Slashdot Mirror
New Universes Will be Born from Ours
David Shiga writes "What gruesome fate awaits our universe? Some physicists have argued that it is doomed to be ripped apart by runaway dark energy, while others think it is bouncing through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. Now, scientists have combined these two ideas to create another option, in which our universe ultimately shatters into billions of pieces. Each shard would then subsequently grow into a whole new universe. The model could solve the mystery of why our early universe was surprisingly well ordered."
Now it sounds like these guys aren't even trying anymore. I could've sworn I saw this in an episode of Star Trek.
. . . witty, and profound, but the announcement that the free bagels and donuts we get every Friday have arrived.
Just think, if only one percent of those billions of new universes repeat our time-stream, this joyous moment will be repeated . . .
whoa, they maple bars this morning. I'm out of here. Priorities . . .
The Last Question. htm
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question
Just ask the good Jedi how they feel about "Balance" now...
... is there something somewhere else blowing?
And no, that wasn't a Spaceballs reference!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Baby come back!! No more dark matter - I promise you a Big Bang this time!
I propose that the universe is actually a cheap science kit awaiting purchase on the shelf of a hyper-dimensional Toys-R-Us. I could probably prove it too if I had the funding...
Nothing witty
We'll stick around to stay in our little galaxy's lives, as we want to pass on our knowledge and provide care for them. That and the threat of paying child support.
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
There has been a lot of research showing that Black Holes themselves are essentially fundamental particles. Coupled with (even if string theory isn't true the fundamental particle geometry is interesting) two concepts of measuring distance. Such that when one passes the Plank Length the 'easy' way of measuring distance becomes hard and measures the reciprocal instead, while the previous hard way becomes easy. Then throw into all of this the notion that we are all moving through space-time at constant velocity (light speed - this is why when you travel faster through space time slows down. so no-one really understands what time is, or how many dimensions (of 11, say) are time, or whether they are essentially different from space, mathematically, physically or philosophically.
So yeah, i'm just about willing to believe anything right now.
Prominent bizarro physicists believe the new universe will be inverse of our own, controlled by the indigent, and known as the hobo-verse. This new hobo-verse will be controlled by a singular omnipotent box car hobo named "Klackity Klack." Also, it will smell like pee.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I'm a physics teacher currently teaching about the Big Bang and possible ends of the Universe. I'm just wondering if there are any research physicists in the room who could tell me which theory of the end of the Universe has the most physical evidence to support it at the current time.
Thank you,
-CGP
You frequently get the question "Why is the universe {whatever}?" or "In order to support human life, the universe had to be {whatever}."
This is frequently used to support the idea of divine intervention.
If you ask such a question or make such an observation, you have to remember:
The fact that we are here to observe it greatly restricts the possibilities, so what seems like "long odds" isn't long odds after all.
To put it another way:
If you play in the Superbowl and win, and your friends congratulate you, you don't say "What are the odds of my friends congratulating me for winning the Superbowl? There are 300,000,000 million Americans and only a few dozen have friends who congratulated them for winning the 2007 Super Bowl. That is rare, this is proof of divine intervention in my life."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I think the work being referred to may be in this paper, in which the universes are "causal patches" which are disconnected from each other causally by the Big Rip.
Sigh...
Its not mythology.
Explain to me the cosmic background radiation, the galaxy redshift, the decrease of the alpha constant... the big bang theory has explanations for these.
You are yet another one of the persons who falsely believe that science deals with truths. Guess what: SCIENCE DOES NOT DEAL WITH TRUTHS. It deals with MODELS, called "theories". No one claims that the big bang is "the truth". It is the best thing we have, however, since it explains most phenomena. Your jain stuff has to be verifiable AND be a) simpler than the big bang theory and/or b) cover phenomena not explained by it, then it could be considered a valid theory.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Nice way to ruin it for the unitiated.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
Intelligent Design is not as good a theory as any, as you say, unless you think theory means "gosh all this science is hard stuff! Let's throw up our hands in reverent awe and say that some unknowable entity poofed us into existence. Alright, time for lunch."
ID does not qualify as a scientific theory because of including God as a factor. God, however, cannot be probed. No one can prove or disprove God, essentially turning God into a joker. "Hmm... there was the Cambrian Explosion... oh - I know, God did it!" Since god is a non-verifiable entity, it has no place in science. For the same reason, some scientists are starting to dismiss String Theory (there is currently no way to verify it).
