe. Moreover, it isn't incompatible with multiple universes, or even this guy's own multiple big bang idea. All it says is that the CURRENT universe we're in MUST have certain characteristics BECAUSE we are here. In fact, multiple universes (via quantum foam or many worlds or whatever mechanism you chose to invoke) actually makes the anthropic principle easier to understand, not less.
Professor Turok is the one who is giving up. "When did the universe begin and why?" "There's no answer! It's just always been like this, forever!" Gee, thanks doc, that's real intellectual progress.
Bruce
Hey Slashdot Editors: Try Googling a couple of clicks worth before accepting submissions depending on The Guardian's science reporting, please.
i cuniverse.htm
From http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/02/0506/0506-cycl
"Princeton University
April 25, 2002
New Theory Provides Alternative to Big Bang"
These guys, Tourok and Steinhardt, published this four years ago! News?
Well, clearly this isn't true for everybody - there are people who understand evolution fairly well and yet don't accept that we're here because of it.
Of course, in the case of the unwashed masses, most either believe or disbelieve evolution not because they do or don't understand it, but rather because of the influence of somebody else or a willingness to just accept something based on presentation. That goes for most people who do believe in evolution - in the big scheme of things relatively few people actually understand it one way or another.
Hopefully this isn't a situation where if they can arbitrarily pick a certain number of expansion/compressions, then the variables work. That would seem like in statistics, where if you do a regression to a high enough power, you can fit it to any curve you want, which would be counter intuitive.
FTA: Mechanisms exist that would allow the Constant to decrease incrementally through time.
So, its not a constant...
Not explicitly, it demonstrated that they couldn't see any evidence of an 'aether' through which light travelled.
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
I think calling scientific theories 'laws' is a big mistake.
We don't call theories laws. We call simple imperical observations and their simple mathmatical models laws.
As an example we have the Ideal Gas "Law," and the Kinetic Theory of Gases which offers a possible explanation of that law. The one is an observed phenomenon, the other a line of reasoning making conjoined use of a number of "laws" to derive another.
Of course even this is a big mistake that we don't really do much anymore. The use of the term is primarily historical.
On the topic introduced by the OP, I think we should just teach people what the damned word means, but then, that is, of course, just my theory.
KFG
The only religion I have come across that states the universe may actually be OLDER than the 14billion years is that of Scientology, they assert that existence has gone on for trillions of trillions of years. If the trend of the universe looking older and older continues, maybe we will be able to truly analyze the thetan threat.
ROFL
I'd be willing to place money that the 986 billion years comes from the reporter, not the researcher. The researcher says he estimates the universe is actually at least 1 trillion years old, compared to the 14 billion year estimate for time since the big bang. The reporter was clever and figured out that meant the universe was at least 986 billion years older than everyone else thought, thereby proving that he is smart enough to competantly report on cosmology...
The reason this is worth reporting on (at least according to what I was able to decipher from our brilliant reporter on the subject), is not that the idea of prior universes is new (just a couple days ago I was reading about it in The Elegant Universe published in 1999, and I recall Stephen Hawking mentioning the idea in A Brief History of Time), but that he has created a model that shows a theoretically feasible transistion from the previous universe to this one that also might explain some of the puzzling observations we've made about our universe without resorting to dark energy.
Finally, a scientific explanation for dupes!
I've been screaming this for nearly a decade.
All that screaming...maybe that's why no one listened to you?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I've always had a problem with the idea that there was a "beginning" of time, or the universe. No real reason to expect that other than theological ones. and I mostly reject those.
The other thought that comes to mind -- and one that I have not seen discussed is one of regional "big bangs" - that is: in an infinite sea of space, there could be regions of matter that clump, grow in size and then eventually explode out again. there may be several such regions with interstitial space of relatively low matter density.
Also -- imagine if there were a cycle of big bangs in one region. Looking at the numbers, there is a strong argument that intelligent life will arise given the number of stars, planets, time scale and the assumptions about how difficult it is to get living things started. Hence SETI and other search efforts. So... if there were previous big bang cycles there could have been intelligent races. In fact cycles in big bangs greatly increases the chance at some point an intelligent race existed. Imagine where humans might get in a few billion years... Imagine the challenge of trying to get a race to survive through a Big Bang. Or - more interesting for us - affecting the situation after the crunch to encourage intelligent life in the next cycle or possibly leaving a message for us to find. all kinds of neat possibilities.
