Do We Live In a Giant Cosmic Bubble?

Khemisty writes "Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation. Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario. If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations. 'If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating,' said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. 'It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.'"

Comments

I know I do

[Anonymous Coward]

Like, cosmic, man.

Re:I know I do

[SleptThroughClass]

Apparently someone is indeed less dense.

Re:I know I do

[bugeaterr]

6000 years ago, god farted in a Cosmic Bathtub.

Re:I know I do

[SlowMovingTarget]

A brane-fart, eh?

I always wondered...

[clonan]

If this was why the galaxies appear to rotate to quickly at the edges.

Would the greater density at the galactic cores cause time to go slower and effect the apparent speed as observed from the exterier of the system?

Re:I always wondered...

[Goaway]

No. The gravitational forces required for time dilation to be that strong are many orders of magnitude stronger than what you'll find on the galactic scale.

Being special

[Harmonious Botch]

Ok, I'll believe that there are regions of space that are more dense than others. I'll even believe that we are in one of them. ( This is no harder than believing in dark matter and dark energy, and it's before breakfast )
But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region. So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?

Re:Being special

[BigGar']

Man you ain't kidding. Take a look at the Capitol Hill region of space. That is one ultra dense region of hot air, that isn't just warping space-time this is a region of space where the wildest of idea's are warped into reality.

Re:Being special

[someone1234]

Except if such specialties make our sentient life possible (or much more probable).

Re:Being special

[2names]

Density distribution throughout the universe (ours, at least) is relative to the scale at which your measurements are made. Follow me here...

If you get far enough away from this universe, and I'm talking 'Douglas Adams' far, this universe would appear to be perfectly uniform. However, the closer your observation point becomes, the easier it is to distinguish the clumps, bumps, peaks, valleys, troughs, etc. in the density. At a very close, human-type scale, the density changes are very easy to spot. How dense is the space between the Earth and the Moon as compared to the Earth itself?

Re:Being special

[LordNimon]

Why is it so hard to believe? Let's say for instance I tell you that there is a one-in-a-million chance that a person will have a particular dream. Every night, 300 million Americans go to sleep. Would you find it hard to believe that at least one person has this dream every night?

And what if you were that one person last night? Would you think you were special? You would, if you were bad at math.

So why is it hard to believe that our planet exists in conditions that have incredibly low odds? The universe is not only more vast than anyone can imagine, it's also been around for over 13 billion years! For all you know, these "special conditions" you complain about could have happened a million times by now.

Re:Being special

[meringuoid]

But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region. So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?

There's an unexplained anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Hot and cold spots don't appear to be quite randomly distributed. Nobody's come up with a good explanation, and it might be an instrumentation error or due to some local gravitational anomaly - say, lensing around the next supercluster over - but at the moment it's very unclear.

Re:Being special

[Chris Burke]

But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region.

How exact do you think it has to be when we're talking about cosmic distances? Distances where being in the Milky Way vs Andromeda wouldn't make much difference in how the distant universe looked?

Re:Being special

[Anonymous Coward]

. So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?

Oh, but it does indeed! haven't you noticed that the universe is at daylight here but at night in China?

Re:Being special

[ivandavidoff]

Boy, and what an ultimate irony it would be if the center of the bubble isn't just Earth, but the exact location of Copernicus' grave.

Yes, this is clearly the answer. What we can observe of the universe does not jibe with what we THINK we SHOULD be observing; so, obviously, we are in the middle of an anomaly, outside of which the universe behaves the way we THINK it should behave.

Re:Being special

[John Hasler]

We need not be at the exact center. Closer to the center than to the edge would probably suffice.

Nor does ours need to be the only bubble: there could be billions of them. Thus we need not be unique: just not quite average (but then, being perfectly average would itself be unlikely).

Re:Being special

[ShieldW0lf]

You're believing something the opposite of what the premise of the article is. The premise of the article is that we are in a bubble containing a void, not a highly dense space.

