Big Bang, Deflated? Universe May Have Had No Beginning
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
Space.com
http://www.space.com/28681-theory-no-big-bang.html
http://www.space.com/28681-theory-no-big-bang.html
If a new theory turns out to be true, the universe may not have started with a bang.
In the new formulation, the universe was never a singularity, or an infinitely small and infinitely dense point of matter. In fact, the universe may have no beginning at all.
"Our theory suggests that the age of the universe could be infinite," said study co-author Saurya Das, a theoretical physicist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.
...
The new concept could also explain what dark matter the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up most of the universe is actually made of, Das added
Comments
Gee. I thought the universe was destined to end when Apple quit making iPhones
(or when Justin Bieber acts like a rational, mature person)
(Of course, in Corvair fashion, you only want to risk it going 48 miles per hour in order to travel through time. At 49, the fanbelt breaks and the rear floorboards give out.)
Anywho, everything else in the universe is reused -- we're all star stuff from how many cycles of exploding stars since the beginning of this universe. It makes sense that the universe as a whole perpetuates, and regenerates every now and then.
If there was no beginning that can have been no creator.
Somewhat like a reset switch on a microcontroller. Press the switch and from the relative standpoint of your Propeller, it's the first time it's ever been on. The concept of a before doesn't exist.
At times, I dislike 'pure science'. The discussion about the universe is endless. I can put my mind to better use by napping.
-Phil
Just live one day at a time and put in a good day's work and you will do fine.
The best thing about the origin of the universe is that we are supposed to always get one day per week off.
Wolf Larson in Jack London's "The Sea Wolf" believed that creation was just a huge cosmic ball of yeast. Somehow, I seem to feel there is something right about that.
That was just a wee bit too much for my little brain to comprehend
The appeal of the Big Bang simply was and still is that religions that endorse some sort of higher power having created all this get included in scientific dialog. Philosophically, it gets somewhat awkward to assert the universe is and always was and always will be.
Frankly, I am more concerned about exercising and eating right. The universe will take care of itself.
I think physicists secretly love the challenges that infinity presents them. Certainly if you are trying to model some physical phenomena and you get an infinity popping out of your maths that is not very useful and you may give up with the idea. But one can find ways around these infinities, get them to cancel out or whatever and get a useful result. I have some examples:
1) Newton. The problem of differential calculus is to put two points on some curve, those two points give you a gradient (y2 - y1) / (x2 - x1). Think a change in distance divided by a change in time gives you speed. BUT if you want the gradient at a point on the curve. So y1 = y2 and x1 = x2. That gives you 0/0 and poof you are stuck. Newton, and Leibnitz, discovered how to divide 0/0 and get a sensible result. Magic!
2) Summing series over an infinite number of terms. Or integrating some function from -infinty to +infinity. May converge on a sensible finite result, may explode to infinity. Used all the time. What about the transmission line problem? An infinite length of series inductance and parallel capacitance. Add it all up and you get the characteristic impedance of the line. What about quantum mechanics where the fun seems to be in finding solutions to the wave equation that don't blow up.
3) In recent times physicists have been making use of the bizarre result that you can add all the integers from one to infinity and get -1/12. Turns out that this result is in important thing in string theory. Admittedly I have no idea how!
Thinking about it now I have noticed an odd thing. Physicists have concepts of measurable things like mass or voltage or velocity for which they never entertain the idea of an infinite amount of them. On the other hand, they have concepts of time and distance, also measurable things, for which we do accept that there may be an infinite amount of them. That's very strange. What other measurable things are allowed to, at least conceptually, go to infinity?
I don't know about that.
Stephen Hawking Thinks These 3 Things Could Destroy Humanity
Artificial intelligence -
Hawking is part of a small but growing group of scientists who have expressed concerns about "strong" artificial intelligence (AI) intelligence that could equal or exceed that of a human.
Human aggression -
If our machines don't kill us, we might kill ourselves. Hawking now believes that human aggression might destroy civilization.
Alien life -
But Hawking had made ominous warnings even before these recent ones. Back in 2010, Hawking said that, if intelligent alien life exists, it may not be that friendly toward humans.
Unless of course they have a rigorous mathematical model based on measured phenomena that such a thing might be true. I have yet to hear of such a model.
I see what you mean though. The Big Bang idea is convenient if you can then say "See, it all started from nothing. My deity wrote the rules and pulled the trigger." In some perverse way one can reconcile the concept of a creator with that of the Big Bang.
"In the beginning was the Void, and within the Void was a great roaring; and the dust of the Void was so brought together that the earth and all the firmament was so created. The same was in the beginning; and there was no man to hear or to see this wonder."
Some dude named John.
Yes, many things may destroy humanity. Ultimately one of them will. Be it global warming, exhaustion of resources, disease, aliens, nuclear war, smart computers, the Sun going super nova, the heat death of the universe, etc etc etc.