Note to the information archaeologists of the 31st century.... Hi!
See the Turtle of enourmous girth,
on his shell, he holds the earth.
His thoughts are slow, but always kind.
He holds us all within his mind.
Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge..."
Intuition and "common sense" are actually a surprisingly good tools for science inquiry, but they are not the only tools. Of course, empricial evidence and logic always have the final word. Major scienfic discoveries have their origin in those little bursts of insight that can only be described as intuitive in nature. A common misconception is that science always operates in a manner that is strictly logical; progressing methodically from A to B to C. This is simply not the case. Actual scientific research involves a great deal of speculation and guess work. Once you have a result that seems interesting only then does the rigor begin.
It is true that many results are logically deduced from existing results, and then used to predict some real-world phenomena (as in the case of the radio waves predicted by solutions to Maxwell's equations). But when Maxwell originally formulated his laws he was probably thinking: "If I was God, how would I make electromagnetism work?" Einstein was probably thinking along similar lines. In fact, a great deal of my scientific education so far has been devoted to developing my intuition along with my knowledge and ability to reason. A student who focuses entirely on developing knowledge and reason, while neglecting their ability to speculate, is doomed to fail as a scientist.
Oh, and one more thing... Science does make some assumptions that are purely esthetic in nature. Our preference for simple theories as opposed to complex theories is just one example.
As you pointed out, this "theory" has been considered since Plato, and has made its appearences in religion and "the Matrix". In fact, it's kind of reassuring: we can always put back the quest for the origins, rather than search'em by scientific means.
He just keeps resetting the Wellworld computer.
Don't need to hurt your brain by trying to visualize these higher dimensions. You end up "projecting" these higher dimensions to three dimensions---the way you recognize the world around you---anyways. I remember some said that a four space-dimension creature could appear to us that his head is at his tail. This is nonsense. This only happens when we project the creature to our three dimensional space.
To get back to your comment, I think string theory is meant to address phenomenon that appears to us as being "projected" onto our space. Some physicists found something at the quantum level that doesn't seem to work in three-dimensional arithmetic (they found that creature with his head at his tail). To explain this, they come up with an equation that involves higher dimensions and a projection function from that space to our space. The projection function is necessary so they can verify the model by experimenting in our space.
But I think they're chasing their own tails. If they apply that projection function to their equation throughout, they end up getting an equation in the three dimensional space, which they could have formulated without the higher dimensions.
I think string theory is more of a mathematical trick than a model of the universe.
(Yes, this is all strawman argument. If anyone wants to be more specific, we can talk about functors and category theory more.)
I once had a signature.
Bang, Bang... bang, bang, bang, ...
Big Bang, God, cut it up anyway you want it, essentially we are trying to come up with a theory that proves something can evolve out of nothing. Your head will explode long before you come to a theory of how life started.
Quite cool, a few weeks ago I was thinking about the big bang and black holes, and that all life we know of goes in circles. So I kinda got the revolutionary idea that the "big bang" was not the first or the last big bang. I thought that black holes eventually grew so strong that they sucked in whole galaxies, and, ultimately the whole universe, and when that happened, when everything was in one single black hole, it would go BOOM! and everything would spread out again, just like the theorised big bang. Fun to find a similar theory :)
I've been screaming this for nearly a decade. The idea that it all started with a single "big bang" is preposterous. Nothing in nature has a true beginning and end, everything is part of a larger cycle. It's only common sense that if there were one "bang" there were probably more before it.
I'm thinking, that probably blackholes create these bangs. After they attain a certain threshold of mass, as in several super-blackholes combine, they explode again. But then, I'm not an astro-physicist and have no data to back this up.
Wow, some random guy, with no data or knowledge on this subject, screaming theories based on a gut feeling. How could the scientific establishment have ignored you?!?
Wow, accurate to 3 digits - hot damn. That is amazing accuracy for an extrapolation from what - one data point?
Oh well, what the hell...
If the big bang 'exploded' ie, it went in opposite directions, as a traditional explosion, ie a nuke or supernova,
then it goes from volume X to volume 10X and so on. Now it must have a shape, as its volume is changing.
Or is it octopus shaped?
If they say galaxies are moving away from each other, then geometrically there must be a vague center, otherwise some
will be going towards each other chaotically and some away.
