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Past a Certain Critical Temperature, the Universe Will Be Destroyed
StartsWithABang writes: If you take all the kinetic motion out of a system, and have all the particles that make it up perfectly at rest, somehow even overcoming intrinsic quantum effects, you'd reach absolute zero, the theoretically lowest temperature of all. But what about the other direction? Is there a limit to how hot something can theoretically get? You might think not, that while things like molecules, atoms, protons and even matter will break down at high enough temperatures, you can always push your system hotter and hotter. But it turns out that the Universe limits what's actually possible, as any physical system will self-destruct beyond a certain point.
Isaac Asimov posted a column in 1957 asking the same question. The column was subsequently published in a book of his collected scientific columns. A graduate student took the question posed by the column and used it for his doctorate thesis over fifty years ago.
Well, I think he's saying that after the big bang, the energy density of that microdot of universe was so high it triggered inflation.
Ergo, if you jam enough energy into a tiny enough space, you could recreate the whatever-it-was that triggered inflation, and trigger a new inflation from that spot, probably destroying everything else in the universe the same way Daffy Duck's modern home appliance salesman did: "In the modern home, we don't go upstairs. We bring the upstairs...down."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This guy has anawful lot of confidence in how the universe works, I'll give him that much. I am only a lowly being compared to him, but isn't this all speculation? I'm pretty sure this is not a science with any kind of proof or even basic consistent knowledge, but don't let me get in the way.
You are correct, it's mostly a bunch of pop-sci woo-woo. For example, a massless particle no matter how energetic cannot on it's own convert into a black hole as he claims, because no matter how much energy it has you can always Lorentz boost into a frame where it has arbitrarily small amounts of energy. Likewise the photons in your room have arbitrarily large amounts of energy, depending on the reference frame you choose. But they have no mass, and a system requires a certain amount of mass to convert into a black hole (and the mass of system is invariant, i.e. it's the same in every reference frame).
The "the Universe would be destroyed" bit is also completely and purely theoretical at this point: we have no real proof for inflation at all. Our physics just doesn't really extend to those energy scales yet.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Yeah, it's a pop-sci article about what happens at high temperature. Your tone makes this sound like a bad thing, but I'm not sure what is wrong with explaining the currently accepted best model of cosmology in accessible language. Not everyone has a background in theoretical physics and I think it's kind of awesome that some people try to bring science to more people. i) It does talk about things that have been known for decades, but it never claims to be news. And I think a lot of people forget about the second half of the Slashdot motto, "Stuff that matters." ii) I didn't see anything about eternal inflation in the article, but as far as whether they are fact or speculative, in my experience most of physics is speculative. That's why we have the Theory of Relativity, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, etc. Notice the words theory and model. iii) It doesn't. Both the summary and the article claim the Universe limits the max temp. iv) I think the article was just doing some math with what we know about the composition of the observable universe to make a point. v) I'm not sure how a maximum temperature contradicts a big bang model. Possibly because a big bang model would mean that all the matter and energy in the observable and non-observable universe were condensed to a very small volume or singularity the temp according to the article would be higher than the temp for inflation and therefore that small volume or singularity could never have been reached in the first place because inflation would have taken place earlier and caused space to expand and cool? I'm guessing at your point. I guess I just don't get the hate towards StartsWithABang. They get a lot of posts on Slashdot which I guess is suspicious, but the information always seems objectively presented, accurate and maybe some people don't like the writing style, but I think it is ok to be excited about science when you are writing for a general audience and not presenting a piece of academic research.
A lot of hate might be averted by making it clear that it's a review article rather than a news article. This is a news site, and its audience has a large numbers of experts and interested laymen. The assumption is that it's telling us something we don't already know, and the style of the summary is no different from any other Slashdot post. The effect sounds offensive and condescending: "Here's a thing you didn't know!" "Actually, I do, and better than the underlying article."
The article itself is (usually) fine in its original context. It's the appearance on Slashdot that aggravates the Slashdotters. Combined with the fact that people are rather sensitive to spam, and an out-of-place article looks like spam (even if it isn't), which ties into a whole separate set of aggravations.
If they were to present it with a different subtext: "Hey, we're nerds here. This is a topic that many of you know about, but many don't, and it would be interesting to discuss it amongst ourselves. This article is a good starting point." That would start with a different writing style, one that didn't imply that the information was brand new. It wouldn't hurt to add a visual differentiator as well: a different icon, maybe even a different color or shape. And perhaps a way for people to filter it from their streams.
I get that there isn't nearly as much interesting, discussable news as one might think, so Slashdot has to drag in some stuff from wider afield. If they acknowledged that, and adjusted for it, they could make it a positive experience for their audience, rather than a negative one.