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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).
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.
Until we have some understanding of the (assumed) new physics responsible, I don't think anyone can say.
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!
Using (from Wikipedia)
in LibreOffice I get
2574.67 exp(0.017222 x)
with R2 at 0.9945
What am i missing (except that changes in social behavious will/may influence those numbers)?
That a polynomial of 2nd degree gives R^2=0.999, so a better fit. I mean look at the fitted curves, the exponential is way off.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
"how do we know that the observable universe is the whole universe?"
We don't and it almost certainly isn't; certainly, I doubt many people seriously believe it is.
"What if the Big Bang, was just one of a very large number of 'local' bangs."
Something very close to this idea lies at the heart of "chaotic inflation" which is still pretty much the most widely-used version of inflationary theory. It's occasionally described as a "seething foam of spacetime" with little bubbles popping up through quantum fluctuations eveywhere, and some of them having the right conditions inside to inflate, making another universe.
"If these other universes were far enough away, say a billion billion billion diameters of this universe, would there be any way to detect them? "
Not directly. Indirectly, it would depend on the details of the theory that produced them.
"A re-collapsing universe would also eliminate the conundrum, but it looks as if that is now ruled out."
Why do you say that? Again, it's very dependent on the details of the theory. You might be referring to the Gurzadyan and Penrose papers that were rubbished quite recently. The theory is basically fine, so far as anyone's aware; Penrose hasn't actually published the details for how it all works, but it's a nice enough mathematical trick. (Basically, once everything including black holes has decayed to radiation there's precious little difference between the ultimate future and the ultimate past, so conditions are right for more fluctuations that trigger another big bang. Or something like that. Details are hard to come by.) The problem was the analysis of the CMB - more specifically, the interpretation of that analysis. Find a different prediction from Penrose's model and it'll still be viable to test it. The same goes for any other cyclic model.
I read the sad story of a bitter failure who's full of shit. Let's see you brute force yourself a 1m accuracy GPS system without Einstein. You can do it. You'd just be the latest in a long line of mule-headed engineers going back to Ptolemy. What, it's not accurate enough? Let's throw on another epicycle (correction fit to the residual). Still not accurate? Another epicycle (correction fit to the residual of the residual). Kepler and Einstein are full of shit, we'll just brute force it, right? You want a hand-held gps? Sure, we'll engineer it, and here's the battery in a backpack to power all those corrections. Please tell me your field and state so I can avoid whatever it is you engineer. P.S. OPERA is the first neutrino speed measurement. We've been measuring the speed of neutrinos for over 50 years, only one of them has error bars that don't include c. And THAT measurement is outside the error bars of all the other measurements. But you put all your faith in the outlier. P.P.S. I have the design for a gyroscopic perpetual energy machine. The 'scientists' say it can't work. But I'd be willing to part with the design and give it to your 'engineering' firm for $50k and an NDA.
Wannabe nerds that act as the working hands of science will just out anybody as an idiot if someone dare says that the Lorentz Factor is a load of horse shit. They want to tie velocity and gravity together, whenever the recent experiment breaking the light speed barrier throws all of that away.
To Anonymous,
Oh dear, Mr. Coward, just when my self-esteem was starting to recover, now I'm a wannabe nerd, a "working hand of science". Sigh. Well, my duty is clear -- your brilliant comment has shown me what I must do.
You, sir, are an idiot because you dare to say the Lorentz Factor (whatever the hell that is -- I know what the Lorentz Transformation is, I know what O(1,3) is, I know what a Lie algebra is, but "Lorentz Factor" -- capitalized, no less -- I can only assume that you mean \gamma) is a load of horse shit.
Perhaps if you went back to University -- assuming that your substance abuse problem is now under control and you are taking your meds -- you could learn a little bit about actual relativity theory instead of learning it from the Discovery channel with its silly pictures of curved surfaces and ponderous voiceovers, and who knows? Maybe you'd learn of the eight zillion pieces of experimental evidence we have that it is, for the most part, correct (instead of citing the one as-yet unverified report of a single particle that might -- might, mind you -- prove the exception to a very general rule).