Maybe the far far universe beyond 15 or 100billion years ago is so far red shifted its in the 1000nm range of 'light' where its not visible
so it has to be artificially blue shifted-compressed to see it. Maybe we just have to get the background 'noise' in near IR range
and compress the values and 'shift' them up to visible light and 'render' on the screen and presto we can see further - in
a very blury way.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I came up with it on acid years ago.
...after all, the evil galactic overlord, Xenu, ruled 4 quadrillion years ago!
xenu.net
xenu.net OT III
"horrendousspacekablooie"?
Most people nowadays have a tendency to find much interest in questions like "what came before the Big Bang" and the like. I, too, think this is a nice field of research. However, this is far, very far away from the actual issue.
What came before what isn't an interesting subject per se. A simple catalog that says that event "a" happened before event "b" doesn't tells much, it's just raw data. The insteresting stuff is whether event "a" caused event "b" or not. And it's no wonder then that at the heart of any such study is the concept of "causality". And causalitu not as something that you "think", but as an actual reality.
So, if you say that the chain of causes and effects has 15 billion years, or 900 billion years, or 100 trillion years, this is simply a measurement of the "size" of causality. But no matter what's its size: knowing it perfectly won't tell you from where causality itself comes, nor what it is when taken as a whole.
Compared to this kind of metaphysical questioning ("metaphysics" means "that which goes along with physics", causality itself baing a good example of a metaphysical subject), things such as the size of the time dimension seem very secondary.
I think it's sad scientific journals don't put these subjects into discussion. Philosophical themes that are by nature linked to scientific research are very accessible if well presented, providing as much food for thought as the latest and greatest string theory. After all, what you learn there ends up being valid for everything else you'll study, including the most recent scientific researchs.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
This is just the latest rehash of Sir Fred Hoyle's Dynamic Steady State theory from the 1950's.
Science Fiction was treating this idea in the 1960's and 1970's. See Tau Zero, and the later Hee Chee series for views of watching it happen (Tau Zero) and watching someone else make it happen (Various Hee Chee books).
Well, as we get more data, there will be interesting new (or old) twists in how we view reality. In 30 more years, they'll either say 'of course' or else laugh at how stupid we were to have considered this. Then in another 20 it'll be back in some other guise. That's how these things work.
First, no one knows for sure if the universe is isotropic. We assume it is. As we assume that protons don't decay, energy is conserved, and so on. Second, just as in your example, there is no center in the surface. Assuming the universe would shrink in a Big Crunch, it would be just like deflating a gas ball; everything would go closer (in fact, space-time itself would bend), without a need for a center.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
... since there's no faith involved or anything ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I have this theory going on in my head.. Why did Nature (or whatever Darwin talks about) made us so 'powerful', 'smart' and 'advanced' that we have powers to control Nature (like rains, jungles, animals) i.e. there is a lot of imbalance in Nature due to us Humans.
Now reading this article I am realizing that MAY BE we were CHOSEN by Nature to create Nuclear Weapons.. and then Destroy Ourselves. May be by causing a mini-Big Bang ?
Then why do scientists support this expansion theory with the red shift. It seems like this red shift is only representative of expansion in the three dimensions we are familiar with? Which leads back to the question, where is the center of this expansion?
First you tell me that sound does not travel in the vacuum of space, now you tell me there was a big bang! I'm so confused!
Monkey feces. "Regardless of how long it takes and discounting any effects of Hawking radiation, everything will eventually fall into a black hole" is about like saying "except for the fact that I'm slow, have no hand-eye coordination, and can leap no more than 2 inches vertically, I could be the NBA's MVP"
Black holes are no more like vacuum cleaners than the stars which formed them. The Schwarzschild radius grows as mass is added to the b.h., but it's an extremely slow process. Going from an Earth-mass black hole (assuming there's a method to actually create one) to a solar-mass black hole would change the S. radius from about the size of a golf ball to about 3 km. That's not exactly enough to envelope the whole solar system, much less the matter in interstellar space.
You're right. I meant (supporting) evidence, not proof. My bad.
And a hypothesis is not a prediction, it's a testable proposition.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Tell god enough sex already! Stop with the banging!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
They will post a link to a generalist source misreporting a journal article about the universe repeating itself every trillion years.
And some older posters will point out that it is a dupe.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
And the topper is that he explained it along with a pretty much identical idea that comes from ancient Hindu beliefs.
http://www.rediff.com/news/jan/29sagan.htm
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Actually there is a significant bit of aesthetics in theory. Some things just feel right -- clean, almost. A good theory generally manages to combine at least a couple of previously understood bits of information or previously existing theory.
