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First Mathematical Model of 13th Century 'Big Bang' Cosmology
KentuckyFC writes "The 13th century thinker Robert Grosseteste is sometimes credited with predicting the Big Bang theory of cosmological expansion some eight centuries ahead of modern cosmologists. His theory, written in about 1225, is that the Universe began with a Big Bang-like explosion in which light expands in all directions giving matter its three-dimensional form. The expansion eventually stops when matter reaches a minimum density and this sets the boundary of the Universe. The boundary itself emits light towards the center of the universe and this interacts with matter, causing other nested spheres to form, corresponding to the fixed stars, the elements of earth, fire, water and so on. Now a team of physicists and experts on medieval philosophy have translated Grosseteste's theory into the modern language of mathematics and simulated it on computer. They say Grosseteste's theory produces universes of remarkable complexity but that only a tiny fraction of the parameter space corresponds to a universe of nested spheres like the one he predicted. What's interesting is that modern cosmologists face exactly the same problem. Their models predict many different kinds of universes and have to be fine-tuned to fit the universe we actually live in. 'The sensitivity to initial conditions resonates with contemporary cosmological discussion and reveals a subtlety of the medieval model which historians of science could never have deduced from the text alone,' conclude the team."
I was under the impression that 900 years ago was "history", rather than "news".
He must have had contact with extraterrestrials. What, I wonder, was his basis for writing such a theory?
"Big Head". You wretched nit.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
What they're saying isn't that his model is excitingly accurate, but that his model amazingly exhibits the same fundamental sensitivities to parameters as our current ones.
While Robert Grosseteste had a very crude model in terms of how he saw the universe (concentric spheres), his Big Bang idea was damn good and more importantly, his model is just like what we have now: for his model to work the way he specified it, he would need a very narrow band of parameters. He didn't know it back then, but by changing the parameters he would have had massively different implementations that are quite amusing. Anyway, looks like a fun exercise for those involved.
...all the way down?
I'm sure there are multiple people working on Grand Unified Theories suitable for generating all known cosmogonies. Feel free to post yours!
Feel free to post yours!
In my GUT, the three force of the universe (gravity, strong nuclear force, electromagnetic/weak) have been combined. I call it the Force. It surrounds us, binds us, flows through us, and thrives in microscopic organisms in your bloodstream.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
You wretched nit.
I'd keep on reading Slashdot only for the colorful yet elevated vocabulary I learn here.
I want to be a spaceman
That's what I want to be
Cause if I wuz a spaceman
Everyone would love me
Zero hour nine AM
And all this science
I don't understand
It's just my job
Five days a week
A spaceman
Physics apparently wants one single gigundamous theory to explain "everything" meaning subatomic particles, atomic particles, and gravity, but without having to explain chemistry or physics.
That seems unlikely. We cannot even prove arithmetic from set theory, so proving all of the universe from a single starting point seems unlikely.
As far as predicting things, look closely at our Theory of Evolution.
In order to be valid, it must explain every species currently here or represented in the fossil record
but notice that it is not expected to predict the form of any new species at all nor predict the numbers or types of species extant in a million years from now (but expect cockroaches).
We want more from physics than we know we can get from math or expect to get from biology.
Managing user expectations is one of the most important pieces of a successful project.
From a mathematical perspective, expecting to derive everything from a single starting point seems unreasonable.
From an evolutionary perspective, if the current universe is one thing that might have happened but not necessarily would have happened, that doesn't seem to be enough of a criticism to discard the theory, not if you are honest about your basic assumptions and expectations. In biology, octopi did evolve but septopi and hectopi and quintipi did not but could have and perhaps still may occur.
Is he did it without the higher maths and computers, which leads me to think the mind is capable of fully grasping reality and it's creation/dissolution but that explaining it (writing it down for others, etc) is the hard part.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
LOL dongs.
> Robert Grosseteste
AKA Robert Bigballs
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
.. and had me wondering why this fellow isn't more widely known. Then you remember that he came up these ideas in the days when going public with them would likely get you burned at the stake (or worse).
