Was There Only One Big Bang? 295
goldaryn writes "Physorg.com is running an interesting story about the work of Oxford-based theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. Penrose has been studying CWB radiation and believes it's possible that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of 'aeons.' He believes that he has found evidence supporting his theory that the universe infinitely cycles."
No...this is the third matrix. (Score:2)
...and its still lost the plot.
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No. This is an episode of Futurama. [wikipedia.org]
I just wonder how many feet below the last one this universe is.
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Don't step on the turtles.
Old hat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Old hat (Score:5, Informative)
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Mm, but I meant detailed information as in "oh, there was a planet full of wonky aliens over there" or "there was another Earth in the previous universe!"
Consider that a black hole can be classically described by only 3 parameters: its mass, its charge and its angular momentum ... there ain't much detailed information there.
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Re:Old hat (Score:5, Informative)
I saw Penrose speak on this topic at the Perimeter Institute about two years ago. He has been working on this for quite a while.
You captured the essence of his hypothesis. The idea is that in the latter stages of a universe, you eventually get two supermassive black holes orbiting each other - each containing half of the matter in the universe. As they rotate around each other, they're effectively ripping each other apart from the massive gravity wells. His theory is that the point at which they finally coalesce after billions of years of orbit, space and time "reset", and in that same instant the big bang takes place.
His premise is that not all of the energy has been completely contained within the singularity. When the big bang happens, the outlying energy causes rings in the background radiation.
Funny thing was, two days before his talk he got the first results back from the radiation survey. They didn't find rings, they found ovals. And in his words "we have no idea what that means".
It's great to see that he's making progress.
Re:Old hat (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, all that is the same, across universes. What is different is facial hair fashion.
Re:Old hat (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes he does, many of his early "wacky ideas" did indeed "pan out", such as the proof that black holes could form and the concept of cosmic censorship.
"I can generate whacky ideas without evidence just as fast as him"
Maybe, but I doubt you have the mathematical skill of Penrose to back it up.
OK (Score:3, Funny)
I see what you did there. Very clever. Actually reading the article and summarizing it rather than telling the GP to RTFA, thus avoiding a backlash from GP, and the attendant waste of time flame war, while promoting useful discussion. Nice work. This merits a stamp of approval.
OK
Re:Old hat (Score:5, Informative)
SGU (Score:4, Funny)
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Damn it, include a spoiler warning next time!!!
Re:Old hat (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's easier to understand what we are talking about if you imagine the universe as a white blanket.
Before the big bang occurs, the blanket perfectly smooth, just like it was well ironed. Then, a massive jolt causes it to fold, crease and wrinkle: this is information, i.e. matter. Entropy could probably act as a gradual, unstoppable force that gradually puts the blanket under tension again.
The end of universe, therefore, is the return to a pristine state completely devoid of information. Suppose you spill a cup of coffee over the blanked: it is now tainted, but this doesn't necessary interfere with the distension process of prohibit the blanket from returning to a perfectly smooth state. However, if you take a look at the tainted blanket, it obviously isn't perfectly white as before.
Therefore, the Big Bang acts as a creator of new information, not as a destructor of previous information.
Re:Old hat (Score:5, Informative)
Milliseconds, not minutes, but yeah. At about t+4ms, the strong forces came into existence. Before that, the math completely falls apart, and we have no idea what was happening. We don't even know if time itself was constant, and as we percieve it those first 4ms could have taken a billion years or more.
This isn't, by any stretch, a new idea, though. It's very similar to the Hindu/Buddhist cosmologies, which have been around for thousands of years. Sure, the hindus do use the notion of Brahma and the Manus to explain the passing of cycles, but both faiths teach that the universe goes through an infinite cycle of expansion, stability, and collapse, and that time goes off into infinite in either direction from here. This scientist's "new idea"? It's been around for at least 5,000 years.
logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Buddhist cosmology isn't really "religious"; whether it is true or not has little bearing on whether you're a Buddhist. The cyclic model in Buddhist cosmology simply makes sense and avoids issues of first causes and the end of time.
In contrast, Christian cosmology is used to justify Christianity: if Christian cosmology is wrong, the whole theological edifice of Christianity comes crashing down. Christian cosmology also fails to address the question of where God comes from.