That said, the grandparent post was, well, pretty dumb.
To: Average_Joe_Sixpack
From: God
Date: 5/6/2006
Subject: Stop
knock it off, right now
seriously, what the hell
-God
No, no, no. The world was created in six days by a dude called God. Everybody know this is a fact, cuz it's taught in school.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
According to Mayan legend, the first three rebirths of the Universe were basically failures.
3 .13.13.13.0.0.0.0
But this current rebirth of the Universe, number four, was stable and useful and so people could live in it.
Another version of the Universe will come after this fourth version. The fifth Universe will be improved upon
but similar to this one.
In Mayan time the End of the Last (3rd) Universe:
13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.1
10,331,233,010,526,315,789,473,682,240,000 Days
(10 nonillion, 331 octillion, 233 septillion, 10 sextillion, 526 quintillion, 315 quadrillion, 789 trillion, 473 billion, 682 million, 240 thousand Days)
28,697,869,473,684,210,526,315,784,000 "Years"
(28 octillion, 697 septillion, 869 sextillion, 473 quintillion, 684 quadrillion, 210 trillion, 526 billion, 315 million, 784 thousand Tuns)
Currently in the 4th cycle of the Universe (4 dimensional space-time continuum)
There is a 5th Cycle of the universe coming, but not for a VERY LONG TIME.
Another 13.0.0.0.0 will occur on December 21, 2012.
So, I don't think the words 'radically new theory' mean what you think they mean.
My Dad's had a theory along these lines ( very similar, actually ) for years. He wrote a letter on the topic to the university where Stephen Hawking hangs out ( can't remember which one it is now ), and they gave him a lifetime subscription to a science journal they produce. Cool :)
If scientists can have a theory where everything explodes, contracts & explodes, then why not little parts of the universe doing the same thing.
Of course this doesn't exactly satisfy our curiosity - there are still questions of where matter & energy came from, if there was a beginning of time, etc, but somehow I don't think these are ever going to be explained in a way that people can digest in an ordinary state of consciousness. The ultimate nature of the universe is far more bizarre than we could possibly imagine.
But anyway, this theory of multiple big bangs & contractions makes perfect sense to me.
everyone seems to be missing out on the most important part of this idea--that the universe is infinitely large and old, and that it will last forever. That means individual humans could LIVE FOREVER. Looks like we cryonicists could be living forever!
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
The Big Bang is not very aesthetically pleasing. Everything else depends on context, but we're supposed to hang it all like a Calder mobile on some unsupported skyhook? That's Creation Science, kiddies.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The 2002 paper was an introduction to a cyclical cosmological model. In the time since 2002, the authors have refined the initial idea and worked out some more of the details of the model. The latest paper demostrates that this new model may present an alternative explanation for the difference between early inflation and late inflation. I've read the relevent papers and your question is naive. If you aren't a cosmologist maybe you should stay away from criticising them.
"It's a theory" implies "there is no proof" since theories are inherently unprovable. Therefore, the statement is a tautology: if A==>B then (A & B) is a tautology. You're quite correct though, "there is no proof" does NOT imply "it's a theory" so if the original poster had said "there's no proof so it's just a theory" (which is probably what he MEANT to say) then that would be a non sequitur.
You're right, "testable proposition" is probably a better term but "prediction" is more easily understood by people who think the defining characteristic of a theory is that it is unproven.
See the Bear of fearsome size!
All the world's within his eyes.
Time grows think, the past's a riddle;
The Tower awaits you in the middle.
That the universe is infinite in age and always adding to its size. The big bang is just the explosions of the centers of the galactic core recreating and in some cases creating new elements. I image the raw universe as a pure vacuume occupied only by energenic sub atomic particles. --chris
Like many of you, I am constantly in a state of confusion about cosmology. HOwever, I think this may be due to the very poor explanaitons given by the scientific community.
Like many of you, I had taken the big bang to mean that there was something small that expanded, a view that certainly seems encouraged by popular writing on the subject.
However, other views I have read suggest this is completely wrong. the "big bang" actualy started with an infinite universe that was much hotter and denser then today...imagine a 2D univers, a brightly colored, infinite rubber sheet. after the big bang, the sheet grows, and the color becomes thinner..so the initially infinite universe becomes much larger and less colored...(I agree, the idea of infinities of different sizes aint easy to swallow, but I guess thats what georg cantor was talking about)
perhpas someone who understands this stuff can comment
I suppose that one could call the grand unified force (or whatever else turns out to be bottom layer once we're done peeling the onion of physics) by whatever name one wishes, be it God or Chi or FSM. The philosophical issue doesn't arise until you try to anthropomorphize it and ascribe personality and moral attributes to it, or claim that it's tricking you and that the universe is actually younger than some trees ...