But Loopy is right, the universe will take care of itself. It just does what it does.
Next Propeller project: A way to pop a whole bag of popcorn in one bang! (No machine guns, just one bomb)
Human aggression could of course be a problem, but a real problem is that we are getting too dependant of modern technology. What if we face a big outburst on the sun (like in the 1880's) that kind of outburst today would probably kill most of the communication satellites, including GPS satellites, powerlines and even micro prosessors all over the world. That could probably harm supplies to grocery stores and gas stations. And you would have no money because all your money are just digits in broken computers.
Everybody gets their food from the store today and no farmers can grow their corn without using diesel consuming tractors. The natural houshold is gone in the western world, thats frighten me.
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11138-this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-not-with-a
Sorry, but I don't care about anyone's new theories. I've grown numb to revolutionary internet headlines. Every other article starts with "Scientists have solved the mystery of..."
Some dress that no one sees the same colors on. A "Color Perception Scientist"? C'mon. The Internet is "tearing itself apart" from the mystery? Gimme a break. http://www.vox.com/2015/2/26/8118961/color-dress-science
"Logic surged from gaping rents in the very fabric of the time/space continuum". I wrote that. Maybe I can be a copy writer too!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/20/tectonic-plates-move_n_6713638.html
-Phil
Between Doppler shift, hysteresis, gyroscopic effects and Coriolis acceleration, I'm amazed that the universe functions at all.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to my BS2PX Over Unity experiments.
Not really. It just wraps it up for Oolon Colluphid's version of God. There are many who have believed for a long time that God organizes matter, and not that God creates it ex nihilo. One always has to guard against strawmen and overgeneralizations.
One also has to guard against the violation of forum rules.
Internet headlines certainly are getting out of hand. I am deeply annoyed at Yahoo and the Washington Post and even some of the thread titles for just grabbing attention in the most blattan uninformative manner.
While I don't complain here about particular thread titles, I frequently comment at Yahoo News and the Washington Post that they have no shame in pandering for circulation hits.
This universe news is rather old and may just be another round of circulating 'the buzz'.
We can always have gods or God or a god. Belief and denial are linked, something similar to love and hate. So having strong beliefs may likely imply and equal passion for denying what you choose not to believe. Recently, I have been pondering how much humans are belief/denial driven. World news seems to support this being the case.
As to what the universe really is.. we may never know. But I love the photos of galaxies far beyond. The give me the same warm feeling of watching a wood fire.
My feeling is that all of this physics theory is now so complicated that nobody can begin to understand it without studying it full time for years and decades. Certainly the maths involved is way more than most of us get a handle on in a calculus class in school or undergrad maths. Without the understanding of the maths there is little hope of grasping the ideas.
Then, papers bringing forward new ideas, new models, new proofs of this and that, are greeted with great enthusiasm by those Physics and Maths nerds, mostly in research departments, who do this for a living. For them it's a challenge to understand the thing and pick it apart.
That causes splash in the scientific world that get's picked up by the media, who mostly don't understand anything like the rest of us. It then gets plastered over front pages everywhere as "the answer to life the universe and everything". Even before those who could understand it have read the thing properly.
As John Lennon once said, "Life leaves a lot to the imagination."
There has never been observed evidence that the universe is anything but infinite, despite the limitation of being able to look into the past for a notion of it's "age." The current epoch may have started with a Big Bang, but the BB theory does not try to explain what existed before that. Simply because we cannot observe the universe prior to 13.7 billion years ago, doesn't mean there wasn't a 13.71 billion years ago.
So, I'm afraid, we'll always have to not know, no matter how good our understanding of physics.
There seems to be two ideas at work here:
One is that some theory and or evidence suggests you can't observe anything prior to 13.7E9 years.
The other is that some theory has it that there was nothing prior to 13E9 years.
My understanding was that BB was the latter. As such BB would not try to explain what was before because it has already explained there was no before.
Clearly if there is no matter or energy around it is impossible to measure time so there would be no before.
Likewise, there has always been three endgame scenarios of the Big Bang, but these are still independent theories not attached to Big Bang itself.
Given observations such as accelerated expansion, there are more recent offshoots of Big Bang that try to address the "before." Here's one: if the universe eventually expands to the conversion of all remaining matter to photons, as some theories propose, time will cease to exist. By extension, so will space. Now, all the energy in the once-expanded universe is in dimensionless space. As some suggest, a new bang (whether from a singularity or not), a new beginning, a whole new time. There WAS a before, but not from the current universe's perspective.
Anyway, there are more theories to this than you can shake a stick at. Most have intriguing aspects. The Perimeter Institute in Canada is dedicated to exploring these. Check out BBCs Horizon program for an hour-long documentary on the institute.
Yes it did. Their choice of habits.
["Far Side" cartoon shows dinosaurs smoking and insists that's the real reason they became extinct.]