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I was told that story by a friend. Quite interesting. It was the shortened version (as in a 5 minute telling), but I think I got everything.
I do wonder though: How did the very first one occur? If this universe is from the last one, then there must have been a first one somewhere.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I call it the "Big Burrito" theory.
Details forthcoming after lunch....
The idea is called Kabbalah. It's nothing new.
> The model could solve the mystery of why our early universe was surprisingly well ordered.
Not really - you've just pushed the problem back one level. Where did the well-ordered universe shards that made this universe come from? It can't be "turtles all the way down"
If you define a different universe as being physically distinct from ours, then yes;
If parts of our universe started out in the same singularity as us but are now outside of our light-cone, then they are in effect physically separate from us, so that places them in a different universe, doesn't it? If they are outside our light-cone, and can no longer affect us, then they are not in our universe anymore but since they still exist, I think you have to consider them as being in a different universe.
Of course it means they have to be outside of our entire universe's light-cone...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Because physicists dont look shit up on WordNet.
The word delegate means different things to a security guard at the UN, and a C# programmer.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
See, that's why I like the Torah.
It was originally written in hebrew. Guess what? It's still read in hebrew.
I may not follow the jewish religion spiritually or even traditionally...but I still feel we have the holy text that is closest to what how it was originally written...
That doesn't explain why using electricity on shabbat is considered work but walking five miles because you aren't supposed to drive is NOT considered work. Fuck that.
Living With a Nerd
It's the new growth area in more fashionable parts of the financial industry: temporal debt relocation.
Too much debt? Can't make interest payments? Already at BBB debt rating? No worries, [XXX] can help you! For a nominal fee of $99.99, we'll buy your debt and make it go away. How? Our patent pending quantum time tunnelling technolgy relocates your debt to an alternate universe, allowing a parallel you to foot the tab.
What could possibly go wrong? Call today: 1-800-NO-MODET.
[Hablas Espagnol!]
I was told that story by a friend. Quite interesting. It was the shortened version (as in a 5 minute telling), but I think I got everything.
I do wonder though: How did the very first one occur? If this universe is from the last one, then there must have been a first one somewhere.
No, there doesn't have to be a first one. It's perfectly possible for there to have been an infinite series of previous ones.
In fact, if you accept that something can't come from nothing, then the very notion of a first one at all is absurd. Where did THAT come from?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The correct analogy would involve you having no idea whether other Americans exist, but thinking: "Hmm, the more Americans there were, the lower the likelihood of intelligent design would be."
You may be on to something there...
Intelligent Design is not as good a theory as any. It's not testable, it's not falsifiable. It can't be repeapted. It's not based on multiple observations. These problems and more make Intelligent Design invalid as a scientific theory. No matter how you package it, Intelligent Design is religious dogma, not science.
Also, I could modify that last line of yours to say that majority of the religious community used to believe (and some members STILL believe) that the Earth is flat. Based on your post, I should say that you should believe the Earth is flat, too. It says so in your Bible.
My blog
the uniformity of the background radiation and the uniformity of the red shift are observations that don't contradict me, nor do they support you. on the scale we are talking, such large expanses of time and space, you can't with certainty say that what you observe supports the existence of the big bang with any more certainty than i can say it disproves it. there are too many unknown variables about what we don't know on these time/ space scales at work here for you to say you can stand firmly with two feet with the "proof" you have
it's a dead heat. there is no proof either way. and as such, we are left with only one guiding principle:
occam's razor
when you hear hoofbeats, don't think of zebras
when you hear hoofbeats, it's probably just horses. why do you insist it should be zebras?
the exotic is the exotic for a reason: it's less likely, because its more complicated for the collusion of the events that make the improbable possible to occur. in other words, i do not have any more faith in my uniform across all time and space model... i can't. the proof isn't there for me. but by the same token, where does the certainty in your model come from? a model that is less likely, because its more complicated
furthermore, your model speaks of anthropomorphic prejudice. whatever you think is being supported by the obervations about redshift and COBE's findings is one out of thousands of interpretations, but you seem to have latched onto the most dramatic old testament creationistic model, with such an overly certain fervor that it belies a cultural/ theological/ anthropomorphic prejudice on your part. the big bang has been accepted and enshrined for no other reason than that the western culture that gave birth to hubble, einstein, etc. is firmly entrenched in old testament teachings for generations about a creation myth that... bears strong resemblance to the big bang. nice coincidence huh?