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At about t+4ms, the strong forces came into existence. Before that, the math completely falls apart, and we have no idea what was happening.
I might add that this is all based on the assumption that we even know how everything works with the present forces of the universe. You know, those forces that can't account for 95% of the apparent mass-energy of the cosmos.
Of course, any pattern in the CMB could be significant, and it could be the result of pre-big-bang structure. Of course, where that structure ori
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> Milliseconds, not minutes, but yeah. At about t+4ms, the strong forces came into existence.
Probably get down-modded for asking a genuine question but anyways ...
From where? By what cause? And more importantly WHY?
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And the truth is, whoever can actually answer that question will be collecting a Nobel prize for it.
It's a question philosophers, scientists, religious types, and basically everybody has been trying to answer since humans first became sentient, and at this point, if you ask any 5 people why it all came into existence, you'll get 10 answers.
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I see a different front page headline: "Science decodes message from God." Below the fold:
Oxford, UK. Physicist Roger Penrose has deciphered a hidden message from the creator Deity, encoded in subtle variations of the universe's background radiation. The message consists of a single word sentence: "Suckers!"
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Best thing to do would be to ignore these speculation by the physicists. If they eventually come up with something that is accepted by large number of other physicists and come up with experiments or astronomical observations to back it up, that is when we laypeople should pay attention. Else we will be wasting our time following them barking up the wrong tree, er, spurious solutions.
So, this means we should quit reading Physorg.com and just watch 'Dancing with the Stars'?
Analogy not relevant? (Score:2)
"Suppose you spill a cup of coffee over the blanket: its now tainted".
Since you are talking about the universe, the above statement would imply that something outside of it is having an effect, which is by definition not possible. Likewise the "stain" would seem to imply that some matter would or could be differentiated at some fundamental level from other matter as part of the process. This seems to make any mathematical model of the universe an intractable potentially infinite number of "unique" terms w
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Wow, you say all that with such certainty as if all of that were known.
Fact is that nobody can say even with any confidence what happened around the big bang, how the universe is going to end, or whether any information survives the/a big bang/crunch. Even non-big-bang models of the universe can't be excluded based on what's known.
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Re:Old hat (Score:5, Interesting)
Many Big Bangs / inflations doesn't even have to mean complete recycling of, well, everything - for example [wikipedia.org].
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Hindu Philosophy (Or More Specifically Dharmic Philosophy, which coveres a than just Hinduism/Religion) Has always seen the universe as a creation/destruction cycle, with multiple cycles of creation/destruction.
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> His theory? I thought of this when I was 12.
Where did you publish? I'm sure Dr. Penrose wouldlike to see your math.
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he left it in the other universe.
Pretty old theory (Score:2, Interesting)
Pretty old theory, that gave rose to various philosophical question, like if it is recurring, is the outcome always the same, or different every time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
Indians first came this theory to light, Nietzsche spend quite sometime thinking about this, Kundera wrote a book around it: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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Well let's assume that it's different every time and is infinitely repeatable, like rolling near infinitely sided dice. Then a person, place etc.. will exist at some point in every conceivable way it CAN exist. and IF by some chance we have no perception of time when we die, then in fact we will exist again in what would be to us, an instant, in every way we CAN exist.
That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of consciousness. Would we exist in every way, or would consciousness follow a thread to one of the possible ways so that we experience them one at a time? Would we experience them at all or would it be someone else? Why does everyone here seem to be on the very first life? (I know in infinite possibilities it has to happen somewhere, but there must be a lot more first lives that are on worlds where some are on later lives.
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Wow, who needs Thought Police. Everyone should now be imprissoned because they must, in some instantiation of themselves, have committed some awful crime. Why worry about whether it is in this universe or another? Safer to just lock them all up anyway.
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Ah, I suppose you work for the Transportation Sexual Assailants?
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World population passed the 4, 5, 6 and now 7 billion mark in our lifetime. Population of India was just 300 milliom in 1920s (Poem by Barathi referring to Mother India with 300 million faces comes to my mind). Population of USA was just 85 mil
Re:Pretty old theory (Score:5, Informative)
More people are alive today than all humans who have ever died.
That's an urban myth (how you defend it with flawed math probably nicely demonstrates our propensity to attaching to ourselves undue importance). 100+ billion homo sapiens dead already:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-living-outnumber-dead [sciam.com]
http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf [prb.org]
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx [prb.org]
Re:Pretty old theory (Score:4, Insightful)
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How rare it is that someone accepts correction so maturely! Too bad, though. I was pretty jazzed about the bit about seven eights of scientists still being alive!
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Not original (Score:2)
I proposed the same idea while visiting CERN with a student group when I was 17. My reasoning involved the anthropic principle, since the time between big crunches and big bangs could approach infinity. I was told me my idea was as good as theirs'.
Now I think that space may be infinite and that vacuum may fluctuate in places with no matter to such a degree that time slows down from the presence of so much mass. My generalization is that if stuff isn't expressively disallowed, they are true and there is a re
Before the Big Bang (Score:5, Informative)
UNfortunately like most BBC documentaries now.. (Score:5, Insightful)
... it was rather dumbed down with lots of silly graphics and other dicking about from the guy in the editing suite, shots of people walking backwards and forwards and a narrator asking loads of questions that the program didn't really give the interviewees enough time to answer properly. And when they did it was obvious they'd been told to keep it simple. Which was a shame , it had great potential but there seems to be a line of thought in British TV at the moment , not just the BBC, that people just can't handle difficult science in more than 30 second dollops before the viewing needs a break. Thank heavens for TED.
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As opposed to an American network, where you'd have had a rerun of Dancing With The Stars.
See also, What If Torchwood Were American? [elearners.com]
Re:Before the Big Bang (Score:4, Funny)
I just watched the first two parts. Absolute garbage. They try to compare synonyms, such as why do "regular explosions" produce chaos, but the "big bang explosion" produced order. It's not the same idea of explosion!?!
They even mention that the early exponential expansion of the universe was "unprecedented". Really? The universe was 10^-30 seconds old when it happened!
I'll not waste time on the remaining parts.
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The Matrix Vs. Carl Sagan [youtube.com]
no to big-bang-centricity ! (Score:3, Insightful)
no to big-bang-centricity ! your universe is not the center of the multiverse !
Yes to big-bang-centricity ! (Score:5, Funny)
no to big-bang-centricity ! your universe is not the center of the multiverse !
You bastard! You're trying to make us humans even more insignificant than we already are??
We already admitted that Europe isn't the center of the world.
We already admitted that the world isn't the center of the solar system/universe
We already admitted that the sun isn't the center of the galaxy
We already admitted that our galaxy isn't the center of the universe
You're trying to make us admit that even our universe isn't the center of the multiverses?
Damn you!
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'THE' multiverses ? you're being our-multiverses-centric !
Probably (Score:2)
It would make sense, given that all its sub structures behave in that way. The universe as one huge-ass string.
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It would make sense, given that all its sub structures behave in that way. The universe as one huge-ass string.
By huge-ass string I think you are saying that the universe is a piece of shit. No argument there
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OOOPS!
New? (Score:2)
My brother is an astrophysicist. The way he explained it to me is thus (and I believe this is pretty accurate, but dumbed down for the non-physicist in me):
There's a variable in the calculations that determine what happens in between "Big Bangs".
If the variable is less than 1, then the universe contracts to a point, and then explodes again, forever exploding and then crunching.
If the variable is more than 1, then the universe expands forever, getting cooler and cooler and never shrinks back even when there
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Basically. You're talking about the critical density of the universe. This is about 1, meaning that the universe is "flat" -- so it's infinite in extent and basically composed of a load of flat sheets rather than saddle shapes or spheres. So far as we can tell it's exactly 1. (It's pretty easy to tell, actually. We can look at the ripples in the universe back from when it was 370,000 years old, and then look at *those same ripples* from when the universe was about 10 billion years old. Those ripples have a
Re:New? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm, big question. I'll try and give the quick answer
The first ripples are seen on the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is a bath of microwave radiation that surrounds us, at almost exactly 2.71K and the most perfect blackbody ever observed. It is virtually impossible to explain the existence of this without having something very similar to modern cosmology. People tried when they were trying to keep steady-state cosmologies in the 60s but ultimately they failed; it's seriously difficult to explain something with a blackbody spectrum and isotropic to one part in a thousand (to one part in ten thousand if you subtract off a dipole which is almost certainly a Doppler shift caused by our motion with respect to the CMB) unless the universe started from a compact, very nearly uniform state.