I think we really need to restructure our underlying philosophy of what existence is. I've been chewing on this concept for years:

This "universe" isn't infinite. It's a 4 dimensional object, with a large but quantifiable amount of mass/energy, and this mass/energy has permutations across x, y, z and t. You see a 3 dimensional object with dimensions x, y, z moving through t, but observed from outside the t dimension, it's a 4 dimensional object.

The big bang, the singularity, is significant because at the moment that the mass/energy of the universe is in the singular state, it is identical to all the other universes. It is at this point that it "connects" to all the other universes, like petals connecting together to make a flower.

Questions of religion, spirituality and what it means to be human start getting in your way once you start looking at things this way. Am I an aspect of this object that is my universe, or am I some sort of traveler within this object that is a universe?

I think there's a good possibility that the missing matter and forces we hypothesize to be acting upon our universe are actually other universes influencing our own, like petals on a flower bumping into each other. And, assuming that we are "souls traveling within the universe" as opposed to "4 dimensional objects that are aspects of the universe", it isn't outside the bounds of reason to imagine that we might one day be able to map the shape of these universes and achieve "time travel" by moving to other universes.

I expect that we will eventually find the concept of the "infinite universe" to be a false path, and that we will achieve great breakthroughs when we find a framework that doesn't rely upon its existence.

Re:Being special

[mcgrew]

This is no harder than believing in dark matter and dark energy, and it's before breakfast

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so". -The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Re:Being special

[khallow]

I expect that we will eventually find the concept of the "infinite universe" to be a false path, and that we will achieve great breakthroughs when we find a framework that doesn't rely upon its existence.

Already happened. Our description of the laws of physics is local in nature and doesn't depend on the extent of the universe.

Re:Being special

[Artifakt]

We don't necessarily have to be at or near the center of such a bubble, here's the conditions we might require:

1. We would have to somewhere be in a bubble that is much less dense than the actual average for the universe,
2. that bubble would have to be pretty uniformly less dense for the 12 Billion light year radius around us. It doesn't have to be exactly uniform, in fact one reason we might be able to detect it is if it isn't. The bubble doesn't have to be spherical, overall, or uniformly dense, overall, and the nature of the edge, where it becomes more like the rest of the universe is, is allowed some variation as well.
    (In fact, from what the original paper says so far, the center of the bubble could still be even less dense than our part, just so those lower density regions were more than the observable length away.)
    (If this hypothesis develops into a full fledged theory, we would probably be able at a minimum to confirm or reject the existence of even lower density regions, predict how thick the edges of the bubble are, and write an equation that describes how the density would go up, as hypothetically measured at different points in the edge.).
3. The bubble would have to be pretty big, bigger than the time it takes light to cross the entire part of the universe we can see. Since we estimate the universe is about 12 Billion years old, the edges of the bubble must be more than that number of light years away from our POV. But, we don't have to be equally near all edges.
      (We could still possibly see some effects from what is now farther away, because we can observe things such as the cosmic microwave background, that preserve data from the very early times when things were much closer together. We could also see the indirect effects of gravity on things we can see directly in the visible, Gamma or UV ranges).
4. We would have to be near enough to an edge in at least one direction that we could see the effects of those hypothetical average density regions that lie farther than 12 Billion light years away. That way, we may never be able to see them directly, but we can infer them from the parts we can see, so this becomes testable. So if the bubble is much bigger than 24 billion light years across, we must not be too near the center. The bigger the bubble is, the farther out from the center we would have to be to detect something, but that's still a pretty general requirement that we be somewhere in a pretty big volume, not really something improbable or requiring a particularly privledged viewpoint. Our view would be unusual, but not unique.
5. Near enough in point 4 depends on how swiftly the edge of the bubble changes to a more average density, and just what the average is, among other factors. Again, actually coming up with some more specific numbers is what will happen if this hypothesis gets developed into a more established theory. The researchers will calculate some combinations of overall size, rate of change at the edges, and density for the larger universe, and see if there are combinations that predict something we can observe to test them, while throwing out combinations that lead to conclusions contrary to what we can observe. Better yet, a lot of our existing observations can be used to swiftly develop this hypothesis - this is much more testable right now than, say, string theory.

