Big Bang

From Meghan Bartels at MSN: Hawking approaches the problem by offering a detailed analogy, comparing space-time to any other continuous, curved surface, like the surface of the Earth. “There is nothing south of the South Pole,” Hawking says. The same principle holds with the universe: “There was nothing around before the Big Bang.”More. “Nothing” is actually a big word. It can mean many different things while purporting to be one big Nothing. Fine print. Ken Francis replied to this line of thinking at New English Review: About seven years ago, during a talk on Hawking at a university, I raised my hand and criticised comments he made in his then latest book, The Grand Design, which he co-wrote with Star Read More ›

The hyperreals are an extension of the real number line that brings to bear a reciprocal relationship between the very large and the very small. By so introducing extensions to the real number continuum, it forms a base for an infinitesimals approach to the calculus and makes sense of a lot of the tricks used by early pioneers of Calculus from Leibniz and Newton to Euler and beyond. (Though, it is clear in retrospect that they missed a lot of the pathologies that are now part of the far more cautious approaches of today.) And yes, here is a case where Wikipedia does some good (likely, in a context where there are few basement trolls capable of making a mess): Read More ›

From Sean Carroll, discussing his arXiv paper (a chapter in an upcoming book, Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics) at Preposterous Universe: It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation. More. He adds, [t]his kind of question might be the kind of thing that doesn’t have a Read More ›

Comments from Kirk Durston and Rob Sheldon added. From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: But in the past few years, a growing number of cosmologists have cautiously revisited the alternative. They say the Big Bang might instead have been a Big Bounce. Some cosmologists favor a picture in which the universe expands and contracts cyclically like a lung, bouncing each time it shrinks to a certain size, while others propose that the cosmos only bounced once — that it had been contracting, before the bounce, since the infinite past, and that it will expand forever after. In either model, time continues into the past and future without end. With modern science, there’s hope of settling this ancient debate. In the years Read More ›

According to SciTech Daily in a January 3, 2018 article, Tabby’s star, aka KIC 8462852, has had a mysterious brightening and dimming cycle.  (Such a cycle, of course raises the interesting thought of the erection of a Dyson Sphere or a similar megastructure.) As the article reports: >>A team of more than 200 researchers, including Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Assistant Professor Jason Wright and led by Louisiana State University’s Tabetha Boyajian, is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the “most mysterious star in the universe.” KIC 8462852, or “Tabby’s Star,” nicknamed after Boyajian, is otherwise an ordinary star, about 50 percent bigger and 1,000 degrees hotter than the Sun, and about than 1,000 light years Read More ›

From The Economist: Persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue, of course. And, as all this effort shows, physicists have been nothing if not persistent. Yet it is an uncomfortable fact that the relentless pursuit of ever bigger and better experiments in their field is driven as much by belief as by evidence. The core of this belief is that Nature’s rules should be mathematically elegant. So far, they have been, so it is not a belief without foundation. But the conviction that the truth must be mathematically elegant can easily lead to a false obverse: that what is mathematically elegant must be true. Hence the unwillingness to give up on GUTs and supersymmetry. New theories have been Read More ›

You shouldn’t exist either. But the people saying so in this case are not population bombers or jihadis. From Philip Perry at BigThink: What CERN scientists say as a result of their latest experiment is: the universe itself is a miracle, as it shouldn’t exist at all. This is of course taken in reference to the Big Bang theory. Though the prevailing one, it’s not the only theory to explain how all and everything came into being. Still, in this view, it all starts with the singularity. We all pretty much know by now that naturalists (nature is all there is) hate th ig Bang and the only question is, how much will they twist science to discredit its significance. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although for five decades, the Big Bang theory has been the best known and most accepted explanation for the beginning and evolution of the Universe, it is hardly a consensus among scientists. Brazilian physicist Juliano Cesar Silva Neves part of a group of researchers who dare to imagine a different origin. In a study recently published in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation, Neves suggests the elimination of a key aspect of the standard cosmological model: the need for a spacetime singularity known as the Big Bang. In raising this possibility, Neves challenges the idea that time had a beginning and reintroduces the possibility that the current expansion was preceded by contraction. “I believe the Big Bang never Read More ›

