butterwise writes "From the Guardian Unlimited: 'The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.'"
"All we can say is [the next big bang] won't be within the next 10 billion years." Good job, because if we were around we would instantly disintegrate into massless particles of light.
And you know how quickly that kind of thing can ruin your day!
The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs and big crunches - where every particle of matter collapses together.
And also from TFA (again, emphasis mine):
With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it.
Now, I'm no cosmologist, but these two descriptions of the theory seem to be in conflict...does the matter in the universe come together in the Big Crunch, or does it fly off into space forever, replenished by subsequent Big Bang events?
If the Guardian Unlimited doesn't even know what the theory is proposing, why are they reporting it?
Fortunately, we needn't depend upon Guardian Unlimited for our cosmology news...Nature.com happens to have a much more informative article [nature.com] on the subject. What's especially amusing is that they've had this article since April 26th of 2002.
Well, the difference in explanations is obvious. In the first case (big bang, big crunch, rinse and repeat) they are referring to the standard big bang theory. The new theory (as far as TFA says) doesn't involve a crunch, just another big bang after the current matter in the universe dissipates. How that part works out would be an interesting read. One aspect of the duality that binds the various aspects of M-Theory is that for certain branches of the theory, what is true at one geometric scale n is true
Except that Big Bang Theory neither requires nor expects a crunch. In fact, most modern cosmologists think that we live in an open universe, meaning that we will eventually suffer heat death. There's a lot of literature on this, but I highly recommend Guth's The Inflationary Universe [amazon.com] for a layman physics treatment. The book is quite interesting, has little math and lots of references if you want to go look up where he's coming from. To say that Guth is an expert on cosmology [wikipedia.org] would be a gross understatment.
Well, brane theory (a.k.a. string theory) is kind of funky. It posits that there are parallel universes (branes) that are tied to each other in different dimensions. There was an explosion that forced the branes apart, although they are still tied together through another dimension. As the branes (universes) spread themselves out, the force connecting them get weaker. Each brane starts to die entropically. (All the higher energy states have been taken and only chaos can exist; no ordered states are possible). At some point, the force from the initial explosion is not enough to overcome the "force" exerted by the bridging dimension to keep the branes apart. The branes then collide with each other again. There is another big bang caused by this collision.
Dimensions are weird things. Imagine a two-dimensional plane that goes on infinitely. For a finite, two-dimensional being on that plane, there can only be two-dimensions. As far as he can see, his Universe is the only one. But there can be a million other dimensions stacked onto his in the third dimension. He is just one page on the book, but he cannot observe that third plane. Brane theory observes that just because X dimensions exist, that does not mean we experience all of them.
Think about time as the fourth dimension. Basically, a n-dimension allows you to add an infinite amount of things on the same place in a (n-1)-dimension world. In a two-dimensional world, you can stack many lines onto each other in the second dimension along the plane. A two-dimension sheet can be stacked infinitely in the third-dimension, so many objects can share the same two-dimensional space along the third-dimension. Many objects can exist at the same three-dimension coordinates but at different times.
What if there are more than one time-dimensions? Or more than three-spatial dimensions? Is there any postulate that says we can observe them all if they exist? That's kind of the battle because there can be no direct "proof" of any other dimensions, if they exist. Yet the other dimensions can still affect our dimension. That's why cosmology seems to be so made: because it is.
And a better question. The universe is isotropic, which means that it looks the same everywhere (or so I am told). Thus there is no "center." Imagine the surface of the Earth. Where is the center of the surface (no digging allowed). There IS none.
Well, if this property holds true for the universe, and eventually our universe will expand a whole lot and lead to a new bang, exactly where in the known universe will this bang occur?
Or, perhaps there IS a center to the universe. If this is true, what would this do for relativity, which states that ALL frames of reference are valid? If you could just fly in a rocket and see a bit red cement pole with "center of universe" painted on it, that would make a dandy absolute reference point.
Well, if this property holds true for the universe, and eventually our universe will expand a whole lot and lead to a new bang, exactly where in the known universe will this bang occur?