Basically, if you link the isotropy of the CMB with the idea that the Earth isn't at the centre of the universe, you're lead almost inevitably to modern cosmology: the universe is isotropic around the Earth, but the Earth isn't at the centre, so the universe must be isotropic around *every place in the universe*. That means it's both homogeneous and isotropic.
The next assumption is that gravity is metric-based -- that is, that on scales larger than a few micometres, that the effects of gravity are due to distortions in space-time. This is an extremely safe assumption on solar system scales but it's only that - an assumption - on larger scales. Still, we've got no sensible alternatives so let's stick with it. (It's very hard to build a working model of gravity that isn't metric-based.)
The next assumption, and this is much weaker but is the best we can currently do, is that Einstein's general relativty applies on very large scales. GR is a particular form of a metric-based theory and is the simplest, most intuitively clean of them. So let's stick with it. But it's quite weak.
Doing that, we're lead to only one possible model for the universe -- the Friedman-LeMaitre-Robertson-Walker model. Basically that says that if you've got 3D spatial surfaces that have to be homogeneous and isotropic, you can chose to make them flat, saddle-shaped or spherical, and then pile them together to fill the whole of spacetime. It then tells you the behaviour of these surfaces given the matter you put into it.
An immediate consequence of saying "The universe contains photons and baryons" (which is obvious; as cosmologists use the word, *everything* is baryonic except for neutrinos and photons, and no-one would deny that we exist, or that photons exist, or that neutrinos exist, so you put them all in there) is the CMB. It exists, and we can calculate when it formed. The CMB is formed when the temperature of the universe becomes low enough that photons don't continuously reionise hydrogen. Basically a small universe is a hotter universe, so at some point in the distant past (which turns out to be before the universe was about 370,000 years old) the universe was hot enough that if an electron combined with a proton to form hydrogen, a photon immediately came along and smacked the electron back out again. This tied protons, electrons and photons together. The universe was opaque and it was all a massive chaotic game of pool. Without any pockets.
When the universe became cold enough that that no longer happened, the electrons all condensed into the protons, the universe suddenly went neutral, and the photons could stream free. Those photons are the CMB. Originally they were very hot but as the universe has expanded they've been redshifted until they reached teh current temperature barely above absolute zero.
Now, when the photons and protons were bound together it wasn't all *entirely* smooth. There are waves go through any plasma. (Without them the Sun would be a very boring place.) These waves are those ripples in the CMB I mentioned. At the formation of the CMB the photons suddenly broke free and the waves stopped, err, waving. This left an imprint of the ripples in the *baryons* on the photons. Ba
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Since our physics don't apply anywhere near the big bang, there are no calculations that can tell you what goes on if such an event were to occur; likewise, while projecting backwards until you get to something ridiculous (cosmologists call the ridiculous point a singularity, but what they mean is that nothing we know applies there, which is ridiculous from the standpoint of continuing with any attempt at explanation (no framework).) Once you've reached the ridiculous, traipsing onward and trying to imagin
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I'd try and defend my profession but I won't because you're quite right. We can happily build models for pre-big bang theories but until we've got a good reason to believe in a way to go with high-energy physics, it's all just phenomenology -- a mathematical way of waving your hands, basically. No-one's actually denying this; if you read the papers on this kind of model they'll tend to wave their hands madly and talk about modifications arising from M theory and low-energy effective field theories. All that
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That's like saying it's absurd to study black holes because we can't fully model them. We don't have to, because viewing them gives us enough information to understand quite a bit about them and use that to adjust our models. For the big bang, we can't tell mathematically what happened before it, but observation can yield data to form more seemingly accurate models.
All done through science, no religion required.
