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Was There Only One Big Bang?
goldaryn writes "Physorg.com is running an interesting story about the work of Oxford-based theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. Penrose has been studying CWB radiation and believes it's possible that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of 'aeons.' He believes that he has found evidence supporting his theory that the universe infinitely cycles."
...and its still lost the plot.
This is hardly a new idea... My understanding was that it had been proven to be impossible to see any detailed information about the previous universe, as the big bang effectively destroyed almost all information about it.
Pretty old theory, that gave rose to various philosophical question, like if it is recurring, is the outcome always the same, or different every time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
Indians first came this theory to light, Nietzsche spend quite sometime thinking about this, Kundera wrote a book around it: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I proposed the same idea while visiting CERN with a student group when I was 17. My reasoning involved the anthropic principle, since the time between big crunches and big bangs could approach infinity. I was told me my idea was as good as theirs'.
Now I think that space may be infinite and that vacuum may fluctuate in places with no matter to such a degree that time slows down from the presence of so much mass. My generalization is that if stuff isn't expressively disallowed, they are true and there is a real world example of it.
All rites reversed 2010
There is a BBC Horizon episode up on youtube called What Happened Before the Big Bang. Interviews with several physicists about different ideas on the topic of what might have preceded our universe.
The Long Now Foundation
It's turtles all the way down
Some of his theories seems to be too believe based, such as the Quantum Consioucness and his view of the existence of universe with purpose. Is this one of those also?
no to big-bang-centricity ! your universe is not the center of the multiverse !
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
It would make sense, given that all its sub structures behave in that way. The universe as one huge-ass string.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I don't understand. I thought the consensus between scientists was that the universe is expanding indefinitely, and that there won't be a big crunch ?
My brother is an astrophysicist. The way he explained it to me is thus (and I believe this is pretty accurate, but dumbed down for the non-physicist in me):
There's a variable in the calculations that determine what happens in between "Big Bangs".
If the variable is less than 1, then the universe contracts to a point, and then explodes again, forever exploding and then crunching.
If the variable is more than 1, then the universe expands forever, getting cooler and cooler and never shrinks back even when there's a billion billion light years between the nearest two particles.
If the variable is exactly 1, then the universe expands to a point and stops expanding, staying at that size / temperature forever.
All current measurements put that variable at 1. With an error margin of about 5.
To me, that just about sums up human understanding of the universe perfectly (i.e. the amount of a potentially-infinite space-time entity - of which we inhabit precisely nothing - that can be understood by a short-lived squelchy collection of cells, most of which are dedicated to staying alive for a handful of decades, and that would fit into a small handbag).
Isn't the whole big-bang, absolute beginning thing mainly rooted it Judeo-Christian belief?
It's never sat well with me since it violates the laws of thermodynamics -- you don't get something from nothing.
... next Slashdot will tell me that the universe has AIDS, and that whoever has been banging the univerise has AIDS now too.
I'm looking at you, God! Couldn't you have created a pair of pants to wear on the eighth day, to keep you out of trouble?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
...and boy are it's legs tired.
Isn't time just infinite cycles?
I don't understand his point. Time itself is just the measurement of infinite change in states. The universe is infinite because it expands as we measure it, just like Pi.
It could just as well be multiple universes. The thing that triggers a big bang could be a certain mass in a black hole. That is, when enough of our know universe accumulates in a black hole, boom headshot! Could just as well happen all over in places we havent seen or that are just to far away.
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The candles burn out for you; I am free.
... it was rather dumbed down with lots of silly graphics and other dicking about from the guy in the editing suite, shots of people walking backwards and forwards and a narrator asking loads of questions that the program didn't really give the interviewees enough time to answer properly. And when they did it was obvious they'd been told to keep it simple. Which was a shame , it had great potential but there seems to be a line of thought in British TV at the moment , not just the BBC, that people just can't handle difficult science in more than 30 second dollops before the viewing needs a break. Thank heavens for TED.
No, there were 42, silly.
http://xkcd.com/505/ "A Bunch of Rocks"
It may even be that "our" big bang and "our" universe is one of many in the great infiniteness of the.. universe. Just like there are more planets, more solar systems, more galaxies other than our own. Just like cells in the human body, and atoms within the cells...
Time is irrelevant unless measured, eg by a human. So this pulse may be as normal as any pulsating object, large or small.
The mind wanders..
Waiting for you by the bridge
no to big-bang-centricity ! your universe is not the center of the multiverse !
You bastard! You're trying to make us humans even more insignificant than we already are??
We already admitted that Europe isn't the center of the world.
We already admitted that the world isn't the center of the solar system/universe
We already admitted that the sun isn't the center of the galaxy
We already admitted that our galaxy isn't the center of the universe
You're trying to make us admit that even our universe isn't the center of the multiverses?
Damn you!
...scientists discover faint traces of music using the latest telescope technologies. In a reaction, one of the scientists who discovered the phenomena explained: 'It is strange, but somehow a distant background soundwave, transported from the beginning of the big bang into the now, appears to be omnipresent in our universe.'
After further research, the soundwave was found to actually be a song, namely "I got you babe" from Sonny&Cher.
Additionally, the scientists discover that the universe must have started at 5:59am, approximately. It is unclear what this discovery means.
In other news, Bill Murray said some of his repetoire is based on true facts, although he did not explain which of that.
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The Doctor already did it last season.
rewriting history since 2109
There has never been a beginning and there will never be an end of "time" or the universe itself. What is the problem about that? It seems logical. If you HAVE a beginning, what was before that? And so on, and so on.....
So if several Black Holes can co-exist - why not several Big-Bangs?
When looking at the jets BackHoles and other cosmic entities emit - I ask myself if this jet at its exit point looks just like after a BigBang?
If some cosmic theories postulate that gravity gets weaker and weaker - maybe that is the trigger which makes the mass concentrations in Black-Holes decide that it is time to leave the nest *g*
and Bang again Big?
This would also make the Event Horizon spread out farther and farther - wouldn't it?
"the theorie of Black Holes gave the idea to the BigBang theory - they just applied time-reversal!."
No 'they' didn't. Black holes are based on inhomogeneous solutions to Einstein's equations -- the first being the Schwarzschild solution describing a spherical, uncharged body embedded in flat spacetime, with Reisser-Nordstrom, Kerr and Kerr-Newman adding in electromagnetic fields, rotation and then both respectively.
Cosmology is based on Friedman-LeMaitre-Robertson-Walker solutions, which impose maximal symmetry on spatial surfaces of constant time. You might be interested to note that no black hole solution can be maximally-symmetric since only three surfaces are -- normal flat space, a (hyper)sphere and a (hyper)saddle.
There really isn't much connection. "Reversing" time on a black hole solution (which happen when you take, for example, a Schwarzschild solution and allow it to exist all the way to the centre of the system instead of cutting it off with a stellar surface partway down, which is what happens in the solar system) gives you a white hole.
So that's the message Destiny is looking for in StarGate Universe - Galactus wuz here.
There's a restaurant, too, isn't there.
Hindu (Indian) scriptures already say that world ends and starts again after every 4320000 years.
This process is repeated again and again, forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology
the white hole sounds plausible to me.
Any comment on the assumption that gravity gets weaker and my imagination of the consequences of such an event?
Sir Roger Penrose is one of the more prominent living physicists. Penrose tilings were named after him (in a nutshell, they generate infinitely complex mosaics with only a few tile types). These tilings later came up in quasicrystals. He also invented twistor theory in the 60's, which is another way to view spacetime. Ed Witten of string theory/M-theory fame--perhaps the second most famous living physicist behind Hawking (my opinion)--applied twistor theory to string theory in 2003. Penrose has controversial views on human consciousness and has suggested our brains must work by a quantum mechanical process. He's written several books on the subject including The Emporer's New Mind . He won the Dirac Medal and Prize in 1989 (Hawking won in 1987; Witten won a similarly-named award in 1985) and has won a laundry list of other awards for theoretical physics. He was knighted in 1994 for his contributions to physics, is an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford, and is 79.
do we get to live continuously then????
I think you got this CWB thing completely upside down.
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Professors Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok (the later now the head of the Perimieter Instititute here in Waterloo, Ontario and a former student of Hawking) have postulated this theory as well. In their book, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, they provide a simple and extremely elegant theory that explains how this happens, and more importantly, that their endless, cycling universe theory is the best way to explain away all of the fudges and math fixes needed to explain traditional Big Bang theory. If we need to have hacks and fudges in the standard inflationary Big Bang theory, and we do, then it's probably wrong. Turok and Steinhardt's theory will, within a decade, have the necessary experimental evidence to be shown right or wrong so we'll soon know. The elegance of their theory, despite its reliance on some string theory that has yet to be experimentally demonstrated, is that it explains all of our observational evidence, without additions or fudges, as well as tying in our fundemental knowledge of things like conservation of energy, etc. I, for one, welcome our balloon-like universe overlords.
