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Study Hints At Time Before Big Bang

Posted by kdawson on from the other-side-of-the-looking-glass dept.

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.'"

13 of 408 comments (clear)

  1. first post from by fotoguzzi · · Score: 5, Funny

    new universe.

    --
    Their they're doing there hair.
  2. What did you expect to see? by Alarindris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What did you expect to see? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I always rationalised the Tardis in Doctor Who as some sort of pocket of universe that sprouts wormholes to different points in spacetime. Bigger on the inside than out would be no problem since the inside is a different spacetime connected to the Tardis's destination via a thin neck that is hidden by some sort of hologram. Come to think of it, since the outside of the Tardis is some sort of hologram hiding a wormhole entrance that explains how the Tardis can change shape to disguise itself. An if someone attacks outside of the Tardis you just turn of the hologram and break the thin neck to that part of spacetime and reconnect a bit later to make the thing appear indestructable.

      And a civilisation like the Time Lords that's had spacetravel for thousands or millions of years and knows how to harness the power of blackholes would be plausibly be capable of this sort of thing. I certainly wouldn't expect them to be flying around in the sort of spaceships we'd design based on our current knowledge of technology.

      So I'm not surprised either ;-)

      Actually the odd thing about Doctor Who is that there is no evidence that the people that wrote it knew anything about physics, so the Tardis isn't supposed to be a pocket universe, but I can quite see explaining all the Tardis's odd properties using this model.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:What did you expect to see? by MickLinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My brother, Joseph D. Rudmin, expected to see this. He's done a lot of work with space tensors, and has basically concluded that space-time is 3x3t (6 dimensions), with the 3 time dimensions mistaken for one for massive objects (and, ironically, it's quite possible that low-mass objects like electrons can mistake the 3 space dimensions for one). Right now, he's trying to use these equations to calculate / predict the electron's charge/mass ratio. It's a huge calculation, so it's been taking him many years.

          However, if I remember right, he regularly publishes at the Virginia Academy of Science annual meetings, and has also written a small (90 pg) book that he self published, just to get the ideas out there (ISBN 0976894726 - Thoughts on the Electron Mass).

          To the point of what he's expected to see here: he's pointed out that if you have a galaxy at the center of a collapsing black hole, and are in the galaxy, you cannot tell the difference between that event and a big bang. Moreover, once the SC-radius has formed, you cannot tell whether you are inside the black hole, or outside it as the rest of the universe collapses into it's own black hole. Moreover, because light that goes out from the universe / black hole gets redirected back inwards, you cannot tell the boundary of a black hole from the boundary of a universe. They are, by dual definition, identical.

          However, initial formations of the universe are seldom for every formation of a black hole. Therefore, it is more probable that our big bang was nothing more than the collapse of a black hole.

      --
      Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
  3. read this back in 2000 by reydeyo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:read this back in 2000 by OzRoy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is a big difference between someone expressing an idea, and someone actually saying "We have found evidence to suggest this is true."

      Just because you read about the idea 10 years ago doesn't make this any less significant.

  4. Re:Really, what does this mean? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    By the way, just to avoid confusion, what I meant by the above is this: consider an experiment where you are blowing up a balloon and you measure time by something traveling in the balloon or by the rate that the balloon expands. How do you measure time before you started inflating the balloon (where it had a volume of zero) when your experiment can only be done inside the balloon? It only makes sense to define time as far as the balloon (or universe) is concerned after the inflation has begun and the volume enclosed by the balloon is greater than zero. There is no you can infer by any characteristic in the balloon how time worked before. From an abstract reference point, this could be the first time the balloon inflated, or maybe you pinched off a zero volume part of another balloon and started inflating, or maybe this balloon inflated from zero and then deflated to zero over many cycles. Your measure of time has no meaning in any case and none of them are related. The expansion could have been different or you could have used a different gas which would affect each potential measure of time in the balloon.

  5. I think you mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...String hypothesis.

    1. Re:I think you mean... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      The consensus in science amongst string theorists is that string theory is correct.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  6. AFAIK by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:AFAIK by scribblej · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think you fail in your understanding of the razor.

      You see, it's used for deciding between two propositions. "The universe exists" might be one, but you need another to decide... so let's pick an obvious alternative. "The universe doesn't exist." OK. Now we try to apply the razor. Only there's a problem, see. Occham's Razor can only be applied when both theories fully explain the observations; only one "multiplies entities beyond necessity" -- which is fancy talk for "includes more than the other," basically. The problem here is the alternative hypothesis, "the universe doesn't exist" is going to require a /lot/ more explanation to fit. It doesn't fully explain the observations. Now you have to explain how, if it doesn't exist, we still seem to experience it as though it did. Any explanation you come up with for that is necessarily going to be far more complex than the alternative.

      So I'm only really responding to you because at least one mod thought what you said was clever. With no malice, I'm telling you it's not clever, it's ignorant. A lot of people misunderstand Ockham's razor and jokes like yours don't help the matter any.

      If you are saying that the existence of the universe would not have been /predicted/ by an application of Ockham's razor, you are talking nonsense on several levels. First off, it's not a predictor. It's just a simple reminder that adding "extra shit" into your theories is rarely a good idea. If you're going to put something into a theory, it needs to be something that's justified by the observations. Ockham's Razor is only good for helping decide when you've screwed up and included more than is necessary. Secondly, it doesn't make a lot of sense to talk about predicting the creation of the universe, I don't think. But maybe TFA has a few things to teach me on that point.

      I hope that helps someone.

  7. Re:This idea is hardly new. by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No, it's not evidence, it's an outlandish _interpretation_. We can only go by the BBC journalist's writeup of course, but here's how the scientific method (that they ought to be following) works:

    First, they (should) ask do the "ordinary" physical laws explain the fluctuations? Next, if they have shown that _none_ of the physical laws _can_ explain the fluctuations, they should ask can this be a _new_ physical law to be _added_ to the existing ones? Next, if they have shown that adding such a new law is _inconsistent_ with existing laws, they should ask whether some of the existing laws are _wrong_?

    If at the end of all that mountain of work, they still cannot fit the observation to a natural explanation, they should leave it at that and let somebody smarter go through their arguments to find what they missed.

  8. I would also like to be a philology "nazi" by Reality+Master+201 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.