Slashdot Mirror
CERN Scientists Conclude that the Universe Should Not Exist (ign.com)
Scientists at CERN are bemused as to why the universe exists, according to a new study. From a report, shared by a reader: Recent discoveries suggest that there's a perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter - meaning it's not clear why they didn't annihilate each other upon the birth of the universe. CERN's latest study sought to find out whether different magnetic properties accounted for matter's seeming victory after the Big Bang, but found another point of symmetry. Essentially, going by our findings so far, there simply shouldn't be a universe. Further reading: Universe shouldn't exist, CERN physicists conclude - Cosmos Magazine.
...it doesnâ(TM)t.
"...the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
- Douglas Adams
The phrasing here is just terrible. They confirmed the universe is harder to explain. Phrasing like this is for pushing intelligent design arguments.
Since the law of conservation of mass and energy states that matter and energy can not be created then how did it ever come into existence in the first place?
poof in a flash of logic?
(Yes, from the joke {Rene Descartes walks into a bar and orders a drink. When he finishes his drink, the bartender asks him if he would like another. Descartes replies, “No, I think not,” and disappears in a puff of logic.})
...they vanished in a puff of logic.
Or for the "separate but equal" ones. Khm...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
-- Some Religious newsletter probably
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Nah, that's a common misunderstanding between how matter and antimatter interact. They're very cautious and only engage in a fight they know they can win, but their technology is very limited in terms of detection, so only when there's a REALLY REALLY APPRECIABLE difference in the sizes of the two armies does the larger one accept casualties and attack.
[The Truth provided above is released under MIT GPL. Please make sure you provide a copy of original Truth, if you redistribute. Any enhancement to Truth you make, however, is yours.]
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sure it is, and that's the point they're making.
"The Universe should not exist" is the press simplification of "the observable physics shows no reason why matter and anti-matter should be in an imbalance, however, clearly they are in an imbalance, so... WTF!"
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one.
What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones? You ask how it came into existence in the first place, and I say what if it DIDN'T and it's simply always been there?
Everything our current models tell us about reality, from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the observable universe could very well be nothing more than a finite and insignificant perturbation in the infinity of existence.
This is an old and well understood mystery in physics. We've known about baryon asymmetry since shortly after we understood E=mc^2 (more properly E^2 = m^2*c^4 + p^2*c^2). We just don't have a model or data that fully explains why we see lots of matter but not much anti-matter. We have some ideas about how it might have happened but nothing that really answers the question adequately.
Maybe they got the rate of annihilation wrong. Maybe the mutual destruction process is ongoing.
that's a relief.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Among a long list of unresolved questions in physics and that's why the creation of AGI is of paramount importance for human kind. Considering the amount of knowledge that we've accumulated so far our biological brains might not be enough to crack the universe. And if it were too simple too understand, it would hardly be able to produce sufficiently intelligent life forms to grok it. But then again we might not be intelligent enough to ever figure it out or create AGI to do the same thing.
and I will be able to refute this claim by kicking it
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The Universe
Some information to help you live in it.
1. Area: infinite.
2. Imports: none.
It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things from.
3. Exports: none.
See Imports.
4. Population: none.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
5. Monetary Units: none.
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
6. Art: none.
The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough – see point one.
7. Sex: none.
Well, in fact there is an awful lot of this, largely because of the total lack of money, trade, banks, art, or anything else that might keep all the nonexistent people of the Universe occupied.
#DeleteFacebook
That doesn't sounds like a headline that would drive ad traffic though...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
There has just always been a universe. Problem solved :)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Admit it, you watched it only for Penny Hofstadter.
#DeleteFacebook
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one.
What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones? You ask how it came into existence in the first place, and I say what if it DIDN'T and it's simply always been there?
Everything our current models tell us about reality, from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the observable universe could very well be nothing more than a finite and insignificant perturbation in the infinity of existence.
If Einstein was right, and space and time are the same thing, it seems reasonable that if the Universe has infinite space it should have infinite time.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
... is obvious. Apart from different charge, antimatter is no less than four letter longer (57%!) and therefore experiences more drag against the ether.
Hence, all the antimatter is located around center of the universe (point zero!), and the matter is scattered around the outskirts.
These CERN guys really should study this Newton guy! It's not like this is hard or anything.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Douglas Adams
#DeleteFacebook
Here is a simple answer; because we are wrong with something. We have known that we are wrong for a while with the X number of unsolved physical problems.
Another study confirms that the Standard Model is incomplete when it was already known. News at 10.
So the true purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to rectify the situation.
Because the negative energy balances out the equation.
It could be Satan.... ~The Church Lady
If you study something deeply to comprehend the rules that has the thing working, and you conclude based on these rules that the thing should not exist, then the rules are wrong, or you're missing deeper insights about that object.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
So after all this time and study, it turns out we really are a fluke of the universe and we really do have no right to be here.
