Big Bang Abandoned In New Model of the Universe
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
What seems to be new here is that this specific model seems to explain something that has yet to be well understood. This is a big win for this model but it can easily mean that it happens to capture part of real mechanism in that specific aspect while making unrealistic assumptions elsewhere (like the possibility of there not having been a Big Bang).
It will be interesting to see how this model affects our current understanding of the universe. It might be a complete change, or just an incremental one. Odds are on the latter one but the former makes for much better blog posts... ;)
For proof, see the perpetual energy source products that pop up every few months.
(not talking about this article in particular)
Not necessarily. The question isn't really settled. It seems quite complicated when you get to those scales. E.g. just as an analogy, in general relativity even energy isn't really conserved. (See http://math.ucr.edu/home//baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_...) So I don't know whether we can say anything definite about entropy.
I'm not sure I agree with this line. Copernicus made the "unrealistic assumption" that heavenly bodies and motions were not spherical, and Galileo made the "unrealistic assumption" that earth wasn't the center of the Earth.
This type of thinking hampers scientific progress.
While there are certainly a handful of "unrealistic assumptions" that have lead to scientific breakthroughs, giving credence to an idea simply because it is unrealistic is... well... unrealistic.
It also took approximately 300 years for common opinion to shift from a Ptolemic universe to Heliocentrism. We're on a much shorter time scale for the Big Bang theory, and it's very well acknowledged the theory has problems.
This is already true in Special Relativity. This MIT TR article is so shallow it shouldn't be linked to.
In this case, the MIT TR writes about a bleeding edge, unpublished paper written by a non big-name physicist that will most likely be discarded and never be talked about in 6 months.
The author is from a "Institute of Statistics" and the paper was written in Word with double-space formatting. That means the author is probably not a physicist, and non-physicists have a very low chance of being able to grasp the problems with current models and propose better ones, not to mention accounting for all the astro observations coming out every day.
Looking at the actual paper as somebody with a cosmology background, what he's saying is:
1. Let's take the classical Einstein equations
2. Let's see what happens if c, the speed of light, is not constant, but a function of time c(t)
3. Hm, but to not break the original equations let's also make G be a function of time G(t) such that c(t)^2/G(t) is fixed
4. Hm, but then in the derivations, where there are derivatives wrt. to time new dc/dt and dG/dt terms appear
5. and so on
There is no new physics in this paper, it's just a routine derivation with a twist. The TR blogger is probably not a physicist and/or has not read it, he just pushed out some generic bullshit about space and time.
There's no point in talking about this paper for non-professionals. First, professionals have to reach concensus whether this makes any sense and is compatible with observations (the former part is easier, the latter takes longer and more people). Once a result passes these tests, then it makes sense to tell people about it.
If the TR wants to push out some sciency newsitem, they could for example talk about recent Higgs data from the Tevatron, which is bleeding-edge fresh but fairly uncontroversial, as it is a measurement and has gone through the Tevatron team:
http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2010/07/higgs-still-at-large...
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Reply to scott_s (for some reason I can't reply to the comment): I agree, total seperation is not good. It's not good if all the physicists involved are pure academics, because it allows for sub-optimal incentives to dominate. I believe the good model is fOR physicists with no academic incentives (positions, grants) to also take part in the discussion, eg. somebody working at Morgan Stanley or doing a startup. This model would be similar to programmers donating their time to open-source projects. (The academic counter-argument which easily wins out today is that if you're not working in the field, you don't understand the issues and don't have a say.)
Not that there isn't newsworthy stuff posted to the arXiv, and not that it isn't worthwhile, thought-provoking and fun to read these papers and these ideas - you should just have an idea of where it's coming from, and where it's likely headed...
I think that limiting people's freedom of speech is exactly what censorship is.
Whether they have "no chance in hell" of understanding it is besides the point.
You are dealing with censorship when an entity uses his authority and power over you to prevent you from saying or hearing certain things. There are usually ideological reasons to prevent freedom of speech and information. We are not dealing with any of that here. At most, we are dealing with a democratically, self-imposed, self-maintained censorship, whose origins are not ideological in nature.
What I'm talking about is this: The web is a wonderful place, originally built to share academic documents, but which has blossomed into so much more. Government documents and many other things are now shared on the web, and discussion and openness is rampant.
Now I hear the suggestion that academic documents should be limited in some way - that they should only be discussed on "academic" websites, whatever that might mean.
This statement to me is analogous to "Government white papers should only be discussed on Government web sites" and reminded me of the recent Australian censorship to prevent "unnecessary premature debate".