Re:Being special

[ksd1337]

Nah, you meant to say Jack Thompson. The vacuum between his ears sucked in all the copies of Duke Nukem Forever, and we can't get them out now.

Re:Being special

[pla]

So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?

Yes. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe looked for (and found!) exactly that.

Now, exactly what the WMAP's findings mean... Well, physicists and cosmologists will probably argue about that for the next century. But as a scientifically-literate non-expert, I would say that an anisotropic CMB seems consistent with (though certainly doesn't require) the "bubble" theory mentioned in TFA.

Re:Being special

[f()rK()_Bomb]

The observable universe is actually more like 96billion light years across, its a common mis-conception that because its 13.7 billions years old, its 27billion light years wide. This would b true if space was flat, but on cosmological scales, its highly curved.

The lower bound on the size of the universe, based on the CMBR is 78billion light years, any smaller, and then light would have circumnavigated it since the big bang, and we would see multiple images in the CMBR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Re:Being special

[The Mighty Buzzard]

It wouldn't surprise me at all. One-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Re:Being special

[jessemerriman]

Sounds a lot like Julian Barbour's The End Of Time.

Occam's Razor?

[H0p313ss]

I'll apply Occam's Razor and ask which is more likely.

• Are we in an unusual zone so we get unusual results?
• Is there some unknown and mysterious matter that screws up our results?

Quite frankly I find both solutions rather silly, they sound a little too much like deus ex machina to me. I suspect the truth is still out there and when we understand it will change our view of the universe. It's happened before, it will happen again.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[kisrael]

My favorite alternative is that we need someone to do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton; that just like Newton's laws are near-perfect and beautiful at reasonable speeds, maybe there's something that happens at cosmically grand distances, masses, or propagation delays for Gravity that we're going to have to be awfully clever to ever hope to reliably detect.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy both felt like big hacks to me.

But, I am by no means a scientist, just an interest layman who hasn't done enough reading.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[R2.0]

"My favorite alternative is that we need someone to do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton; that just like Newton's laws are near-perfect and beautiful at reasonable speeds, maybe there's something that happens at cosmically grand distances, masses, or propagation delays for Gravity that we're going to have to be awfully clever to ever hope to reliably detect."

Screw that - the reason Einstein needs to go down can be summed up in one word:

Starships.
(and not the lameass rock band, either)

Re:Occam's Razor?

[timmarhy]

you realize dark matter is simply the generic term applied to that missing mass we can't account for, not an actual explanation for it?

Re:Occam's Razor?

[philspear]

I thought it was for deciding between two or more competing theories. I didn't think it could be used to reject all theories. If you have two theories, one makes two assumptions, one makes just one, it's more likely to be the one that just makes one. While both may be wrong, you can't use Occam's razor to throw BOTH of them out.

Furthermore, you don't use it at all, or if you did, you forgot to tell us the outcome. You actually just say both sound like deus ex machina, are both silly, and we're not right yet. Didn't even mention any underlying assumptions. That's not Occam's razor, or even rational argumentation. You just have a gut instinct that they're both wrong.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[H0p313ss]

You make very valid points and I agree with many of them. However, my point here is that there are two theories, one new, one less new, that IMHO make too many assumptions. The simpler solution is that we really don't understand the problem yet and that there is a more elegant solution waiting to be found. This is the unstated third choice. I should have made that more clear... I'm blaming the cold medication.

Is this a proper application of Occam's Razor? I'm really not sure I'd care. I'm not sure that even Occam would care...

Re:Occam's Razor?

[DynaSoar]

I'll apply Occam's Razor and ask which is more likely.

• Are we in an unusual zone so we get unusual results?
• Is there some unknown and mysterious matter that screws up our results?

Quite frankly I find both solutions rather silly, they sound a little too much like deus ex machina to me. I suspect the truth is still out there and when we understand it will change our view of the universe. It's happened before, it will happen again.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1. Deus ex machina is a term that can be applied to anything which conforms to Clark's Law ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). Any spacetime/matter phenomenon that can be understood has the possibility of being controlled and therefore to become a technology, therefore Clarke's Law can be applied.