I'm also curious about where these new "big bangs" occur, since the big bang in normal cosmology (i.e. the Friedman-Robertson-Walker based on General Relativity) happens everywhere, not in one particular place. It's not clear that that is the picture in this new theory. This actually sounds less like F-R-W cosmology and more like a steady state model that Fred Hoyle was pushing a while back.
On to the point about providing an absolute reference frame, that might not be such a big issue. The difference here is between what's called weak lorentz symmetry breaking and strong lorentz symmetry breaking (if I'm not mistaken). Relativity says the laws of physics are the same in all frames, but it could be that one frame ends up being easily recognized, even though it doesn't have special laws (this is the weak sort of symmetry breaking). In fact, we already have this because of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). The CMBR defines the average rest frame of the observable Universe. On Earth, the CMBR looks blue shifted in one direction and redshifted in the opposite direction, because we're moving with respect to the CMBR rest frame. So, you could argue that if you get in your spaceship and turn on the thrusters until this redshift effect goes away, you'll really be "at rest" (that is, you'll be at rest in the average rest frame of matter in the universe). So there is a sort of sign post (for a particular velocity, not a particular position), but the laws of physics aren't any different in that frame, so this doesn't break relativity.
Unfortunately, your model breaks down in the face of binary star systems. In fact, in all gravitational systems the bodies involved actually orbit one another. For example, while the Moon orbits the Earth, the Earth also orbits the Moon. The Earth is so much more massive than the Moon, however, that the centre of the orbital motion (the centre of mass of the Earth-Moon system) is actually within the Earth itself. However, it is *not* at the Earth's centre; the Earth "wobbles" due to its orbiting the Moon.
Similarly, the centre of mass of the solar system is within the Sun, but still the Sun has a wobble due to its orbiting of the rest of the bodies in the system. That's more complex, of course, as with so many bodies, they tend to be at different points around it. Also the Sun is so much more massive than the other solar bodies as to render the effect essentially negligible.
The effect tends to be more noticeable in binary star systems as the two stars tend to be more closely matched in terms of mass. In that case, the centre of mass of the system is more nearly half-way between them. They both orbit something, but that something is a point of empty space.
Incidentally, this effect is how we've detected some extra-solar planets - particularly massive ones orbiting relatively small stars cause a noticeable wobble.
Dammit, managed to post that as anonymous. Dunno whether I whacked the button by accident or it was a proxy bug. In any case it was me and I think it's interesting stuff;)
I always found it amusing when people take scientific estimates at face value. The article says something along the lines of "the universe could be up to a trillion years old," so, obviously, the universe is precisely 1 trillion years old.
Reminds me of the story about the museum curator who was leaning on the second floor railing looking down at the T-Rex display, one of his personal favorites. A small family group were in front of the display, looking up in awe, and the kid asked his parents how old it was. The janitor, who had been listening nearby, sauntered over and said "I happen to know that that there skeleton is sixty five million and thirteen years old." The curator cracked up as the janitor continued, "Yup, I been workin' here thirteen years now and the curator himself told me on the day I started that it was sixty five million years old."
I've read similar things, where the cosmological constant changes over time, first expanding and then contracting the universe. In some ways it's more satisfying than having the universe as a one-shot deal that ends in cold nothingness.
It did trigger the beginnings of an idea for a science fiction novel. What if the current state of the universe was the result of tinkering from the previous big bang cycle? If you end up with constants that make life more difficult, blame those that came before. Sort of like global warming on a multi-universal scale.
I'm not very surprised that scientists are describing the universe as much older than previously thought. One of the fundimental problems of the big bang theroy was when incorperating the size of the universe it would have ment that it expanded much faster than the speed of light. (or at least this is my understanding of the big bang theory)
Actually, this wouldn't make a difference. The idea stated here is that the universe has either (a) expanded and contracted many times or (b) expanded to nothingness and been replenished by a new big bang many times. (The article isn't clear on which.) While this suggests the existence of a pre-Big-Bang universe, it does not suggest that the latest Big Bang took place any earlier than current estimates used for hte single-Big Bang theory.
