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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.'"
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.
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
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.
Strange how this coincides with the theory of "Cosmic cycles" in Hinduism and other Vedic religions like Buddhism
It's not strange at all. With many different religions and each religion having many different sects, how scientists describe how our universe works will seem similar to some religion somewhere.
If you think about it, religion is one way for people to describe what is happening in the world around them.
Personally, I say keep your faith and your science seperate.
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.
"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.
I'm also curious about where these new "big bangs" occur, since the big bang in normal cosmology (i.e. the Friedman-Robertson-Walker based on General Relativity) happens everywhere, not in one particular place. It's not clear that that is the picture in this new theory. This actually sounds less like F-R-W cosmology and more like a steady state model that Fred Hoyle was pushing a while back.
On to the point about providing an absolute reference frame, that might not be such a big issue. The difference here is between what's called weak lorentz symmetry breaking and strong lorentz symmetry breaking (if I'm not mistaken). Relativity says the laws of physics are the same in all frames, but it could be that one frame ends up being easily recognized, even though it doesn't have special laws (this is the weak sort of symmetry breaking). In fact, we already have this because of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). The CMBR defines the average rest frame of the observable Universe. On Earth, the CMBR looks blue shifted in one direction and redshifted in the opposite direction, because we're moving with respect to the CMBR rest frame. So, you could argue that if you get in your spaceship and turn on the thrusters until this redshift effect goes away, you'll really be "at rest" (that is, you'll be at rest in the average rest frame of matter in the universe). So there is a sort of sign post (for a particular velocity, not a particular position), but the laws of physics aren't any different in that frame, so this doesn't break relativity.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy