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2011 Nobel Prize In Physics
brindafella writes "Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. The two teams have now been recognized with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Half of the prize will go to Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project. The other half will be shared by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who led the High-z Supernova Search Team, and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on High-z. In essence, they proved that Einstein's 'biggest mistake' (the cosmological constant, to create a 'stable universe') was actually a clever theoretical prediction that there was something else happening — dark energy."
Not only are the galaxies going to fly apart but our solar system, the planets, our bodies, our cells and ultimately even our atoms (and subatomic particles!). I think only photons or other massless particles will be spared. :(
I know the Nobel committee said the Universe will end in Ice not Fire but it seems more like a great empty VOID.
So... is there a way to harness this "dark energy"? Like attaching a rope between two objects (planets?) and let the universe try to pull it apart? Or would the rope have to be massless? Or maybe there is a more direct way of harnessing this energy? (anti-gravity?)
IAVONAP (I am very obviously not a physicist).
Out of curiosity, assuming that CERN in fact broke the light speed barrier, how does that effect things like the dark energy equations, if it effects them at all?
The human population grows exponentially, which the universe apparently may do too. If we will build spacecrafts capable of intergalactic traveling, will we fit, eventually?
If space does not accelerate fast enough, probably not.
Dark energy is the name of a problem, not a solution. It's embarrassing that 75% of the universe is made up of we-have-no-idea-what.
I get that this is the Nobel prize - but these people appear to have already accomplished something. Indeed, the noteworthy achievement for which they are receiving the prize is over a decade in the past. I thought the Nobel prize was awarded to encourage responsible action? It's a "call to action", not a fuddy duddy pat on the back from the good-old-boys club. Look at the photo at the linked article - three white males. By the way, what the hell is up with "dividing" a Nobel prize like it's some sort of peach pie? Half for one white male, while the other two share the other half? Who comes up with this stuff?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We call it the "Big Bang", but it's not really analogous to a conventional explosion like that. It's not as if the outer perimeter of space is where all the expansion is happening - space itself is expanding. Points in space - stars, planets, galaxies - are moving apart as space expands between them.
#DeleteChrome
Big bang, supernovae, dynamites, I feel a compulsive obsession in the Nobel club.
It seems so often in the scientific world that two teams come to make the same discovery simultaneously. More often than not the next logical step in a field is dictated by the global advancement in that and other fields, and not the individual genius of the author. Many times ideas are ripe for the picking, if you are one of the very smart working on them. Hence the large number of joint discoveries or teams that supplement each other's results despite being in competition.
Completely off-topic, but I can't stop from making a parallel with the patent world. I expect this manner of scientific advancement to translate to technical creations too. The basis of the patent system is that rewarding the author will stimulate creativity. But one cannot wonder how many of really smart inventions wouldn't have been invented anyway, or indeed have been invented simultaneously by someone else when their time had come.
In the extreme, it's clear that a system that devotes a large proportion of the resources of society to reward the inventors in one that stimulates creativity. However that stimulus is not without his costs. The large legal ecosystem surrounding the patent system is a high consumer of those resources dedicated to inventors. Businesses have to devote important resources to ensure that are not infringing, instead of simply strive to create the best product possible. The exclusivity period is an economic disturbance, the large license fee an inventor might require for his revolutionary invention might not be earned if the same invention would have been made anyway in a year or two from the original filling date. The public key cryptography algos come to mind.
Note that I'm talking about smart, revolutionary patents. I think we can agree that the bulk of patents don't fit that category and cost the society more than they bring. Well, I'm upping the ante and question if even the smart patents really cover their costs for society. Because if most of the smart ones would have been discovered anyway in a year or two, maybe we can get rid of the patent system for good. Sure, some smart ones would remain uninvented even after the 20 years period without the stimulus of a financial prize. But I argue they would be few and far between, their opportunity cost much smaller than what we are collectively spending on the patent system.
Even if my understanding of dark matter is the equivalent of the Bohr Atom I can at least make some sort of sense of it. Dark energy OTOH is totally alien and incomprehensible... I mean energy still can't just be created right? If so there must be some reservoir that its being drawn from and if not it seems like lots of our basic ideas about how stuff works must be wrong.