So if there are problems with the speed of expansion post-Big Bang, t
very old universe !:-) Any way you can find in a lot of places informations about a lot of Galaxies that have been classified older than the big bang (15 billons years) ! The french magazine "Science et Vie" have some goods articles on the subject this mounth release.
Strange how this coincides with the theory of "Cosmic cycles" in Hinduism and other Vedic religions [wikipedia.org] like Buddhism [ttp]
In short, Hindu scriptures accept the Big Bang (and for that matter Evolution), but believe that it is cyclical in nature. Destruction follows creation, to be followed by creation again. Similarly, "devolution" follows evolution, in a cycle to be repeated endlessly.
While there are many links to back this up, here's the most relevant one I found on Hindu Cosmology [atributetohinduism.com] (I'm not affiliated to it in any way, just happened to be one of the first sites that came up on a Google search). Among other prominent people, it also carries this quote from Carl Sagan [wikipedia.org]'s description of Hindu cosmology in his book Cosmos. To quote:
The late scientist, Carl Sagan, in his book, Cosmos asserts that the Dance of Nataraja (Tandava) signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory).
"It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of." Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of inorganic matter.
For modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artist created visual images of dancing Shiva's in a beautiful series of bronzes. Today, physicist have used the most advanced technology to portray the pattern of the cosmic dance. Thus, the metaphor of the cosmic dance unifies, ancient religious art and modern physics. The Hindus, according to Monier-Williams, were Spinozists more than 2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted by scientists of the present age.
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
"The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed."
Strange how this coincides with the theory of "Cosmic cycles" in Hinduism and other Vedic religions like Buddhism
It's not strange at all. With many different religions and each religion having many different sects, how scientists describe how our universe works will seem similar to some religion somewhere.
If you think about it, religion is one way for people to describe what is happening in the world around them.
Personally, I say keep your faith and your science seperate.
Scientists and Philosophers have been waving this theory around for at least 30 years. The problem in the past has always been that even though they really, really wanted this theory to be true, they didn't have any good evidence for it. As far as I can tell from TFA, that is still the case.
Right now, astronomers have some serious blinders on literally and figuratively. There are very few places in the sky where we can actually see objects that are far enough away to have cosmological significance. Even then, we can only see that far and not further. Modern cosmology is based on a limited view of the universe. Now we are finding some crazy shit. Stuff doesn't move the way it is supposed to. The crazy double super secret invisible "cosmological constant" and "dark matter" sound more to me like m
It sounds to me like someone guessed the number 1 trillion (1,000 billion) as the age of the universe and now its being quoted as fact. You cant say the universe is 986 billion years older then previously thought becuase it makes people think your using an exact science becuase you are using exact numbers. This is sensationalist science at its worst.
Whether or not the theory will hold up in the future nobody knows but as for right now everyone needs to remember this is a theory like any and decieving people into thinking its otherwise is unfair.
Sorry to be off-topic, but articles like this throw around the word theory like every new hypothesis that's met with even a shred of success deserves to be called a theory. It's no wonder that so many people out there fail to realise that "It's just a theory, there's no proof" is a complete contradiction.
I'm favoring, more and more, a redefinition of the terms used in biological science to match those in the physical sciences. Start calling hypotheses theories, and drop the whole "Theory" label from the theory of evolution. Teach it as a combination of evidence-driven research, and base principles (Natural Selection becomes "Darwin's Laws", Mendellian Inheritence becomes "Mendel's Laws", and so forth).
Getting rid of the vague "theory" description will make it much easier to convey which parts of the modern theory of evolution should be considered fact, and which parts are still active areas of research.
Unfortunately, (as we currently understand things) we can not discover what existed before the big bang. This theory is only philosphical convecture that is not falsifiable.
The Guardian summary is very poor and mostly misses the point of the new work.
The cyclic model has been around for several years, and there is plenty I don't understand about it, but it is distinct from the old big bang-big crunch ideas. The "cycle" is the repeated collision between two sub-universes, called branes. We live in one of these sub-universes. Each collision resets our sub-universe with a new big bang... Our universe is constantly expanding; there is no crunch.
