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Before the Big Bang: A Twin Universe?
esocid writes "Until very recently, asking what happened at or before the Big Bang was considered by physicists to be a religious question. General relativity theory just doesn't go there — at T=0, it spews out zeros, infinities, and errors — and so the question didn't make sense from a scientific view. But in the past few years, a new theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) has emerged. The theory suggests the possibility of a "quantum bounce," where our universe stems from the collapse of a previous universe. This may be similar with beliefs of Physicist Neil Turok of Cambridge University who has theorized about a cyclic universe, constantly expanding and compressing."
he got her really drunk.
This explains evil Spock and good Bender!
I was about to mod this funny, but suddenly I got this feeling that maybe you were serious.
I have no response to that other than, um, sometimes its best to not post your thoughts in public where others can see...
The universe is safe for you and me, but what of Lazarus?
You're assuming space is linear. Check again in another 12 to 15 billion years, and if you see yourself looking back you'll understand how this could be...
Considering approximately 5% of Physicists in the Unites States are religious I dont think they considered it a religous question.
If the likes of stephen hawking and albert einstein with general reletivity cant work it out how are illiterate goat herders from 2000 years ago supposed to have done it?
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
It's just like history, really... History repeats itself, do does the Universe.
There were two universes but Manfred drones destroyed the Light Universe. Fortunately, we're already in the Dark Universe.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Does anyone know what they are speaking about ? But I doubt that there is a twin universe that is now gone. I am more on the line that there is a parallel universe that is almost like our own, expect Bush wasn't president of the U.S and we now have people on Mars and so on. That universe had Al Gore as president.
Will our galaxy drift until it reaches a clump of galaxies (another universe?), where it will be compressed, or will the compression take place after all galaxies expand outward, slow down in their expansion, and then all slowly begin compressing in a big crunch?
Obviously, IANAPBICAT (I am not a physicist but I'm curious about this).
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
Marvel Comics has been telling us this for years! Decades, even!
Galactus, the Overmind, and the Stranger all came from the previous Universe, by one mechanism or another surviving the Big Crunch and the following Big Bang. There may be other previous universe types, but those 3 are the only ones I picked up on, back in my comic book days. (decades ago, even)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Or Hindu belief...
Hubble telescope can look at the sky in two opposite direction...and it did. Two opposite direction, you know....exactly opposite. In one direction, it looked into 12 to 15billion light years ago and see many galaxies. In a piece of the sky 1x1 degree it saw over 10,000 galaxies.... The light from this galaxies took 12 to 15 billion light years to reach our telescope. Then the Hubble looked into the opposite direction and saw exactly the same thing.... Exactly... Now put your mind to work... 12 to 15 billion light years ago....the galaxies in two opposite directions were already....24 to 30 billion light years away from one another! This mean the age of the universe exceeds 30 billion light years..... If you use this logic to compute the size of the universe 12 to 15 billion light years ago, it just won't work. You know why? Because Big Bang is bull crap! If Big Bang is true, then you should see a light barrier where there will be total darkness once the boundary is crossed. This boundary is where the photons have already flew past us if it was emitted beyond this boundary. OK....it is hard for you to understand. So bear with me... The speed of light is uniform and always the same... So if there was big bang, the initial batch of photons should have flown by us long time ago because the speed of expansion is less than the speed of light. Therefore we should never be able to see the early moment of big bang because the photons emitted then were all gone past us! How can you see something when there is no photons to be seen? It is like you driving a Tata, I am driving a BMW.We start at the same place. You are the galaxy and I am the photon. First you and I were together...but the moment you move away from the center with the big bang, I passed you and then you will not see me again. Therefore, looking into the past to see the early stage of the galaxy is itself a fallacy based on a phony concept. The galaxies have to be there 12 billion years ago so we can see it now. At this very moment...you look at all direction you can see 12 billion light years away and still can see billions of galaxies. This means that 12 billion years ago there were these galaxies at those locations giving out light. So there were galaxies that were at least 24 billion light years away ( the one from opposite direction) that were giving out lights 12 billion years ago. So, the universe was at least 24 billion light years in size 12 billion light years ago. If you look into 15 billion light years ago..the universe, from one direction to the other, was at least 30 billion light years in size... The funny thing is...the further we look into the past, the universe was found to be bigger in size...It has to be per my logic. So..the more into the past, the bigger was the universe...Exactly opposite to the big bang that says we start at one point! Also,The scientists say the universe was started from a point no bigger than a bar of soap. This point of extremely hot energy exploded and formed the space and time continuum as we know of today. But facts tell us otherwise. OK..the scientists tell you that, the further you look into deep space, the further back in time you are looking into. You see, it takes time for the photon to travel to you from its source. Therefore, the further into the deep space you look, the further into the past you are looking into because it took the photon more time to travel to you. And, if the big bang is right, the further you look into the past, the higher is the temperature. Yet this is not the case. Also, the further we look into the past, the bigger the universe has become. Big bang predicted a much denser and hotter universe. If the big bang is correct, then you look close to the beginning of time...the universe could be like one big fire ball. You see, the Big Bang theory said that if you can look at the beginning of the universe, you should see nothing but very high temperature. Good luck to you if you want to look for a very high temperature region. Looking around
You are assuming that the scale of space is stable - that the separation of galaxies comes entirely from their material moving apart (at sublight speed) since they were essentially together in the moments after the big bang.
