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Study Hints At Time Before Big Bang
canadian_right informs us that scientists from Caltech have found hints of a time before the Big Bang while studying the cosmic microwave background. Not only does the study hint at something pre-existing our universe, the researchers also postulate that everything we see was created as a bubble pinched off from a previously existing universe. This conjecture turns out to shed light on the mystery of the arrow of time. Quoting the BBC's account: "Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular. Describing the team's work at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in St Louis, Missouri, co-author Professor Sean Carroll explained that 'a universe could form inside this room and we'd never know.'"
new universe.
Their they're doing there hair.
They need to get cracking on this. A universe from my closet? Fan*TAS*tic! My rent/sq. ft. is going down as I write...
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Didn't string theory already predict something like this?
Really though, what (in the background radiation) would point to no time before the big bang? A Kotch curve? A Hilbert curve? Complete order and continuity? I fail to see how 'blips' in the cosmic background radiation proves anything about time before the big bang.
Sounds like MIB may have a lot more correct.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
that once we fully understand the universe it will be replaced with something even more complicated.
Others argue that this has already happened...
thhgttg
MP3 Search Engine
Full Tilt
Alan Guth described this sort of thing, and many other possible origins of the universe, in his book written in 1998. I think I even remember him hypothesizing that a universe could possibly be its own parent. Definitely old news.
Seriously, I read about this idea years ago in Alan Guth's book, The Inflationary Universe. Chapter Fifteen.
When I first read this, it sounded so strange that I was unable to conceive it in any meaningful way. Then I got really high. Now it seems self-evident. It may not be genuinely insightful, but it sure is fun.
Property is theft.
How can we define time independently of space? Can anybody devise an experiment that can measure time in some fundamental way without needing a displacement and a velocity?
This almost sounds like pseudoscience. Time as we know it can only be defined in our universe because this is the only place we can measure it. There is no logical reason whatsoever to believe that there was a 'before' the Big Bang because you can't assign any physical meaning to 'before' (as in 5 s before or 10 years before).
At least they're thinking big, I guess. Like, you know, on the scale that makes God seem insignificant.
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
Isn't this similar to membrains supported by String theory? According to String theory the whole universe is a membrain. When our universe (membrain) collides with another membrane a new membrain may be created.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
...String hypothesis.
I take that to mean that universes could also be destroyed spontaneously...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
mourn our lost ancient overlords.
Welcome, new galaxy?
Call me when they have observations, not hints and when it is reported by something else than BBC that wouldn't recognize a star from a galaxy
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
AFAIK, it didn't predict anything (experimentally measurable) yet that isn't already predicted by other, simpler theories. I.e., it still fails Occam's Razor. Miserably.
Plus, AFAIK a lot of it has a lot of possible solutions, and for some they don't even have the equations (yet), so there's not much of a prediction you can do with it. So far the majority of it isn't even as much a theory, as in something where you plug your values in a clear formula and get a prediction, but more of a theory that a theory might exist.
Or to put it otherwise, it's more of a mathematical construct than physics. Don't get me wrong, maths is a very very useful tool. Essential, even. But if I'm allowed a bad analogy, it's a bit like a painter's brush: it can be used to paint anything, regardless of whether it's real or outright impossible in the real world. You can use it to paint Mona Lisa or Escher's impossible pictures. So is maths. You can describe an infinity of possible universes with it, most of which have nothing to do with ours. You can use it to describe light propagation through ether, or the raisin pie atom model, or the ancient geocentric model, or even the counter-Earth ideas from waay back, all of which by now we know to be false. It becomes physics (or generally science) when you can test that formula against the real universe and see if it fits or not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Although the word "universe" is now accepted to mean "the membrane of space that was created by the Big Bang," this is etymologically inaccurate. Outside of playful uses (such as "off in one's own universe" or a TV serial's universe) the word "universe" should be synonymous with "absolutely everything ever," and we ought to come up with some intermediary term (like "brane" if you feel like you require more than ten dimensions in order to explain quantum phenomena) to refer to this nice big bubble of matter-energy we've found ourselves encapsulated in.