Importantly, the cyclic theory has detectable differences from the standard big bang scenario. For example, primordial gravity waves, detectable through their influence on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, are present in the standard big bang scenario and absent here. Thus their possible detection by a future microwave experiment could rule out this theory.
The purpose of this new work is to argue that the cosmological constant (the factor which make the expansion of the universe accelerate) is naturally small and positive in the cyclic model. This is as we observe it. The standard big bang theory does not make a prediction for the size of the cosmological constant (it's just a parameter), while in string theories the expected size of the constant is vastly larger.
Steinhardt has many materials (including a cartoon movie of the brane collision) on his homepage [princeton.edu].
The article is none too clear, but it seems that the major claims of this new theory are that the Cosmological Constant:
a) Might diminish over time, and
b) Might be able to survive a Big Crunch/Bang cycle, and
c) Seems to be smaller than it "should" be if the universe was created 14 billion years ago.
From these, they propose that:
d) The universe is actually much older and has gone through many Big Crunch/Bang cycles, allowing enough time for the CC to shrink to its current level.
However, I'd like to see some hard evidence for a), b), and c) before I accept that d) might be true.
My Dad's had a theory along these lines ( very similar, actually ) for years. He wrote a letter on the topic to the university where Stephen Hawking hangs out ( can't remember which one it is now ), and they gave him a lifetime subscription to a science journal they produce. Cool:)
If scientists can have a theory where everything explodes, contracts & explodes, then why not little parts of the universe doing the same thing.
Of course this doesn't exactly satisfy our curiosity - there are still questions of where matter & energy came from, if there was a beginning of time, etc, but somehow I don't think these are ever going to be explained in a way that people can digest in an ordinary state of consciousness. The ultimate nature of the universe is far more bizarre than we could possibly imagine.
But anyway, this theory of multiple big bangs & contractions makes perfect sense to me.
I'm not an astro-physicist and have no data to back this up.
Then why, pray tell, did you bother to enlighten us with your "theories?"
Common sense told Aristotle that objects fall because they are trying to return to a natural state of rest. Common sense and intuition are ridiculously bad tools for scientific inquiry. Esthetically-pleasing deductions with no empirical evidence are even worse.
Not even a hypothesis, actually. Valid hypotheses are falsifiable. "Nothing in nature has a true beginning and end, everything is part of a larger cycle" is not.
There is nothing magical about scientists that separates them from non-scientists. Science is a method anyone can use. Fanciful statements about the grand order of things and how natural phenomena are governed by laws inferred from common sense, however, do not science make. We should accept whatever theory is most consistent with the evidence, with a degree of reservation proportional to said theory's contradictions or shortcomings, be they internal inconsistencies or empirical evidence that it cannot explain.
Besides, if you want a common sense system to explain the universe, I recommend basing it on the Ptolemaic system [wikipedia.org]--at least that one has had some pretty good mileage.
From wiki "The early universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density and concomitantly huge temperatures and pressures. It expanded and cooled, going through phase transitions analogous to the condensation of steam or freezing of water as it cools, but related to elementary particles.
Approximately 10-35 seconds after the Planck epoch a phase transition caused the universe to experience exponential growth during a period called cosmic inflation. After inflation stopp
You CAN wrap your mind around time NOT having a beginning?
Neither a finite nor infinite universe are really within the ability of human comprehension as evidenced by the fact that every scientific, philosophical and religious argument out there basically boils down to "everything that exists was created by, erm, uhm, uh, this other thing...and this other thing... and oh, damn it, it just is, okay?"
Time couldn't have had a beginning, by its very nature. So of course there was stuff happening before the Big Bang... a chain of Big Bangs is what I always assumed happened, or if not that, at least something.
It works something like this: according to relativity, space and time are really linked together as 4 dimensional spacetime. Just as 2- and 3-dimensional objects can have shape, so can 4-dimensional objects like spacetime. When physicists try and get some idea of the shape of spacetime they find that it "narrows to a point in the time direction" - the big bang.