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains: Our best theories, like the aforementioned theory of evolution, the Big Bang theory, and Einstein’s General Relativity, cover all of these bases. They have an underlying quantitative framework, enabling us to predict what will happen under a variety of situations, and to then go out and test those predictions empirically. So far, these theories have demonstrated themselves to be eminently valid. Where their predictions can be described by mathematical expressions, we can tell not only what should happen, but by how much. For these theories in particular, among many others, measurements and observations that have been performed to test these theories have been supremely successful. More. “Fossils, genetic inheritance, and DNA prove the theory of evolution” Read More ›

By way of bypassing the Big Bang, from Anu Padmanabhan at Nautilus: The key new ingredient we have introduced, which helps to bypass this technical difficulty, is the concept of cosmic information. The idea that information should play a key role in the description of physics has gained considerable support in recent times. This notion arises in several contexts when one attempts to combine the principles of quantum theory and gravity like, for example, in the study of quantum black holes. There is also the intriguing notion of holography in some of these models, which suggests that the information content in a bulk region can be related to the information content on its boundary. But, unfortunately, the mathematical description of Read More ›

From ENV: If the universe had a beginning, then it had a first cause. And if it had a first cause, then it makes sense to ask what kind of first cause is necessary to explain the origin of the universe. It must be: A cause outside of the universe Capable of generating all the matter and energy in the universe Capable of generating all the order we see in inherent within the universe (more on this coming up). That’s quite a job description — one that no known material cause or set of material causes appears capable of accomplishing. The need for such a powerful and intelligent first cause strongly suggests a purposeful design behind the origin of the Read More ›

From Adam Hadhazy at Space.com: A new cosmic map was unveiled in August, plotting where the mysterious substance called dark matter is clumped across the universe. To immense relief — and frustration — the map is just what scientists had expected. The distribution of dark matter agrees with our current understanding of a universe born with certain properties in a Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. So what is the problem here? But for all the map’s confirmatory power, it still tells us little about the true identity of dark matter, which acts as an invisible scaffold for galaxies and cosmic structure. It also does not explain an even bigger factor shaping the cosmos, known as dark energy, an enigmatic Read More ›

From Andrew Griffin at The Independent: “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” explained Christian Smorra, the author of a new study conducted at CERN. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?” The latest possibility was matter and anti-matter’s different magnetism. But new research shows that they are identical in that way too – lending further mystery to the question of why the universe is still around at all. More. Persons who find that this situation seriously interferes with their lifestyle could try complaining to the UN. See also: Read More ›

From Oxford’s William E. Carroll at Big Questions Online: The use of cosmology either to deny or to affirm creation is often the result of confusions about what creation is and about the explanatory power of the natural sciences. Creation, as a metaphysical and theological notion, affirms that all that exists — in whatever way it does — depends upon God as a cause. The natural sciences have as their subject the world of changing things, from subatomic particles to acorns to galaxies. Whenever there is a change there must be something that changes. Whether these changes are biological or cosmological, without beginning or end, or temporally finite, they are still processes. Creation, on the other hand, is the radical Read More ›

From Rachel Feltman and Matthew R. Francis at Popular Science: The main reason some physicists obsess over the beginning of the universe is because so much evidence points to there being one. But what if our universe grooved within an ageless multiverse—like a patch of ground from which countless flowers bloom. In this model, each universe has a big bang and keeps its own time. In the most popular version, each universe might even have its own version of physics too. Infinite possibilities yield infinite results: Some say this theory explains life itself. We’d have to be extremely lucky for a single big bang to create a universe with the perfect conditions for life as we know it, but if Read More ›