In fact space itself stretches. The separation of the material between pairs of distant (and near) galaxies comes from both their motion through space and the stretching (expansion) of the space between them.
The result is that sufficiently distant galaxies can be much farther apart than they could have traveled - even at the speed of light - through non-expanding space in the time since the big bang.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Aren't you forgetting about the Theory of Relativity, and the affect on Space-Time of the movements of such massive objects as Galaxies? In a purely Newtonian sense, you have a point, but Einstein proved things are a lot more complex than that.
Sure it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB
Also, http://xkcd.com/54/
It had to expand from something the first time, didn't it?
If space (and in effect time) stretched like that, it wouldn't even matter. It would be like stretching a gummy bear... sure, maybe you got a long gummy bear, but it is still ONE gummy bear. If space stretched, so would time, and one unit of space-time is one-unit of space-time, regardless.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Adams said it best: "The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore."
OK, I'm not a cosmologist. The Big Bang is a theory so could certainly be wrong, so I'm posing a question here as well as posing a 'what if?'. We're looking for the God Particle (Higgs boson), which attaches itself to all matter except photons. Well, I think they attach to photons in some way too. Where I'm going is to a steady state universe where the most distant light has been affected by Higgs' particles. That light has lost energy getting here though not velocity. We see it as a red shift. Further along back in that direction, the photons have been affected enough to no longer be light but background RF radiation. Is it possible that we are truly in an infinite universe and that the most distant sources of photons that we can discern are now in the RF range? Not because of a receding outer limit but because their extreme distance has drained their energy?
So is this older than the Kessel Run, or simply faster?
There's nothing particularly special about loop quantum gravity that makes it possible to avoid having a singularity at the big bang. Loop quantum gravity is just one theory of quantum gravity. The best known theory of quantum gravity is string theory. In pretty much any theory of quantum gravity, the classical picture of the big bang singularity is going to get heavily modified. The conditions of the big bang are pretty much the only conditions under which you really need a theory of quantum gravity (unless you're really clever about finding some other situation, like black hole evaporation, where quantum gravitational effects come in). In all theories of quantum gravity, there's a scale called the Planck scale, and when you go beyond that scale (e.g., the universe is hot enough so that the wavelengths of particles are on the order of the Planck length), mysterious stuff happens. Because of this, it's reasonably plausible that the big bang singularity is eliminated in any theory of quantum gravity.
Old attempts to make a theory of a rebounding big bang (with, e.g., a cyclic universe) had various technical problems, which have been solved in recent years. In a rebounding big bang, there are issues to worry about such as what happens to causality, entropy, and the thermodynamic arrow of time. E.g., you could imagine that a universe cycles through a series of big bangs, and that each cycle is a lot like the one before, or you could imagine that the second law of thermodynamics operates across rebounds, so that each cycle has more entropy than the one before. You could imagine that there could be cause and effect relationships extending across rebounds, or that that could be prevented by the laws of physics. Some people believe that there's an unsolved "entropy problem" in the current standard big bang theory. Here is a good FAQ about cyclic models.
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So it would be safe to say that if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, we could witness objects
distancing themselves at almost 3 times the speed of light, considering the addition of each:
- object A can travel "just a bit slower" than the speed of light in one direction
- space can stretch "just a bit slower" than the speed of light
- object B can travel "just a bit slower" than the speed of light in opposite direction from object A
Interesting isn't it?