Perhaps an analogy is the best way to think about it. A sphere is a two dimensional surface in a particular shape - at any point of the surface of the sphere you can parameterise direction in terms of 2 perpendicular base vectors. We do exactly that with directions about the surface of the earth (though we call "negative east" west, and "negative north" south), so if you like you can think of north and east as the dimensions/directions on the surface of the earth. If you keep heading north, however, you find that the sphere narrows to a point in that directions - the north pole. You can't really talk about what is north of the north pole - the question doesn't really make sense. Of course you can only really see that by stepping outside and observing the 2-dimensional surface of the earth as it is embedded into 3-dimensional space; if we look at things in terms of a more easy to picture map projection into 2-dimensions (just as the surface is 2-dimensional) you might think "can't we just keep going up? Surely there's more north?"
In practice spacetime works roughly the same way except the "surface" is 4-dimensional instead of 2-dimensional. The key point is that heading back in the time direction is just like heading in the north direction of the sphere - eventually you reach a point, like the north pole, where "before" or "further back in time" doesn't make sense, in just the same way that "further north of the north pole" doesn't make sense. From our perspective inside spacetime that's harder to imagine, similar to the way the map projection tends to skew your thinking. It is made worse by the fact that we usually tend to think of time as something very separate to space rather than just another direction. The concept of time beginning with the big bang does make sense, it just requires you to break out of the standard intuitions about how space and time fit together.
This is an interesting idea. However, I don't think we know whether there are an infinite possible combinations of matter and energy. I would think the possibilities would be infinite. My intuition tells me there would be an infinite number of possibilities. But even if there is only a finite number of possibilities, we may still only live once. Probability is funny when you are dealing with the infinite. For example, if I tell you to build a decimal with an infinite number of digits between 0 and 9, you could pick 0.166666... with the 6 repeating. Then there is a possibility that you pick the number "1" exactly once, and the number "6" the rest of the time, so "1" only lives once, so to speak. (Strangely, the probability of this happening turns out to be 0, however.)
God is one kinky SOB (Score:2, Funny)
** I hope I don't get smited for that
Re:God is one kinky SOB (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:God is one kinky SOB (Score:5, Funny)
** I hope I don't get smited for that
For some reason, when I conjugate the verb word "smite" in that context, I get "smut".
(Yes, I know, it should be "smitten", but that's hardly humorous.)
Parent
Whew! (Score:4, Funny)
And you know how quickly that kind of thing can ruin your day!
Re:Whew! (Score:3, Funny)
-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA (emphasis mine): And also from TFA (again, emphasis mine):
Now, I'm no cosmologist, but these two descriptions of the theory seem to be in conflict...does the matter in the universe come together in the Big Crunch, or does it fly off into space forever, replenished by subsequent Big Bang events?
If the Guardian Unlimited doesn't even know what the theory is proposing, why are they reporting it?
Fortunately, we needn't depend upon Guardian Unlimited for our cosmology news...Nature.com happens to have a much more informative article [nature.com] on the subject. What's especially amusing is that they've had this article since April 26th of 2002.
Wrong... read more closely (Score:3, Insightful)
How that part works out would be an interesting read. One aspect of the duality that binds the various aspects of M-Theory is that for certain branches of the theory, what is true at one geometric scale n is true
Re:Wrong... read more closely (Score:3, Informative)
H
Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:5, Interesting)
Dimensions are weird things. Imagine a two-dimensional plane that goes on infinitely. For a finite, two-dimensional being on that plane, there can only be two-dimensions. As far as he can see, his Universe is the only one. But there can be a million other dimensions stacked onto his in the third dimension. He is just one page on the book, but he cannot observe that third plane. Brane theory observes that just because X dimensions exist, that does not mean we experience all of them.
Think about time as the fourth dimension. Basically, a n-dimension allows you to add an infinite amount of things on the same place in a (n-1)-dimension world. In a two-dimensional world, you can stack many lines onto each other in the second dimension along the plane. A two-dimension sheet can be stacked infinitely in the third-dimension, so many objects can share the same two-dimensional space along the third-dimension. Many objects can exist at the same three-dimension coordinates but at different times.
