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Quantum Equation Suggests Universe Had No Beginning
cyberspittle writes: The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once. "In addition to not predicting a Big Bang singularity, the new model does not predict a "big crunch" singularity, either. In general relativity, one possible fate of the universe is that it starts to shrink until it collapses in on itself in a big crunch and becomes an infinitely dense point once again. ... In cosmological terms, the scientists explain that the quantum corrections can be thought of as a cosmological constant term (without the need for dark energy) and a radiation term. These terms keep the universe at a finite size, and therefore give it an infinite age. The terms also make predictions that agree closely with current observations of the cosmological constant and density of the universe."
I don't get it.
Meep.
cool
Equations and theories that not only explain current observations but bundle up and deal with things our other theories say we should observe that we don't are attractive from a neatness standpoint. I'm skeptical when they make exotic and complex predictions which we haven't seen any evidence of yet, but when they tie up all the loose ends without creating more I usually take that as a sign there's something fundamentally right about that path. Only time and accumulated evidence will add certainty to it, but I like the ideas in this one.
And as far as a universe with no beginning or end is concerned, what's the problem? I was dealing with infinite open shapes (lines, planes) in grade school, unending closed shapes are trivial (a circle, a sphere), and if you assume our universe is a 4-dimensional "slice" of an n-dimensional space it's not that hard to construct an arrangement where you can travel forever in any "direction" (since the time axis counts as a direction here) inside our universe without either encountering an edge or returning to your starting point. The math's brain-bending when you start, but it's like differential equations: migraine-inducing and you hate it with the burning fire of a thousand suns right up until they describe the General Method, at which point you blink and go "Oh. That's easy. Why didn't you mention this in the FIRST PLACE?!
OK, these guys are probably far smarter than I'll ever be, but... the universe clearly isn't staying at a finite size, and playing the universe's expansion in reverse would imply that it started at a single point. How do they account for this? I even went as far as to read the article, but it wasn't mentioned.
Are they saying that the universe fluctuates between a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density and a not-quite-eternally-infinite empty void, or that it simply was a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density for an infinite time before it expanded?
It's interesting, but I'm curious as to whether the model shows a universe developing with the features we observe. The density of the universe is one thing, the general structure of it is another. There seems to have been a lot of thinking around how the universe was shaped by the big bang including all sorts of models and simulations. It'll be interesting to understand if this new model also fits.
First, modern cosmological theory doesn't predict a Big Crunch either... because of this little thing called, the universal expansion is accelerating...
It wasn't general relativity or special relativity that suggested a beginning to the universe, that was everyone seeing red shifts from everything in the universe (and the further away they were, the further they were going away)
It also multiplies entities unnecessarily by introducing a graviton, that unlike the Higgs Boson is supposed to mediate mass...
Everything about this just fails to be interesting in any particularly interesting way...
Also "The universe may have existed forever..." yeah, that's what "time didn't exist before the universe" means...
this really is the song that doesn't end. It just goes on and on my friend. Some people started singing it not knowing what it was, and they'll continue singing it forever just because some scientists proved the universe is infinite.
Good luck!
captcha: tyranny
that made me giggle.
and that involves a certain plant, a yard of gummed-edge pressed wood pulp and a bucket of munchies.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
...it's turtles, all the way down.
Table-ized A.I.
..the Universe had no beginning. Before the Universe was created (has created itself?) there was no time and after it ends, there won't be any time either. If it collapses into a super-mega singularity, time will stop forever inside and since there is no outside point of reference, will seem to be stuck like that forever, even when it ends :-)
;-) )
(disclaimer: watched too much Star Trek at young age and Big Bang Theory now, no formal physics degree
" people are not saying that the Genesis" That should read "people are now saying".
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
One of the many, big, unanswered questions concerning the origin of the universe is - where did the energy come from? Conservation of energy - the assumption that energy cannot be either destroyed or created - is a fundamental axiom in physics, which goes against the idea that there was a point in time before which the universe didn't exist, but after, it did. Unless, of course, one can conceive of a negative energy of equal size having been created at that same moment.
A naive consideration would say that if a mass, M, is created, then there must have an 'anti-mass', -M, as well; using Newton's equations, we would expect M and -M to repulse each other, while M would attract M and -M would attract -M (yes, doesn't make sense at stated, but follow my thought here, OK?) And, if one were to ramble on along those lines anyway, it seems tempting to look at the equations for how electric charges interact and think of electric charge as a kind of imaginary (as in complex numbers) mass. No doubt better people than I have already spotted this and worked out why it doesn't make sense, but I haven't seen their work yet.
Comcast Theory
Table-ized A.I.