But CMB fills the entire universe, it doesn't come from one localized area. See the part of his post:
What you want is a specific "point" at which the big bang happened. That's not the case. When it happened - it WAS the universe - ie it was every single point at once. As the universe expands - anywhere you look from or to you'll be able to see this background radiation. Of course there will be fluctuations if the expansion of the universe isn't completely uniform - and why should it be? Matter distorts space and time, contributing to this non-uniformity.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Awesome, reminds me of a video I once saw.
Jesus Christ I love porn.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html :3
Though coming from very different directions, both LQG pioneer Lee Smolin and Stephen Wolfram, who needs no introduction here, have opined that the best candidate as the fundamental level of a discrete physics (i.e. where the appearance of being continuous is emergent) is a graph theoretic network of nodes and links where it ceases to make sense to ask what they are made of. (This is also explored in Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder .) The basic idea is that there is some simple enough but cosmologically consistent transformation rule which produces the next local state of the graph from the current local state, supposedly at the Planck scale (of order 10^43 times per second).
A likely scenario is that "somewhere" long unreachable beyond our event horizons, there was a region of network sustaining chaotic inflationary expansion in which a bubble of more conservative physics emerged. Our conservative bubble only exhibits polynomial (near cubic) growth but that was enough to separate it from the exponentially growing seed graph.
My current betting is that Type 1a Supernovae, or at least some more precise analogue thereof in our parent cosmos, seed new outbreaks of chaotic inflation in which a new generation of more conservative bubble cosmoses arise, the whole process being susceptible to selection for fecundity and constrained only by the need for a viable history to some initial conditions simple enough to have just happened, presumably for no better reason than because nothing is unstable.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
the explanation I have heard from a couple physicists and astronomers goes more like this:
Imagine space as a slightly inflated rubber balloon. Imagine two dots on the outside of that balloon. Then add air to the balloon, inflating it further.
What you get is two dots that are farther apart, more real distance between them but the same balloon.
So that explains all the dinosaurs!
To use your analogy, draw a grid on the balloon. When you inflate the balloon, the grid squares grow. But one unit is still one unit. If you had to measure around the balloon, it would be x squares, regardless the size. This is because we are IN the balloon so that is our frame of reference. You are measuring it outside of the universe, and it just doesn't work like that.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
wow. we are all dumber for having listened to you... that's 4 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Go back to watching NASCAR and do us all a favor....
Professor Sir Roger Penrose gave a fantastic lecture at UWA in Aug 2007 on a very similar theme.
...and all of it will happen again. Maybe.
Read this off http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmogony the other day. Kinda similar idea in ways:
What if the big bang was just the explosion of all the crap that was in the event horizon of a black hole from a parent universe?
Questions I have are:
-How could there be such a massive black hole in a parent universe that our universe originated from? Subsequent universes would have smaller and smaller total mass/energy so it couldn't go on forever, and that would mean there was a starting point?
-Wtf is the collapsing of a black hole? I thought they evaporated...
but wait ... if 2 people leave my house at lightspeed in opposite directions, after an hour they will be at 2 lighthours from each other ! so they would have to be already travelling 2 hours after that hour ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
My god man, I want what you're having.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
You are pointing to imperfections in an analogy and claiming they are flaws in the concept the analogy is meant to describe. The balloon analogy is not a premise supporting expansion. It's just a visual aid.
This is because we are IN the balloon so that is our frame of reference.
No, we are on the balloon. The surface of the balloon is a 2D representation of our 3D space. Talking about the inside of the balloon is nonsensical.
All I know is that for Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon, it's a shorter trip than for anyone else!So is this older than the Kessel Run, or simply faster?
No, they are one light hour apart, relative to each other...
Otherwise they would have had to have travelled at 2C for the past hour...
Which if course, is impossible...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
The problem with such theories is twofold:
First, we will likely never prove anything at the Planck scale. This means that without some radically better ideas, we may be stuck with current situation -- lots of theories but no proof.
Second, one cannot take a theory that is wrong in a measurable way, make some small adjustment, and end up with a theory that is right. In field theory if we get the strength of electromagnetism wrong, we can adjust it. It's just a number. If we find a new particle we didn't expect, it's straightforward to add it and does not radically change all the other particles. But in Wolfram's cellular-automata ideas, if you change even slightly the inter-link rules, you get radically different behavior on large scales. These ideas may even be right, but they're impossible to work with.