Good show about the microwave radiation, though. Now, let's hope that there isn't a film of Angels & Demons that is conveniently timed or anything.
One cannot possibly define what time exactly means.
Shouldn't that really be
new Universe
?
Without launching into a futile and fruitless debate over the etymology and semantics of "universe", I add my small voice to those who assert that "our universe", i.e. the observable and predictable one, is not at all "universal". Indeed, if one can embrace the concept of infinity, then our little cosmos becomes merely our current neighborhood. The possibilities around the corner, so to speak, are endless.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
... Fruit flies like a banana.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
Much of todays science really sounds more like philosophy than hard earned science. I want logic and data supporting scientific work and not just some coct up crazy theories thats more about debating skills than really proving something.
HTTP/1.1 400
i don't see why the universe can't be endless in time and space, and the expansion and contraction we see is local, while somewhere else they are having a pinch. kind of like the choppy surface of the ocean on a windy day: troughs and peaks
once we thought the earth was the center of the universe. we threw that centrism out the window. can't people see that the big bang theory is the same kind of centrism?: "this is all we know, therefore, that's all there is"
if there is anything science teaches us, it is that we are not the center of everything
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
iUniverse? :)
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
As Hawking put it; asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole.
What I take from his statement is that the universe can possibly map to a system with complex numbers where concepts similar to north of the North Pole exist. However, time does not apply until there are particles interacting with each other at rates that can be described with probability functions.
The rates must be non-zero otherwise the universe would be over instantly. Going faster than the speed of light would be the same as going faster than the speed of time. Is this article claiming otherwise?
I have my own universe, I change a few things... then be a god... XD
signature is pants
Or perhaps a broad sword ?
Either way I think he needs a bigger blade.
at the end when it zooms out from earth and goes past the planet, past many solar systems ect. and all the sudden everything is in a marble which an alien is playing with it.
Sounds like this.
What if these new universes are actually our own universe, and we are contained infinitely within ourselves? And conversely, one of an infinite number of elements that are within ourselves?
I really shouldn't be allowed on the internet this time of day.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
> the researchers also postulate that everything we see was created as a bubble pinched off from a previously existing universe.
Wow! Reading slashdot is better than smoking pot!
...that we are waiting for The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief!
Okay, who added this tag? Perhaps I'm too easily amused, but it cracks me up.
1. Engage in baseless conjecture about alternative, unproveable universes.
2. Define new branch of mathematics that can support a complex multi-dimensional model reinforcing your baseless conjecture.
3. Publish in academic journals and popular media.
4. Lecture to gullible masses.
5. Profit!
6. Avoid performing any work beneficial to mankind. ~
Invenio via vel creo
I've always liked to dream that our 3d universe is just the event horizon surface of a black hole in a 4d space. In this fantasy, the big bang is just our view of the supernova where the collapsing object's surface area and mass rapidly expanded. The rest of the 4d universe is inaccessible to us, just as the surface of a black hole in our universe has no way to "see" the rest of ours.
I am surprised that no one made a reference to Cosm (I have the Hardcover instead of this one, thanks), from esteemed physicist G. Benford, for a science-fictional treatment of that very topic (universe creation).
Farnsworth: Astonishing! I must have created a parallel universe.
Alternate Farnsworth: Baldercrap! I created your universe. All you created was my fist parallel to your face. [He weakly punches him.]
Farnsworth: Ow.
A pre-universe universe. Wow so conceptual.
Sean Carroll explains things in more detail at his blog. http://cosmicvariance.com/
There's a universe forming in my pants!
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
What is the root and history of the word 'pedantic'?
Languange and definitions evolve. Get over it. The term 'multiverse' has been around for a long time as has the concept of multiple 'Universes'. Relax. Have a beer.
Yes, there was time before "the big bang"..., and it's not a theory but fact http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginity
I've modeled the great white handkerchief as an M-brane in 26 dimensional space, only to discover that it's actually a blue bandana. :O
Invenio via vel creo
The writeup doesn't say how the conjecture avoids it.
