Thursday, February 12, 2015

No Big Bang?

"The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once."


"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.
Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

14 comments:

ricpic said...

Not buyin' it. Something had to come before forever. That's the way we're made. There HAS to be a beginning.

Leland said...

What, there are Big Bang skeptics? The science is settled. The skeptics must be religious zealots. Dark Matter! Racists!

Chip Ahoy said...

The BB theory is based on the observation that stars and galaxies exhibit red shift all over the place, meaning we are moving away from each other. Observation: galaxies move away from each other. Conclusion: It all started with one huge explosion.

See, that there is what you call a leap of faith.

All the following theories are derived from that red-shift observation, questions such as what happened to matter in the first moments of creation along with the whole string of following moments, and is there maximum expansion for the universe, can it be calculated? and what happens at maximum expansion. All of that based of red shift of stars.

And since you cannot understand what they are on about all the time, nor should you have to become expert in everything, and since you are paying them for their interpretation, you accept what they offer.

Urantia has the best description of this that I've read, presented as the voice of authoritah, it reads as science fiction. The discussion centers on pervaded and unpervaded space. Notice in this post the illustration has pervaded space expanding into unpervaded space. Urantia describes space respiration of pervaded space through unpervaded space to a maximum extent, a peak expansion, then a contraction.

Where does it go?

I read the book some ten times so I know what it says. It's the only book I ever read that much. Even language books don't get read twice. Pop up books do. They're worth keeping. So, ten times I read, the universe of pervaded space is shaped somewhat as an hourglass with the vastness of heaven at its center. Pervaded spaces passes through the area, the place, of heaven, the site of creation, as respiration through unpervaded space.

I quit! Because I am sick and tired of "unpervaded" being underlined in red. It's not fair.

One time I read a lengthy discussion on NYT crossword forum that went on for days about how virtually any word is valid in English with the prefix "un" attached to it. If a dictionary were to list them all then all the words in the dictionary would be doubled. Almost.

See? We cannot even talk about it, that is, the word is not in the dictionary for the thing the picture with this post describes, unpervaded space. We think of unpervaded space as the space between the things in our universe, the space between galaxies. It is the nothingness that all that pushes into, as shown in the illustration, unpervaded space does not rush in to full the spaces between galaxies as our universe of galaxies expands.

It is a compelling and beautiful theory.

But tell me, Astrotnomist, Astrophysicists and Nuclear physicists when you study the marvel of things pushing into naked space, and the space between spaces between particles in the material world, does your theory make room for your soul or is that part abandoned? Is there a soul in your material universe? Do you have a soul? Or are you just an exceedingly curious talking slab of meat? Oh, just tell me about all the faith you have solidly stacked on the observation of red shift phenomena that provides such a dazzling gloriously beautiful and self-correcting theory that leaves one's soul, all souls, shipwrecked on the barren sandy shore of materialism.

And that is why the blooming of a flower, the unfurling of a palm frond growing upward is more assertive and more aggressive than death, even a violent death. While the first is a determined construction by program forcing into the material universe, outward, and upward in defiance of gravity, organizing in bold if temporary defiance if 1st law of thermodynamics, the other is merely resigning, submitting.

Trooper York said...

There is a problem with the "Big Bang Theory."

It is on every freaking channel these days. I mean seriously! It is an ok show but does it have to be on every freakin' channel every hour of the day!

It is almost as bad as that "Law and Order" bullshit.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

That illustration looks a lot like the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek TOS.

Kind of makes you wonder.

john said...

In a random location somewhere on this earth, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, a rerun of Gilligan's Island is playing.

That should keep you happy, Troop.

Methadras said...

ricpic said...

Not buyin' it. Something had to come before forever. That's the way we're made. There HAS to be a beginning.


Yes, I believe there was a beginning, but I also am coming to believe that the big bang wasn't it. If the universe has 'always' existed, then even if there was a universal wide big bang as we have been told for decades that there has been and even in the light of the evidence of the CBR (cosmic background radiation), then maybe there is something that occurred even prior to that and has been overlayed so far into the past that it is effectively and will always be invisible, so the only remnant we can wrap our heads around is the idea of a Big Bang and the CBR being a left over.

Imagine the universe as a giant hole, and the material to make that hole is off to the side waiting to fill it back up, but that hole keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, not as a negative space, but just as a space getting larger. In fact so large that we even classify that there is an observable universe and an unobservable universe. A universe who's light has already pass on by and will never be seen again.

We believe that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. I contend that the universe is much much much older than that. So much older that you will never see it and can't.

bagoh20 said...

I have no idea what happened before the big bang, but I say: let's do it again.

chickelit said...

Niels Bohr did something similar over 100 years ago when he postulated his theory of the hydrogen atom. He did away with classical theory for the atom (which predicted instability), in effect saying that it didn't apply. The reason his theory stuck was that he explained so many things without classical theory.

The general public had little use for any of this, and I suspect the same for this new theory. The proof will be how new progress can such new thinking foster in physicists.

William said...

Terry Gilliam has a new movie out called The Zero Theorem. I liked it. It poked gentle fun at the Big Bang theory and the Holy Trinity. It's the only movie I ever saw where the Holy Ghost has a speaking part. Very little has been done to dramatize the Holy Ghost. God the Father and Jesus usually get all the good lines, but, in this movie, the Holy Ghost, played by a hot chick, really steals the show........When I was a kid there was this toy. It was a small box with an on/off switch. When you turned the switch on, a little hand came out of the box and turned the switch off. That's my understanding of how the universe operates.

chickelit said...

William wrote: That's my understanding of how the universe operates.

Did you mean "The energy miser"?

If yes, that may be a profound and subtle display of the 1st Law Of Thermodynamics: "Energy is conserved"

rhhardin said...

If time has no beginning, we haven't had time to get here.

Tank said...

Before the Big Bank there was the little bang and the medium bang.

Ya gotta build up to these things.

Practice even.

MamaM said...

Micro bangs. Firing from neuron to neuron, processor to processor, screen to screen, brain to brain, resulting in the best of Lem's, right here in the nut shell.