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
In my GUT, the three force of the universe (gravity, strong nuclear force, electromagnetic/weak) have been combined. I call it the Force. It surrounds us, binds us, flows through us, and thrives in microscopic organisms in your bloodstream.
In my GUT, thriving microscopic organisms produce chemical reactions which result in great Force being expelled from my body. It flows through me, surrounds us, and is a source of great division.
I like recent holographic theories as candidates for ultimately supplying a workable GUT. Consider cosmic expansion - what happens to the surface area of a sphere as the radius of the sphere increases arithmetically? Gravity can be readily explained as perturbations on the surface of the sphere. I wish I knew the maths to explore this idea properly.
That guy, Robert Grosseteste, has got to be either a time traveler or an alien. How did he come up with his conjecture? And especially in that age?
bow tie ?...
Totof
Wouldn't that be "grosstete"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It flows through me, surrounds us, and is a source of great division.
Mine can do square and sometimes cube roots, and I'm teaching them calculus next.
Wouldn't that be "grosstete"?
The first "e" in the French word tête has that funny hat on it, technically called a circumflex. This tells us that this vowel used to be followed by an "s" in earlier stages of the French language. So tête derives from older form teste.
The word tête is also feminine, so any adjectives must also use the feminine form. French gros (from Latin grossus) in the feminine form becomes grosse.
So, just as expected, gros + tête == grosse tête as spelled in modern French, and grosse teste in Old French, whence the Norman French language and names of 1200s England, courtesy William the Conqueror.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I know that nobody's likely to see this, but if you read the actual paper, considering the effort put into describing the numerical difficulties, it seems odd that they give no description of the time-integration scheme or the method of computing the derivatives. At first glance, the form of the equations seem to lend themselves quite naturally to modern TVD approaches....
Just FYI, today most historians only refer to the period of 400 to 800 CE as the "Dark Ages" in western Europe. This is because in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the region there was a dramatic drop in human development that led to a general loss of literacy and therefore we have very few written records of the period (thus, it is "dark" for historians who largely try to base their work on written documents [hence the difference between "pre-history" and "history"]).
The broader "Dark Ages" that you refer to running from 500 to 1500 is mostly a result of renaissance propaganda that sought to discount everything that had happened between Rome and their own day. Without discounting the achievements of the renaissance, most of 16th century assertions about the past are just false. The 13th century, in particular, was one of Europe's peaks and marked with relative peace and prosperity. In France, for example, there was more international trade going at a level that surpassed any previous period and would not be matched till the 18th century. The pursuit of mathematics had been rediscovered (thanks to contact with the Arabs) and was being actively developed; the first universities (most of which still run today) were being founded; architecture was producing some of Europe's most beautiful buildings, there was an agricultural revolution... I could go on.
I went to the presentation at the Royal Society last week given by this group on Grosseteste's colour theory. Grossteste's papers are very dense and very short, and this one fitted on a sheet of A4. He had a theory about colour that seems to have three clear axes and eight corners. However, he never tells us what the axes are called, or names a single colour, or even tells us where white and black come, which the presenters admitted was 'pretty strange'. There is no obvious algebra, which is correct for the age, but makes it very hard to interpret an unambiguous meaning. Aristotle's theory on colour, which Grossteste would have read in translation from Arabic at the time, has clear experimental models for generating infinitesimal shades between any two colours, and names seven colours - perhaps in an early attempt to see how many colours are needed to mix any colour. In contrast, it is difficult to be sure whether Grosseteste's work is philosophical (which colours should exist), experimental (which colours do exist), or mathematical (how can we model what we see).
Grosseteste was known to be one of the better mathematicians of his age. He is not Nostradamus, pumping out cryptic statements in the hopes that some of them will match something at random. What he said was respected in his day. We have some modern computer model that seems to match what he said to some extent, but only for some small subset of the parameter space. I suspect this tells us more about how we think then about how Grossteste did.
It's from John Cleese, I forget which script.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.