Gee...why didn't they name themselves the American Space Society?
*grins sheepishly and backs out of the discussion*
Apply logic like that to global warming and the
spoken like a religious devotee, not a scientist
this is science's way of dealing with those who take something as literal truth that is not totally proven:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/science/10auct.html?ex=1370750400&en=c9d19e51a82df186&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
and i can see in the grammar nazi like way your brittle mind sputters over the definition of the word "centrism" that you can't think very well abstractly, evwrything must be literal and cut and dry
there are unknowns and specious interpretations. the "truth" of the big bang is full of them. i await the dismantling of the big bang, it is too anthropocentric, too old testament in its creation mystique
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dear science,
The whole "before the Big Bang" was my biggest, roomiest gap.
Now I'm holed up between Austrolepithicus and Paranthropus Aethiopicus.
Please stop.
Hugs and Pestilence,
god
Although the word "nazi" is now accepted to mean "a person who is fanatically dedicated to, or seeks to control, some activity, practice, etc." this is etymologically inaccurate. Outside of playful uses (such as "grammar nazi" or a TV serial's "soup nazi") the word "nazi" should be synonymous with "a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party," and we ought to come up with some intermediary term (like "asshole" if you feel like you require a more abusive term) to refer to this kind of pedantic overbearing we've found ourselves saddled with.
Word definitions and connotations have a tendency to move around quite a bit. The word "stink" for example, was once a neutral term to describe something giving off a scent, and now has decidedly negative connotation, if not being outright denotative of giving off a bad odor. Similarly, nazi once meant the members of the political party that established a murderous and expansionist totalitarian regime in Germany. Now it used to describe someone who likes to pick on people's misuse of its vs. it's.
The south pole.
To understand that statement, imagine your head up your ass.
Interestingly if they've found evidence of something from before the Big Bang then our entire notion of spacetime having being created at that point are mute, it's not a Big Bang, perhaps a Cosmic Strangulated Hernia?. This then is the biggest news in physics since, well, since forever. To have then described something of the nature of that preexisting universe
(reference story above that we are arguing under)
maybe you should excommunicate me like galileo for doubting established dogma. you need more fury in your defense of science as a static, unchanging, decided thing. how dare i! sacriledge!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But they aren't very talkative.
Rethinking email
By definition the Big Bang is the singular point at which spacetime was created ex-nihilo. Thus to talk of a time before the Big Bang is wrong.
... I guess that may be a bit of a mouthful.
What they mean is a time before the point in time at which proponents of Big Bang theory consider a singularity to have existed
Incidentally the report of having form at it's start is rather reminiscent of running start theory popular in ID, or possibly creatio-ex-materia.
except maybe something popping up behind me from another 'verse. Oooo, that hurts!
Global warming is completely explained (and very easily so) by current natural laws. It was even expected berfore it was measured.
Rethinking email
Posted by ajesusnut on Tuesday June 10, @03:50AM
from the it's-all-turtles dept.
Theology PseudoScience
canadian_right informs us that scientists from Baylor University have found hints of a time before God while studying the Gnostic Gospels. Not only does the study hint at something pre-existing God, the researchers also postulate that God was created as a turd pinched off from a previously existing God. This conjecture turns out to shed light on the mystery of the arrow of time. Quoting the BBC's account: "Their model suggests that new Gods could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent God, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular. Describing the team's work at a meeting of the Answers in Genesis Society (AiG) in Petersburg, KY, co-author Made Up Professor Kent E. Hovind explained that 'a God could form inside this room and we'd never know, except for the stinky turd.'"
"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."
~ e.e.cummings
We all knew there were Universes in Universes every since Men In Black came into theatres, didn't we? Old news, really.
I could have sworn that our laws of physics didn't exist prior to the big bang. Thus, making it impossible to determine pre-bang events.