I suppose it's just a matter of time that we discover that the Cosmic Microwave Background is really just the sound of the universe laughing behind our backs.
The phrasing here is very much hyperbole.
Standard quantum mechanics (well, relativistic quantum mechanics) states that particles and antiparticles must have exactly the same magnetic properties. Exactly.
If CERN tests didn't verify this, there would be a big, big problem with parts of physics that we thought we knew pretty well. That's a pretty exciting experiment to try, since if there was a big big problem with quantum mechanics, it would be groundbreaking to find this out. But it's not particularly headline news to say "quantum mechanics is confirmed, yet again."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I like to think that there was originally a whole shitload more matter/antimatter and what we're seeing now is just a rounding error.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'"
- Isaac Asimov
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Sure it is, and that's the point they're making.
"The Universe should not exist" is the press simplification of "the observable physics shows no reason why matter and anti-matter should be in an imbalance, however, clearly they are in an imbalance, so... WTF!"
With oddities like dark matter and black holes floating around out there, fucking kills me that some of the smartest minds on the planet are all "WTF!" about finding an imbalance.
Gravity wells are negative energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
WARNING SPOILER ALERT!
It is only because Ruin has made a deal with Preservation and the universe in the end does not exist, but miniscule fraction of a second before collapse has been expanded indefinitely. Ruin doesn't mind because time is inconsequential in the face of immortality. Eventually the forces will cancel each other and the universe will end unless the Hero of Ages intervenes claiming both powers simultaneously.
this sig is deprecated
> you guys across the pond later used the same monica for
Pres. Bill Clinton
(Anyhow you probably wanted to write "moniker" which actually refers to the monica used by Ike a previous US president.)
Like most star explosions, (including the formation of black holes), you get 2 jets of matter spieling outwards in opposite directions. What if one jet's what we call matter and the other anti-matter. How's that for formulating a theory. Can I prove this? Of course not; thus it's a theory. :)
I just want to know if they wear cowboy hats or if they wear goatees, so I know what kind of universe we're dealing with if we ever decide to visit.
You sir. You do not exist. My computer says so. -Therefore I shall ignore you from this moment forward.
My condolences to your non-existent offspring.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
So does Kelsier punching Preservation speed that up or what??
This was discussed at the time of the Higgs-Boson discovery.
https://www.livescience.com/46478-universe-should-have-collapsed.html
It's even possible at small scale given enough time. Lots and lots of time. An example being the Loschmidt paradox and the Fluctuation Theorem.
Sentient life is incredibly improbable, therefore sentient life ends up observing an incredibly improbable universe around it, because in all the other possible outcomes, there's nobody there to observe it. So maybe it's just that we are in the matter corner of a universe that just lucked out, and the corresponding antimatter part is somewhere outside the observable portion of the universe.
Someone had to do it.
It seems to me that poor communication discourages people from being interested in Physics. "The Universe should not exist" is clickbait dishonesty by the media.
Read the scientific article, A parts-per-billion measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment. There is nothing dishonest.
It would have been far better to explain the conflict being observed and acknowledge that not much is known in that area of interest. It is FAR too early to draw conclusions.
What the CERN scientists may have discovered is that the "basic assumptions of the standard model of particle physics" are incorrect.
More clickbait dishonesty:
CERN Antimatter Experiment Suggest the Universe Shouldn't Exist
CERN Research Finds "The Universe Should Not Actually Exist"
The Universe Should Not Actually Exist, CERN Scientists Discover
CERN Scientists Find Further Evidence That the Universe 'Should Not Exist'
The universe shouldn't exist, scientists say after finding bizarre behaviour of anti-matter. Quote: "We don't know why the universe isn't destroying itself." That is at least in the direction of being honest; we don't know why.
I'm guessing that media writers didn't want to try to understand the actual issues, so they all adopted one writer's wild exaggeration.
I see NO evidence that anyone at CERN is dishonest. The dishonesty seems to be only in media reports.
Our universe is merely a zit.
Table-ized A.I.
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one. What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones?
Because if it had always existed, there would be dead stars that are infinitely (or nearly infinitely) old. But there aren't.
What we do know absolutely for sure is that the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form. Stars don't last forever. Entropy tends toward maximum. If the universe was infinitely old, it would have slid down the curve of entropy to be a featureless mess.
The nature of that event at the beginning (of the universe as we know it), however, is still somewhat unclear. We do see the universe expanding, and that's a clue. We can track it backwards to very small and very dense. But we can't track it backwards to the "beginning," because it gets to realms of energy and density for which we don't know the laws of physics.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
what kind of universe we're dealing with if we ever decide to visit.