there are thousands of possible reasons for what we see. but why is the big bang treated with such certainty? this is suspect to me
occam's razor defeats you: the boring and mundane is more likely than the exotic. i don't have more proof than you to support the mundane model i am suggesting. but at least i realize that. big bang supporters don't seem to understand that the leap from what we see: "abc" to what it means: "xyz", has a lot of "defghi...stuvw" in between of alternative reasons, less exotic more mundane reasons, that gets conveniently skipped over when thinking critically about the big bang model
you've latched onto the exotic, and not allowed for the natural variety of less dramatic interpretations to come to fruition in your mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Usually when the bible or related pagan religions (such as caananite or egyptian) refer to the "four corners of heaven", it's more than likely they're making a reference to the four heavenly calendar points: the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices. it has been for the majority of human civiliation that the earth has been understood to be curved -- an easy observation for even ancient scientists to make when watching a ship "sink" below the horizon or watching the sky shift as one changes latitudes.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
I see no problem with a fourth dimension expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions.
Here's how we can define it:
"The fourth dimension is expanding rleative to the three spatial dimensions."
What laws or axioms or postulates has the above statement violated?
None that I can see.
What the author seems to be saying is that time is an emergent property of this underlying physical reality, which they then use to unify seemingly disparate physical phenomena.
"The fourth dimension is expanding rleative to the three spatial dimensions."
This would explain why everything propagates through space-time at the velocity c--this never changes.
Criticizing string theology will get you banned by the groupthinkers.
"It must be so--for the greater good of physics, the individual physicist, and thus physics, must be sacrificed."
So many live so blind to the irony here.
Not the adjective 'hyperbolic' as in 'exaggerated'. It's called 'hyperbolic' cause it's related to hyperbolas.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
1. You provide no examples.
2. "Quite close" is subjective, and therefore a useless metric of success.
3. Even if you did provide several strong existing examples, it would say absolutely nothing about the accuracy of this particular Asimov short story.
The only reason people want to daydream about how accurate this particular short story could be is because they hold their own intelligence to be an object of personal vanity.
And not that it matters, but here are a few science fiction pieces that were way off:
Ehm yeh, but there are only 2 ways to go:
Either something can come from nothing (good luck with proving that) or something comes from something (good luck proving that too). And in the latter case, if something is only possible from something then something can't exist; it's a paradox.
You're right that we can't prove either way whether it's possible for something to come from nothing - it's just a generally accepted premise. I'm not aware of anyone who has seriously doubted it. The closest I can think of is theists who believe the world was created "ex nihlo" - literally, "from nothing" - but even they usually say that it didn't *really* come from nothing; it came from God. "Something cannot come from nothing" is actually a premise in one of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God, the "first cause" version of the cosmological argument.
But your second sentence there is incorrect. If it is true that something cannot come from nothing (which seems correct), then either something has always existed, or nothing ever has or ever will exist; and since it is evidently true now that something exists, you must conclude that something has always existed. The first cause argument tries to twist this into "there is some [particular] thing which has always existed", i.e. an eternal being, a.k.a. God, but that's not equivalent to the conclusion of this line of reasoning, which is simply that at any given point in time, the statement "something exists" has been true, or equivalently, if you were to ask about any given thing "was there something before that?", the answer will be "yes". (This is not to rule out the logical possibility of there having been a single eternal being preceding everything else; it merely shows that that's not a necessary conclusion of the premises "something can't come from nothing" and "something now exists").
Your supposed paradox arises because you're trying to ask a question that doesn't really make sense. Suppose you told me that for every real number, there was a smaller number; that is to say, that there is no "smallest number" (which is true). And then I asked you "ah, but what number is smaller than the whole number line?" That's not a well-formed question... the number line itself has no numerical value, so there is no "smaller than" it. Likewise, while it's true (given something can't come from nothing) that there is always something preceding any other thing, it makes no sense to ask "ah, but what preceded all of it?". There is no "before" the timeline, any more than there is a "less than" the number line.