What if there are more than one time-dimensions? Or more than three-spatial dimensions? Is there any postulate that says we can observe them all if they exist? That's kind of the battle because there can be no direct "proof" of any other dimensions, if they exist. Yet the other dimensions can still affect our dimension. That's why cosmology seems to be so made: because it is.
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Re:Global Warming, Universe Competition (Score:5, Funny)
Where people hang out on dotslash.moc, a web site for intellectually average people with magnificent sex lives. News for normals. You look mahvelous.
Parent
Better question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if this property holds true for the universe, and eventually our universe will expand a whole lot and lead to a new bang, exactly where in the known universe will this bang occur?
Or, perhaps there IS a center to the universe. If this is true, what would this do for relativity, which states that ALL frames of reference are valid? If you could just fly in a rocket and see a bit red cement pole with "center of universe" painted on it, that would make a dandy absolute reference point.
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Re:Better question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everywhere.
-matthew
Re:Better question... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm also curious about where these new "big bangs" occur, since the big bang in normal cosmology (i.e. the Friedman-Robertson-Walker based on General Relativity) happens everywhere, not in one particular place. It's not clear that that is the picture in this new theory. This actually sounds less like F-R-W cosmology and more like a steady state model that Fred Hoyle was pushing a while back.
On to the point about providing an absolute reference frame, that might not be such a big issue. The difference here is between what's called weak lorentz symmetry breaking and strong lorentz symmetry breaking (if I'm not mistaken). Relativity says the laws of physics are the same in all frames, but it could be that one frame ends up being easily recognized, even though it doesn't have special laws (this is the weak sort of symmetry breaking). In fact, we already have this because of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). The CMBR defines the average rest frame of the observable Universe. On Earth, the CMBR looks blue shifted in one direction and redshifted in the opposite direction, because we're moving with respect to the CMBR rest frame. So, you could argue that if you get in your spaceship and turn on the thrusters until this redshift effect goes away, you'll really be "at rest" (that is, you'll be at rest in the average rest frame of matter in the universe). So there is a sort of sign post (for a particular velocity, not a particular position), but the laws of physics aren't any different in that frame, so this doesn't break relativity.
Parent
Re:Better question... (Score:4, Informative)
Similarly, the centre of mass of the solar system is within the Sun, but still the Sun has a wobble due to its orbiting of the rest of the bodies in the system. That's more complex, of course, as with so many bodies, they tend to be at different points around it. Also the Sun is so much more massive than the other solar bodies as to render the effect essentially negligible.
The effect tends to be more noticeable in binary star systems as the two stars tend to be more closely matched in terms of mass. In that case, the centre of mass of the system is more nearly half-way between them. They both orbit something, but that something is a point of empty space.
Incidentally, this effect is how we've detected some extra-solar planets - particularly massive ones orbiting relatively small stars cause a noticeable wobble.
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Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:3, Funny)
Where do baby universes come from?
Well, when two universes love each other very much...Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:4, Interesting)
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Taking Numbers at Face Value (Score:5, Funny)
I always found it amusing when people take scientific estimates at face value. The article says something along the lines of "the universe could be up to a trillion years old," so, obviously, the universe is precisely 1 trillion years old.
Re:Taking Numbers at Face Value (Score:5, Funny)
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A more comforting theory (Score:5, Interesting)
It did trigger the beginnings of an idea for a science fiction novel. What if the current state of the universe was the result of tinkering from the previous big bang cycle? If you end up with constants that make life more difficult, blame those that came before. Sort of like global warming on a multi-universal scale.
This isn't very surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This isn't very surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
While this suggests the existence of a pre-Big-Bang universe, it does not suggest that the latest Big Bang took place any earlier than current estimates used for hte single-Big Bang theory.
So if there are problems with the speed of expansion post-Big Bang, t
See also... (Score:5, Informative)
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Utter example of handwaving (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind-boggling? Yes.
Good story to impress your wife or kids? Yes.
