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Space Science

Exit Big Bang, Enter 5th Dimension? 42

Posted by timothy from the actually-it's-the-19th-dimension dept.
The Fun Guy points to this snippet of this "story from the Philadelphia Inquirer: 'the new picture of creation does away with the notion -- now almost scientific gospel -- that all the billions of galaxies making up our universe sprang from a point smaller than an atom. Instead, the scientists say, the big bang stemmed from a collision of two universes that had been separated by a "fifth dimension."'"
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Exit Big Bang, Enter 5th Dimension? More

Exit Big Bang, Enter 5th Dimension?

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  • Yes it does. The predicted number of times a week a typical American can't find his keys is:

    • 1.41 in 3 dimensions
    • 1.83 in 4 dimensions
    • 2.32 in 5 dimensions
    • 2.90 in 6 dimensions
    • 3.76 in 7 dimensions
    The measured value, 2.31, is in agreement with the 5 dimensions theory.
  • First, are these the same scientists who also predict that galaxies are filled with totally undetectable dark matter that makes up 99.9% of the matter of the Universe, and that the space between galaxies is filled with totally undetectable dark matter with negative mass that makes up the other 99.9% of the matter of the Universe?

    Second, have these scientists read "Brief History of Time", which does away with the whole notion that our Universe needed a point to be created in?

  • Nah. It can't possibly be -that- strong. I think they've distilled something from a nearby chemical warfare lab.
  • Theories are designed for the sole purpose of having people throw rocks at them, to see what bits stay up and what bits fall over.

    If a theory can't even survive one tiny snowball on a weblog, THAT is proof enough that the theory is wrong. Alternatives aren't necessary.

    Remember, science is about falsification, but it is ALSO about Occam's Razor. The more elements there are to a theory, the more likely it is to be wrong. Having dark matter (that can't be detected and therefore can't be falsified) that has either positive or negative gravity, depending on where it is and how many pints of beer the researcher drank, violates Occam's Razor and the requirements of a sound theory so badly that it hardly deserves further examination.

    An alternative explanation: Superstrings. These =DO= have negative gravity, and could easily account for all this supposed "missing matter". It's been published in so many reputable science journals that it can rightly treat your counter with the contempt it deserves.

    Another alternative explanation: The models people are using of galaxies are over-simplified. You simply can't solve the 3-body problem, except by doing the experiment. A galaxy is an 11 BILLION body problem, if you consider the stars alone, and possibly 111 billion, if you include planetary systems, asteroid belts, etc, which do affect the star's motion.

    You've also got to consider "shepherd stars/galaxies". In the same way that shepherd moons stabilize the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, it is entirely plausable that unstable galaxies can acquire the semblance of stability through the proximity of other large bodies in the vicinity. Again, shepherding is a well-known and well-established and (more to the point!) OBSERVED phenomina.

    Then, you have to consider that gravity itself is not exactly well-understood. There is NO quantum model for gravity, for example. Gravitational waves, from n-ary systems are also a complicating factor, as they will exist within the galaxy AND between galaxies. It is extremely unlikely that models of galaxy formation and galaxy stability, even if the sheer computing power existed to solve these problems accurately, could even remotely include the quirks of gravity.

    Last, but not least, relativity throws another spanner in the works. Each body (star, planet, asteroid, etc) has it's own time-frame, because each body will have a unique relative velocity. This makes any kind of simulation positively HORRIBLE! It's bad enough to have to solve by numerical methods an approximate model of an 111 billion body problem. To then have to solve each equation with respect to ALL other bodies means you have FACTORIAL 111 BILLION equations, PER ITERATION!

    Now, you're going to tell me that a bunch of punk science wannabies, who have devised a bunch of media buzzwords, can resolve a problem of this magnitude on their home PC?

    Dark Matter/Dark Energy is the physics version of the Cold Fusion fiasco. The onus is on the scientists to show why their model meets all challanges, NOT on the challengers to disprove it.