I like to pose a similar line of reasoning to science-minded people who reject theistic first-cause argument, but still like to claim that there was literally no such thing as time before the big bang. The physics equivalent of "something cannot come from nothing" is the law of conservation of mass-energy; which says that it (mass-energy) can never be created or destroyed. This is taken to be a law of physics, i.e. inviolable. Given that, and the fact that mass-energy presently exists, it's then just as quick and easy to deduce that mass-energy has always existed, as something is here now, but it could not have been created, so it must have always been. The only alternative to this is either that the conservation of mass-energy isn't really a law of physics, and that in certain (perhaps very unlikely, but theoretically reproducible) circumstances it can be violated, and something can really come from nothing - which not many physicists will want to accept - or that it is an "inviolable" law of nature which on one single occasion was actually violated - in other words, to call the Big Bang a miracle, which is just to give up on science entirely and say "I don't know what happened and I'm not going to try to find out".
Of course, this isn't to rule out that the Big Bang happened; all empirical evidence points to the known cosmos originating from an explosion of some sort in the distant past. This is just to rule out that ther
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"How is it flamebait if someone even mentions God?...the statement was made in a very tasteful way and it is simply the poster's opinion. I know *most* everyone on Slashdot doesn't believe in God in the traditional sense but Intelligent Design is as good a theory as any...If you were really thinking scientifically you would take all theories into account and not dismiss others because of how ridiculous it is solely based on the majority of the scientific community. The majority of the scientific community used to believe the Earth was flat, you couldn't split an atom, among so many other things. Science is not infallible"
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because it's not falsifiable. That doesn't mean it must be wrong (because it might be historically true), but the reason it's important for things to be falsifiable is because this gives us a mechanism to gain confidence in things we discover.
Science is also not infallible, which is why the justification for belief is important. There needs to be a reason something is held to be true, "You haven't got a better idea." isn't enough. And there needs to be a willingness to abandon things that are shown to be wrong, something various religious organizations haven't been terribly willing to do (eg Galileo got locked up for claiming that heavenly bodies could orbit something other than the Sun).
You shouldn't take my word for it that the Earth is round, you should agree that it is a reasonable conclusion from the fact that different parts of the world can simultaneously experience night and day, or that something casts a longer shadow as you go further north/south, or that you can go up into space and look at it and take pictures. It's not "zOMG SCIENCE SAID SO", it's a mechanism that allows good reasons for thinking things to be evaluated and filtered out from the bad reasons.
Intelligent design might indeed be historically accurate, but there aren't any good reasons to assume that it is. The Bible gives one account, but Hindus will give you another. In the absence of any good way to pick one over the rest, the only reasonable action is to keep looking for reasons. That's what led us to evolution, and parts of evolution that didn't hold up to the evidence (eg Darwin thought all change must be slow and gradual) get shot down just as surely as the claim that the Earth was created in its current form 6k years ago.
It's not a he said/she said thing, it's the fact that intelligent design brings nothing useful to the discussion. Without being able to test it, it doesn't give knowledge more weight, and accepting it implicitly means accepting that we don't need to bother expanding our knowledge. That's simply not a reasonable thing to expect.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
You definatly have time on your hands. I checked your forum. The 'style' of your writing is unmistakable which uncovers immediatly that you post under at least three different nicknames. Loads of threads only consist of (sometimes multiple) post by you.
I don't care about the spam or about how blantanly bad your posts smell of a marketing .
I care about your mental health. Usually spammers and scammers stand to gain from their activities. That's not the case with you. I suspect that you simply are mad.
So please, go see a doctor. Don't harm yourself or other!
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
If the universe is expanding, then there might be things that are heading away from us at the speed of light (speed of light = c).
s pace#Raisin_bread_model/
Since they are receding at 100% of c, you'll never see them; their light cannot ever catch up to us: we are (relative to them) moving away from them at the speed of light and since neither can go faster than c, whatever distance separates us can never be crossed, it is infinite: no matter how long you travel at c, you get no closer.
This is the same reason we see galaxies receding from us at nearly c; if they were red-shifted any more (receding at c), they would be outside our light cone and invisible in every sense. They would not exist as far as we are concerned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J