Scientific? No.
very old news (Score:3, Interesting)
Any way you can find in a lot of places informations about a lot of Galaxies that have been classified older than the big bang (15 billons years) !
The french magazine "Science et Vie" have some goods articles on the subject this mounth release.
Never know! (Score:5, Funny)
Hindu Cosmology (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, Hindu scriptures accept the Big Bang (and for that matter Evolution), but believe that it is cyclical in nature. Destruction follows creation, to be followed by creation again. Similarly, "devolution" follows evolution, in a cycle to be repeated endlessly.
While there are many links to back this up, here's the most relevant one I found on Hindu Cosmology [atributetohinduism.com] (I'm not affiliated to it in any way, just happened to be one of the first sites that came up on a Google search). Among other prominent people, it also carries this quote from Carl Sagan [wikipedia.org]'s description of Hindu cosmology in his book Cosmos. To quote:
The late scientist, Carl Sagan, in his book, Cosmos asserts that the Dance of Nataraja (Tandava) signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory).
"It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of." Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of inorganic matter.
For modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artist created visual images of dancing Shiva's in a beautiful series of bronzes. Today, physicist have used the most advanced technology to portray the pattern of the cosmic dance. Thus, the metaphor of the cosmic dance unifies, ancient religious art and modern physics. The Hindus, according to Monier-Williams, were Spinozists more than 2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted by scientists of the present age.
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
"The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed."
Re:Hindu Cosmology (Score:4, Insightful)
Strange how this coincides with the theory of "Cosmic cycles" in Hinduism and other Vedic religions like Buddhism
It's not strange at all. With many different religions and each religion having many different sects, how scientists describe how our universe works will seem similar to some religion somewhere.
If you think about it, religion is one way for people to describe what is happening in the world around them.
Personally, I say keep your faith and your science seperate.
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Very Old theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Very Old theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Now we are finding some crazy shit. Stuff doesn't move the way it is supposed to. The crazy double super secret invisible "cosmological constant" and "dark matter" sound more to me like m
986 billion exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not the theory will hold up in the future nobody knows but as for right now everyone needs to remember this is a theory like any and decieving people into thinking its otherwise is unfair.
Re:986 billion exactly? (Score:3, Funny)
It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Design (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Desi (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean "tautology." If it's a scientific theory then by definition it cannot be proved, only disproved.
From the article it's hard to say whether this is a theory, a modification to an existing theory, or a hypothesis.
A theory isn't just an accepted hypothesis, it's a descriptive edifice that lets you make predictions. Those predictions are hypotheses.
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Wow! This precisely cooincides with... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm flabbergasted!
Metaphysics (Score:3, Interesting)
Guardian misses the point (Score:4, Informative)
The cyclic model has been around for several years, and there is plenty I don't understand about it, but it is distinct from the old big bang-big crunch ideas. The "cycle" is the repeated collision between two sub-universes, called branes. We live in one of these sub-universes. Each collision resets our sub-universe with a new big bang... Our universe is constantly expanding; there is no crunch.
Importantly, the cyclic theory has detectable differences from the standard big bang scenario. For example, primordial gravity waves, detectable through their influence on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, are present in the standard big bang scenario and absent here. Thus their possible detection by a future microwave experiment could rule out this theory.
The purpose of this new work is to argue that the cosmological constant (the factor which make the expansion of the universe accelerate) is naturally small and positive in the cyclic model. This is as we observe it. The standard big bang theory does not make a prediction for the size of the cosmological constant (it's just a parameter), while in string theories the expected size of the constant is vastly larger.
Steinhardt has many materials (including a cartoon movie of the brane collision) on his homepage [princeton.edu].
Cosmological constant survives the Big Crunch? (Score:4, Informative)
a) Might diminish over time, and
b) Might be able to survive a Big Crunch/Bang cycle, and
c) Seems to be smaller than it "should" be if the universe was created 14 billion years ago.
From these, they propose that:
d) The universe is actually much older and has gone through many Big Crunch/Bang cycles, allowing enough time for the CC to shrink to its current level.
However, I'd like to see some hard evidence for a), b), and c) before I accept that d) might be true.