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/no-minister...
I don't like Saint-loup's suggestion at all. If it's a social suggestion that we shouldn't talk about such things, then leave the conversation - don't try to shut it down. If it's a serious suggestion about controlling the conversation, then it is a censorship proposal.
No-one is blacking out words here, but what is the problem with discussing these papers? I asked for a reason, and Maro's very nice response seemed to indicate that it was justified as the material can't be understood by mere mortals. I don't think that's enough of a reason.
I understand that you don't like my response. I don't think I was ranting. I just really like the openness of the web and abhor any attempt to control it. If you don't like the conversation, move along.
The feeling you get when you read about something computer-science or software-engineering related in mass media ("oh my god those idiot journalists can't get anything right") is probably very similar to what a physicist feels when she reads discussion by non-physitics.
> Non-physicists have no chance in hell to understand arxiv papers
You mean "archive physics papers": mathematicians are usually non-physicists and sometimes understand the arxiv math papers. I used the arxiv for months before I found out it had physics papers too (and that in fact it was started for physics papers).
We'll blame that on their retrogressive attitudes, of course.
Still, it's great that someone tries to find new perspectives to look at. I wish them good luck in their findings.
Another problem we have, is that we have one point of observation into the unimaginably big universe. Given our limited view overfitting the data to support some model is likely.
By the time I got to the end, I was reading it in Geordie LaForge's voice in my head.
I do like that it fits better with conservation of energy, and I was never comfortable with using dark matter to explain away inconsistencies between the big bang model and some observations.
It will be interesting to see how much traction tis new theory gets in the next ten years or so.
The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.[1][2] During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead. Flat-Earth models were in fact held at earlier (pre-medieval) times, before the spherical model became commonly accepted in Hellenistic astronomy.[3]
Rocks had "low" weight, thus falling to the ground and fire had "high" weight, thus rising to the sky. Being composed of "earth" and "water", we stuck to the surface of the Earth because that was our natural place.
A lot of this model was carried over into Medieval science, but it changed over time to adapt to new discoveries, until it finally broke around the time of Galileo & Copernicus.
C.S. Lewis wrote a very interesting little work on the Medieval worldview called The Discarded Image that goes into some of this. He was writing mostly as a literary historian, but covers the scientific understanding to the extent that it informed literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discarded_Image
For anyone who actually read the paper, if there is no big bang and no beginning, what does this model imply about the universe 14B years ago?
"we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end"
This new theory I can at least kind of wrap my head around, there is no beginning and no end... i don't know why but it makes more sense to me.
This is not a new idea. This was in my high school physics textbook in 1998, and it was an old textbook.
Ob: Does the theory explain inflation? Could it be used to formulate an FTL drive.
I've spoken with, and heard many professors speak of the Big Bang Theory as accepted fact, when in fact it is not, and not only that, but it has very serious, fundamental problems:
- It flies in the face of logical reasoning. Something cannot come out of nothing.
- The point above actually has a physical law. It's called the First Law of Thermodynamics, and the Big Bang Theory is in stark violation of it.
That's not to say it's completely invalid. There could have been a Big Bang, in fact it's very likely there was, but that doesn't mean it was the "start" of anything, other than rapid expansion, or, converting into mystical terms, a reincarnation.
The Universe will always be here. It has always been here. It cannot go away. It is indestructible and everlasting. The mystics understand this, and so does anyone who understands basics physics.
The universe did not come from nothing. Consider the following two claims:
* The universe has a finite age.
* The universe has always existed.
Both of these claims are true. It might seem that if something has always existed, it must have existed for infinitely long. No so. At every time in history, the universe has existed, even though the age is finite.
Your intuition might disagree. But recognize your intuition has been developed under very peculiar circumstances on the surface of the Earth. You should be skeptical of your own intuition when studying things outside of your usual experience. In this case, human intuition says two things:
* There was always something before.
* There was always something 5 minutes before.
In ordinary human life, both claims are true. That's what your intuition says. But for the universe as a whole, only the first claim is true, and the second claim is false. Even though it is true that there was always something "before" (for any time you give me, I can divide that time in two and give you an earlier time), it is nevertheless not true that there was always something 5 minutes before (pick 4 minutes after the big bang, and 5 minutes earlier than that is simply undefined [1]).
Big Bang theory is a self-consistent, meaningful mathematical theory. It does not fly in the face of logical reasoning. Rather, it is a spectacular case-in-point of the power of logical reasoning to describe and explain the universe.