"Reality is self-induced hallucination. %~P"
...) Universe (PDU) is one of many (for my SciFicPhy) much like the bubble containing air in a field of water, atoms ... dimensions, our PDU contains celestial objects in a gravity field, particles ... dimensions. Other PDUs in a levity (anti-gravity) field contain (I suspect) very unique laws of physics.
...). The interaction of two unique-PDU in the levity field is possible and (I suspect) the result would be a singularity event that would cause another PDU-cosmic egg ... eventually there would be a SciFicPhy cosmic-chick ... [PLEASE, take the humor and run!].
This Physics-Domain (Newton, Bohr, Einstein
I have always viewed string theory as a flat analogy for particle relationships to environments. Also, I believe, Steven Hawking is correct that our PDU laws end at the horizon of a black-hole and there is no possible recovery of our PDU laws from the horizon of a black-hole or from beyond this PDU-brane horizon at the levity field where even gravity is dissipated (All PDU are forever expanding, till
http://slashdot.org/~OldHawk777/journal/186073
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
oh man, what if, like, your moments of true epiphany and understanding, the moments of complete and empathetic bonding with the universe and all its splendor create your bubbleverses.
thanks to an equivalent to lsd, a sentient being in another universe made our universe and the life here possible.
mankind is not the center of the universe
extrapolation would be: our frame of reference in time and space is not the totality of the universe
it is egotisitical and anthropocentric to imagine the slight bit of what we have seen should be a good definition of all there is
understand where i am coming from now?
i don't know of a scientific method that says "ok, we have seen everything, there is nothing more to see that would change how we understand things"
if you arrive at that thought, then the big bang is easily understood as a stop gap measure, and a poor, old testemant derived one at that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Great, now my brane hurts.
That should be:
Grate, now my brane hertz.
So there is no spoon, but there may be a fork
Hmm, I don't know what you mean there. What I was referring to was the ancient Central Fire hypothesis of , and the Counter-Earth it postulated to keep the universe symmetrical and balanced.
I find it interesting and relevant to String Theory because, well, it illustrates how far from the truth you can land by just postulating ideals of symmetry and what the maths _should_ be there, and not letting experimental data get in the way. He just postulated a mathematical view of the universe (as in, really, he thought that the universe is a mathematical construct) and that certain symmetries and numbers _must_ be true, and ran amok from there.
E.g., he introduced the idea of a "Counter-Earth" so:
1. the total number of planets would be 10, because in his maths view of the world they _had_ to be 10, and
2. the universe wouldn't be unbalanced. Since in the contemporary view, the other planets and stars were elemental and had no mass or weight, only the Earth really weighed anything. So if only the Earth rotated against that central point, the universe would be rather off balance. So he placed a mirrored earth on the other side of that central point, so the centre of gravity of it all would be nicely in the middle.
Now ok, it may sound a bit too critical. I do understand that it was an important stepping stone, even if as the first theory which wasn't Heliocentric, and didn't have an absolute up and down. (It had towards the central point and away from that central point.) For that age, it was a step forward. It doesn't mean we still need to do that kind of thing, though.
Anyway, if it clashes with some movie, novel or setting name, I apologise for not being clear enough.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This box contains our own universe!
Occam's Razor indeed. The article (yes I know, I read it... I'm sorry) basically says that they measured all of the background microwave radiation they could find and found out that there is more in one direction than another. Then someone said, "Hey, I bet our universe's parent universe has something to do with this." If this happened pretty much anywhere that I have ever worked, that guy would immediately be slapped.
I've always been confused at how they can say entropy "causes" the arrow of time. I understand how it could conceivably be used to measure the passage (and perhaps direction) of time, but cause it? It seems common sense to me that the increase of entropy occurs because of time, not the other way around.
Then again, I also have a problem with the entire idea of entropy. Order -> Disorder, ok, but who decides what's "more ordered"? Seems completely subjective to me. How do you figure out if some bit of energy is really "useless", or could conceivably be harnessed for work with sufficiently advanced technology?
Farnsworth 1: Oh, you'd like to get back to your evil universe, wouldn't you? And destroy your box with our universe inside it.