2. "Willam of Ockham had a beard," which is to say he was not an authority in the field and the rule associated with his name fails. It is sufficiently common that data proves a more complex hypothesis true that reality invalidates use of this axiom even in pre-result situations. Acceptance of parsimony (same concept as the razor) without cause is mental laziness as well as the logical error of acceptance of (perceived) authority. Nature doesn't care about how easily our tiny meat computers can process a given data set.

Those said, I may disagree with your supporting statements, but I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion that "the truth is still out there". Call it the first corollary (inclusion of "still") to Mulder's Law.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[Abcd1234]

"Dark Matter and Dark Energy both felt like big hacks to me."

To you, perhaps. Problem is, at least in the case of Dark Matter, it's real and we've observed it.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[cmat]

Dark matter and dark energy are as much "hacks" as "gravity" is; i.e. they all are names for phenomena that we observe in the universe except that we have some sort of an explanation for gravity, whereas the former two we have no (at least known to me) current consistent theories that can explain why there is unobserved extra mass in the observable universe and what is causing the observable universe to expand (accelerating the expansion). Note that both of these properties of the universe have been measured (observed).

Re:Occam's Razor?

[DrWho520]

Well, no more a hack than adding an arbitrary number of dimensions to the universe until all your equations work out. Oh, wait...

We known this for a long time

[Iowan41]

At least as far as gas and dust are concerned. The Standard Model explanation is that a 'nearby' star (the pulsar Geminga) went supernova a good long time ago, and blasted a large bubble (300 ly across) of relatively gas and dust free space, called 'the Local Bubble', and our solar system is well within this bubble. The relationship between that and what is being discussed I do not know, for details haven't been provided even on such things as scale. Do a search on 'Local Bubble' and you will find a great deal of information about this.

Re:We known this for a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

This is different bubble. The Local Bubble is rather local (tens of parsecs across) and we can easily see gas outside of it. The bubble in the story could be bigger than the visible Universe (gigaparsecs across) and thus can be fundamentally untestable. Plus, null results (that we can't see outside of this gigantic bubble) make it even more unlikely because over- and underdensities are progressively rarer as they get bigger.

Large Hadron Collider can help us

[ilovesymbian]

Maybe the Large Hadron Collider can help us with this. The scientists can try to recreate this as well - after they fix the magnet issues.

You mean like...

[clonan]

a 3 million sun heavy black hole...like the one in the center of many galaxies including our own?

Re:You mean like...

[Quietust]

There would definitely be significant time dilation in close proximity to said black holes, but beyond even a fraction of a light year it would become negligible due to the rate at which gravitational force weakens.

Re:You mean like...

[caramelcarrot]

The gravity from a 3 million sun black hole is no different to 3 million suns, and given that a galaxy will contain billions of such suns - no, that's not sufficient.

Re:You mean like...

[Lumpy]

incorrect. The gravity from a 3 million sun black hole has a deeper center than if you took 3 million suns and stacked them in a sphere just touching each other.

The gravity well of the two is quite different. one will be huge because the gravity mass is spread out at last a few hundred thousand suns wide in all directions and the other has a gravity mass that is far FAR smaller. This making the sides of the gravity well steeper and causing a very defined terminator line compared to that of the giant ball of suns.

Re:You mean like...

[caramelcarrot]

Considering the point was related to the effects of such a black hole on the outskirts on the galaxy, then yes, the oddities of the gravitational field of the black hole are on a massively smaller scale and totally irrelevant. Your point that the field isn't exactly the same is true, but pedantic and irrelevant to the discussion.

Re:You mean like...

[Goaway]

that would slow down time in the area.

The point is, no, it would not, not to the degree you are thinking of. Look, we do know what a galaxy is! We know there's a lot of mass in there! And it's easy to calculate the time dilation it causes, and it is negligable.

Re:You mean like...

[Tubal-Cain]

The Republicans now have a torture advocate and a creationist Nazi-sympathizing theocrat on their ticket for November.