Was reading that 'its expansion is speeding up', but I also read a document from 1972. How can they get a Nobel Prize for old news ? Here is a part of 'Siloism' (first published in Santiago de Chile, 1972). "c) Origin of the Universe. Light converged upon itself and this gave place to the surging of dense energetic and material expressions. This was the stage of the "fall of the light." This provoked the original explosion, and from this centre, radiation and mass of igneous matter expanded at increasing speeds. In this way, what began to take shape as nebulae, galaxies, suns, planets and moons of different systems, continues its acceleration whilst it moves from its original centre, leaving spiralled cycles in its wake. As these bodies move away they begin to return to their origin due to their curved trajectory, whilst they accelerate and approximate the speed of light. Finally, all bodies will end up transforming their matter into radiant energy and this energy will be converted into light. In addition, from every direction of the curved space this light will convex upon one centre in order to produce a new creative explosion. In synthesis: Light is eternal, it is the origin and the end of the Universe. It is of no interest here to study the processes of densification, nor, inversely, those of increasing vibration of matter, anti-matter, and energy. It suffices to say that these are three expressions of the same principle, that each of them can turn into light and vice versa."
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We should just call what we have Ptolemaic Cosmology. We have no idea what the heck is going on. What we know is good enough for the technology we have. Dark matter and dark energy are just our versions of the epicycles. Convent for expressing what we see but no basis in reality.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Once again, October comes and S. L. Wu is sad. And I am therefore happy. (You HEP types know what I'm talking about. Stick it to the Man!)
Dark matter and dark energy are just our versions of the epicycles. Convent for expressing what we see but no basis in reality.
You can only be confident about something like that if you're incredibly impatient, and don't know much about how hard this stuff is. The earliest observational evidence of dark matter came from the 1930s, when Fritz Zwicky measured the line-of-sight velocities of galaxies in clusters and realized that there had to be more mass in clusters than could be attributed to the galaxies alone, or there wouldn't be enough gravity to keep them together as a cluster. It was another 30+ years later that we observed with X-ray telescopes a decent-sized chunk of that missing mass in clusters, in the form of a hot intracluster plasma at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees that fills the space between galaxies in clusters and, in rich clusters of galaxies, contributes several times more mass to the cluster than the galaxies within it. Thirty-plus years, for something that's fairly easy to see once you have the technology that can look there (X-ray telescopes); it took us a while to get it.
All our cosmological theories may turn out to be complete crap. But it's absurd to say so now on the basis of complaints like 'we haven't solved the dark matter problem yet' or 'we can't explain a nonzero vacuum energy.' There was a fair amount of time between Oersted and Maxwell, as well. In the meantime, the most plausible theories will get pursued, and we'll see.
All particles with positive mass go slower than the speed of light.
Particles with zero mass go at the speed of light.
Neutrinos, going faster than c like tachyons have imaginary mass.
Imaginary mass, plugged into gravitational formula which uses mass squared will give repulsion rather than attraction.
If the universe is filled with these neutrinos, it would explain the repulsive force we label as dark energy.
This is derived from a previous comment I made, corrected by a reply.
Saul was heard to mutter "for my $supernova ( @supernovae ) { alarm if q($supernova) 0 }"
It's not that we haven't solved the dark matter problem. It is that we speak of an imaginary construct erected to save an accepted model as if that imaginary construct is real. Saying that we really don't know what is going on is not impatience or fundamental lack of awareness of what scientific knowledge is. It is recognition that the Big Bang explanation has some fundamental challenges and we have to turn to imaginary matter and imaginary energy to continue to cling on. Epicycles actually predicted the apparent motion of planets quite well. It was not until orbital mechanics and elliptical motion were understood that any competing notions could match epicycles. Astronomers could see the fundamental problem of shadows on planets and recognize that epicycles require an imaginary impetus to cause bodies to orbit a moving point in space with no visible indication that anything existed at these points. Our current cosmological model is increasingly supported by imagination.
Gravitaiton doesn't use mass squared, it uses the product of two different masses (at least Newtonian gravitation, GR doesn't directly use mass at all, only energy and momentum). So naively inserting an imaginary mass into Newton's gravitational force for both particles will indeed give repulsion (i.e. two imaginary masses would repulse each other). However putting in one imaginary and one real mass (to find out how tachyons interact with an ordinary mass) would give an imaginary force. I have no idea what that would describe. Dragging particles into an imaginary direction?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's been quite a few years (and I don't know where my copy is at the moment), but I could have sworn that Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time already touched on this. (I could be thinking of another book, but it was definitely more than 13 years ago.)
What we know is good enough for the technology we have.
I'd quite like for us to develop some kind of technology we don't already have.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Imaginary mass, plugged into gravitational formula which uses mass squared will give repulsion rather than attraction.