Instead we develop a low-energy theory that predicts everything we need and everything we observe, and that is all physics can do. This kind of wishful thinking about gravity is not physics, because it cannot be proven (or disproven). Falsifiability is an important feature of a physical theory, and is too often neglected these days. Likewise fantasizing about the beginning of the universe is not falsifiable. We have only one universe, and cannot do experiments on its beginning.
Science is prediction, not explanation.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Doesn't the geometry of the universe have to be closed in order for expansion to reverse and turn into a collapse?
I remember that some calculations showed it to be either flat or almost so. Of course, the key could lie in the "almost"...
Your mistake is thinking that time and space are constants. They are not. They are relative to your reference frame. Hence the name relativity. After one hour, the two people are two light hours apart from each other from your reference frame. From their reference frame, time is going slower and distances in the directions they are traveling are shorter, so they would not measure themselves as being two light hours apart. They would measure themselves as being no more than one light hour apart, although from your reference frame it would be many billions of years in the future at that time.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
it's just like this one, except everyone wears cowboy hats.
Are you talking about the universe, or the United States economy?
The common view is that the universe is accelerating, yes. But it could well be that we are slowing down. All we notice is a constant redshift. But lacking a point of reference, we could also be slowing down.
Actually, CMB is not from the Big Bang, but from the "recombination" event about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. That's when the universe changed from cloudy to clear, and the light in the universe was suddenly free to travel in straight lines. But again, this event took place all over the universe at the same time, therefore we see the radiation coming from all directions. At this time, the universe was nearly uniform (to one part in 100,000), so the radiation is nearly uniform in all directions.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Of course. If there's a long series of 'big bangs' followed by 'big crunches' etc... Then it would just follow that there was a previous 'universe' that underwent a big bang/big crunch cycle, one before that, and probably one after ours crunches down then explodes again to creat another 'universe'.
Yes, it will crunch down again because gravity always wins, even against Chuck Norris.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
In one direction, it looked into 12 to 15billion light years ago and see many galaxies. In a piece of the sky 1x1 degree it saw over 10,000 galaxies....
The light from this galaxies took 12 to 15 billion light years to reach our telescope.
Then the Hubble looked into the opposite direction and saw exactly the same thing.... IANAA but is this true..? I can't find any information about this, so if anyone would kindly point to some sources (that state this fact) I would appreciate it. Thank you.
This is why we need an option to mod posts "stupid"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
No, we are on the balloon. The surface of the balloon is a 2D representation of our 3D space.
You are trying to oversimplifying it and it is getting in the way. The balloon is our universe. Drawing a grid on the outside would be akin to cubing up a block of cheese. Get past the fact that it is drawn on a 2d surface. This represents cubes of space/time within our universe.
In the end, the change in distance is offset by the change in time, which makes it a non-issue.
An unrelated, but equally technical postulation would be, imagine that everything in the universe was growing! Everything is also moving away from each other at a proportional ratio to how fast it is growing. Use any numbers you want. When it comes down to it, IT DOESN'T MATTER, because everything would be the same in our frame of reference. It would only be different to someone outside of our universe, who isn't affected.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
We DO "see" the remnants of the big bang. It's the nearly uniform 3K cosmic background radiation. That's what happens when you take an imensely energetic ball of stuff and stretch it to the current size of the universe.
Everyone here is apparently rather stupid.
If I leave your house traveling at the speed of light, and look back an hour later, I'll see your house exactly as I left it. (Pretending that time would actually pass enough for me to 'see' anything.)
So, 'relatively', anyone who also left at the same time, in any direction, at any speed, looks like they're 'relatively' an hour away! Because they're standing at my starting point motionless!
Of course, as no one can actually do anything at the speed of light, even assuming they could reach it, this concept is rather stupid.