[citation needed]

Are we in some kind a time loop / time DILATION...

[Joe The Dragon]

Are we in some kind a time loop / time DILATION FIELD. If we are we should use the ZPM powering it for other stuff.

Re:Bubble?

[explosivejared]

Dude, don't worry God will just be there with a 700 quadrillion ton slab of dark matter to bail... I mean patch the hole right up.

I concur and have the following questions.

[scubamage]

I like this theory. My questions are, if our known universe is a bubble/globule of matter floating in a larger void...

1. Where are the other globules?
2. What happens if we hit one?
3. Where did the globules originate?
4. Is that larger void a super-large globule itself inside a still larger void? If so, see questions 1-4.

The anthropic cop-out

[tepples]

Except if such specialties make our sentient life possible (or much more probable).

That's called the anthropic principle, and Wikipedia's article cites criticisms by several philosophers of science who call it a cop-out.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[Anonymous Coward]

It's perfectly reasonable to think that, if sentient life requires unusual circumstances, then we will find ourselves in unusual circumstances.

It's already the case that we're in a rather odd location. Pick a random point in the universe. Does it happen to be on the surface of a planet? Of course not.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[caramelcarrot]

It's not really a cop out if you can actually give the statistically biasing action. It is a bit of a cop out to just say "specialties make our sentient life possible (or much more probable)" but if you can quantify this, then it would be possible to quantify the experimental bias. The anthropic principle is a lot more rigorous than people give it credit for. Of course rare events are always possible, too.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[knavel]

Nonetheless, it's a somewhat plausible theory that warrants investigation before being disregarded completely.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[corbettw]

I've always preferred the misanthropic principle, myself. "We see the universe the way we do because people are idiots."

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[Anonymous Coward]

Philosophy is just jealous of its little brother science that went on to bigger and better things while philosophy is still trying to shake off post-modernism.

Science = Planes, trains and automobiles, semiconductors and superconductors, quantum mechanics and nuclear fusion...

Philosophy = Thousands of years spinning its wheels and still no consensus of what truth is and still dealing with misleading concepts like "qualia".

I think many philosophers are bitter because they aren't really the center of attention anymore. Philosophers these days seem more interested in pooh-poohing everyone else's lack of subtlety. Unfortunately, after people become so entrenched in technology, questioning the philosophical basis behind such technology seems absurd and reeks of solipsism.

Btw, I'm still waiting for someone to explain the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing nature.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It's not really a cop out if you can actually give the statistically biasing action.

Since they can't actually give that (whatever it is) as our universe and everything in it is only a single data point, it's a cop out.

The anthropic principle is a lot more rigorous than people give it credit for.

No, in fact, it's just the opposite. The anthropic principle is far, far, far less rigorous than our soceity is collectively giving it credit for. It represents an objective low point in the progress of science over the last 300 years. I am not being hyperbolic. Never since the days of Newton, or even before then, have so many "eminent" scientists seriously proposed so much philosophical arguments and circular logic as valid science.

The reality is that fundamental (I say fundamental mind) theoretical physics has made absolutely no progress whatsoever in the last 40 years!! Our theoretical scientific community is collectively demoralized, burned out and beaten. Rather than admit this, they have resorted to fantastic theory after fantastic theory in an effort to maintain their position as the leaders of societies great leap forward.

That the last ~20 years of this period has coincided with the rise of religious and fundamentalist thinking, is no coincidence. Society has sensed that fundamental science has made no progress, and people have collectively turned back to old ideologies, religions and subjective schools of thought. At this point, some scientists have simply stopped trying and have joined them.

I was skeptical of a great deal of modern theories the first time I ever read a modern popular science book. Initially, I was prepared to give the theoretical scientific community the benefit of the doubt on some of its more dubious proposals. But as time has gone by, and line after line has been crossed, I for one have had enough.

