New theory of our universe

WalterMitty

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11837869

interesting.

NoQuarter

Thats more like it! I tell ya I just cant buy into the big bang theory!

opinion guy

This story bears and a strange resemblance to the latest arc story line in Stargate Universe.........weird.....

themadhair

NoQuarter wrote: »

Thats more like it! I tell ya I just cant buy into the big bang theory!

Erm….this is entirely consistent with BBT and heavily relies upon it….

Conor108

opinion guy wrote: »

This story bears and a strange resemblance to the latest arc story line in Stargate Universe.........weird.....

What a quality show! EVERYONE WATCH IT! Come on season 3:D

AlmightyCushion

opinion guy wrote: »

This story bears and a strange resemblance to the latest arc story line in Stargate Universe.........weird.....

I was thinking the exact same thing.

NoQuarter

themadhair wrote: »

Erm….this is entirely consistent with BBT and heavily relies upon it….

Not in the sense that there was "nothing" before a certain stage...which doesn't sit well with me. Rather "cyclic" events seem a better explanation to me (and i dont claim to know a lot about it at all).

Perhaps my first post was unclear in what I meant.

Still all a mindfcuk though!

themadhair

NoQuarter wrote: »

Not in the sense that there was "nothing" before a certain stage...

Where in the BBT is that?

Hint: It isn't.

NoQuarter

So what do they say was before 13.7 billion years ago?

Hint: I really dont know the answer because, ya know, some people dont know all the answers.

themadhair

NoQuarter wrote: »

So what do they say was before 13.7 billion years ago?

'They' don't. Why do you believe BBT says something about what was before the expansion?

NoQuarter

I dont believe it says anything about it at all, in fact i dont know if it does or not, but considering the big bang is supposed to be the birth of the universe there would therefore be an underlying assumption that there was something before that!

themadhair

NoQuarter wrote: »

but considering the big bang is supposed to be the birth of the universe…

Maybe I’m being a little too cynical and it isn’t helping matters. Here is a brief overview I posted on another forum once:

It first began with Einstein’s general relativity. Combining relativity with the notion that the universe is relatively homogenous leads to a startling conclusion – the universe cannot be static. The hypothesising soon met experimental verification when Hubble, making use of the Doppler shift in spectrographs, showed that the other galaxies in the universe were all receding from us. If the universe is expanding then it follows that at some point in the past the universe was ‘smaller’. Two competing theories were proposed to account for this, one of which was the big bang theory. The basic idea is that the universe existed as a very dense (and therefore very hot) state and expanded to its present day state. This leads to certain predictions concerning what remnants this hot dense state would leave behind – the most notable being that the universe should mimic the heat signature of a blackbody. A very specific prediction that was verified when the COBE satellite went up.

At its most basic we can observe the universe is expanding. The BBT simply extrapolates this observation back to when the universe was much denser and hotter. There is nothing whatsoever in the theory that deals with the ‘birth of the universe’.

NoQuarter

themadhair wrote: »

There is nothing whatsoever in the theory that deals with the ‘birth of the universe’.

Must be dyslexic so....

Wikipedia wrote:

The early hot, dense phase is itself referred to as "the Big Bang",[notes 3] and is considered the "birth" of our Universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang


If wiki is wrong...fine... im not claiming to know it all. Your opening statement, however, was bang on.(excuse the pun)

Johnmb

NoQuarter wrote: »

Must be dyslexic so....



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang


If wiki is wrong...fine... im not claiming to know it all. Your opening statement, however, was bang on.(excuse the pun)

Am I misunderstanding you here? It seemed at the start that you were thinking the BBT says that there was nothing before the Big Bang (it doesn't). Then you later seem to be saying that you think it implies that there was something before the Big Bang (it doesn't really do that either). The BBT simply tries to explain how the universe started expanding as it currently is now. It doesn't try to explain what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang, as that would be irrelevant to the BBT. It doesn't get into what caused the Big Bang, nor, really, the Big Bang itself, just how the universe expanded as a result of the Big Bang. Most of the theory deals with what was going on in the moments just after the Big Bang.

NoQuarter

Thanks for that john, I wasnt actually trying to say anything, like i said, i dont know much about it!