DaveyJJ
Gravity getting "weaker" is probably referring to a scale-dependent Newton constant (or however else they've phrased the strength of gravity). Something like Horava-Lifshitz gravity is perhaps worth a look if you're interested in things like that and can find a popular-level thing on it (I think I read a survey of Horava-Lifshitz gravity on the New Scientist website a month or two back which was OK if a bit... undercited, shall we say). That's basically a theory of gravity that modifies the Newton constant on very small scales to make it easier to link with the other three forces. Failing that you could hunt out things on "Brans-Dicke" gravity, or "Scalar/Tensor" gravity, which are effectively theories with a *space*-dependent (rather than scale-dependent) Newton constant.
Easy reading on FLRW cosmology? Hmmm. For whatever flaws he might have, Sean Carroll's a very good communicator. http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/cosmologyprimer/index.html is worth a look. (He might not use the words "FLRW" anywhere in it, which if so proves he's smarter than me when he's talking with non-specialists...)
"Suppose you spill a cup of coffee over the blanket: its now tainted".
Since you are talking about the universe, the above statement would imply that something outside of it is having an effect, which is by definition not possible. Likewise the "stain" would seem to imply that some matter would or could be differentiated at some fundamental level from other matter as part of the process. This seems to make any mathematical model of the universe an intractable potentially infinite number of "unique" terms with special properties, and hence probably outside of experimental science to establish.
But don't listen to me. I tried to read Penrose's book the Road to Reality, but I had to give up after a couple of hundred pages. The math curve got too steep for me and I couldn't tell if I understood what I was reading. I've had to lock myself in a math library ever since. Kind of like being trapped in a black hole of increasing density and no chance to escape.
I think the reason why some people thing there was another big bang is because some of the same actors appeared in a different series, but it wasn't big bang, is was Roseanne.
rewriting history since 2109
Buddhist cosmology isn't really "religious"; whether it is true or not has little bearing on whether you're a Buddhist. The cyclic model in Buddhist cosmology simply makes sense and avoids issues of first causes and the end of time.
In contrast, Christian cosmology is used to justify Christianity: if Christian cosmology is wrong, the whole theological edifice of Christianity comes crashing down. Christian cosmology also fails to address the question of where God comes from.
I have a problem with Penrose's hypothesis - maybe someone can clarify.
[Note IANAastrophysicist - so this may display blatant misunderstanding]
If the Universe goes through cycles of: ...
Big Bang-->Lots of matter (baryonic particles)-->No matter, just energy (photons) --> BB -->
then this suggests that space was not created at BB only matter - so universe is spatially infinite but matter expands into it following BB and then breaks down (eventually) and then we have a big-bang event again and the cycle repeats.
I thought one essential component of traditional big bang theory was that both space and time were created at the big bang. [I have no problem with the time creation - as time is a function of mass. i.e. no mass => no time]. But how do we get rid of all the space in time for the next BB??
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
Mark Edwards
nor a physicist, nor a mathematician, nor a scientist of any sort. In fact, I don't even have a university degree. I have an avid interest in science of all kinds though. I've read books on both cosmology and quantum mechanics over the years. Sometimes (often) a good bit of the math is beyond my expertise and training, but, I feel like I get the jist of it. Can you recommend any books someone like me should read to get a better understanding of the current cononundrums in Cosmology. Thanks in advance.
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable."
The Penguin Producer
The Universe is just breathing.
... Night of Brahma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Brahma
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson, dated 1970, is based on the concept of a cyclical universe. The crew and passengers of an interstellar spacecraft find themselves in a situation where they have no option but to keep accelerating. In so doing, due to relativistic time dilation, the outside universe expands over billions of years, and eventually starts contracting again into 'the monobloc', containing almost all the matter and energy in the universe. Skillful piloting allows our heroes to successfully navigate to the next universe, where they set course for a young-earth-equivalent.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
According to the theory the all of the mass-energy of the universe has already occupied a space no larger than a beach ball. If it were possible for gravity to recompress everything back down through a singularity, it would have done so then.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Are we looking at the rings from the centre of these concentric rings? I couldn't find that in the article. If so, there may be something very wrong with his theory. While it could be possible, I doubt chance would put us there.