The Universe infinitely cycles... (Score:5, Funny)
...and boy are it's legs tired.
oblig... (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't time just infinite cycles? (Score:2)
Isn't time just infinite cycles?
I don't understand his point. Time itself is just the measurement of infinite change in states. The universe is infinite because it expands as we measure it, just like Pi.
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How many digits are in Pi?
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You possibly weren't looking, or at least carefully, or perhaps not at all of it..
Pulse (Score:4, Interesting)
It may even be that "our" big bang and "our" universe is one of many in the great infiniteness of the.. universe. Just like there are more planets, more solar systems, more galaxies other than our own. Just like cells in the human body, and atoms within the cells...
Time is irrelevant unless measured, eg by a human. So this pulse may be as normal as any pulsating object, large or small.
The mind wanders..
In other news... (Score:2)
After further research, the soundwave was found to actually be a song, namely "I got you babe" from Sonny&Cher.
Additionally, the scientists discover that the universe must have sta
Been done (Score:3, Informative)
The Doctor already did it last season.
if there are several Black Holes, why notBigBangs? (Score:2)
So if several Black Holes can co-exist - why not several Big-Bangs?
When looking at the jets BackHoles and other cosmic entities emit - I ask myself if this jet at its exit point looks just like after a BigBang?
If some cosmic theories postulate that gravity gets weaker and weaker - maybe that is the trigger which makes the mass concentrations in Black-Holes decide that it is time to leave the nest *g*
and
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"the theorie of Black Holes gave the idea to the BigBang theory - they just applied time-reversal!."
No 'they' didn't. Black holes are based on inhomogeneous solutions to Einstein's equations -- the first being the Schwarzschild solution describing a spherical, uncharged body embedded in flat spacetime, with Reisser-Nordstrom, Kerr and Kerr-Newman adding in electromagnetic fields, rotation and then both respectively.
Cosmology is based on Friedman-LeMaitre-Robertson-Walker solutions, which impose maximal symm
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the white hole sounds plausible to me.
Any comment on the assumption that gravity gets weaker and my imagination of the consequences of such an event?
This sounds familiar (Score:2)
There's a restaurant, too, isn't there.
About the author... (Score:3, Informative)
CWB (Score:4, Funny)
The reason (Score:2)
I think the reason why some people thing there was another big bang is because some of the same actors appeared in a different series, but it wasn't big bang, is was Roseanne.
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So after the Big Bang we get Roseanne again?
I'm not entirely comfortable with this hypothesis.
As one AC once printed "There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer".I think I'll just grab that straw thank you very much.
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but, consider that the big bang theory has a connection to the startrekieverse...what if the nielsen fluxuator was reversed popularized?
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Factoid: The actor in question is the little boy in Christmas Vacation.. I was shocked to discover that for some reason
Douglas Adams had the idea first. (Score:2)
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oblig.
"There is another theory which says that this has already happened."
Calm down guys (Score:2)
The Universe is just breathing.
Are we looking at the rings from the centre? (Score:2)
Are we looking at the rings from the centre of these concentric rings? I couldn't find that in the article. If so, there may be something very wrong with his theory. While it could be possible, I doubt chance would put us there.
two fairly big problems (Score:2)
I gave a talk on this for students at my school recently. Penrose has a popular-level book out on the topic, which came out a few months before the publication of this claimed observation. The paper describing the observation is here [arxiv.org]. Here [newton.ac.uk] is a talk Penrose gave at Cambridge in 2005 on the topic.
If this is right, then it's certainly a huge discovery. There are at least two pretty big problems, however.
(1) Penrose's model requires some mechanism by which 100% of the massive particles in the universe get
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I doubt that there are people who think that the Universe came from nothing. It's just that it's more or less impossible to look back beyond the Big Bang, so the cause is a big question mark. Then again, the laws of thermodynamics may be local to this Universe, so violation at the boundary (in time) isn't a deal breaker per se.
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Well, it doesn't. The Big Bang appears to be a local minimum of entropy, but the whole picture might be very complicated.
I can suggest this book [amazon.com] as a good layman book on the topic. It's clear, delves in all the current cosmological problems around the problem of our universe, and doesn't have a single equation until at least mid-book.