For example, there is little problem with mu-mesons, produced by cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere that leave them streaking at nearly the speed of light towards the Earth. Their exponential time constant is roughly 2 microseconds (I can say this authoritatively as I myself measured it in a physics lab as an undergrad). 2 microseconds times 3X10^8 = 600 meters, so that basically no mu mesons should reach the ground, many tens of exponential lifetimes away. Yet nearly all of them do, because of that pesky Lorentz Factor, \gamma! How about that! The mu mesons think that all of that distance is contracted to be less than 600 meters, and we think that their little bitty clocks are all dilated and everything so that they live much longer than they would at rest. It quantitatively works out.
I'd continue and wax poetical about e.g. spin orbit interactions, successive infinitesimal Lorentz transformations, and g-factors, but if I did your head would clearly explode. Suffice it to say that ordinary chemistry would be extraordinarily different if relativity theory where entirely false. You did say that you believe in biology and chemistry, right? You do know that chemistry is derivable from physics, and that biology is best understood in terms of chemistry (and physics), right?
But no, no, to even understand the evidence you'd have to actually learn some mathematics, and clearly that is out of the question, even with your meds adjusted. Besides, if we listened to the scientific consensus, we would never have broken the sound barrier, that's clear (and I did not know that, thanks for cluing me in). I guess everything I read back as a lad about how we actually did break the sound barrier, overcoming all sorts of physics and engineering problems involving turbulence and critical properties of fluid flow was, sadly, a lie. I'm surprised that you didn't accuse scientists of still being in a state of denial about that. I certainly was. Now I am Enlightened.
I hope you don't interpret this reply wrong. I would indeed have said in response to a less informative comment, one that didn't communicate with your clear, incisive wit, that I'm open to new ideas and new theories, as a theoretical physicist. I would have said, in fact, that the entire physics community is pretty damn open to new ideas, new theories, and new evidence (hence TFA, Nobel Prizes given to people who have pursued what I would call a "new idea, a new theory" and found experimental evidence to support it). But
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.
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.
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.
It is absolutely true that some of the anomalies that are not being interpreted as dark matter/dark energy have been around (observationally) for a long time, but the Universe is big and making accurate measurements on a macro scales hasn't even been possible until fairly recent times. The observations now are simply reaching the point where they strongly suggest if not demand new physics to explain them, the floor is now open for theories that consistently describe the new phenomena and still explain the old phenomena as well.
However, this mish-mosh you are quoting is not science. There is no evidence for a prior state "fall of light" -- the BB erased all useful details of prior state, although with empirically confirmed predictive quantitative theories we might eventually be able to extrapolate our post-BB observations into knowledge of prior state. The problem is a difficult one, though -- sort of like expecting to be able to read the manufacturing stickers off of a thermonuclear device from the mass and energy distribution visible from a certain direction from far, far away, long after the blast. Furthermore, all of the other stuff in this post, about moving away and returning on curved trajectories and all of that -- I don't know what all of that means. Nobody does. The English (or Spanish) words are meaningless, impossible to compare to observational reality, impossible to verify or refute with experiment.
What might mean something is a specific mathematical model that can be shown to be completely consistent with known physics and existing observational evidence and that describes the deviations from four-force model gravitationally bound galaxies in a quantitatively consistent way. That actually would mean something, and would even be compelling. It is also what is (AFAIK) completely lacking at this point, although there are a few very crude models that can provide some degree of qualitative agreement. As far as I know, there is no physical principle or law of nature that suggests that all matter will ``turn into light'' at any point in the future time evolution of the known interactions. I would go so far as to say that this is more or less impossible, in fact. What is an electron going to turn into that conserves charge, spin, and so on? Even theorized finite lifetimes of protons are finite but so very, very large that they can be consistent with the fact that we have never, so far, observed a proton to decay. The null hypothesis that they don't decay is so far a tenable one; although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody salted the tail of one tomorrow, a good theory isn't the measure of truth or knowledge, reliable observation is.
Without such a quantitative, predictive, empirically verified mathematical model, flowery words are just quasi-religious bullshit and in some deep sense have no place in physics. They smack of "Maharishi physics" or the kind of crap that you can see in "Down the Rabbit Hole" or "Multiple Worlds Quantum Theory" (so far).
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.