    If we lived in your world, we'd still be using Plato's model of the solar system. After all, it DOES work. It meets all predictions, just fine, and contradicts no other theory. (Relativity allows you to pick ANY body as the point of reference, so an Earth-centered solar system is certainly valid. It's even useful, sometimes.)

    The requirement that the simplest theory wins is what overthrew Plato, and replaced his model with a sun-centered system which was later extended by Kepler to have elliptical orbits.

    IMHO, the idea that the scientists have botched the calculations is MUCH simpler than believing in exotic, undetectable matter. And the idea of Superstrings (which is looking a healthy candidate for a Grand Unified Theory) explains any remaining phenomina just fine.

  • The currently-accepted scientific method is to always accept the simpler of any two explanations, provided it is no simpler than necessary.

    In this case, you have two candidate theories:

    a) The Universe was formed from the collision of two other Universes, through an additional dimension.

    b) Space/Time is parabolic. Therefore there is no "beginning of time", no creation, and no need of a theory to explain one.

    IMHO, theory (b) is the simpler, meets the requirements, and is even verifiable. Theory (a) multiplies the entities involved, is extremely complex, cannot be tested, and cannot even be modelled.

    Theory (a), then, is "convenient", as it is impossible to disprove, by any known means, and also gets to transfer the question of origin in the bargain! As theories go, this one deseves to be exiled to Pluto. It answers nothing, predicts nothing, and (therefore) is worth nothing.

  • Instead, the scientists say, the big bang stemmed from a collision of two universes that had been separated by a "fifth dimension."

    Those of us of a certain age know that the universe existed before that band existed, and continues to exist even after the band broke up.
  • >> The basic idea is that complicated physical phenomenon can be analyzed more simply using more dimensions. <<

    Similar to adding more indirection in programming to get more abstraction.

    x = eval(eval(eval(eval(a))))

  • I dig your nub, sport. Methinks this fella is skipping past the point and fiddling with the specifics. Just as we can manipulate length, width and height quite easily in this world, and are slaves to time, some being operating outside of the realm of time (ie: one dimension greater than ours) would have time as a malleable tool, as well as those 'lesser' dimensions which we control. With that in mind, the idea of god as a 'being' is even plausable, or at least one decent conclusion, in that gods decisions are not immediate (ie: ignoring time) but work within the realm of time. If god, a being with its own purposes, decided to for example sink the titanic, something that it sees Always (being outside of time), it could do so, via millions of years of manipulating the physical realm of our universe such that icebergs would be 'naturally' present right in the path of that ship, at the time that it passed by. But I'm digressing or something. Following the previous thought, there could be a God, if the number of existant dimensions is finite. Or for those infinity buffs, God is a being operating above and outside of all the infinite possible dimensions.

    In my humble opinion, infinity is silly to work with. I like numbers or concepts that aren't in so much motion =) So I call God the 'absolute'. We can quite easily observe that this universe is relative, and all things exist, and exist separately, only in so much as they can be described in relation to other things. I don't like the '2 universes colliding' theory, in that it doesn't offer us any real answers to the 'why and how are we here' question.. the one science and religion in some part are both trying to resolve. The big bang offered us a drill-down to a single point, leaving only that one question. Now we've opened up the bag again and decided that our universe is just a 'thing' along with other 'things' inside of a bigger 'something'. Like a planet in a solar system. A solar system in a galaxy. Etc. Doesn't help solve the problem.

    I think our existance is the absolute contemplating itself, and thus being experienced as relative. In personified terms, all of our existance, since the 'dawn of time' until time is long forgotten by All Things, are made up in the one divine instant that God said, "I."

    But that could just be the acid talking.

    -rev

  • In other news. (Score:4)

    by SpanishInquisition ( 127269 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @09:09AM (#301012) Homepage Journal
    A recent study show a dramatic increase of crack consumption in the scientific community.
    --

  • Actually, 10 dimensions (Score:3)

    by Nohea ( 142708 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @10:14AM (#301013)
    I recently read Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku, and he says many current physicists studying superstring theory postulate 10 dimensions.