The anthropic principle was not, is not and never will be a scientific theory. Is is a pseudo-spiritual argument born from the minds of people raised in an Abrahamic culture, who after countless personal failures have lost confidence in their scientific methods, and who now simply have reverted to the worldview inculcated in them all those years ago. There is far more Genesis than analysis in their arguments.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[moderatorrater]

Statistics require multiple data points. Statistics based on one data point are called "anecdotes" or, more simply, "bullshit". We have investigated one planet very well, one planet very little, and a handful of others we've looked at from a very long distance. We can't rule out the existence of life in our own solar system, and there are billions of those in just our galaxy. Statistically speaking, there's no way in hell that we can even begin to do the math required to figure out if the anthropic principle is skewing our understanding of the universe. It's like saying that the cosmological constants are finely tuned to life, and that if they changed a little bit life would be impossible. BULLSHIT. We know for a fact that life on earth has found a way to live almost anywhere on the planet, be it the arctic or just outside volcanic vents. For all we know, life has found a way to evolve in any circumstance, be it the matter orbiting black holes or in universes where light travels at 1 meter/hr and gravity is many times weaker than it is here. The anthropic principle is a way to look at the vastness of the knowledge that we don't have about the universe and make sense of it by saying, "Well, I think we're special, don't you guys?" "Oh yeah, my mom calls me special all the time." "What do you say we turn that into a theory and call it a night?"

The only thing the anthropic principle tells us is that we can't use ourselves as a valid data point. It doesn't tell us anything more or less than that.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[Ultimate Statement]

The unusual circumstance is that we are indeed in a time-bubble. We live in an alternate time, and it is coming to an end (Jesus explained it as the end of TIMES, he new there was more than one time).
Think about this situation as an spiral moving upward (the real time) and another one, which finally blends in (the alternate time), and I guess you know when that date is. It pleases me how science confirms this information, and others, time after time.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[thasmudyan]

I may be wrong, but isn't the term anthropic principle essentially the opposite of what you're describing? IMHO the anthropic principle just states that there is nothing special about our particular environment beyond the fact that we happen to live here and there is not much else that we have experience with?

Sadly, religious nutjobs have completely turned around what was once an important scientific reasoning tool that existed to make sure our observations of nature are not biased towards human existence.

The anthropic principle is the mother of all cause-and-effect observations. The obvious cause here is that we live in a certain environment with a certain set of rules and random environmental factors, as a consequence of this, we have turned out the way we are now - including our way of interpreting the world around us. Now religious people, for whatever fucked-up reason, believe our environment was actually created by someone just for us to live in, and that the purpose of our universe is to support human life - thereby turning common sense on its head by confusing cause and effect.

Re:The anthropic cop-out

[thasmudyan]

In summary, just because we observe a universe of nature X doesn't mean our existence depends on X.

You're right of course, and the reason the anthropic principle got trapped in this pretentious and totalitarian implication about what our existence seemingly depends on is, because it got mutilated by "spiritual" pseudo philosophers in an effort to make themselves seem relevant, when in fact those particular questions should have been directed towards biologists in the first place.

But to expand on the problem of logic and religion, because I believe you have hit a broader theme here: religion's job description is to defy logic and scientific understanding. I postulate that for each and every scientific theory conceivable, an unlimited number of unprovable twisted religious explanations can be conjured up. This works basically by defining supernatural influence as whatever areas are poorly understood by the people at the time. Whenever the horizon of scientific understanding is updated, religious people have the option of either rejecting the new findings or updating the nature of god to reflect the new border beyond which there be dragons. And you'll find both things happening in real societies as a reaction to scientific progress all the time.

Re:Say what?

[tibman]

One of my Favorite episodes from all the Star Treks. Best part was that the time bubble around the planet prevented the inhabitants from communicating or interacting with the galaxy, their SETI program was ultimately a failure and they didn't understand why.

Year of Hell

[vecctor]

This is the two-parter you mean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_Hell :)

Dark Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitol Hill region of space. That is one ultra dense region of hot air

Actually, that particular region of the universe consists of dark matter. It's an enormous pile of it, brown in color, steaming and giving off fetid odors that would knock a buzzard off a shit-wagon*. The region is full of it and amazingly, endless numbers of primitive little life-forms actually burrow themselves into it and suck nutrition from it.

* We miss you, George.