Farnsworth A: Nonsense! I would never do such a thing unless you were already having been going to do that!
Farnsworth 1: Wha?
Farnsworth A: You heard me!
we had God cornered, he goes and pulls another fast one.
Olber's paradox says that if time stretches back infinitely, the sky would be uniformly as bright as a star.
In this theory, the parent universe is not visible. Our universe separated from it at the Big Bang. There was a time before, but that doesn't mean you can see an infinite number of stars
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Universe is, as with all things, not as simple and defined as a human being would make it.
....googles of years, those black holes will only get bigger and denser and more powerful. Eventually they'll suck the entire universe into a singularity of timespace. And then once the critical point is hit, kaboom. another big bang and the rebirth of the universe.
If one believes that our current visible existence was formed as a giant explosion of particles and energy, you have to ask how did the conditions of such come to be. Of course....a simple hypothesis would be that it became that way because it collapsed onto itself! We all know that black holes exist and only grow. As time passes by
At CERN they are trying to recreate conditions similar to the big bang. Could this be history about to repeat itself? Every few billion years an advanced life form creates a CERN-like particle accelerator experiment and poof, another big bang happens ;)
Suppose you stand at the edge of the universe. You reach out your arm, if you can reach it out, there is space to reach in to, you're not at the edge.
Suppose instead your arm hits a boundary, you are not at the edge, there is a boundary beyond.
Conclusion, the universe extends [infinitely].
---
i don't buy this particular, incidentally
uhhh i guess no one has heard of M theory?
11 dimensions...infinite universes. big bang like clapping hands:
here is a short bbc ch2 segment on it:
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-3969763606736507921&hl=de
That's the funniest tag I've seen in a while. :) Thanks
everything we see was created as a bubble pinched off from a previously existing universe
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article the slashdot summary links to is basically a drastically shortened version of this recent article in Scientific American, plus a nutshell presentation of this paper.
Find free books.
Indeed, but that's not what Occam's Razor is about. You may predict or explain any event or thing, no matter how complicated. Occam's Razor is only about _how_ you explain it.
Basically, imagine that you walk through an apple orchard on a windy day, and an apple falls on your head. Let's pick two possible explanations:
1. Probably the wind shook a branch and an apple fell.
2. The Illuminati hired a secret Ninja clan from Japan, to follow you around and drop an apple on your head when a good opportunity presents itself. And they picked a windy day so the rustle of leaves would hide their noises.
Basically Occam's Razor just says that if explanation #1 explains it well enough, go with explanation #1. There is no need to complicate it with unneeded extra elements.
Incidentally, from a science point of view, #1 also has _some_ predictive power. You can, for example, calculate what the probability is to get hit by an apple, or in what season it's more likely, or whether you need to wear a hard hat or it'll likely be just a minor bruise. Explanation #2 is pretty worthless, since there's no way to predict who the Illuminati want to drop an apple on and on what date. You don't even know whether to wear a hard hat, since they might drop an apple made of lead if they want to. (Ninjas can do stuff like that;)
On the other hand, if explanation #1 doesn't explain it, _then_ you can look for a more complex explanation. E.g., if you were walking through a banana plantation and an apple fell on your head, maybe it wasn't the wind after all.
But again, this all has to do with the explanation, not with the thing you explain or predict.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So we come from another universe? Ok. Cool.
Now could someone tell me where THAT universe came from? And the one before that...
-516
I think I'd know.
Oh, there goes one now!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Dr. Seuss presented this theory in 1954. The sub universe was, of course, discovered by Horton the elephant.
I've been reading the SciAm version of the article recommended by another poster, and it says that the universe started as a low entropy state. I don't understand how you can consider a largely homogeneous blob a low entropy state. What am I missing?