All of these type of models about the universe have elegant math behind them.
But until they can any observable predictions which can be measured and possibly falsifiable, then we are really dealing with pure math and philosophy and not physics.
One can construct countless mathematical models which fit known observations, but very few make new falsifiable observable predictions.
This is my gripe with something like String/M-Theory, which has not made any legitimate predictions, and fails at stuff like monopoles which not been observed.
Suppose the Universe is filled by a Bose-Einstein condensate of gravitons with mass, and that the amplitude of the condensate's wavefunction spans the entire universe.
Turns out that when you derive the FRW equations from this, doing so inserts a cosmological-constant lookalike into the equation for a''
So plug the size of the Universe into the Yukawa equation and a graviton mass of 10^-32eV pops out. Plug this into the assumption that the wavefunction is a Gaussian the size of the universe (which makes d'Alembertian proportional to the wavefunction and gives you that nice constant) and you get a cosmological constant that's plausibly near to what we observe.
Inserting the universe-condensate also creates a second correction term which prevents the FRW scale factor from blowing up or collapsing either in the past or the future, which makes that nasty big bang singularity go away.
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It's worth noting that they invoke Bohmian quantum mechanics, which will immediately sketch out a lot of quantum folks...
What bugs me is that the massive graviton blows up the mass hierarchy problem. It's hard enough to come up with a non-contrived way to have particles whose measured mass ranges from 1eV to 170GeV, but to extend it by 30 orders of magnitude on the light side is just mean.
1) Some creationists claim that the big bang proves scripture is true.
2) Some creationists claim that the bag bang cannot be true, because it contradicts scripture.
3) You're the first person I've ever heard to claim that the big crunch matches scripture, and frankly I don't see where you pulled that from.
Conclusion: Scripture means whatever you want it to mean.
Also, do you know of any scientist other than Hoyle who tried to dismiss the big bang as religion? Hoyle, who was still pushing his steady state theory a generation after everyone else recognized that the evidence pointed to a big bang, and coined the term 'big bang' to denigrate the competition to his own precious theory?
Finally, I'm not sure how this qualifies as "going back to the old model", since there's still a big bang. It just doesn't start with a singularity in this proposed model. Scientists have asked about "before the big bang" for decades. In fact, they now seem to associating 'the big bang' with the beginning of the inflationary era, if I understand what I read correctly.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
too bad we can't verify them. Especially since the thrown most of the assumed ones out of their model. It's nevertheless an interesting approach in describing the universe if you take the time to read about it. Who knows, maybe the existing models were over-constrained and it might not be bad to give them a fresh look.
The truth probably lays somewhere in between.
This has to be the first time any kind of science involving the word quantum has made more sense than an alternative.
A few years ago, a colleague proposed the idea that North-European population are tall because of an adaptation to the colder climate.
He could prove his theory but only for a perfectly spherical viking.
Time is how we measure change, its a property of an object, not an object itself.
For time to have a begining would mean a situation when nothing changed. Which suggests zero energy. So for time to have a beggining is to suggest energy can be created created.
orsomethinglikethat
3) You're the first person I've ever heard to claim that the big crunch matches scripture, and frankly I don't see where you pulled that from.
Clearly it is Ragnarogk, the end of days and doom of the gods!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Let's start with a good definition. What is 'Hell'? Please be specific.
if there was no big bang, why is it that the further away from Earth we look with telescopes, the more red-shifted the light is?
It gets tired on the long journey.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
TBB theory is based on the dogma of human kind it self, humans have difficulty in accepting eternity so they elaborately invent theory's that incorporate a begin and an ending. Yes our lives are limited time. But existence can only be if it is eternal.
Think Q.
Bach says it all.
A burning rubbish heap outside Jerusalem.
If the unisverse is not expanding (which it is presently) in general then that allows not to conclude that the age of the universe is infinite. It only shows that you cannot determine the age of the universe on the basis of inflation. However, you still could determine the age by entropy. The higher the entropy the older the universe. And if I look at my work desk, the universe is pretty damn old.
> Let's start with a good definition. What is 'Hell'? Please be specific.
Hell is other people.
-- Sartre
Tired light used to be considered a possible explanation for cosmological redshift, photons losing energy (which means their frequency is lowered) on a long trip through space, but afaik this was inconsistent with certain observations. But who knows it might actually fit into this new theory.
Some day we'll be able to travel a huge distance, actually exiting the part of the universe that's filled with matter, look down on the entire thing, and see that all those galaxies together form just two, huge words: "first post". Slowly blinking between red and yellow, which explains the red shift.