Your second point is that the Big Bang disobeys the first law of thermodynamics, which is the conservation of energy. False. You are assuming there was a period of time when there was no energy, and then suddenly energy came into being. That's not what happened. The energy has always been around, for all time, and thus the first law is not violated.
[1] It so happens that "negative time", or even time t=0, is equally as meaningless as Elephant Time or Verb Time. They are all undefined.
The universe did not come from nothing. Consider the following two claims:
* The universe has a finite age.
* The universe has always existed.
Both of these claims are true.
Here's the other bit:
[1] It so happens that "negative time", or even time t=0, is equally as
meaningless as Elephant Time or Verb Time. They are all undefined.
You can state it's "meaningless" to speak of t=0, but you provide zero backup for this, other than it satisfies your fantasy.
You can state it's "meaningless" to ask what happened X minutes before the Big Bang, but again, this is only in the service of satisfying your fantastical theory.
Meanwhile, back in the Universe and the realm of Logic, it's very meaningful to ask what happened at "t=0", because such a state did exist. It even existed in your Big Bang Theory, which states there was an "initial state."
It is highly improbable (if not provably impossible), that such an "initial state" is realistically feasible, and it certainly violates Occam's Razor. Your "initial state" has no explanation. You in fact vehemently object to any attempts at an explanation, deriding them as "undefined." This is faith in its purest form.
Sorry, but I think you are a very religious man and don't realize it. Thank you, however, for the wonderful illustration of my point, I can use it as a historical example of the problem. :-)
I know, HN doesn't allow downvoting of responses. :-p
But you still do not seem to comprehend the fact that the standard theory assumes time is finite.
Really? I thought I was very clear in demonstrating that I understood this through and through, hence the accusation of faith. I did not simply use an assumption that time is infinite as disproof, in fact I did not disprove BBT at all in my response, but merely gave reasons why I thought it was extremely unlikely to have a start.
Occam's Razor says to go with whatever the simplest model is that accurately predicts everything, not just the simplest model.
The Razor is a rule of thumb. If you have multiple theories / models that all accurately explain all observed phenomena, then they're all correct. In fact, since they make the same predictions, they're all equivalent. Occam's Razor basically says "don't waste time with theories that accurately explain the world but also make unfalsifiable / meaningless predictions."
If our physicist friend didn't provide "backup" for his points, it's probably because he's just trying to set you on the right track. You can't reasonably expect someone to lay out the experimental results of every test we've ever run that has led us to assert TBB. And if you're going to persist in claiming that you understand the theory anyway despite all evidence to the contrary, I really doubt it would make any difference.
I am curious how you became so very confident that you are an enlightened genius and all physicists are naive and irrational fools. Especially since physics arrives at it's theories by empirical evidence whereas you seem to arrive at yours by proclaiming inapplicable truisms.
I'm very curious about the assertion that t=0 is meaningless. Is this the conclusion of a line of reasoning, or is it an axiom assumed in order to make the theory work?
It looks like the latter to me, but that may just be because I'm not familiar with the literature and concepts.
Consider the function 1/x. For all positive x, 1/x is defined. As you approach x=0 from the right, 1/x approaches infinity. Same thing for the density of the universe. But the point 1/0 itself is undefined, even though the limit is well defined from the right. Likewise, t=0 itself is undefined, even though the density is well defined for all times greater than t=0.
I wouldn't really consider this an "assumption." It is actually a consequence of assuming that the universe is expanding in accordance with the law of gravity and that energy is conserved. The only way to do it is to construct a "metric" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtre... ) where a bunch of parameters are undefined at t=0, but well-defined thereafter.
Would you say that's a decent summary, given that I'm translating from scientific terms to more philosophical terms?
Yes, I think that's right. It's more accurate to say that there was no first moment rather than that t=0 was the first moment. Reconciling that with the fact that time is nevertheless finite is an important part of understanding the big bang.
To put it mathematically, the set of points of time is open on the left end. The set of times is this: (0,\infty). And not this: [0,\infty)
Edit: By the way, when I say that time is "finite", I mean finite from now into the past. Not finite from "start" to "finish". The standard cosmological model with dark energy have time being infinite from "start" to "finish"
Have fun with that and your "dark energy." I will continue to laugh at you. :-D (And will get downvoted as a result, but it's worth it.)
But Hammer Time is still okay, right?