It will be a universe with a you-shaped hole in it. Because you will annihilate everything you touch. Kind of like Symantec.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance - if dark matter somehow interacts with anti-matter somewhat less weakly, for some reason. Black holes don't work, since there don't seem to have been any in the early universe, and there's no reason to think they'd prefer anti-matter.
This news is exiting to me, since one way or another it suggests new physics is needed to understand the imbalance.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Among other things, if the universe always existed, where is the fresh matter coming from that's fueling all our stars? Everything should have burned out already in an infinitely old universe. You'd have to invent some source of matter generation or non-energy-conservation, and that's far more problematic than the current big bang theory..
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
> Everything should have burned out already in an infinitely old universe.
You have mistakenly interpreted my comment on the existence of the universe being infinite as a claim that the universe is steady-state.
You probably should have paid more attention to my final statement in that post which would have disabused you of that notion.
It's probably due to statistical variation in the early expansion of the universe.
Here's an analogy:
Suppose you throw 1 million coins and tally the results. You might expect to get 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails, but it's *more* probable that you would get a different ratio. The probability of being 1-off in either direction is higher: even though both individual probabilities are smaller there's two possible outcomes (one more head, or one more tail).
(In 8 tosses of the coin, there's 70 ways to make 4H/4T, 56 ways to make 3H/5T, and 56 ways to make 5H/3T. Even split has 70 ways, while 1-off has 112 ways.)
What you actually get is a bell curve of probability. Take a single sample and you expect to get "somewhere near" the mean value, but it's highly unlikely that you'll get exactly the mean.
So in the early universe, suppose position is quantized and there is exactly 1 place to be. Lots and lots of energy sitting on that one spot, some of it splitting into matter and antimatter and then annihilating back to energy.
The universe expands and there are now 2 positions. The energy and matter/antimatter distributes randomly.
Even though you'd expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter to go to both positions, it's statistically unlikely. Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 antimatter and 210,000 matter in the other. Both sides have 500,000 "coins", but with slightly different proportions, according to statistical chance.
Now suppose the universe continues to grow at a rate faster than the matter can keep up. There are suddenly 4 positions instead of 2, then 8, 16, and so on. The matter/anti-matter ratio in each side is now 210,000/290.000, which annihilates, leaving 80,000 matter particles and 420,000*MC^2 of energy. On each side.
This would only happen if the universe expands faster than the particles can travel across the available positions to annihilate.
As it happens, there's evidence that the early universe *did* expand faster than the speed of light, which is why the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but looks to be at least 93 billion years in diameter. This is the early inflation model.
So even if all known processes generate equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, it makes statistical sense that there might be an excess of one or another in different parts of the universe.
I hold a similar viewpoint; if the universe is truly infinite, then anything we can conceivably observe is infinitesimally minuscule.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The big bang was symmetrical, expanding in both positive and negative time. Matter is weakly coupled to time, anti-matter is weakly coupled to negative time. We live in positive time, and thus see mostly matter.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
But "WTF" is where the best science comes from. Hmmm, the precession of Mercury isn't explained by Newtonian mechanics. WTF? Why here comes Mr. Einstein with an explanation...
As others have pointed out, we know there are issues with the Standard Model, we even have some possible expansions on the Standard Model like supersymmetry, and CERN is doing its darndest to crank up to energy to try to catch a glimpse of the superpartners to the known elementary particles.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What we know for sure is that the universe hasn't existed forever in its current form. If it has existed forever, it has been in a different form.
If you are arguing for the possibillity that the universe is a temporary fluctuation in a thermal equilibrium state, you do realize that large fluctuations are exponentially unlikely, and the probability of any fluctuation being long-lasting is even more exponentially unlikely. So, if what we see as the universe is a fluctuation, it is almost certainly very very small, and very very short lasting-- what you call the "universe" must consists of nothing more than your brain and some random signals propagating to it, and its duration is no more than a few fractions of a second.
Your previous post is not something you did (your memory of it is a random fluctuation), I don't exist, the internet doesn't exist, and this post doesn't exist (what exists are the random fluctuations in thermal equilibrium that, coincidentally, your brain happens to interpret as memories, and as an "internet" post.).
Also, everything we know about the universe doesn't exist-- your memories of what you think we know about physics are just random fluctuations, not real: nobody has ever actually done any physics experiments because nobody else actually exists.
And neither will you, in a second or two from now.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yeah, it didn't look like you were going in that direction, and I glossed over the last sentence. I'm still not really sure that the idea of being a pocket in an infinitely old universe really changes things much compared to the idea that the Big Bang created the entirety of the universe. Either option is in the realm of unknown and probably unknowable.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
It's not a press simplification. It's a direct quote from the author of the study.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
"Whew! Thank goodness we're not living in that universe!"
