One Big Bang, Or Many? 492
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.'"
Utter example of handwaving (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind-boggling? Yes.
Good story to impress your wife or kids? Yes.
Scientific? No.
Very Old theory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Giant Recycling Machine (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
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 in the opposing theory at the scale 1/n. Perhaps they are using relationship to argue that complete dissipation in one perspective constitutes absolute concentration (i.e. a big crunch) from a different perspective.
Beats me, I'm 15 years removed from my undergraduate physics courses, and I jumped ship on physics just before string theory started revving up big-time in the early 1990's.
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:Better question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everywhere.
-matthew
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 modern day epicycles than actual scientific theory. The scientific community does not like people who rock the boat, because they like to be right. Competing theories are pushed to the wayside, and something as innocent as sugesting that this universe or a universe existed before us and may have caused what we see today is contriversial.
I could be wrong about things like the cosmoligical constant and dark matter or any other crazy theory I have in my head. My problem is that there are very few healthy debates on any of these untouchable theories. What debates that do occur can jeopardize dissenters' positions and funding. Now is not a good time for science in my view.
Is this science or religion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me know when they've got a good way to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
After all, I can say the universe was created "in progress" 30 seconds ago, and you can neither prove nor disprove it. It's an untestable theory. Even if I am right, it's scientifically useless to take such a theory seriously as a scientific theory.
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.
Re:Don't worry too much (Score:2, Insightful)
No.
Re:Hindu Cosmology (Score:2, Insightful)
Without zero (which basically implies -power of- ) one will be unable to think of any size bigger than say 10000 or so.
Zero indeed is the greatest of inventions
Yeah, so? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:No center? (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting coincidental theory.. (Score:2, Insightful)