Which is why all this discussion is rather stupid. The original poster apparently doesn't realize that when scientists talk about seeing things farther away than the age of the universe, they're actually talking about where they are now, not where they are when the light that is now reaching us left them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I dunno.. I remember back in the eighties, when friend of mine and I used to go out and buy a 6 pack (or whatever) and sit around discussing "cosmic" stuff, and one night I said, "What if the "Big Bang" was an implosion of another pre-existing universe, creating this one?", to which my friend said, "Yes! I like it!" ;-) )
Now, of course, IANAG (I Am Not a Genius); I can't even begin to fathom the math, but the concept doesn't seem so surprising or new to me - I mean, a drunk teenager came across the idea 20 years ago, as I'm sure many other people have (just maybe not while drunk
I can't believe this is just now coming out ? However, a cycle seems unlikely because our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate; unless it eventually slows down, and then finally collapses, I don't see us imploding any time.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Ok so ro understand all this Hoopla I need to know 3 things. ! Where is the centre of the three dimensional universe (The one at least I live in)? If none why not. 2. Is there a frame of reference in this three dimensional universe that I can call 'standing still' or zero or absolute zero motion? ditto 1. 3. I found this phone left to me by aliens. It is unbreakeable, ie. it cannot be examined, it never breaks down, it doesn't need batteries (unlike some other phones) so never runs down. It can replicate itself at will, so I can give as many copies to as many entities as I want. It allows two way video/audio/information (including translation functions) transfer conversations from anywhere in this or other universes. It's only function is to allow conversations between two (for now) entities in the universe(s) to communicate NOW. It is, therefore, I assume, not constrained by the speed of light because two people, light years apart, can communicate as though the were sitting together at the same desk. It has a display that shows each persons 'local' time ( say some sort of accurate timer (hydrogen atom ticks?) since the 'big bang'). I've just given a copy of the phone to my ladyfriend named Bright who travels much faster than light. She has just left home in a relative way, but may return home so we can re-do the previous night. Can anyone explain how I could use this phone ( and Brights) to explain WTF is going on, what I would see on the display, etc, etc. Its all free open sourced hardware/software and uses the free inter/intra universe(s) net. It apparently has other functions I have not yet uncovered. BTW its named ePhone, apparently after Einstein.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
You are correct, the size of the metric changes as space expands, however we can detect this expansion because of the limit of the speed of light. Imagine a galaxy that emitted photons 10bn ly ago, and during the time those photons have been traveling toward us, space has been expanding. This has caused the photons to redshift, so we can derive how much space has expanded since that time and how far away the galaxy would now be. So when we say a galaxy is 40 bn ly away, we mean it would take 40 bn ly for light emmited NOW to reach us. It doesn't mean that the light we are seeing has been travelling for 40 bn years or that the galaxy was that far away when the light was emitted. Although 3-dimensional space is nearly Euclidian, spacetime is not. The balloon is a good analogy, except that normal people don't take into account the universal speed limit when they imagine it.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Your brain has malfunctioned or something. You have absolutely no clue about the terminology you speak of or the theories behind your broken explanation.
First of all, when someone refers to "light years", they are referring to a distance, not time. Something doesn't take "light years" to reach something else. Something is "light years" away from something else. This scale is also based on relativity so the distance may not even be exact when speaking of great distances.
Light travel is not instantaneous, so it takes time to travel great distances. Something that is 12 billion light years away is something that produced or reflected light 12 billion years ago and the light from that source is just now reaching the reference point. When someone mentions we are viewing the past through devices such as the Hubble Telescope, we are using very sensitive equipment to measure the light and produce imagery from it, therefor being able to see the very faint light that traveled that great distance, but was produced long ago.
Time is relative, so speed, dependent on a time variable, is also relative. There's a lot of forces in space that can affect time, and relatively speaking, slow down or speed up light in a given space should things like gravity change the scale of time. Velocity can also change the scale of time. Path of particles are variable given the variables of the medium the particles move through, so the path of light may change. Did you know you can bend light with intense magnetism?
I think you read something and before understanding it, drew your own conclusions and never bothered to research it. I, myself, don't understand much when it comes to quantum physics (or physics in general), but I do know your explanation has a lot of problems due to false assumptions.
How exactly would this answer a religious question again? It still doesn't answer the question of where the Universe came from in the first place nor why it came about nor... I mean seriously, replacing a "We don't know" with the equivalent of "It's turtles all the way down" doesn't exactly answer any so called religious questions at all. In fact, it doesn't even encroach on them.
Is this the dinosaur hunter's geeky brother?