Anonymo

it's a bit bizarre that this paper is receiving such widespread attention. even if the theory wasn't a bit off the wall the cmb analysis is very ropey. i'd say a lot more work must be done if they are to be believed in their claims

this theory posits that the universe has been undergoing a series of expansions and contractions, i.e. going from big bang to big crunch forever. this accordian effect replaces the need to define the start of time to be at the big bang. in fact it means there is no start since the universe has been expanding and contracting forever. the cyclic universe idea has been around for a long time (it was previously rejected because of entropy growth so i guess this particular version of the theory gets aroung that somehow). anyway like i said i think this idea is a bit far-fetched and certainly the analysis in this paper does little to justify it

riffmongous

Anonymo wrote: »

it's a bit bizarre that this paper is receiving such widespread attention. even if the theory wasn't a bit off the wall the cmb analysis is very ropey. i'd say a lot more work must be done if they are to be believed in their claims

I thought the same first time I read it. It wouldn't be the first time that an astrophysics theory has got a lot of attention due more to it's philosophical implications rather than scientific merit

themadhair

Even if you think the paper has ropey CMB analysis, it does raise the question of what caused the fluctuations if they are real observances:

Anonymo

themadhair wrote: »

Even if you think the paper has ropey CMB analysis, it does raise the question of what caused the fluctuations if they are real observances:

the point about the analysis being ropey is that i don't think they've shown these are real observations. in particular there is no prediction for the amplitude of these fluctuations and they are putting in an arbitrary cutoff to do this naive analysis. a slight change in the amplitude would likely lead to a null result.
btw i'm involved quite a bit in cmb analysis and i'd be really surprised if there turns out to be something in this

themadhair

Anonymo wrote: »

i don't think they've shown these are real observations.

What is your money on then? An artefact from data processing, lens problem, interference by an intermediary or pareidolia?

Anonymo

themadhair wrote: »

What is your money on then? An artefact from data processing, lens problem, interference by an intermediary or pareidolia?

the latter I think... i'm tempted to put it down to data processing but they don't really do any! they are trying to fit things to the data that they see by eye. in particular their noise analysis is pretty poor. there are a lot of things wrong with what they're doing such as introducing a preferred scale at which to analyse things. i don't think the problem is with the data set since that has been thoroughly checked at this stage. they are picking out specific spots on the temperature sky and if that spot shows enough of a correlation then that counts as evidence. it's like saying 'i want to find out which country I'm in. I meet a group of five Spanish people. This means I must be in Spain'. It's a seriously dodgy inference. i should stop now as I could start ranting!

Nehaxak

Anonymo wrote: »

i should stop now as I could start ranting!

Please don't stop, I'm enjoying reading your point of view tbh

Dave!

Johnmb wrote: »

Am I misunderstanding you here? It seemed at the start that you were thinking the BBT says that there was nothing before the Big Bang (it doesn't). Then you later seem to be saying that you think it implies that there was something before the Big Bang (it doesn't really do that either). The BBT simply tries to explain how the universe started expanding as it currently is now. It doesn't try to explain what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang, as that would be irrelevant to the BBT. It doesn't get into what caused the Big Bang, nor, really, the Big Bang itself, just how the universe expanded as a result of the Big Bang. Most of the theory deals with what was going on in the moments just after the Big Bang.

I don't know anything about the BBT really, but judging from this, a helpful analogy might be evolution: it doesn't matter how the first life arose, but once organisms began replicating, then natural selection begins to play a role.

Anonymo

Dave! wrote: »

I don't know anything about the BBT really, but judging from this, a helpful analogy might be evolution: it doesn't matter how the first life arose, but once organisms began replicating, then natural selection begins to play a role.

Spurred on by some encouragement by Nehaxak I'll give a stab at this.

Dave! I can see why you're comparing this particular theory of the universe with evolution but, to be honest, evolution with all it's nonlinearity is a more difficult concept so I'm not sure it would help here. Instead I'll try give a bit of background on the standard picture and how this theory differs...

