No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning
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phys.org
Struck me as remarkable coming from physicists, then again, they were using "Bohmian trajectories", and Bohm was in his own way an unconventional thinker. In my imagination, Bohm would not have been surprised by an "endless" universe.
Fascinating. How strange it will be if "science" winds up "proving" an age-old "spiritual" idea.
How typically atheistic, scientific minds could think there is a beginning to the universe baffles me.
Compression, release, distribution, re-compression.
An actual true beginning requires an ultimate creator, an entity that can exist outside of all that exists. I disagree with that premise for many reasons.
Much like science missed wildly in estimating just how small the micro world is, it has missed wildly on the macro scale. What is thought of as the universe (the total assumed sum + ~13.8 billion years), is just another very large collection. It goes through a constant cycle, the actual universe does not. I think that within perhaps 20 or 30 years we'll be able to prove that what we think of as all there is - the "universe" - is just one in another very large collection.
The big bang theory is going to fall apart in the next decade. That process is going to upset a lot of people that have bet their entire professional lives on it. One thing I've always come to expect when discussing the big bang theory as being potentially false, is that I will be drenched in every possible argument (rational, emotional, ad hominem, etc) by its devotees. There is an incredibly intense emotional attachment to that theory.
The idea of a cyclical universe has been around for decades (I recall seeing a diagram about it as a child 20 years ago), there isn't a mis-understanding of what the CMB reveals. It gives evidence about the creation of our _own_ observable universe, and the state of matter moments after the creation event of _our_ universe referred to as the big bang.
Ideas regarding our observable universe residing in higher dimensional spaces have been around for several decades under the name Brane Cosmology. In fact this interpretation of the CMB has been studied for evidence of a "mother" or pre-universe state [0]. After an initial round of statistically modelling and excitement, it was found with the current abilities of the WMAP satelitte that no evidence of a such a pre-universe was detectable [1]
My confusion in your position is that these models are absolutely not in contradiction of the big bang model, which explains _our_ universe (saying nothing of multiverses). There can be a lot of misunderstanding in the general public regarding science and pop science and words that have specific meaning (universe, multiverse) can be used incorrectly. It's not fair to direct mis-appropriating terms against the scientific theories themselves.
> Compression, release, distribution, re-compression.
This isn't true for our current universe at least, we are in a run away state of expansion, there will be no re-compression.
> That process is going to upset a lot of people that have bet their entire professional lives on it.
This is a gross exaggeration. Every cosmologist I've known is desperately searching for something different, unintuitive, completely unexpected and exciting. It's fun!
[0] http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1011/1011.3706.pdf [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656
Not a physicist, but that idea has always made the most sense to me. A big bounce rather than a big bang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity
"An actual true beginning requires an ultimate creator, an entity that can exist outside of all that exists."
And... that argument has never made any sense to me at all. A "creator" is in no way needed for an event to occur, most especially an "entity". Events happen all the time without the intervention of an "entity".
How you could so casually write off any possibility of the universe as we know it having a beginning baffles me.
Among other reasons, that is the predominant view of the scientific community, so it really shouldn't be that baffling to you why everyone else thinks so. (That is, they pay attention to the scientific community and not to people who believe that something must "inherently" be a certain way.)
I often find those atheistic wannabe scientific minds to be equally or more "religious" than many religious people. Proselytising? Check. Convinced of their own and their "scriptures" infallibility? Check. Etc
Never did that. "adventured" quite clearly talked about the "big bang crowd"[0], not the people who contributed to the theory, and I'm supporting his/her view.
[0]: "I've found the big bang crowd to be almost like a religion."
Have you talked to actual real cosmologists? I suspect you haven't. The big bang theory is our BEST MODEL for explaining the DATA.
How can you explain galactic evolution without positing that the universe was different (younger) many billions of years ago? We can see that the universe was different easily by the types of galaxies that were present.
We know the galaxy is expanding, this is a fact.
The distribution of hydrogen and helium are consistent with a big bang model of the universe.
We can observe clouds of matter which are distinctly different from matter present in active areas of space. These "leftover" remnants are additional evidence of the big bang.
How can you be amazed that cosmologists adapt a theory which can explain all of the above? Can your endless universe model do that? If it can please claim your nobel prize. I don't understand how you can be arrogant enough to make a claim such as yours with no evidence as if it's obvious.
> atheistic, scientific minds
Ah, now I understand why.
I have no inherent respect for something because it's claimed to be the best model. I believe it's a false idol, worshiped with a near religious fervor because so many have staked their scientific livelihoods to it. Dogma is extremely common in science historically.
At least not necessarily. Think of the universe like an expanding balloon that we exist inside. We have no idea what, if anything, is outside of the balloon, or what came before it. In fact, I don't believe we even know whether time as we know it exists outside the balloon.
Maybe we should be prepared to accept that current theories (or part of them) are in a way Epicyclism all over again, no matter how elegant and solid they seem now.
maybe you should try publishing a paper then. or maybe gain the necessary background to review current theories on the matter first, which from the general tone of your posts seems like it should be your first priority.
http://www.amazon.com/A-First-Course-General-Relativity/dp/0... by Schutz is a good place to start.
In your first comment, you said that general relativity predicted that an infinite amount of time would have passed since the initial singularity. But that is not true: If you apply general relativity to a (very simple) model of the universe, you get the Friedmann equations. You can then solve these equations and get a solution that depends on the parameters of your model (spatial curvature, cosmological constant, equation of state of the matter/energy content). You can then see that all such solutions which fit our observations of the universe (the universe is currently expanding and not all energy in the universe behaves like dark energy) have the property that there was a singularity a finite amount of t ago.
As always in general relativity, one has to determine what exactly "t" means. But luckily, for the Robertson-Walker metric, the answer to that is relatively simple: t is the proper time of particles that are at rest relative to the average matter content of the universe (of course up to arbitrary translations).
So the result is: General relativity predicts for a universe like ours, that for matter that was at rest relative to the rest of the matter in the universe, only a finite amount of time has passed since a singularity. Time does not slow down near the big bang.
Of course that doesn't mean that this is the whole and perfect truth. The very fact that GR predicts a singularity means that GR is incomplete; a singularity is simply not a valid prediction. A theory of quantum gravity is probably necessary to fix that. But I just wanted to correct the error in your first post.
Similarly, "God Particle" isn't a term that was ever used in physics. If I recall correctly, it comes from the title of a popular science book, which the author originally wanted to call "The Goddamn Particle" (because the Higgs was so hard to find experimentally), but the publisher didn't like that. Unfortunately "God Particle" stuck in popular science and the media.
Why don't quantum fluctuations count?
The only reason it could be useful is maybe if "particle" implies a certain set of behaviors all particles have in common?
To make it clearer: what I mean is that the notion of a "gravity particle" only gives us the illusion of something we can grasp, whereas presumably there is no such thing in reality.
Edit: downvote, why? It's a serious question.
Maybe the universe reborns in cycles expanding and collapsing in forever ending loops and there are parallel universes that exist to this one in higher dimensions.