Obvious question, if the universe is infinitely old why do we still have hydrogen left for fusion?
A few billion years ago we realized,
"what if we took species from all different
planets in the universe, and put them
together, on the same planet?" Great
TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews,
deer and Hispanics, all trying to live
side by side on one planet! It's great!
Well, you don't think the whole universe
works the way Earth does, do you? No!
One species, one planet! There's a planet
of deer, a planet of Asians, and so
on! We put them all together on Earth
and the whole universe tunes in to watch
the fun!
There are things outside of this Hell, hence Hell isn't the Universe. Next.
Most of the Universe has no people, hence Universe isn't Hell.
The doppler effect doesn't need relativity, but relativity does enhance the effect (adding time dilation to the classical doppler effect).
In music, there is something called a Shepard tone, which is a series of skillfully combined harmonics that, when listened to as a loop, appears to be constantly ascending.
Perhaps the "expanding universe" is something like that.
- Mike
"The universe may have existed forever,",
Forever, yes, but how for is that ? I thought the time started ar big bang.
Till we see more math and more acceptance by people who can understand that math, we just pat this theory on its head, pinch the cheeks and say "cute!" and move on.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If all universe was smaller than, well, very small, how come it didn't form a black hole in the first seconds?
And then if nothing exits the black hole, how did universe manage to do it?
I suppose that radioactive materials were put here by Satan to trick us. After all, with a perpetual universe we would have reached the half life of nuclear materials over and over again and we would have no radioactive materials at all. Oops!
Back to the Sartre reference a few comments above yours ;-).
I wanted to ask the same question, but then I remembered asymptotic functions. Going back in time, entropy would decrease, but the rate this decrease could become smaller smaller as one regards points that are farther back in time.
However, this would imply that for most of the previous eternity, the universe wasn't doing all that much.
tl;dr: The second law requires delta-S to be positive, but it can be arbitrarily small.
General relativity does require a beginning to the universe. Einstein realized that a universe dominated by an attractive force had to be either shrinking or expanding. He didn't think that was realistic, so he added the cosmological constant to balance the attraction of gravity and get a static universe. That was in 1907-1915. People started doing galactic redshift surveys (with a handful of close galaxies) around 1912, but it wasn't until the late 1920s that it started to be accepted that the universe was indeed expanding.
It turns out that even with a cosmological constant, GR doesn't admit a static universe.
And if time is mentioned, it's always interesting to ask "in what frame of reference"?
If there are any photons left over from shortly after the big bang, they would state that the universe just began seconds ago.
When time is not a constant and may not have always existed?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Isn't this just a rehashing of the steady state theory of the universe?
Unfortunately, the margin of error on their new model is True or False.
So I guess, if this works out, we can just throw away the laws of thermodynamics? Obviously if entropy is always increasing, and the universe is of infinite age, then certainly there would be no organization today, right?
If the universe always existed, then we don't know that entropy is always increasing. Maybe the universe always existed, but there is some mechanism that causes entropy to cycle between increasing and decreasing? Who knows? OTOH, this is just a hypothesis and has yet to be accepted.
It's not the first model that doesn't have a big bang. It's not even the first that uses de Broglie-Bohm theory. For example, there are the bouncing cosmologies (where the universe shrinks down to almost zero but not quite --essentially stopped by quantum effects-- and then starts to re-expand) proposed by Pinto-Neto, Peter, et al. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2790 for a review and references therein, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/02...).
Now while this paper is old news in that it was posted on arxiv almost a year ago, well done to the slashdot editors for waiting for it to be peer-reviewed (independently of how messed up you think the peer-review process is) and not taking every new model that gets posted on arxiv as some new profound discovery that must be true (slashdot would never do that, honest).
Clearly it is Ragnarogk, the end of days and doom of the gods!
Too late, it's already come & gone.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Hawking (or earlier).
I come here for the love
Considering that entropy might decrease leads to some fairly strange scenarios, e.g.:
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or so all other evidence indicates. That said, is there any reason why what we call the "big bang" represents nothing more than an unmeasurable atemporal interval between otherwise quite mundane spatio-temporal domains? That would satisfy the condition of "eternal existence" and leave room for the big bang.
In other words, big bang, followed by big crunch some xx billion years later. Rinse, lather and repeat.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Basic logic fail!
Required reading for internet skeptics
Are you a JRef regular? You usually only get this kind of silliness there.
In reply to "hell is other people" you say "Most of the Universe has no people, hence Universe isn't Hell." That doesn't make any sense.
Let's give you a hand. If we accept that "hell is other people" then we need to assert that "the universe isn't other people" to conclude "the universe isn't hell". If you instead assert "Most of the Universe has no people" then all that follows is "Most of the universe has no hell".