Actual Article (Score:4, Informative)
finally (Score:3, Funny)
Good work, Dad :) (Score:3, Interesting)
If scientists can have a theory where everything explodes, contracts & explodes, then why not little parts of the universe doing the same thing.
Of course this doesn't exactly satisfy our curiosity - there are still questions of where matter & energy came from, if there was a beginning of time, etc, but somehow I don't think these are ever going to be explained in a way that people can digest in an ordinary state of consciousness. The ultimate nature of the universe is far more bizarre than we could possibly imagine.
But anyway, this theory of multiple big bangs & contractions makes perfect sense to me.
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why, pray tell, did you bother to enlighten us with your "theories?"
Common sense told Aristotle that objects fall because they are trying to return to a natural state of rest. Common sense and intuition are ridiculously bad tools for scientific inquiry. Esthetically-pleasing deductions with no empirical evidence are even worse.
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Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing magical about scientists that separates them from non-scientists. Science is a method anyone can use. Fanciful statements about the grand order of things and how natural phenomena are governed by laws inferred from common sense, however, do not science make. We should accept whatever theory is most consistent with the evidence, with a degree of reservation proportional to said theory's contradictions or shortcomings, be they internal inconsistencies or empirical evidence that it cannot explain.
Besides, if you want a common sense system to explain the universe, I recommend basing it on the Ptolemaic system [wikipedia.org]--at least that one has had some pretty good mileage.
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No they're not (Score:3, Interesting)
"The early universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density and concomitantly huge temperatures and pressures. It expanded and cooled, going through phase transitions analogous to the condensation of steam or freezing of water as it cools, but related to elementary particles.
Approximately 10-35 seconds after the Planck epoch a phase transition caused the universe to experience exponential growth during a period called cosmic inflation. After inflation stopp
Yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither a finite nor infinite universe are really within the ability of human comprehension as evidenced by the fact that every scientific, philosophical and religious argument out there basically boils down to "everything that exists was created by, erm, uhm, uh, this other thing...and this other thing... and oh, damn it, it just is, okay?"
Re:Yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly the dilemma. You can't imagine absolutely nothing, but there's no reasonable explanation for existence either.
Re:Time had a beginning? (Score:5, Interesting)
It works something like this: according to relativity, space and time are really linked together as 4 dimensional spacetime. Just as 2- and 3-dimensional objects can have shape, so can 4-dimensional objects like spacetime. When physicists try and get some idea of the shape of spacetime they find that it "narrows to a point in the time direction" - the big bang.
Perhaps an analogy is the best way to think about it. A sphere is a two dimensional surface in a particular shape - at any point of the surface of the sphere you can parameterise direction in terms of 2 perpendicular base vectors. We do exactly that with directions about the surface of the earth (though we call "negative east" west, and "negative north" south), so if you like you can think of north and east as the dimensions/directions on the surface of the earth. If you keep heading north, however, you find that the sphere narrows to a point in that directions - the north pole. You can't really talk about what is north of the north pole - the question doesn't really make sense. Of course you can only really see that by stepping outside and observing the 2-dimensional surface of the earth as it is embedded into 3-dimensional space; if we look at things in terms of a more easy to picture map projection into 2-dimensions (just as the surface is 2-dimensional) you might think "can't we just keep going up? Surely there's more north?"
In practice spacetime works roughly the same way except the "surface" is 4-dimensional instead of 2-dimensional. The key point is that heading back in the time direction is just like heading in the north direction of the sphere - eventually you reach a point, like the north pole, where "before" or "further back in time" doesn't make sense, in just the same way that "further north of the north pole" doesn't make sense. From our perspective inside spacetime that's harder to imagine, similar to the way the map projection tends to skew your thinking. It is made worse by the fact that we usually tend to think of time as something very separate to space rather than just another direction. The concept of time beginning with the big bang does make sense, it just requires you to break out of the standard intuitions about how space and time fit together.
Jedidiah.
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Re:What makes this really interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Giant Recycling Machine (Score:3, Funny)
(Sorry, couldn't resist)