"Average" is Not Normal

[Tablizer]

But the chance of being in a spot that is a perfect representation of the average is rather small. The chances of being in a spot of above-average density and a spot with below-average density may even be greater than being in an average spot. This is of course unless the spot is significantly below or above he average.

It's also possible that intelligence life is more likely to evolve in sparser areas. Dense areas may offer too much chaos for advanced life (multicellular) to take hold. Some speculate that dense space is the best place for life to get started but sparser areas are better for the long-term evolution needed for intelligent life. A dense area of space is more likely to be blasted by a central-galaxy black-hole jet or a supernova magnetically-focused gamma beam; which would fry all the mammals.

Management

[JayAitch]

Always thought it was upper management that lived in a bubble.

Re:Bubble?

[Praedon]

Why does the first thing that comes to mind after reading just this headline, make me think of that one episode on Star Trek Voyager, when Voyager got caught in that planets atmosphere/space-time bubble and time on that planet was accelerating at like almost a week for every second on voyager... and then the civilization finally learned space travel and went up to voyager, and learned about all the time acceleration... Kinda screwed up if this is all true. :P

Maybe it's a warp bubble...

[UseTheSource]

Dr. Crusher: "If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"

...

Dr. Crusher: "Here's a question you shouldn't be able to answer: Computer, what is the nature of the universe?"
Computer: "The universe is a spheroid region seven hundred and five meters in diameter."

Sparse bubble more special than "normal" matter?

[Keramos]

As mentioned in the article:

One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special. ... "This idea that we live in a void would really be a statement that we live in a special place,"

Hold on a second...

Current thinking is that 74 percent of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark energy, with another 21 percent being dark matter, and normal matter comprising the remaining 5 percent.

So, being part of the 5 percent of "normal" matter isn't living in a "special place"?

Obvious Answer

[gbutler69]

It's globules all the way down!

Just admit you don't know.

[cjhanson]

It amazes me that as a whole our society is ready to jump on board with any theory that seems to help us understand our place in the universe. The Copernicus theorem is, IMHO, the best addition to scientific process. Ever. We are not special.

As for the content of this story, I mean, come on. I think it is silly that scientist continually feel the need to come up with a "reasons" which bridge the gaps between observable and more importantly, testable and reproducible conclusions. Dark Matter. UH-huh. Oh, no, wait.. wait.. space-time bubble! Yeah, that's it! How about we decide to leave the unknowns as unknowns and instead of spending time and resources coming up with viable possibilities to explain the unknowns, we spend that time discerning the actual, factual answers.

If we keep coming up with "viable possibilities" then all we are really doing is

1. Preventing the lemmings from running around in a crazed frenzy
2. Blurring the path to a better understanding with misleading information

The heart of my point.. the same thing happening to cosmology happened to the theory of electricity a long time ago.. and now we have generations of people who were taught to understand electricity in way that does not promote it's true nature. Same with light. How about instead of teaching our children something that is inherently wrong, we teach them what we do know, and admit that there are aspects we don't understand. At least then they (we) might have a chance to develop useful mindsets and contribute to respective solutions and explanations rather than taking away from them by filling people's head with misleading information.

Re:Just admit you don't know.

[cjhanson]

I did not imply, or rather, was not trying to imply we need to teach this to the children. It was more about the fact that publishing guesses as "leading edge theories" is just bad. It wouldn't be so terrible if it weren't for human nature to loose parts of the message along the way and then before you know it, it is in the text books. I am saying that this practice is clouding the facts and not adding any value to the already steep task of passing on knowledge to the next generation. More importantly, and more to my point, passing on the ability for the next generation to help solve these problems.

Case, point: If we used to teach children that "we kinda think the earth is flat but have no evidence" then there is a STRONG likelihood that this notion would have been dispatch a long time ago. Instead, it was publish to the world as fact, and as such, there are still people who think the world is flat and won't accept any evidence to the contrary, because that is what they where taught in school.

Re:Bubble?

[MightyYar]

Why does the first thing that comes to mind after reading just this headline, make me think of that one episode on Star Trek Voyager

Wow, our minds just totally work differently. I thought of J-Lo's ass.

