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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".
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.
You're spot on. The system is too complicated for evolution to make specific predictions. The general ones may be tested or observed in hindsight, but to make anything other than vague predictions, we would need a lot more computing power/data storage than we have - perhaps more than could exist on our planet. Evolution's value lies not in prediction, but in it's explanatory model. This doesn't invalidate evolution from a scientific perspective, but it does show sometimes that having the final answer makes working through the problem a lot easier.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
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 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.