If you're describing two imaginary masses. If you're describing an imaginary mass interacting with a real mass, you have an imaginary gravitational force. Given that all interactions between dark matter and normal matter would be of this nature, that's kind of a defect in your idea.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Perhaps dark energy is mediated by embrasons. If there was a god, and he was anything like me, the universe would surely have such a particle.
Re: In essence, they proved that Einstein's 'biggest mistake' (the cosmological constant, to create a 'stable universe') was actually a clever theoretical prediction that there was something else happening — dark energy."
Will people please stop repeating the myth that Einstein's cosmological constant was some kind of prediction? It was exactly what Einstein said it was --- a very embarrassing mistake Einstein made trying to prop up his personal "religious-like" belief that the universe was eternal, constant, and unchanging. The fact that we now theorize that "dark energy" is causing the universe to expand at an ever greater rate is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the reason Einstein proposed the cosmological constant -- he proposed it to explain how the universe WASN'T EXPANDING OR CONTRACTING.
And don't get my started on the "butterfly effect" (that a butterfly fluttering in Asia could cause a hurricane in America). Edward Lorenz who proposed it was, like so many scientists, pretty naive about computer programming. All his work showed was that climate models changed dramatically depending on the numeric precision one used to compute the model -- something any decent computer programmer knows all too well nowadays. He misunderstood that to mean a small change could have a large effect. People still repeat that myth too.
Read Penrose's latest book. He seems to think otherwise.
...if the universe is expanding, why don't I ever find a parking place?
Maybe a /.er can explain what's wrong with my theory on this... If space is a vacuum, then isnt mass just trying to spread itself out into space? Like how a water bottle caves in on itself to fill the void of someone sucking the air out of it? Why do we need Dark energy to explain it?
From marperl: Actually a posting from guest blogger tallboy while I'm lost on a Polynesian island:
"Am I the only sentient human being in the universe who's depressed about the Nobel Prize for Physics going to some astronomers who
supposedly proved that the universe that got its start from the Big Bang may expand and expand and expand until everything chills?"
There used to be a competing theory that the universe would expand, slow down, stop and then contract back to a single point only to be reborn with a new Big Bang. I kind of liked that theory because, even if I wasn't going to be around in my present form, at least there was the cycle of Big Boom, expansion, contraction, and rebirth. Now, thanks to the perseverance of Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. there's nothing, I mean Nothing to look forward to. "I get
dizzy when I think about the universe and our place in it. And if the whole shebang is expanding, what is it expanding into? Also, what's all this Dark
Matter and why does it matter? And where's God in all this? When you get down to it: Why does anything exist anyway? (That question makes me beyond
dizzy.)
Sounds like the ultimate disaster movie to me."
reprinted from Thinking Out Loud, Sept. 4, 2011, http://marperl.blogspot.com/
Convent? You have NUNS in your DARK MATTER?
Congratulations to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, for the nobel prize.
I agree to the accelerating expansion of the Universe. In recent times comes to light theories, which reverse the current model of physics. In my book “From the inside of quarks and up to beyond the universe”, page 125, I describe an interesting, new proposal on the cause, of the accelerating expansion of the Universe as follows:
"In the beginning, along with matter, antimatter is created. Then the matter and the antimatter, creates sets of masses of matter and sets of masses of antimatter, which are formed in, solar systems and galaxies of matter and sets of solar systems and galaxies of antimatter. Between the systems of matter and antimatter there is developed a repulsion. This repulsion is dynamically creates the accelerating expansion of the universe, -or better the acceleration of the universes and anti universes-". More details there are in my book.
’am writing these few lines, to highlight the case that besides ‘dark matter’, there are many other reasons, for which, we can attribute the phenomenon, of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. There is no, any particular reasons, after the award ceremony, we all start, to look for ‘dark matter’ or ‘dark energy’.
The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery that
the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing
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The action, when the God of Everything, compressed the
whole Universe into his palm, the scientists named ‘singular point’
And the action, when the God of Everything, opened his palm
the scientists named ‘Big Bang’
Does evolution begin on big bang level ?
At what step does consciousness begin?
Does consciousness begin on big bang level ?
What is our intellect ?
We can see this practically :
after ‘ big bang‘ all Galaxies run away from us
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What was before: egg or chicken?
Oh, I know this question is very old and does not have answer.
Therefore I will ask a simpler question:
What was before: ‘ big bang’ or vacuum?
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Dark Energy may be Vacuum
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/uoc-dem011607.php