I gave a talk on this for students at my school recently. Penrose has a popular-level book out on the topic, which came out a few months before the publication of this claimed observation. The paper describing the observation is here. Here is a talk Penrose gave at Cambridge in 2005 on the topic.
If this is right, then it's certainly a huge discovery. There are at least two pretty big problems, however.
(1) Penrose's model requires some mechanism by which 100% of the massive particles in the universe get recycled into photons or other massless radiation. Black holes can do a lot of this, but there will inevitably be a few lonely hydrogen molecules that never fall into a black hole. Therefore one of the predictions of the model is that there is some novel particle physics going on. In the video of the 2005 talk, you can see that he posits the existence of charged particles lighter than an electron. Various particle physicists pointed out to him that this really isn't possible. (E.g., low-energy photons would interact with matter by pair production, and we observe that that doesn't happen.) By the time he published the popular book, he'd change this to a prediction that all massive particles simply lose their rest mass very, very slowly. This is disappointing, because it means he's stepped back from making testable predictions. "Very, very slowly" can be as slowly as you like, i.e., too slowly to measure, and therefore this aspect of the theory isn't falsifiable.
(2) The other problem is that it's not clear whether the claimed circular patterns are real. Penrose's co-author, the experimentalist on the new paper, is Gurzadyan. Gurzadyan got the WMAP and Boomerang collaborations to give him data. He is not part of those collaborations, but he has a ton of papers on CMB on arxiv, seems to be a heavy hitter in the field. The thing that makes me cautious is that the WMAP and Boomerang collaborations have not jumped on the bandwagon. If they really believed the statistical significance of the result, presumably they'd want their names on this extremely exciting result. Penrose's book also describes a grad student who worked on searching for such patterns in the data, and the book makes it sound like that search was inconclusive. If that grad student (and his advisor) believed in the patterns presently being claimed by Gurzadyan and Penrose, then there's no way in hell that this paper would go out without the grad student's name on them as a co-author; he definitely contributed to the work, and if he believed in the result, his name would be on there.
Find free books.
Sometime in the very near future (relatively) we are all wiped out by a rock.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
arXiv article by Penrose:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706
Comment from Lee Smolin in a Nature review of coming Penrose book on the topic:
No living physicist has yet made a discovery as great as those of Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, but Roger Penrose is in a better position to do so than most.
Further sample of Smolin's review in Nature:
We should pay attention because Penrose has repeatedly been far ahead of his time. The most influential person to develop the general theory of relativity since Einstein, Penrose established the generalized behaviour of space-time geometry, pushing that theory beyond special cases. Our current understanding of black holes, singularities and gravitational radiation is built with his tools.
His work in the 1960s on quantum gravity has borne dramatic fruit within the past five years. Penrose introduced two influential concepts: spin networks, which in 1988 seeded an approach called loop quantum gravity; and twistor theory, a recasting of space-time geometry that has generated a recent breakthrough in our understanding of gauge theories, the basic ingredients of the standard model of particle physics.
Penrose pulls one more trick out of his hat: the insight that physics in both the early and late regimes is insensitive to scale. Briefly, this is because massless particles move at the speed of light, at which point time stands still for them. Because there is no clock ticking, there is no reference against which they can measure a scale of length or time.
So if the only difference between the very early and late Universe is scale, and physics in both of these extremes is insensitive to changes of scale, then it is possible that our early Universe is the late Universe of a previous era. This is Penrose's big idea: deliciously absurd, but just possibly true. Moreover, it doesn't matter if such a transition took an eternity — photons are insensitive to the passage of time.
Penrose's concept joins several other proposals, such as loop quantum cosmology, that replace the Big Bang singularity and allow time to run before the Big Bang occurred, suggesting our Universe is the progeny of a previous one. Other ingenious mechanisms for making the history of the Universe cyclic — so that it repeatedly swells and contracts — have been proposed by physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok and their colleagues. But these exotic proposals involve theories of quantum gravity, which Penrose has no need for in his hypothesis.