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
By "press simplification" I meant "the author simplified things for the press"
How about replacing "In the beginning God said 'Let there be light'"
With "In the beginning She said, 'I just had a thought...'"
This aligns contemporary neopagan mythology with information theory, which is a useful early step in building a new bridge from Here to Somewhere Else that avoids reliance on any of the shopworn and unsafe postulates of the old way of thinking about things.
(There. I think that's vague enough to seem plausibly metaphysical.)
Mod AC parent up. This is known, I believe Kaon decay is one of the proprosed mechanisms to explain the imbalance.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a particle physicist, nor am I an astrophysicist. I am just a dilettante.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Yes, scientists know that. Quantum Mechanics does not take gravity into account, and General Relativity doesn't take quantum mechanics into account. So, we know our "rules" aren't right. That's the reason for performing these studies. By determining how the universe differs from the model predictions it can give us insight into where our models are wrong.
Just thinking about what if the universe actually holds equal amounts of matter and antimatter can lead to some interesting ideas. Are all galaxies of matter or are some of anti-matter?
Or what if Big Bang actually created two mirror universes, one with matter, the other with anti-matter?
But then we must realize that a "perfect" explosion don't exist.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Lots of things happen all the time that "shouldn't" happen. Lots of things that "should" happen don't. The universe isn't fair, it never has been and never will be. Why should the fact that it happens to exist at all be any different?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Evidence that anti-matter would not preferentially annihilate is also evidence that it is still lurking about somewhere. It's worth noting that we have never performed an experiment outside our solar system, and our reasons for inferring what other regions of the universe are made out of are indirect and largely spectroscopic. What if, e.g., anti-matter has repulsive gravitational effect? Would it wind up as a diffused gas of ostensibly normal hydrogen in interstellar space, helping to compact the normal matter galaxies (perhaps its initial confinement could have contributed to a rapidly inflationary universe?). And/or is there another method/place it could be hiding in the void?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
In full general relativity the question of conservation of energy is more complex than commonly imagined, and sometimes seems like 'nonconservation'.
Remember that the conservation laws are reflections of the presence of operations which leave physical laws unchanged (symmetries & transformations), which results in the usual conservation of energy in flat-spacetime.
And next---if there were some state prior to BIg Bang---what makes you think it had to be 'zero'?
> What if the universe always existed, and always will?
Considering that the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says that:
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
I would tend to agree with you.
Either
a) The universe has always existed, or
b) God has always existed.
Either way you end up with the atheist's F word: Faith.
Not negative. Like (-x)^2 = x^2. Which is why annihilation can result in two or more photons with net positive energy. (no such thing as anti-photon).
And gravitation of anti-particles appears to be identical to their normal counterparts.
This universe amoung the multitude of multiverses is just a single instance in a single dream amoung the gazillions of parallel dreams in the mind of Brahma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
In other news: Millions of headless atheists type tirelessly on social media today explaining why this doesn't mean what creationists think it means.
First of all: there are no such laws. You are perhaps mixing this up with the law of conversation of energy.
Energy equals mass, both can be converted freely into each other.
Then again: who knows what laws existed before the big bang? Our laws of physics describe how the universe works right now, we can not even describe the first 'insert scaling' seconds of the universe after the big bang with our physical laws.
From our point of view every pair of virtual particles, one anti matter one posi matter could be a big bang and from the inside view could be a whole universe lasting for billions of years.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Fair enough. A lot of people are taking it the other way though.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
For a moment...just a brief second.... I thought I was reading an article on 'The Onion'
That is not the first law. It is a sidenote, added by the author of the relevant wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The first law is simply: The law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Is the universe an isolated system?
How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter?
You never defined Objective Universe or Subjective Universe, your argument makes no sense.
I read the internet for the articles.
There are apparently ways to detect which kind of matter you are looking at, and regular matter utterly dominates the universe. There is no antimatter half as far as we know.
I read the internet for the articles.
Just like I had always believed it was extremely more obvious that "dark matter" was just regular matter in places we aren't looking for and can't see yet (and not the all misterious things that have waste huge resources of so many brilliant people) the same regarding this asymmetry. Of course, they are so embedded in the mathematics that they lose sight of the elegance of all there is. 20 years from now they will find the "asymmetry" isn't needed, and that it doesn't anihilate because it emanates directly from an obvious overlooked reason such as "They annihilate but so irregularly that there's always a net balance that doesn't "fizzle". Or that the expansion caused asymmetry in the distribution (not in the amount of matter/anti-matter), etc.
unfinished: (adj.)
I've been around long enough to know how ignorant I am. I don't assume the universe obeys my preconceptions. Huh! But I know a frelling fact when it hits me in the face!
- Dominar Rygel XVI, "Farscape: I Shrink Therefore I Am (#4.8)" (2002)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I guess no one knows.