    I know at first it sounds like they are smoking something, but Einstein's theory of the fourth dimension (time) was also not obvious when he proposed it.

    The basic idea is that complicated physical phenomenon can be analyzed more simply using more dimensions. To use the Einstein example, trying to account for variations in distance and time the closer you get to the speed of light would be screwed up calulating in 3 dimensions, but easy adding a 4th one. You just have to accept that space and time can be interchanged, just like the 3 dimensions we see physically.

    http://www.mkaku.org/hyper_toe.htm [mkaku.org]

  • Ok I have no trouble believing in a 5th dimention. I'm sure there are more than 5. But if our universe was created by two others coliding, where did those two come from? If they were created the same way, where did they're two 'parents' come from? It still doesn't explain how these entities came into existence. Even if it explains how our universe came about, it leaves us to explain two more so we're worse off in my perspective. I don't buy it.


    --

  • You seem to have a pretty poor understanding of dark matter and dark energy for someone who is attacking the ideas with such gusto.

    First, dark matter/energy is NOT undetectable. Dark matter is any of a class of possible particles that does not interact via electromagnetism. Hence they can' emit or absorb light (or radio or microwaves, etc...). Since we use telescopes that gather light (EM radiation), we can't directly see these particles. If they exist, however, we could detect them in their, for example, gravitational effects. They may also interact via other forces, such as the Weak force (again, depending on the exact model). So, to say they are undetectable is ridiculous. Dark energy is any contribution to a cosmological constant, something permitted (and in fact hard to theoretically eliminate!) by general relativity. It does not have negative mass, but negative energy density (not the same), and this causes a "repulsion" on cosmic distance scales.

    As for the speculation that they make up the bulk of the matter in the universe, the suggestion comes from many lines of evidence: we believe in general relativity (because of the many predictions it makes that are experimentally verified, such as the perihelion precession of the planets, stellar structure, redshift of energy climbing out of a gravitational well, elapsed time differences of clocks at different altitudes, pulsar timings, etc..). Because of that, we can make a prediction about the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, and those predictions do not agree with the measured curves. But, we have independent reason to believe that the amount of visible matter in the universe is reasonably well known (since the visible matter matches the predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis via, for example, measurements of the abundances of light nuclei).

    So, there is something that is wrong with our theoretical understanding. But it is unlikely to be with general relativity, or with the big bang/expanding universe model (since these models get so many other things right). Thus, there is strong reason to believe, from many independent lines of evidence, that there is an additional component to the energy density of the universe. There is a need both for something to flatten the rotation curves of galaxies and something to flatten the universe (something I didn't mention here, but which is an additional unexplained problem). Dark matter and dark energy in their various forms are some ways of doing just those things.

    As for your question about "A Brief History of Time": you must be kidding. I hope. Many of these scientists you deride for not reading the book are the ones that came up with the ideas Hawking writes about in the book. Furthermore, "A Brief History of Time", like all science books written for consumption by non-scientists, has to take some short cuts and make less-than-rigorous statements. The book was NOT written to present new work to the world; it WAS written to translate science done by scientists for a lay audience. The people actually doing work in this field are certainly much better prepared to do the work than are people who have just read one pop-sci book on the topic.....

  • Re:Let's see... (Score:5)

    by krlynch ( 158571 ) on Wednesday April 11, 2001 @06:25AM (#301016) Homepage

    IMHO, theory (b) is the simpler, meets the requirements, and is even verifiable. Theory (a) multiplies the entities involved, is extremely complex, cannot be tested, and cannot even be modelled.

    Unfortunately, your humble opinion is wrong. Theory 'a' DOES make testable predictions, is NOT more complicated when stated with the technical rigor necessary to ask detailed questions, and can easily be modelled (although I don't know why you would want to model it if you can directly ask it questions). That's why a number of theorists are taking the time to subject it to tests.

    As just one example, both theories make a prediction about the spectrum of relic background radiation of photons: theory 'a' predicts a nearly blackbody spectrum, and with deviations from that spectrum that have a specific form; static universes predict no such background, without supplementing them with additional, ad hoc, assumptions.