Thanks,
-l
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It's big bangs all the way down!
is the process of taking observations, forming principles from those observations, and thereby predicting future results
i have observed that mankind tends to think anthropocentrically, the principle i derive from that is beliefs that are anthropocentric will fall in the face of future scientific evidence. the big bang is anthropocentirc about mankind's frame of reference in time and space being the only valid frame of reference to theorize from
therefore, the big bang will come to pass, like lamarckism, phlogiston, or phrenology. all complete scientific theories in thir times, but doomed to the historical dustbin by being incomplete malformed ideas
such is the fate of the big bang theory
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Brane and brane, what is brane?!
Trying to talk about any notion of time before the big bang is like trying to overanalyze your typical joke where the first line of it involves a group of people who go into a bar, and trying to actually determine what they were doing _before_ they went into the bar. It's completely meaningless to the point of the joke, and at worst takes away from the enjoyability of said joke.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I just got out of a major existential breakdown. I don't need shit like this to confuse it all again!
I have for quite some time held the belief that there is no such thing as a "dimension" of time, or a universal time. Time is simply a measure of change. We base time on earth's changes - rotations and seasons. We base earth's history on carbon dating - the change of decay in carbon over time. Even this measure, however, isn't "universal"; we only have a limited window of real-life observation and comparison for carbon-decay (say a couple millennium), extrapolate that over millions or billions of years, and any small error in our understanding of it could throw our entire basis for earth's history way off.
Back to my main point - time is relative to the change we experience. If nothing changed, ever, who is to say time exists? Change, however, is (at least one of) a constant in the universe. Everything changes, constantly, but at different rates. The only true "universal" measure of time would be to base it on something that ALWAYS changed in a consistent and predictable manner. And even then, it's no more a "dimension" than math or language are dimensions... they're simply human constructs which prove to be useful tools in our daily lives.
Time, therefore, on a planet of rapid change, would mean something entirely different than time on a planet with extremely slow change. Change is affected by a multitude of parameters, making it something that is only relative to the location and those who are experiencing the changes in that location. Therefore, it is a completely fluid construct, slowing or accelerating depending on the environment. More accurate would be a dimension for "change" or "motion". I believe gravity comes in here somewhere (accelerating or decelerating change?).
Intriguing is the speed factor. Does speed really alter our perception of time? Does it simply alter the rate of change for those who are experiencing it, as my post postulates?
Sorry guys and gals... no time travel for us humans!
Futurama has also dealt with this topic in a satisfactory way.
We're either the evil twin universe or the cowboy universe.
The general definition of homogeneity is "being the same throughout". "The same" and "throughout" are each meaningless without their own notion of scale. Scale itself has some dependencies but I have to burn my brain out on something else right now.
(posting AC due to moderation)
because as everybody knows, it's turtles all the way down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
So would this mean there is no Land Before Time?
I'm fairly sure in MIB they showed a galaxy on orions belt (the cat collar) also there's the civilisation in the locker in MIB2 and the humans in the other locker at the very end
If the universe were isotropic but not homogeneous, then our observation that the universe is expanding away from us would mean we were at the center of the universe. If the universe were homogeneous but not isotropic, we could see the edges and discover we had an absolute position in the universe.
It is true that our observations might just be a special case that merely looks one way when the "big picture" is actually something different, but that's always the case in science. That's why using science is so hard, but it is this very predictive nature which makes it so useful. The only way the universe can be any way other than as we observe is by bad luck on our part. The only way you can save your claim is by the fallacy of overwhelming exception: "The big bang could be bullshit if new evidence demonstrates as such." What a tautology; certainly not honest science.
Distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle invented the term "big bang" to deride the idea of a universe with a compact origin. But the term caught on as standard.
Lets now call pre-big bang time "foreplay".
"What if uhh... C-A-T, really spelled dog?"
The universe does look like it is receding equally in every direction from our position in space. That would indeed be an astonishing coincidence, and thinking we just happened to be at the center of the universe would be a rather geocentric (not "anthropocentric" as you've inaccurately labeled it).
But that is not what the Big Bang says! The Big Bang also recognizes that the universe looks this way at every point, not just wherever we happen to be. The universe isn't just isotropic here; it's isotropic everywhere.