Does not change the fact that the parent (and the wiki article about the first law of thermodynamics) is wrong.
Inside of a closed system you still can freely convert energy into mass and vice versa.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...thus replacing the problem with yet another problem.
...and it's turtles all the way down.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
People talk about it like that's when "the universe began", but it's really just "when the universe AS WE KNOW IT began". It says nothing about what was happening before that time because the answer is that we have no idea. Maybe it was always here. It's possible new universes are formed inside of black holes and that our universe was formed in just such a manner.
I rather like Penrose's ideas about this. When the energy density is high enough, effectively everything becomes massless and moves at the speed of light. In such a case, the universe ceases to have time and distance scales - when nothing in the universe experiences time or distance, the concepts become meaningless. General relativity still works just fine in such conditions, as it's fundamentally scale-invariant, so this doesn't break established physics.
Under that interpretation, the big bang isn't when the universe began, but when time (and space) began. What was there "before" was all the same stuff, just in a state where time and distance don't happen.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Even though you'd expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter to go to both positions, it's statistically unlikely. Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 antimatter and 210,000 matter in the other. Both sides have 500,000 "coins", but with slightly different proportions, according to statistical chance.
So in total you'd have 580000 antimatter and 420000 matter. Where does this imbalance come from?
Okay, you got me.
Swap "antimatter" and "matter" in the 2nd half of that sentence to correct my senior moment.
Full sentence should read:
Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 matter and 210,000 antimatter in the other.
There are people trying to prove that antimatter has negative mass. That would explain the 'missing' part as well as the accelerated expansion of the universe [antimatter has somehow become Dark Energy].
There may be people trying to prove this, but if antimatter has negative mass, you have even worse problems. But it doesn't: if it did, then it would take zero energy to create particle/antiparticle pairs (mc^2 + (-m)c^2 = 0). And positronium (which has been made) would have net zero mass, and thus would accelerate to arbitrary velocity under the pressure of photons of trivial energy, and we'd never see it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The current iteration of the universe is not infinite, which you state. So it's completely plausible the universe has always existed but it goes through "rebirth" every few trillion "years". Maybe the big bang that started our universe was the infinity + 1 big bang that happened.
Yep. That's one reason I put in that particular wording: "the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form.
I'm far from an expert and I'll go so far to say that I'm not even very knowledgeable on the subject.. but my simple brain seems to think that at some point expansion halts and contraction begins. Could the universe contract into a singularity and cause another big bang?
That is plausible in terms of the physics: it's sometimes called the "big crunch", and the idea that the universe expands to a maximum extent, contracts, and then recycles into a new big bang is called the "cyclic" or "oscillating" universe: https://www.universetoday.com/...
The best data we have at the moment, however, says that there is not enough mass in the universe for the expansion to be reversed by gravity (in fact, it suggests the opposite: rather than expansion slowing down and eventually stopping, expansion is actually speeding up.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Doesn't matter how unlikely it is in infinite time it's gonna happen a lot.
Yep. But the chances are ten-to-the-googleplex to one that all that gets temporarily created in the fluctuation is your brain, and that fluctuation only lasts long enough to read this message, after which you (or, what you temporarily believed was you) dissipate.
And, if it's true, then everything we know about physics is fantasy, since physics (like the existence of other people) never actually ever existed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The energy of gravitational binding is necessarily negative. That is you say, if you have two objects near one another, you would have to inject positive work in order to separate them to infinity.
The most likely answer to the question about the 1st law of thermodynamics is that the entire universe is net zero energy, with the positive contributions from mass balanced out by the negative gravitational binding energy. Current cosmological calculations are consistent with this hypothesis, although it remains to be proven conclusively.
Or, as more commonly stated, the entire universe is a free lunch.
Congratulations getting through the first day of intro. to philosophy class. But one of the reasons science has been the most successful branch of philosophy is that we quit giving a crap about theories that are not falsifiable.
Curiously enough, I have a degree in physics. But I'm wrong about things often enough I'm not about to make that appeal to authority.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
What happened before the big bang is irrelevant. It's philosophy, not science. We can only ever study what happened after the big bang (though we have a damn good understanding already from a tiny fraction of a second after onwards).
Also, the Heat Death is not going to happen, that scenario is scientifically ruled out since many years.
Yep. This is still an "observation", not a "conclusion".
That won't stop the press running with the story though, and lo, a whole load more stupidity will be created from nothing.
Stupidity is the only thing that that doesn't obey the laws of thermodynamics. It's an infinite resource and can be called into existence at any time with negligible energy loss to the otherwise closed system.
No sig today...
Sure, and the space between atoms is mostly void, so when you eat things you're mostly eating nothing, and you shouldn't ever be able to get full.*
It's all fine and dandy to play with paradoxical thought exercises, but on another practical level it's also obvious when something works pretty darn well, and even if you don't have a philosophical proof, it's still effective.