Of course, Sean is biased - he has his own pet theories - but you do get a good idea of the various prob
Re:Expansion (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really so much "consensus" as "the result of the model we're currently using". No-one *likes* the standard model of cosmology; it's obviously just phenomenology, but it happens to fit all the data at least as well as any alternative. The standard model of cosmology is "lambda CDM", the lambda being a cosmological constant which drives an accelerating expansion in the current universe, and the CDM being cold dark matter which was responsible for the clustering of matter and the formation of galaxies and so forth.
The problem is that if it *is* just a cosmological constant then it will grow to dominate the universe and things will, indeed, expand forever.
But it's probably not a cosmological constant. The "best" prediction from quantum field theory -- and it's not really a prediction so much as the only way of estimating the size of the constant -- comes from evaluating the vacuum energy. Doing this suggests that it should be about 10^120 times bigger than we see in reality. That's a pretty big difference. Weinberg described it as the most embarrassing mismatch between theory and observation in the history of science, and he's got a point. The conclusion is that there's probably some mechanism (coming from trans-Planckian physics, maybe, or something else) that cancels the cosmological constant. If that's true, then it's almost certain to cancel it perfectly because the fine-tuning necessary to produce the *observed* constant is horrific, whereas a symmetry principle could wipe the whole thing much more easily.
That leaves you open to more general dark energy models to explain the accelerating expansion and that's where you have more fun. There are plenty of ways to get an observed acceleration. Some of them lead to big rips, which is where eventually the universal expansion will tear galaxies, then solar systems, then stars, planets and eventually even atoms and nuclei apart. Others lead to the decay of whatever field is responsible for acceleration -- like if you couple a scalar field into dark matter you can tune it such that the scalar field grows to dominate and then starts transferring its energy into dark matter, which would cause the universe to reclump again (and then probably the dark matter would dump energy back into the scalar field causing more acceleration). Those models are horribly contrived and unrealistic, but at least they're alternatives.
And the cosmological constant is pretty contrived and unrealistic in the first place...
Anyway. Before I got side-tracked my point was that there isn't really a consensus so much as a model that fits observations and predicts eternal expansion, but that it's not the only model and it's not even the best motivated model, merely the simplest. Other models can still lead to crunches while fitting pretty much all the data as well. And others can lead to cyclic universes, which is ultimately what Penrose is talking about in one form or another.
Disclaimer: I am a cosmologist but I've not actually read the article. This is Slashdot, after all.
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Ah, for the good old days of cosmology, when 120 orders of magnitude was nothing much to worry about.
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I'll have a think.
If you happen to have any extras, I'd appreciate sending one this way. All of this is making my head asplode.
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Hi Boris. Wouldn't A Brief History Of Time be the classical layman's book on the subject?
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Yes, but this turtle, you see, has concentric rings. And a very large black hole. Which, if you ask me, it should probably get looked at.
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Tell me what is deeper than the center of the Earth. Or what is to the north of geographic North Pole.
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This is also what is described in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology -- the universe itself being cyclic in nature, going through an endless series of destruction and creation; not to mention vast and full of other planets and the like, not some unique playground made just for us by "God".
Of course, "modern" science has mor
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Be a smug pecker-head all you like ... while Western society was rooting about in the muck during the dark ages where we intentionally forgot everything we ever knew, the rest of the world was going about their business.
When we though the universe revolved around the Earth, most of the rest of them had a pretty good idea about things like retrograde and orbits and a vast universe -- that counts for more to me than an im
Re:Turok and Steinhardt also postulate this (Score:4, Interesting)
Well then, we're in agreement. :-P
I wasn't saying that you could use ancient Hindu or Buddhist cosmology to say anything predictive about modern scientific cosmology. Merely that they had arrived at that conclusion 4000+ years ago -- either through observations or lucky guess.
Oh yeah, baby ... noodles, pottery, writing, navigation, iron, running water. Talk dirty to me. ;-)
Cheers
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No offence meant, btw. For some reason I just felt like having a go at people linking religion and cosmology and kind of got off-topic from your post :)
Also, you forgot fireworks.
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I'd assumed we'd covered that already. ;-)
Cheers