In cosmology, there are all kinds of weird and interesting solutions. For people asking about geometry questions and considering general relativity it is essential to remember that these are CLASSICAL FIELD theories! LQG (loop quantum gravity) is a proposed quantum theory of gravity. There is no "geometry" in a quantum theory. Although this idea is debated to some extent i.e. NCG (non-commutative geometry) etc.
For esoteric and philosophical reasons, it always sits well to consider a cyclic universe for much the same reason that people such as Einstein himself wanted to have the static solutions to the universe; that is, having cyclic or static behavior somehow circumvents pesky questions such as "What came before?!" and other semi-religious insights. (Actually... I digress... but my main problem with string theorists is that I dont see any difference between their dogma and the dogma followed by religious people. And string theorists get so smug about everything that I really want to demonstrate some fundamental physics of momentum transfer to the face.)
Anyhow... what is practically problematic with cyclic solutions, in my opinion and the majority of other less theoretical physicists (even though I am a theorist, I can say that I'm heavily partial to experiment), is that having an infinite class of solutions doesnt really give much meaning. It's like the saying, "Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless." Furthermore, in the case of a cyclic universe, it doesnt do ANYBODY any good since we are causally cut-off from the previous or next cycle. So then it's kind of superflous i.e. "Great. But so what? Hinduism and Buddhism say the same crap. Just less math involved."
Fundamentally, one just needs to consider the various "fluids" i.e. omega matter, omega radiation etc etc that exist in the Universe. It is the densities of these fluids that determine the overall geometry and thus fate of the Universe i.e. open, flat(which is a trivial open case) or closed.
Current observations place the total content at 26% radiation, 4% matter, and 70% dark energy. With this amount of dark energy, recall that dark nrg is a sort of "anti-gravity" fluid in that it actually drives expansion. So we currently fit into the flat universe model. This is one of the reasons why the dark nrg problem is such a huge deal! Getting a handle on it tells us ultimately where we are going and how. And also... where we came from. Take "we" as "Universe." Also... remember that if we do find that the total amount of dark energy density fluid exceeds 1, there was no possibility mathematically that a Big Bang occurred!!! (Refer to famous Type-Ia Supernovae Team survey paper)
Remember that there is also "stochastic inflationary cosmology" (which I like just as much as any other cosmology). In this paradigm, one can just say that our universe is one peak of a very large i.e. infinite number of "peaks" in some background fluctuations and that there are multiple inflations that occurred as a result of some stochastic processes acting over some primitive manifold. This is amenable to quantum theory due to the probabilistic interpretations.
Personally, I dig Turok (and the game of course). LQG is better for me than string theory as well. But again... what really matters is EXPERIMENT EXPERIMENT EXPERIMENT!!! OBSERVATIONS!!! Not just mathematically jacking-off!
All science is either physics or stamp-collecting.
Are we at War ? With whom ? Is it the ideology called Islam ? Will it go away if we surrender in Iraq ? Were the attacks on 9/11 an accident ? If they could have killed 300,000 rather than 3000, would they have held back ? Do you think they are not, will not keep trying ? What is the alternative to the 100 year war you are afraid of ? Would you say, "if you want defeat in Iraq - vote Obama" ? Is Obama's plan for Iraq something other than surrender ? Do you think defeat will lead to peace ? Do you think defeat in Iraq will pacify our enemies ? Do you think we have enemies ? Perhaps it is just a criminal conspiracy composed of 150m muslims (the 10% of "peaceful" islam that apparently run the show in that faith) Do you think NYPD is sufficient to handle that ? McCain or Obama or Hillary - I'm afraid we have our 100 year war ahead of us, like it or not.
No I think you are oversimplifying by implying the expansion affects everything such as particles and light (where our 'units' come from) and time. But time isn't just another dimension, its directional and we are 'falling' through it at a relatively constant rate.
Whatever is happening with the distance and redshift between galaxies, it is affecting space and time quite differently, otherwise we might not be able to notice the effect.
The edge of our universe is the cell membrane, which is why it registers as background radiation. Other galaxies are just atoms that make our cell composition up. We are nothing more than part of a larger organism. You know that feeling you get when you feel like you are under a microsocpe? Maybe you are...
I am really happy to hear about this concept being received, to a degree, by others and brought towards the public. T=0 bringing zero, infinties and errors, indeed. That's why I always believed the Big Bang was only the end of the beginning. The sense to this is so much more apparent to me.