* Insert Chinese food joke.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Wikipedia explains it better than I ever could https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
>Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance
No it isn't.
Dark matter accounts for the hidden mass of the universe, it doesn't account for why there is matter in the first place. If dark matter interacted with anti-matter more strongly than regular matter, you would get more annihilation reactions, not fewer, because dark matter has mass and therefore gravity and attracts matter and anti-matter alike.
The universe is just a really big quantum vacuum fluctuation. It came from nothing and will eventually collapse back into nothing and as long as it doesn't interact with other universes it will be exactly like it never existed at all. Which it doesn't.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
He's probably more concerned about money.
You can say "I dunno" and it won't cost you a dime.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That is extremely unsatisfying as an answer. The universe is just one huge mystery.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If the universe is infinite, and generally isotropic (as all observations indicate it to be), then there are some interesting consequences - given infinite time to deal with, all things that can happen, no matter how improbable, will happen. What's more, they will happen an infinite number of times. Since your existence can happen (given that you are writing on the internet), then it must have happened before and it must happen again. Which means that right now, this discussion is just one iteration of an infinite string of slashdot arguments about stoner physics.
The absurdity of all that is one reason that I don't think anybody really believes in infinity. Unless you are willing to accept all the ludicrous statistical implications, you probably shouldn't suggest that the universe is actually infinite.
Based on your thesis it would seem that symmetry has a statistical base separate from literal symmetry. Are we observing statistical symmetry or the lack of literal symmetry?
Here's my thesis:
1) We know that space itself is expanding, and we expect that the expansion is evenly distributed.
2) Visualize position as quantized. It may or may not be quantized, that's just the mental model that I'm using to better show the process.
3) Suppose a bit of matter is sitting on a position right when the universe splits that position. What happens?
My thesis is that the matter ends up randomly in one or the other new positions that came from the original position.
My post derives from that thesis. There could be other results from that thought problem, but the random choice seems reasonable, based on what we know about QM.
Either way you end up with the atheist's F word: Faith.
It doesn't take faith to believe the universe has always existed. And nobody is required to believe that the universe has always existed. What we can deduce from observation is that, going back in time, all parts of the universe get closer and closer together, which suggests that at one point they would have all been in the same place. Hence the big bang.
This says nothing at all about whether the universe has always existed. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't. It's just a philosophical question, and one that nobody really has an answer to. And invoking a deity or some kind of supernatural narrative doesn't help at all - either the universe exists for some unknowable reason, or there's a deity that exists for some unknowable reason, and that deity created the universe. Can you really argue for one versus the other?
He's both the beginning, and the forever and everlasting. There is no "before"; as in a god that created a god. I should preface that with being from the faith of Christianity.
If science is about the "how", as in how things work and inter-operate in the Universe, then faith (and the supposition therein depending on your POV) is there to address and answer the "why"; as in why it all started to begin with.
Life is not for the lazy.
> Recent discoveries suggest that there's a perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter ... going by our findings so far, there simply shouldn't be a universe
I have a different discovery that it does exist, so I suggest you theorist go back to the drawing board.
Your existence proves me right. Or you don't exist and can't prove me wrong. Either way, the universe exists.
We have no idea how dark matter interacts with anything, but annihilation is one possibility (a bit remote though - it would mean particularly odd physics). All of the anti-matter annihilating with dark matter would leave all of the matter and most of the dark matter, so that could work, far-fetched though that reaction would be. Interacting in some other way, where they react to form some other kind of dark matter, is also possible, and perhaps less fanciful.
It's all a reach though, since we know so little about dark matter you can invent all sorts of crazy theories about it, and that doesn't mean much.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The way I think of it, I donâ(TM)t see a single big bang, or even a single crunch that happens over and over. But multiple crunches happening spread out across infinity. Where our perception of the universe is just one tiny bit from a single crunch event. We are speeding up as the gravity of the other crunch events matter starts over coming the gravity from the matter from our crunch event.
Rinse and repeat forever across infinity.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
This is a non-political topic. Yet it has somehow attracted a large amount of commenters. The discussion is at times insightful, funny, or just good-natured. People are debating science, math, technology, and philosophy.
So my question is: what the hell has happened to slashdot? Have I somehow transported myself into the anti-universe?
Whoosh! And here I was hoping for an "Intercourse the Penguin!" response. Slashdot, you disappoint.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Their problem is that they know of only four fundamental forces. When they finally discover the fifth, they'll smack themselves on the forehead and wonder why it took them so long.
If Einstein was right, and space and time are the same thing, it seems reasonable that if the Universe has infinite space it should have infinite time.
