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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...
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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).
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. . . .
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.
... Fruit flies like a banana.
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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.
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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
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?
More like :
Universe newUniverse = new Universe(oldUniverse);
Slipping shoelaces ?
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 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).
Sean Carroll explains things in more detail at his blog. http://cosmicvariance.com/
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.
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.
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
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.
"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."
~ e.e.cummings
Great, now my brane hurts.
That should be:
Grate, now my brane hertz.
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 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.
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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.
BetterUniverse better = UniverseFactory.getUniverse(oldUniverse);
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".
If the joke is "Mary and Joe went into Fred's tavern to call the police but the line was busy" I might very well wonder if you were screwing up the joke by not telling me the first part.
If there are no observable effects of a time before the big bang, then it's not particularly interesting to talk about it. If there ARE observable effects, then it's VERY interesting to talk about it.
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.
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.