Now go and sin no more.
Required reading for internet skeptics
... this is when you know that your model does not work
This is all rubbish. It makes no sense to ask when the universe "started" or came into being. Time is an artifact inside of the universe---not the other way around.
Clearly, that's a stupid idea. So, the notion of eternity is not a good one, as it leads to fucked up contradictions and bizarrities. For example, if the universe is infinite, and it does repeat periodically, then the repetition itself is periodic and is itself a repetition. So, if we have infinite time, time ceases to exist.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Hell is other people. Seriously....
Einstein - Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
... but I just don't know where to begin.
A shame you posted this as AC because you're the only person on the entire page who mentions the Higgs field, which was proven by the LHC this creating the current Standardized Theory. It seems to me that if you to invent a graviton, then like the Higgs boson it would have to appear simultaneously in the entire known universe 10 -12 seconds after the big bang, same as the Higgs field, so why haven't we found it yet?
Probably because the graviton doesn't exist. Gravity is a function of mass, that warps space, just as Einstein thought. Perhaps someone who does this sort of thing for a living could weigh in. I just find it extremely interesting.
Murphy was an optimist
How does the cosmic background radiation -- Penzias/Wilson's discovery -- fit in with this new cosmological theory? I thought that was supposed to be significant supporting evidence for the Big Bang? Neither TFA nor TOFP says anything about it (although there is some speculation in the commentary which follows TFN).
licet differant, aequabitur
Universe existed "forever" - a solution to a set of equation systems conclude... Yeah okay. Why should I be impressed? Just because something that uses this universes' conception of "time" (controversially I would think) in the results to conclude "forever"? Well good luck with this "forever". I can almost hear other "forevers" laughing. Such articles just make me sulk.
As I see it, given the universe is probably a simulation (Edward Fredkin talks about this, among others), the issue is not where energy comes from, where the computational matrix came from. This assumes that is indeed a valid question, since philosophically the nature of consciousness may just assume computation or somehow be one with it.
To understand my point, consider if you were to make a simulation of the Milky Way Galaxy colliding with Andromeda, like in this cool video:
"GTC2012 Kepler GPU Demo: When Galaxies Collide "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"In this video, Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang and Stephen Jones demonstrate the power of the new Kepler GPU. This astronomy simulation shows that the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in 4-5 Billion years from now."
When writing the code, you would realize that the total amount of energy you put in the simulation is essentially arbitrary. You can set the kinetic energy of motion of all the individual simulated bits to whatever you wanted (up to the limits of how you store the numbers by flipping bits in silicon). The potential energy of gravitation or electromagnetism you create in the simulation is likewise essentially arbitrary, based on how you place the initial components and how you set gravitational constants and electromagnetic constants. Granted, there are consequences to how you set all those parameters, but that is a different design constraint based on aesthetics or purpose.
So, from my viewpoint, it is quite possible that "energy" and "matter" are probably essentially arbitrary. Someone with control over low-level aspects of the simulation (maybe even humans, someday) could magic matter and energy into existence as easily as a banking computer could magic trillions of dollars into existence by flipping a few bits on a hard drive or computer memory or fiber optic messages somewhere. Granted, there are social consequences to such currency creations, and likely would also be some social consequences somewhere as well to magicking matter and energy. :-)
But, that still leaves the question of where the computational matrix came from. Or, as is mentioned here, what implements the virtual turtles all the way down. :-)
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
https://mail.python.org/piperm...
Still, as another Slashdot story or poster months or years ago said, there is a some finite probability infinity will create itself from absolute nothingness, given the lack of constraints in complete nothingness. So, that could explain it all in that sense. :-)
Granted, my comments and musings on all this is perhaps just like a bacterium trying to make sense of what is happening while it is on the wing of a jetliner -- or no doubt the situation is even stranger. So, just some thoughts and possibilities. And of course, as other posters have said, or Iain Banks in "Excession", this is an "Out-of-context problem" which can not be that well addressed by typical scientific paradigms or rules of inquiry, since we are talking about things beyond the tiny circle of light cast by the comparatively feeble flickering of human mind and society, relative to a vast infinity of infinities and so on.
Still, we don't fully understand the human mind or consciousness either, so who really knows what it is possible to understand or not understand. We don't even know how long "humans" in a sense "live", with life after life as a possibility (like if "life is but a dream" or a game or learning experience we will wake up from and go onto other experiences), and so on.
Again, these all quickly become religious and philosophical questions -- but that does not mean they are not important or interesting. Although it does mean they are not that open to conve
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.