There was a theory that it is and that the big bang was at 0 on the time line. Antimatter was just matter than was travelling backwards in time. Thus for the same issue we are talking about here, there is no real antimatter as it all went down the negative time while positive matter went down positive time for two separate universes going away from each other in time. Feynman diagrams work this way but I think they did some studies on irreversible process and came to the conclusion that anti-matter is travelling in the same direction as normal matter after all.
Either continual universe-scale big bang / big crunch cycles, or localized mini-crunches cleaning everything up every now and again.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Matter is antimatter and everything is everything else, and paradoxes must resolve themselves and we are a giant state machine and we are all the same person meeting in the wrong order.
The universe is a mathematically open system.
Why does every web site have a goddamn popup? Does anybody ever click on them?
The research itself is testing what is known as "CPT invariance" (you can see this stated clearly in the article link in the OP). A super short explanation is that CPT is charge-parity-time invariance. CPT invariance means if you flip the sign of the electric charge, swap parity (meaning exchange left with right), and reverse time, then the physical system will behave exactly as it did before. If CPT invariance were indeed violated, then that is one thing that could explain the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter.
But CPT invariance has never been the primary avenue of research for understanding the matter/anti-matter asymmetry. The general assumption that most theorists working in high-energy physics work with is that CPT invariance is absolute, and the matter/anti-matter asymmetry is explained by breaking CP invariance instaed. CP invariance means that if you flip the charge and reverse swap left with right, but don't reverse time, then the system will behave the same. Break that, and flipping charge and swapping left/right will change the behavior of the system.
So what this research really means is that the general assumption most theorists were working on was probably a solid foundation, and they can continue looking for the CP invariance they expected was there all along. But I guess that's not a very sensational headline.
This comes to mind...
http://cafehayek.com/2014/03/t...
(Don't go off on the web page; it's just a place google found the cartoon that didn't require a login)
No, it isn't. I've done the calculations and gravity is not taken into account.
What is the difference between how and why? The only answer to why is by explaining how. God is a cop out for those that find explaining too difficult.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Sorry, CERN. We thought nobody would notice... Alright then. Computer: END PROGRAM!
***CARRIER LOST***
Gravity means that a physical system can both exist and have net zero energy at the same time. The energy consumed by generating mass follows a linear trend, but reduces the overall energy of the system by higher order. Consequentially you can either have nothing or a minimum viable amount, but not something in the middle. Additionally, a system which exists has less entropy for each additional particle, so it is also entropically feasible for it to spontaneously occur.
They did not conclude the universe should not exist. They rather just said they did not understand why there is an imbalance between matter and anti-matter. This by the way not new and is discussed in physics for quite some time.
On a cursory analysis of the article I came across the following line: "Usually the antimatter lifetime is limited by imperfections in the traps – little instabilities allow the antimatter to leak through.But by using a combination of two traps, the BASE team made the most perfect antimatter chamber ever – holding the antiprotons for 405 days. " This is why this type of work is useful to society right now: in order to answer the fundamental questions of the Universe, with precision, it develops new technologies that can be applied to a number of other fields.
Just one of the many things that confound scientists. It "just so" happens matter and antimatter coexist. It "just so" happened that a single cell reproducing asexually "just so" developed the ability for sexual reproduction and it "jiust so" happened both male and female came about at the same time. It "just so " happens hydrogen formed itself into a sun, "just so" happened water formed on the planet, "just so" happened an atmosphere appeared to protect the planet from being blasted by radiation, and life "just so" happened to arise on the planet.
How many "just so" incidents does it take before one becomes overwhelmed by the evidence and therefore must logically conclude that indeed, "In the beginning, God created..."?
The scientists in this article came very close to admitting the truth: the evidence points away from happenstance and random events and towards purposeful design.
It is like these scientists found a vehicle made of Lego (tm) bricks and conclude "these blocks just assemnbled themselves over trillions of years by some unknown force stacking them together! This ought not to even be here!" It never enters their minds that for Legos to be assemnbled into anything there must have been an assembler to do so, just as for a spider to have been programmed to spin a web there must have been a programmer to do so.
And so these scientists take another hit on the bong or pour another drink snatching away the brief moment of clarity they had.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and his theory, arose at the same time an opium epidemic was going on. Yes, I believe Darwin was an opium or codeine addict, fow how else could he come to such addled conclusions that he did?
Darwin, bless his little heart, made his journey on the Beagle so as to smoke his opium without being bothered by the police, or nagged by relatives for being stoned all the time. And what do you, all the other university drug addicts, in their impaired state of mind, believed Darwin's tale of species origins to be true. It takes a mind altered by drugs to be able to look at the evidence of purposeful design and come to some other conclusion.
In 1939,
https://aviaryrecoverycenter.com/timeline-heroin-epidemic
1830 – British dependence on opium reaches an all time high, with 22,000 pounds of opium imported from Turkey and India.