...doomed to the historical dustbin by being incomplete malformed ideas You're appealing to an overwhelming exception. You're saying "we will know the big bang is wrong if new evidence surfaces to suggest it is wrong." Science doesn't "prove" (nor, therefore, "disprove") anything. You can always say one explanation would supplant another if only there were evidence for it; of course it would! Evidence is what supports induction, and since you disagree with the evidence (I'm sorry physical reality displeases you), you have to attack the induction. You would have us reject the explanation which best agrees with the evidence simply because you don't understand the explanation, or because you don't like it to the extent that you do understand it. such is the fate of the big bang theory How pompous. You have no oracle providing you with more complete or future knowledge than the centuries of astronomers and physicists whose observations have produced the Big Bang idea. You have only your superstitious dislike of the Big Bang concept, and the seeming need to peddle it on Slashodot.Hmm, so for the creationist, does this imply that God pinched one off and now we are here? ... Shit.
If bubble universes exist, you will survive the experiment. The inflationary effect will simply form a new bubble universe, attached to this one via a miniature black hole which will fairly rapidly evaporate. From your standpoint, the energy is destroyed, in violation of the law of conservation of energy, and disorder has been reduced (matter is more ordered than energy and more energy has been lost than matter) in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course, in the system as a whole, neither law has been violated, it only appears such because you cannot see the whole system, only the part that exists in your bubble.
If bubble universes do not exist, then the inflationary effect must take place in this universe, wiping out a good few thousand light-years radius at least.
This would seem to make the whole idea extremely provable. If you, and every civilization in the local cluster of galaxies, perish in a faster-than-light fireball of unimaginable ferocity, bubble universes do not exist. Otherwise, they do.
Never mind artificial black holes destroying the planet, THIS is the experiment all mad scientists should dream of. Especially if they can figure out a way to thread a wormhole through the black hole linking the two universes. But even if they can't, the prospect of obliterating the entire local cluster of galaxies is every mad scientist's dream!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"entire notion of spacetime having being created at that point are mute"
Joey from Friends does cosmology now?
Its hard to imagine a beginning of ANYTHING without some kind of dynamic. You end up asking really fundamental questions like "How can something come from nothing?".
However, I have never been satisfied with the idea that time had a "beginning", as anything that has a beginning must have SOME kind of cause, and if it has a cause, some kind of dynamic. To call this dynamic "time", I think, is over-simplifying it. I think that the more general term "dynamic" would be more accurate.
However, its hard to imaging this hypothetical "dynamic" without using our current understanding of time, but it could just as easily be "time-like" as it could be time as we know it in this universe.
I would imaging that an alternative universe would also have an alternative "time" generating "temporal" event sequences that are completely different from what we observe in our own universe.
Hmm. I'd assume it's a lot harder to answer something like, "how do big bangs typically work?" since we only have a sample of one. For all we know, it could be a very unusual big-bang, and they usually produce universes very different from ours.
We can reconstruct the way ours seems to have worked. Sorta like looking at where the shrapnel went, scratching our heads, and going, "the bomb must have been _there_." But even with bombs, you can't really extrapolate much from a sample of one. If you did, you could get a conclusion like that the fragments go in all directions because your sample was a grenade, and never know that there are such things as Claymore mines.
I also wouldn't worry much about the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created it all, including relics and data pointing out all the way to the Big Bang. Even if that's the case, way I see it:
1. If he went through all that trouble, maybe He's trying to tell us something. Dunno, sorta like the back story of a MMO, for example. Might as well study it anyway. Maybe he _wants_ us to act like in a universe which wasn't created by His noodly appendage, if He tried to hide all inconsistencies and traces of divine intervention.
2. The laws we discover around the way, may be useful anyway. I mean, however it may have been created, it seems to act quite predictably each time we observe it. E.g., if you drop a cannonball from the tower of Pisa, it falls in the same place and after the same time, every time. Duly noted, stuff involving individual particles, atoms and molecules (e.g., the cancer that you mention) are rather probabilistic, but it turns out that there is a method even to that madness. E.g., even if you don't know exactly which electrons will tunnel, you can calculate a Zener diode anyway.