In addition to this, it's almost impossible to prove something in physics. You can use deduction to support your theory, but you can't prove it in the same way that you can formulate a mathematical proof. That's why it's called a theory: because it's not a proven fact.
However, to make claims like "the universe will always be here, it has always been here, it cannot go away" because otherwise it would violate the first law of thermodynamics is just as bad. The second law of thermodynamics has been haunted by Maxwell's demon for at least a century, and although it does appear to be safe at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if all of this would be proven to be more complex in the future.
So, while you're correct for doubting the big bang theory for too much scientific faith, you might as well put a lot more doubt in other areas as well. A lot of physics is built around faith.
I would take issue with this, at least when speaking of "faith" as "a belief that is not based on proof". For example, the belief that a god created the world in 7 days is based on faith since there is no evidence to support your belief. On the other hand, belief in the big bang is supported by some evidence.
But history has shown that a lot of laws were discovered to be wrong (or incomplete) in the past. Things like the laws of gravity by Newton come to mind. People had a lot of faith in those laws, we're able to send rockets to the moon based on those calculations, but still Einstein managed to show that everything is a lot more complex with his theory of relativity.
The use of the same word as used to describe groundless religious belief just makes me a bit nervous about the connotation.
That's not logical reasoning, that's merely a fact derived inductively from everyday observations.
The point above actually has a physical law. It's called the First Law of Thermodynamics, and the Big Bang Theory is in stark violation of it.
Again, the first law of thermodynamics is a "law" which describes everyday experiences within our own universe at the present epoch. But Big Bangs are not everyday in-universe events.
The Universe will always be here. It has always been here. It cannot go away. It is indestructible and everlasting. The mystics understand this, and so does anyone who understands basics physics
That's just an unjustified assertion, and it doesn't really solve anything. Oh, and I'm sure that "the mystics" disagree on these things, as there's plenty who will tell you the universe was belched out of the belly of a giant porpoise. (If you ask them where the giant porpoise came from, they will get angry.)
How and why the universe started, and why we have this universe rather than any other, are two of the trickiest unsolved questions there are, but the Big Bang is the most sensible theory we have at the moment.
No, it's simply definition.
Again, the first law of thermodynamics is a "law" which describes everyday experiences within our own universe at the present epoch. But Big Bangs are not everyday in-universe events.
I've heard this one too, and if there ever was a weak objection to something, this is it. It amounts to: physics is worthless.
as there's plenty who will tell you the universe was belched out of the belly of a giant porpoise.
Your ignorance is showing and it's embarrassing. The mystical experience is remarkably consistent.
I don't think continuing this discussion is likely to be a particularly productive use of my time. I have a paper I should be working on.
Have fun believing whatever it is that you enjoy believing.
What do you mean by this? To my mind, some definition of "the mystical experience" may be internally consistent, but I highly doubt what you're hinting at makes any testable claims.
The spontaneous creation of particle pairs is not at all an example of "something from nothing", but simply an illustration of "something from something". Vacuum energy is not nothing. That should be obvious.
A proper understanding of what "nothing" means would prevent misunderstandings such as this from coming up. Nothing is literally, nothing. Non-existence. In other words, by definition, you'll never find it.
While I'm sure that many mystics have held the idea of an eternal universe, it isn't as universal as you seem to suggest. Virtually all the mystics in the Christian tradition have held that the universe had a beginning. St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the more prominent examples: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1045.htm
I should have been more specific, but it's rather difficult to be specific w.r.t. definitions of who is a mystic and who is not, it will likely lead to needless debate. :-\
I just hope that those who have studied a bit of comparative religion (and eastern religions specifically) will know what I'm referring to.
However, I did not commit it, I never asserted "true mystics" or anything along those lines. I in fact admitted that my choice of words was poor, and that I was having difficulty choosing a better description.
They key point is that you go around defining the word "X" in a non-conventional way to make sure that your "all X have property Y" is trivially true.
Again, I don't think I committed the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Not trying to argue, but many people don't know that aspect of Aquinas's life. :-)
Even if you are 100% wrong, this type of questioning and reasoning is the essence of what it means to be a "hacker" and should be encouraged on this site.
However, it also implies wanting to know. The consequence of your comment seems to be that we should not research because we will never know and that goes against the entire body of knowledge collected by Humanity over the last 10,000 years.
We already have, unfortunately ignorance will always shield you from the wealth of knowledge that exists beyond your contempt for human nature.
But there are people who readily admit they don't know, but will do research to find a solution. You're not in that category - that's okay - but at least realize that most entrepreneurs/hackers are in the latter camp.