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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.'"
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.
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.
In other news, pornography much older than originally thought.
Registered Linux user #421033
'Cyclic universe' can explain cosmological constant
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
So...This is all just deja vu all over again?
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
Created the universe in one giant gang bang
** I hope I don't get smited for that
For some reason, when I conjugate the verb word "smite" in that context, I get "smut".
(Yes, I know, it should be "smitten", but that's hardly humorous.)
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.
It works something like this: according to relativity, space and time are really linked together as 4 dimensional spacetime. Just as 2- and 3-dimensional objects can have shape, so can 4-dimensional objects like spacetime. When physicists try and get some idea of the shape of spacetime they find that it "narrows to a point in the time direction" - the big bang.
Perhaps an analogy is the best way to think about it. A sphere is a two dimensional surface in a particular shape - at any point of the surface of the sphere you can parameterise direction in terms of 2 perpendicular base vectors. We do exactly that with directions about the surface of the earth (though we call "negative east" west, and "negative north" south), so if you like you can think of north and east as the dimensions/directions on the surface of the earth. If you keep heading north, however, you find that the sphere narrows to a point in that directions - the north pole. You can't really talk about what is north of the north pole - the question doesn't really make sense. Of course you can only really see that by stepping outside and observing the 2-dimensional surface of the earth as it is embedded into 3-dimensional space; if we look at things in terms of a more easy to picture map projection into 2-dimensions (just as the surface is 2-dimensional) you might think "can't we just keep going up? Surely there's more north?"
In practice spacetime works roughly the same way except the "surface" is 4-dimensional instead of 2-dimensional. The key point is that heading back in the time direction is just like heading in the north direction of the sphere - eventually you reach a point, like the north pole, where "before" or "further back in time" doesn't make sense, in just the same way that "further north of the north pole" doesn't make sense. From our perspective inside spacetime that's harder to imagine, similar to the way the map projection tends to skew your thinking. It is made worse by the fact that we usually tend to think of time as something very separate to space rather than just another direction. The concept of time beginning with the big bang does make sense, it just requires you to break out of the standard intuitions about how space and time fit together.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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 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.
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.
linkage
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
"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.
This is an interesting idea. However, I don't think we know whether there are an infinite possible combinations of matter and energy. I would think the possibilities would be infinite. My intuition tells me there would be an infinite number of possibilities. But even if there is only a finite number of possibilities, we may still only live once. Probability is funny when you are dealing with the infinite. For example, if I tell you to build a decimal with an infinite number of digits between 0 and 9, you could pick 0.166666... with the 6 repeating. Then there is a possibility that you pick the number "1" exactly once, and the number "6" the rest of the time, so "1" only lives once, so to speak. (Strangely, the probability of this happening turns out to be 0, however.)
> parallel/oposite/mirror universe
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(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.