Drink beer!

[Chemisor]

> what can we do with this new knowledge other than escape the bubble to realize our true freedom?

We can finally say that beer is the true meaning of the universe. This finding confirms what beer drinkers around the world have suspected for years: our universe is just a bubble in a giant glass of beer! In the beginning, the beer was flat. Then suddenly the bottle was opened, and the lowered pressure lowered carbon dioxide's solubility and enabled creation of bubbles. As the primordial beer gas accumulated in our bubble, gravity appeared (the surrounding universe is made of light beer, which does not bend space as much as the regular beer) and caused the carbon dioxide to coalesce into stars and planets, and eventually into people. Our bubble is expanding now, and floating upward in the glass. Eventually it will reach the top and become a part of the giant cosmic head, at which point we shall all be judged for our actions and be doomed to either sink back in the glass, or to fly up into the cosmos with the angels. Yup, dude, this is some heavy stuff! But don't worry, the more beer you drink, the better you understand it!

Our region of space has less mass......

[onkelonkel]

but compensates for it by having more stupid.

Re:Are we in some kind a time loop / time DILATION

[corbettw]

Are we in some kind a time loop / time DILATION FIELD. If we are we should use the ZPM powering it for other stuff.

Yes, and then put our hands on our hips and do the pelvic thrust.

Connecting ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

It can sounds weird, but I've already thought about that. From relativity theories and connecting it to the third law of motion, action-reaction, and energy conservation laws.

Imagine the following: a huge amount of mass and/or energy increases the density of space-time, creating acceleration known to us as gravity. In fact a bend in space-time tissue attracting everything around, like a curved depression in a surface.

If we think in the conservation of energy in a system (and think the close universe as a closed system), this increase of density at some point should cause a deacrease somewhere, so we keep the total amount of space-time constant for this close system. Think of it as a compensation. Think on this as we strech a bubble gum, some areas get thiker, others thinner, but the total amount of gum is the same.

As increase of space-time density creates attraction (gravity), a decrease should create repulsion ("anti-gravity").

Thinking again into the curved depression, close to matter and energy, far from it we should find peaks in the surface, repelling matter.

In fact, I believe we can find these gravity bubbles surrounding some more gravitational systems, like galaxies, blackholes, and solar systems.

And more! Think about huge amounts of mass moving, like planets, stars and blackholes. The movement os these bodies would create a space-time wave effect surrounding them, which we could connect to the Doppler effect later, for even more weird effects. We already know about these interference from spinning planets, stars and blackholes.

Which make thinks even more diffcult, because relatvity should need to be adapted to include these interferences of anty-gravity if they become true, specially for interstelar long distances.

How old is the Universe?

[spaceman375]

Depends on where you are. Sciencedaily had a story about a year ago (can't find it now; can you?) about some folks involved with WIMP who had found mega-galactic voids and calculated that time ran fast enough inside a really big one that the universe was 18 Billion years old near the middle while it's only 13 and change around here.

So if time moves faster, how long does it take to cross one? Is it bigger inside than outside?

Re:Management Would it SUCK or...

[Hognoxious]

Would it BLOW if someone burst our bubble?

I don't know, but it'll probably cost a lot more than 700 billion dollars to bail the universe out.

The alleged cop-out that is Wikipedia

[tepples]

To make even more of an impact, though, try linking to a reputable source.

By linking to a Wikipedia article, I linked to all the reliable sources that the Wikipedia article cited. Do you complain that they are not reliable sources, or do you claim that the Wikipedia article misrepresents the sources?

Re:Bubble?

[Xonstantine]

Why does the first thing that comes to mind after reading just this headline, make me think of that one episode on Star Trek Voyager

Because you are a nerd.

Re:Questions for Physicists

[marcello_dl]

I don't exactly like the way you formulated the question, but that rings a bell... occam's razor would suggest that if we have to postulate we are in a peculiar place, chances are that our models are flawed to begin with.
"Precession of the perihelion of Mercury" all over again?