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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.'"
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.
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~ |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.
In other news, pornography much older than originally thought.
Registered Linux user #421033
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
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.
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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.
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.
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> parallel/oposite/mirror universe
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