    We know that there is relic background, and we know that it is nearly blackbody, and we even know roughly where the first accoustic peak appears. We also have ongoing experiments that will shortly give us even more information on the details of that peak, and perhaps even the second peak.

    Occam's Razor is a principle that says: given two theories that make the same predictions, and those predictions agree with experiment, you should accept the simpler one until such time as it is falsified. It does not mean that you accept the simplest (pseudo-) theory that comes along, even if it explains the data ... you have to confront the theory with the data. As an example, suppose I have the following "theory" of the universe: It is the way it is because it is the way it is. Certainly simpler than quantum field theory and general relativity, but hardly a "better" theory, since it makes no predictions, and can not be tested.

  • Actually 10 dimensions doesn't give an extremely stable theory of superstrings. It works best in the 23rd dimension. What I don't get is that the fifth dimension is a spacial dimension. Can galaxies see themselves on a different spacial plane??
  • I know at first it sounds like they are smoking something, but Einstein's theory of the fourth dimension (time) was also not obvious when he proposed it.

    Actually it was Minkowski who introduced the concept of 4-d spacetime.

    --

  • I can see why dark matter and dark energy seem a bit incredible. They go completely against common sense. But so does relativity, and nearly all of quantum mechanics. Those theories were developed to explain observations, and they happened to make some odd predictions as well. Early on, the public generally scoffed at those theories because their predictions were contradictory to common sense.

    The ideas of dark energy and matter were also invented to explain observations. So for all you people who keep saying "Dark matter/dark energy/[insert theory here] MUST be wrong because my high-school physics education says so, and I read one book that Hawking dumbed down enough that I thought I understood it, so those people who've spent half their lives studying this stuff must have their heads in their asses," I have a challenge:

    Come up with a better explanation.
    Come up with a mathematically consistent model to represent your explanation.
    Get it published in a moderately well-known scientific journal (New Scientist does NOT count).
    Get it past the first hour of peer review semi-intact.

    Then you can tell everybody that the other theory is wrong. Until then, your words are no more valid than those of the preacher telling you why evolution MUST be wrong.

  • Second, have these scientists read "Brief History of Time", which does away with the whole notion that our Universe needed a point to be created in?

    ...and if Steven Hawking says it, it must be true! Remember, even his theories are still theories...

  • And we have learned another lesson... (Score:3)

    by glebite ( 206150 ) on Wednesday April 11, 2001 @01:52AM (#301021)

    Friends shouldn't let friends drive drunk - even if they are an entire universe... Sigh...

    What I think is fascinating is that we get to look at the whole thing from a different perspective again. If the universe was already "large" to begin with, then was that first burst or explosion super dense plasma? Or, was our universe just a splinter of that explosion?

    Oh well, it's just another reason for my worry-wart friend to ponder:

    death by universe ultimately condensing again;

    death by a forever expanding universe;

    AND NOW! death by collision from something we can't even see coming our way!

  • So what they're saying is, this Universe came out of one of MXYZPTLK's pranks?


    Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
  • I haven't read the article yet... :) but if our "universe" came into being because of the collision of two other "universes", don't we now have a bigger problem of where did these two universes come from? I appreciate scientific discovery and scientific theories, but too many people get too conceited and think they are infallibly correct. People tend to say things like "the universe started with a big bang", as though that were a proven fact, which it isn't. It's a plausible theory based on existing data. (Which, remember, might be flawed because of imperfect instruments and imperfect reasoning.) Now the universe started with a "big crash".

    Well, I'll step back off my soap box. I guess I was just a little surprised and pleased that someone would dare to question the "Big Bang", which most people seem to take for the gospel truth. (The "Gospel Truth", however, has another "theory", which, of course, I happen to think is right. :)

  • All this time I thought that they were only responsible for 60's hits such as "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Up, Up and Away" not the creation of our entire universe!

    It shows what I know. Man, am I embarassed!
  • You miss the point of the article completely.

