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.'"
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:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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."
It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Design (Score:5, 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, this does nothing to solve them.
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.
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 stopped, the material components of the universe were in the form of a quark-gluon plasma (also including all other particles--and perhaps experimentally produced recently as a quark-gluon liquid [3]) in which the constituent particles were all moving relativistically. As the universe continued growing in size, the temperature dropped. At a certain temperature, by an as-yet-unknown transition called baryogenesis, the quarks and gluons combined into baryons such as protons and neutrons, somehow producing the observed asymmetry between matter and antimatter. Still lower temperatures led to further symmetry breaking phase transitions that put the forces of physics and elementary particles into their present form. Later, some protons and neutrons combined to form the universe's deuterium and helium nuclei in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. As the universe cooled, matter gradually stopped moving relativistically and its rest mass energy density came to gravitationally dominate that of radiation. After about 300,000 years the electrons and nuclei combined into atoms (mostly hydrogen); hence the radiation decoupled from matter and continued through space largely unimpeded. This relic radiation is the cosmic microwave background."
It was energy first.
Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:2, Interesting)
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?"
Metaphysics (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Letter to the Editors (Score:2, Interesting)
For those of you that want to see the real physics, the first paper I could find on the subject is here [arxiv.org]. It's from 2001, by the way.
Just say you dont know! (Score:2, Interesting)
I dont see any fossil records, star charts, photos etc, to proove this. Is this just a bunch of nerds sitting around contemplating the cosmos?
Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:1, Interesting)
I saw Roger Penrose give a talk on a similar "old universe" idea, minus strings, a couple of months ago; the theory that he's working on is that the universe might expand forever (which is widely accepted) but that in the distant future it might reach a situation where all of the massive particles are gone, having been turned into radiation and whatnot. At this point, we have a universe that's pretty much uniformly glowing with radiation, and I'm told that without any massive particles there's nothing to measure the space-time metric, meaning that the size of the universe becomes irrelevant. You can then use some conformal wizardry to say that the whole universe is equivalent to a point and call it the Big Bang, making the beginning and the end of the universe the same thing. You also get a nice, isotropic universe without resorting to inflation, which Penrose hates. And of course it meshes nicely with Penrose's Weyl Curvature Hypothesis. He's said that the theory's got some elements that are quite possibly ridiculous, but it's also really fun to consider.
Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:4, Interesting)
does it explain this (Score:1, Interesting)
What makes this really interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
- You scramble the universe every now and then
- You keep scrambeling forever
- If time is infinite, and the possible combinations of matter and energy are not (even if unimaginably many) you will end up with the same combination occuring over and over again infinitly.
So, if our mind is truly is just a part of this physical world, and arise from the energy/matter combinations mentioned above, we will end up living this life an infinite number of times, and in an uthinabkle amount of alternative varieties...
Hello Buddha....
Kind of makes me regret I was late submiting my tax return, again...
Re:It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Desi (Score:2, Interesting)
Just because a scientific law isn't an absolute (as there is no such thing in science), doesn't mean we shouldn't try to take advantage of the fact that most people think that a law is something that's absolute. To draw an analogy, imagine that science is a germophobe and intellegent design (and other anti-science movements) have cut a big gash in science's side. It's much better to stop the flow of blood with a dirty rag and risk some minor infection, than to bleed to death while trying to figure out a better solution. Playing into the common vocabulary is that dirty rag, and I really think it's worth using it if it stops some people from abandoning the sciences over religious and political issues.
Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it is completely far out, largely because you are conflating the very different ideas of a "law of the state" (an institutionalized social norm) and a "law of nature" (a description of how the observable universe behaves).
The universe is not "subject to" the laws of physics, it will not be punished for violating them; the laws of physics are subject to the behavior of the universe, in that is the universe violates a "law" of physics, the law gets tossed out.
(Of course there's also the recursion paradox: if some "superior mind" was there before the observable universe, we've just pushed the question down on the stack and must now address the question of whow this ""superior mind" came into being - we've not made any progress toward a explanation.)
Re:What makes this really interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.