I know it's fun to pretend scientists are as stupid as religious fanatics are, but they're really not. They think, they're reasonable, they're intelligent, and they're critical -- and that's why religion is dying while science is being funded in ways that nothing in all of history can rival.
If it's a scientific theory then by definition it cannot be proved, only disproved
This is Popper's view of science, and while it has it's merits it is nothing like the whole story.
In particular, the use of the word "proof" in the above sentence is extremely odd--it is used to mean "axiomatic, deductive, logically certain derivation", which is a very narrow, specialized meaning of the word that clearly has no relevance at all to a great deal of science. It even has quite narrow application within physics, which is the most mathematical of the sciences (though far less mathematical than mathematicians and some theorists would have you believe.)
"Proof" has a much broader sense which is far more relevant to those of us who live in the real world of the sciences rather than a philosopher's fantasy land where nothing not known with deductive certainly is considered to be known at all. On the contrary, we know all kinds of stuff, and can prove it, in the ordinary sense of the word. I know my name, I have a pretty good idea of my species, and I know the mass of the electron. I am able to know and to prove all these things, in the ordinary sense of the word, although I am not able to derive any of them.
This equivocation of "proof" with "derivation" is pernicious and wrong, and should be stopped. If you want to say that a scientific theory can never be derived by all means do so, but please be clear about what you are saying, and do not use the confusing and misleading term "proved" in the place of the more precise and accurate "derived".
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I didn't say anything about derived. You're referring to a mathematical or logical proof, which is only a proof given certain assumptions -- the rules of logic being among the assumptions.
So what's your definition of prove? To convince someone else you're right? You know your name because you've defined it. You know your species also because you've defined it. You do NOT know the mass of the electron, first because you can only know it to measurement error, second because you didn't define the circumstances under which you're defining "the mass of the electron" and third because you don't really know FOR SURE that your measurements are true.
You are not able to prove ANY of those things. You could well be a clever facsimile of homo spaiens sapiens, I see no way you can prove to me beyond any doubt whatsoever that your name is what you say it is and we've already discussed how you don't actually know the mass of an electron so you can't very well prove to me that electrons have any particular mass.
You may be right -- perhaps you can prove (or is it proove in ordinary language?) those things in the ordinary sense, but in science more strict definitions are required. You cannot prove ANYTHING scientifically. That's not just philosophical babbling or Popperism, it's a useful caution that all good scientists should keep firmly in mind. No matter how sure you are there's a very good chance you're wrong. Claiming otherwise to the nonscientific community, who aren't qualified to know you're full of it, just tarnishes the reputation of science and leads to all kinds of misunderstanding.
The galaxies are moving away from each other, but not so much as in they are traveling through time-space like driving in a car from your home; that the time-space is expanding, like your car being on the road traveling toward your home at 25 MPH while the road is getting longer at 50MPH!
If you pick a direction to traveling in the universe, and go that way, because the universe is curved you'll eventually end up where you started. It is tempting to think of the center of that curve as the center of the universe, but if you change directions, you get a new pseudo-center. If you travel in all directions in a single plane the pseudo-centers line up and you travel paths becomes a torus, and in all directions it looks like a sphere. The universe probably has a non-spherical shape from the outside, since everything in the universe seems to rotate, it possible that the universe as a whole rotates; but because all of our yardsticks are in the universe, they distort and would measure no asymetries from the inside so an external shape is undefined to us.
So how big is the universe? A definition as good as any is when it would have to travel at the speed of light to satisfy Hubble's law, which means any light from an object would have its frequency reduced to 0 Hz; anything outside the universe would have to have a negative frequency, which means that it's imaginary to us and doesn't exist or is undefined.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Isn't the cosmological constant a pretty shaky thing to be basing anything on? Einstein's self-described "biggest mistake"?
This theory really doesn't say anything about the universe, it's more about the psychology of physicists. The steady-state and cyclical universe models have been hauled out again and again, with no experimental evidence suggesting that they might be true, because people want them to be true.
The various religions that have cyclical models of the universe are one of the causes of this desire.