    The extra dimensions proposed in superstring theory are sub-microscopic. The "fifth" dimension described in the article is a macroscopic dimension. The article does not indicate whether M-theory requires a four-dimensional space-time model or whether it will work equally well with a five-dimensional one.

  • It's either 9 or 11, last I checked.

  • Better contact the Banzai Institute! (Score:3)

    by gabriel_aristos ( 265988 ) on Wednesday April 11, 2001 @03:47AM (#301027)
    Sounds like Buckaroo Banzai & crew were really on to something when they fired up their oscillation overthruster and drove through that mountain in the desert. I suppose the Fifth Dimension is full of Red Lectroids, too?
  • This may seem to some to lead to an intelligent creator, but then we could ask the same things of the creator, has the creator always existed? or did the creator come into existence some finite time in the past?

    Rather, the Creator IS. Then, now, and in the future He Is. If you give thought to the existence of an all-powerful God, wouldn't it make sense to not confine him to the time dimension, as He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient (or in layperson terms: all-powerful, always present/everywhere, and knows everything)?

  • And the idea of Superstrings (which is looking a healthy candidate for a Grand Unified Theory) explains any remaining phenomina just fine.

    Hah! You think there can be one theory to explain everything?! What happens, when a new thoery comes along that totally reworks the 'Grand Unified Theory'? Much like Newtonian's laws of motion were completely changed by Einstein's relativity theories. Humans are far too fallable to expect to find an all-encompassing theory of everything.

  • Well, he wouldn't be a creator of all universes then, would he? For there would have to be another universe outside of his 'finite time in the past' in which he did not control (I'm basing this on the previous post stating that God would be unconfined to time itself). He would therefore not be all-powerful, all-knowing, and always-present. Hence, he would not be 'God' with a capital 'G', just one of many gods.

    I'm simply saying that a God that started everything would have to be in control of everything, and basically all 'universes' as we describe the physical realm, would spring from 'God'. He has no beginning or end, hence the argument about how he came to 'be' is not valid, because he has always been, and always will 'be'. He's infinite in all 'directions', in all dimensions.

    Or think of it this way:
    God = infinite (physically, spiritually, mentally, whatever)
    gods = n-th dimensionally confined being (greater than humanity and our 4 dimensional space)
    humans = 4th dimensionally challenged - we cannot exceed our own dimensions of 4 (height, length, width, time).

    And the only one powerful enough to effect a permanent change on the other dimensions would be God. The 'gods' could interact with our 4 dimensions, but could not 'reconfigure' themselves or us to exist in a different set of dimensions.

  • Therefore, there is no "most infinite" god (since a god might be defined as a being that can perform an infinite number of things in zero time.)

    Isn't this exactly what I'm saying, God is not confined to time, therefore He could do anything, and everything all at once? I mean, even talking about Him performing something 'at once' indicates it is occuring in our own 'space-time' which isn't really relavant to someone who is above our 4 dimensional space.

    In other words, you "list" all the infinite things God can do, and I can immediately conceive of something he cannot.

    I'm not listing things He can do, I'm saying all things that we, or any being confined to a non-infinte space can do, are derived directly from God. In the highest sense, God is everything. We would cease to exist if God decided to remove himself from our 4 dimensional space. However, that most certainly does not mean that we are gods ourselves, merely that our existence is based on this dimensionless, infinte God. Quit trying to confine my definition of an infinite God to your own existence, for you cannot adequately explain something which is infinite with your finite being.

  • can be found here, [lanl.gov] at xxx.lanl.gov [lanl.gov], which means it is free, and quite fast to download. (No banner ads or other bs)

  • Yahweh is usually translated I-am-that-I-am, but it can be translated as the-self-existing-one.