1832 – Codeine is extracted from opium.
1839 – Opium accounts for more deaths than any other substance.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
Since the law of conservation of mass and energy states that matter and energy can not be created then how did it ever come into existence in the first place?
Conservation of energy can only happen in a closed system. Therefore, if the universe appears out of 'nowhere', it is possible the universe itself is not a complete system
MobyDisk referred to a Scientific American article which said, basically, that if there was both matter and antimatter in the observable universe, there would have to be a boundary with matter on one side and anti-matter on the other. No matter how sparse the matter was at the boundary, it would create a lot more gamma rays than we detect.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Really this is in a long line of things that have been discovered that changed science. For example, in the 1930s and 40s, there was a debate about whether the universe was steady-state or expanding. Hubble's observations along with discovery of the CBR by Penzias and Wilson showed that the universe was expanding and steady-state was dropped in favor of the Big Bang. Raymond Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba both detected that solar neutrinos created by solar fusion were 1/3 of what they should have been if the Standard Model of physics was correct. It turns out that the Standard Model was correct in regards to nuclear fusion; it was incorrect in regards to the nature of neutrinos.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I mean, who would believe in the existence of universe with a world in it that had the name "Donald Trump" and "President" in the same sentence?
Perfect logic requires perfect knowledge, which we can never have, which is why empirical evidence is so critical.
Here's a lesson I did with my kids t demonstrate the flaw in trusting logic without experiment--
Take an ice cube. To raise its temperature to room temperature (and melt it) you need to raise it by about 40 degrees F.
Take a similar amount of room temperature water. To make it boil, you need to raise it about 140 degrees F.
Now, put both in the same microwave. What will happen first? Will the ice cube melt or will the water boil?
Since ice and water are the same substance, logically, most people think the ice will melt first.
-- Except that ice is perfectly transparent to microwaves. If you can keep the ice dry, it will not melt, while the water will boil furiously. (Any water on the surface of the ice will get hot and make the ice melt a little bit, so use a plastic rack or something like that.)
Question-- When Richard Feynman created Feynman diagrams, *why* did he have anti-particles moving backwards through time? Maybe we're just at a point in the universe where matter is more common that anti-matter. Wait a few billion years and measure again...
Is it your opinion that these positions in space, quantum or otherwise, are in isolation from each others frame of reference thereby preventing total matter-antimatter annihilation? There are no pigeon holes in open space unless you are referencing dimensional space.
I do a lot of work with information theory, so I keep coming back to the question of whether the universe is computable.
If it's computable, then the information needed to calculate the outcome of any interaction is finite, which means that everything about that interaction has to be quantized at some level. (Otherwise the amount of information needed is infinite, and that leads to other problems with entropy and energy and such.)
Others have looked into this and have not found a way to make quantized position compatible with relativity, so the prevailing opinion is that space is continuous at all scales.
I'm not ready to agree with this conclusion just yet - I'm still working on it - because a smooth space is incompatible with computability, and that's a *really big* incompatibility.
That being said, just consider our own expanding space with a bit of matter on it. An electron is supposed to be a point particle (in the mathematical sense of "point", having no volume), so suppose an electron is sitting somewhere in space when that section expands: what happens?
If you want to consider frames of reference, you can think of the electron as moving or fixed, and time it such that the world-line puts the electron on that position at the time it expands.
If the electron is moving and the expansion has a component in the direction of motion, it has to lose energy because of the expansion, which we see as red shift from far away galaxies.
But the question stands: what happens to the electron when the universe expands under it?
I think moving the electron to one of the resultant positions randomly makes sense as an answer, and in that case when the universe was very small it might explain the matter inequality we now see.
So we don't have to wait for life to talk about miracles...
It's obvious to me that the matter segregated itself from the antimatter as it formed during the Big Bang, and thus never had the chance to annihilate each other. There must be a mirrored anti-matter universe out there somewhere but we can not see it. All of our experiments are being conducted simultaneously in the anti-universe, so the perfect balance is always maintained.
PlaynBass
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one.
like 'infinity' for one.
like 'infinity,' for one.
Yep and yep.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
So, if a distant cluster of galaxies was composed of antimatter rather than matter, could we tell? A photon is its own anti-particle, so the light wouldn't let us know.
We'd sure know it if we visited, but it were distant enough, no physical part of it would ever get to us, right? Or get to anything that we'd notice light up very intensely.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Hi lgw,
I wanted to contact you personally.
My gmail email id is rajmohan.harindranath.
Can you send me a mail, so that we can connect?
Regards
Rajmohan H
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
I counter with the observation that relatively few things actually wind up being proven to be truly impossible. Many things are proven to be extremely unlikely, however. I think I get it now! AC = ... A.C. Doyle? Who knew.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...