Mamma don't leave - don't go Don't run - don't hide - don't cry Don't ever feel scared now Mamma just crossed just crossed To the parallel world She crossed she crossed to the multiverse Circling protons - all vibrations Circling neutrons - all vibrations Mamma just crossed just crossed to the parallel world She crossed she crossed to the multiverse And now you're lying there - taking your last breath I'm holding back the tears - Oh mamma don't die
I see what you did there. Very clever. Actually reading the article and summarizing it rather than telling the GP to RTFA, thus avoiding a backlash from GP, and the attendant waste of time flame war, while promoting useful discussion. Nice work. This merits a stamp of approval.
OK
I posted it here last time it happened... The next go around I plan on posting something profound.
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"the universe infinitely cycles."
That's what Kauko Nieminen has been saying over 20 years now.
"The nearest future is also the furthest past"
I always liked the Kevin Spacey quote from the end of K-PAX:
Prot: I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
If I remember correctly, theories developed something like this:
- Einstein: general relativity (GR)
- Schwarzschild: apply GR to stars, and the internals of stars
- ?? (top of my head: Schwarzschild again): apply GR to evolution (moving time forward) of very heavy star, resulting in black hole
In the beginning, these results were rather contested (Einstein famously rejected this solution of GR).
Eventually, these got accepted... and someone had the bright notion of applying this evolution (i.e. moving time forward) in reverse to the universe to see what happened at the beginning.
That's roughly what I recall top of my head, without looking at any pop sci or websites.
If I remember correctly, the GP has a point: Big Bang theory borrowed the idea of calculating the evolution of a system according to GR from black hole theory.
They just didn't apply it to a black hole.
Caveat: I might be wrong.
"Big Bang theory borrowed the idea of calculating the evolution of a system according to GR from black hole theory."
That may even be true - I'm not sure. But what's actually done is very different; at most, the motivation of looking at the evolution of a system with GR would be there. And that I'm seriously unconvinced by but I'm happy to be proven wrong. The thing is that the actual solutions bear no real resemblance to one-another. Schwarzschild is an isotropic but inhomogeneous, spherically-symmetric solution. FLRW is an isotropic and homogeneous solution. That makes an enormous difference. (Totally off-topic but McVittie metrics, amongst others, are exact solutions which are Schwarzschild embedded in FLRW.)
So yeah, the motivation for Friedman, or Lemaitre, or Robertson and Walker, might have been from looking at people modelling the formation of black holes. I've never heard that but it doesn't mean it's not true. Obviously. Even my ego isn't *that* big...
...and all of this will happen again. So say we all.
Now if there's data to support that? COOL!
--
Toro
Sorry, can't remember clearly. It was a long time ago, and I was drunk and there were many women at the party. So it would safe to assume that a lot of banging must have happened and many of them must have been big bangs. Again, sorry can't remember clearly.
I came up with a similar theory myself nearly 10 years ago, and I have my books to prove it...
That aside, I'm sure I've seen other sources with the same idea between that time and now.
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A group of planets is a solar system
... well everything from a single cosmic event is a universe.
A massive number of stars in a given structure is a galaxy.
A massive number of
I'm sick of gravitational theorists trying to suggest that while math says that a ray is a line drawn from a single point to an infinite distance in a single given direction. Though they say, when you reach the edge of the field of the universe, that no longer applies.
It seems logical that once you exceed the boundaries of our universe, there must be more space. In that space, our universe is just a speck of dust. I find it hard to believe that if 1 big bang occurred, there can't be an infinite number of other "big bangs" which have and ARE occurring. Given the scale of infinity, they can be happening multiple times a second. That's the great part of infinity, things are so damn big, that things like that are possible.
So, instead of talking about our universe like it's the only one out there, let's talk about other universes that ARE out there now. While I hate the abuse of Occam's Razor, I will misuse it now myself in the given context. The simpler theory to choke down is that in an infinite amount of space, it is likely that there is an infinite number of similar occurrences. In an infinite period of time, it is likely that there has been and will be an infinite number of similar occurrences within a given space.
Detailing the events during those other occurrences is likely impossible for the exact reason you mentioned which is the lack of ability to observe it.
no talking from your ass for 3 months.
if it doesnt work, im going to prescribe you a longer one.
Read radical news here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_creation_myth Lets try to see if the timescales match...
I've been saying this for over a decade... Though my logic was simply - if all stars eventually die, and black holes eventually suck up anything and everything, wouldn't that create a zero-point mass that wold simply have to give?
Refer to the second law of thermodynamics.
ouroboros?