3. Well, does it matter? Basically those rules act the same, and those predictions are the same, regardless of whether you are a devout Pastafarian or not. Regardless of whether those rules and constants of the universe are created by His noodly appendage, or just are, you can predict the same things and expect them to be just as true or not.
That alone is reason enough to leave Him out of the explanation. It just doesn't change those equations, so you can simplify Him out with impunity.
4. Dunno, if I had went through all the trouble of creating an universe that's so internally consistent and where a small elegant set of equations keep it all going, I'd actually want people to notice those equations and stuff. You know, instead of a thoroughly mumbo-jumbo story about creating Adam with His noodly appendage.
Anyone can make a shoddy rigged demo, basically, which works only due to the support guys (or one support deity, same deal) intervening all the time, and with a bunch of disjointed things that don't share anything except their creator. Anyone can make each animal be a completely different NPC, created arbitrarily on a whim and without any common code or principle.
Making a system this complex which worked on its own without a major glitch or player wipe since the Flood, now that's something to be proud of. Making something where the same building blocks can encode anything from Amoeba to Human, and make it work too, doubly so. Boiling it down to something as simple and elegant as a handful of equations which say why carbon makes chain like that, or for that matter where it can form in stars in the first place, now that's pure genius. That guy coded in a few equations what we can't make with terrabytes of code.
Regardless of whether, say, evolution actually happened, or the whole world started yesterday, the amazing fact is that those chemical reactions in a cell _can_ allow just that. It's a machine as perfect as to be able to adapt itself and produce anything from Cyanobacter to Human, starting from just the basic ribosome. It's _amazing_ work that. Or even just looking at the end result, a human is encoded in just 3 billion nucleotids, or about 750 megabytes. Including code, data
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.baens-universe.com/
It's passably readable since a damn commie runs that portion of Baen it's managed to be polemic neutral. *gasp* No more libertarian/rightwing/facist gun p0rn! No it's damn commie gun p0rn like Orwell said!.
See what happens when a publisher dies?
hmmmmmmmmmm......now if we give them 62 free parameters, they can predict OUR specific universe. Very unimpressive (and kinda' sad actually).
I agree with you. Most people have no idea what a nazi is and what they really stood for. Of course you will be chastised for bringing it to the attention. Good luck.
Freedom is not FREE
How about Dinner and a Movie?
this seems to be very similar to an idea that Penrose had in the 70s and has been discussing a little bit recently, called the Weyl curvature hypothesis. The thing that seems to be novel about the hypothesis of Erickcek et al. is that apparently they have a mechanism for a new universe to pop up in a non-empty "parent" universe; Penrose's idea depends on the parent universe being completely devoid of massive objects, which depends (among other things) on proton decay and a truly huge amount of time.
Is the other universe hosting a planet-sized pink alien monster that will date and finally break-up with our universe?
Is it just me, or are the Big Bang people starting to sound just like the God people ?
Here's my theory, there is no beginning & there will be no end.
There is no box to think outside of.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Could you explain?
Yogis and yogic practicioners have for thousands of years said there exists billions of worlds simultaneously. If you study the Vedic scriptures, this is old news. There are stories of yogies transcending into new worlds that exists in mountains, in trees and, yes, in living-rooms.
What is amazing is how little this has been researched and how ignorant people are today.
of this concept, read "Earth" by David Brin.
:-)
I enjoyed the concept of a scientist flicking a switch and "pop", oh look there's another universe
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
There was a bit on a Friends episode where Joey kept saying the point is moo.
The correct phrase is "the point is moot." (http://wriging.com/writing/notes/3912/p/1/?cat_name=writing¬eid=3912&page=1)
Thanks. I guess that's the problem with homophones when you learn them from audio sources rather than text.
The meaning then of "open to debate" (moot) is not really what I intended, more of "your point does not then speak, it's obviated" which could colloquially at least be "your point is mute".
I'll avoid both phrases I think.