  • I'm by no means an expert, not even close. I read a book
    • The Elegent Universe
    about string theory and such, and the book refers to branes as the different shapes that vibrating strings make up. The article says branes are the different floating universes. Am I wrong, are they wrong, refering to different things, anyone know?
  • This raises precisely the question I'm interested in. However, why do we need a beginning? why can't these branes just have always existed? We are only capable of thinking in finite terms, so we can't imagine something that didn't begin, and has just always been. But, if we do have a beginning that raises the question of "what happened before that?"

    another thought:

    This may seem to some to lead to an intelligent creator, but then we could ask the same things of the creator, has the creator always existed? or did the creator come into existence some finite time in the past?

  • wouldn't it make sense to not confine him to the time dimension,

    why can't this universe's creator have come into existence some finite time in the past? do you know how a creator of universes would work?

  • "Explainable phenomena?" When was the last time you looked at quantum mechanics? By no stretch of the imagination is it explainable. Predictable? Yes. Explainable? Oh, hell no.
  • "Isn't this exactly what I'm saying, God is not confined to time, therefore He could do anything, and everything all at once?"

    Rule #1: There is no such thing as simultaneous. If you show me two things that happen at the same time, I can accelerate to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and show you that they didn't. And vice versa.

    A quick and dirty example would be the photon. For a particle traveling at the speed of light, everything is simultaneous. And I do mean everything, including the photon's creation and destruction. From the photon's perspective, it didn't really exist, since it was created and destroyed at exactly the same time. However, for us "tardyons" (things that move slower than light), photons really and truly exist, and have been known to have life spans measured in billions of years as they travel across the universe into our eyes.

    Also, saying that a fifth-dimensional object (omnipotent being or otherwise) doesn't have to deal with the other four dimensions is like saying that we, as three-dimensional objects, don't have to deal with any of the other two. My waistband suggests otherwise.

    "Quit trying to confine my definition of an infinite God to your own existence, for you cannot adequately explain something which is infinite with your finite being."

    At best, we have a high probability of being finite, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem being what it is... Perhaps you should stop trying to differentiate between the finite and the infinite so much.

  • Scientific gospel (Score:4)

    by Hilary Rosen ( 415151 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @10:12AM (#301039) Homepage Journal
    There is no scientific gospel. Maybe there is, in a third-century "let's chuck out all the bits we don't agree with" way, but not in the sense the author implies.

    The Big Bang theory has survived because it is better at explaining the observed universe than any other theory. It is very challengable, particularly if you have a better explanation of galaxy formation. I'm not sure that this theory is it, although I'm not particularly competent to judge. Where does the energy in the 'branes come from? Is it "'branes all the way down"?
    --
  • Yeah, but how did that omnipotent being come to be?

  • But there is no largest infinity (see transfinite numbers.) Therefore, there is no "most infinite" god (since a god might be defined as a being that can perform an infinite number of things in zero time.)

    In other words, you "list" all the infinite things God can do, and I can immediately conceive of something he cannot.

    Sorry, Goedel and Turing killed God about 50 years ago.

  • ...I mean, in conjunction with Cantor.
  • I think a lot of people mistake the idea of a "demension" as either another location, as popularized in science fiction, or as this other direction which can't be seen. The problem is that there is no "the 4th demension", it's simply how you define it. You could see time as a fourth demension, or you could see any other "property" of an object that has a value as a demension. Like alphabetic rank or color: e.g. think of, in a collision routine, that the two objects to collide must be, both in the same place at the same time, yet also the same color. But there is no "the 4th demension" just as there is no "the 5th trait" of any object, it's simply a matter of how you look at it, that's all. At least that's how I understand it.
  • the others are just theories, Einstein had trouble recognizing even a 5th dimension, some scientists do believe there could be as many as 11 or more. L x W x H x T does make a lot of sense however in our physical realm, i do believe that there possibly could be other dimensions that we are unaware of and only have experienced in a supernatural or theoretical way.
  • the second law of thermodynamics states that every system goes from ordre to disorder. Therefore a so called "big band explosion", would result in enthropy not a perfect universe. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever (and i cant stress that enough) has an explosion ended in order. Try this: bow up your car, you will not get a nicer car. (this also applies the the stupidity that is evolution)

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