A large reason we believe in a hot big bang is the observation of the CMB. This is the relic radiation left over from the very early universe. It was predicted when it became clear that since the universe is expanding then general relativity says that at one stage in the distant past it must have been in a very hot dense state. When the radiation was observed this was seen as a triumph for the hot big bang model. However there was a problem with it. No matter what direction you looked at in the sky the temperature was very uniform (to one part in 100,000). This means that everything must at some stage been in thermal equilibrium. But in the standard picture of expansion distant patches of the universe could never have been in contact (they are much much too far apart). So the picture of inflation was invented. This was a period of especially rapid expansion in the very early universe. After this period of inflation things reverted to the standard expansion picture. Now this might seem a bit dodgy but everything fits well with this theory.
Nonetheless, part of the motivation for Penrose's work is to come up with a theory where different parts of the universe would have been in thermal contact without the need for a period of exponential expansion (inflation). This is his 'cyclic model' where the universe has been expanding and contracting forever. This allows an essentially infinite period of time for the different constituents of the universe to thermalise instead of requiring a period of inflation.

It is quite a departure from the standard lore but that is a good thing. However there are many other tests for such a theory and so far any predictions are pretty hand-wavy.

maninasia

Anonymo wrote: »

it's a bit bizarre that this paper is receiving such widespread attention. even if the theory wasn't a bit off the wall the cmb analysis is very ropey. i'd say a lot more work must be done if they are to be believed in their claims

this theory posits that the universe has been undergoing a series of expansions and contractions, i.e. going from big bang to big crunch forever. this accordian effect replaces the need to define the start of time to be at the big bang. in fact it means there is no start since the universe has been expanding and contracting forever. the cyclic universe idea has been around for a long time (it was previously rejected because of entropy growth so i guess this particular version of the theory gets aroung that somehow). anyway like i said i think this idea is a bit far-fetched and certainly the analysis in this paper does little to justify it

In the multiverse version big-bangs happen all the time in an infinite series, it is not neccessary to expand and contract in cycles. What's more likely, we are part of an infinite series of big-bangs or the only one that ever occurred. I think most of us can figure it out pretty quickly (the same goes for life on earth by the way, the antropomorphic principle can be falsely applied to the big bang too).

Indeed evolution would have a role to play here too, as certain universes could more rapidly spawn universes, other universes may not replicate so fast etc.....evolution works just the same for universes as for life-forms. It is a big mistake to think that evolution works only for life systems, evolution could be the strongest force of nature that we know of! It could determine the likely physical laws that are passed on to daughter universes.

Anonymo

maninasia wrote: »

In the multiverse version big-bangs happen all the time in an infinite series, it is not neccessary to expand and contract in cycles. What's more likely, we are part of an infinite series of big-bangs or the only one that ever occurred. I think most of us can figure it out pretty quickly (the same goes for life on earth by the way, the antropomorphic principle can be falsely applied to the big bang too).

Indeed evolution would have a role to play here too, as certain universes could more rapidly spawn universes, other universes may not replicate so fast etc.....evolution works just the same for universes as for life-forms. It is a big mistake to think that evolution works only for life systems, evolution could be the strongest force of nature that we know of! It could determine the likely physical laws that are passed on to daughter universes.

fair enough maninasia - although i think you're really stretching to try and make cosmology fit into the picture of evolution. it is in a sense an extension of Lovelocks' 'Gaia Hypothesis' that you seem to have in mind. however the multiverse hypothesis is firmly in the realm of conjecture. there is, as yet, no observational basis to believe in the multiverse as opposed to just a single universe (apologies I know single and 'uni-' mean the same thing!). My hesitation about applying the notion of evolution is simply the assumption that the correct/standard picture of cosmology is the multiverse version. Also, while evolution works according to competition for resources etc, it's not clear how this could/can apply to the multiverse picture. In this model different universes spawn from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum sea. There are no offspring - that is unless you regard black holes as being the seeds of other universes, etc. It makes a messy situation a whole lot messier without any observational reason.

However, similarly to the cyclic universe hypothesis the multiverse is absolutely worth exploring to see if there is any possibility of distinguishing such models from the standard picture.

maninasia

According to my understanding of multiverse theory universes constantly bubble off new universes, some universes may be more common than others due to their speed of bubbling or the stability of the bubbled universe. It starts off as random but becomes selected for certain traits. So you see that with any system that replicates there are certainly evolutionary or selective effects. Sure they are not in competition directly (as far as I can see) but it would make it more likely that certain universes strongly predominate in the multiverse, no?

I have read a bit about Gaia, the more we learn about how earth is influenced by bacterial processes the more respect I have for this idea! Gaia was written in the 1960s but it seems every new discovery reinforces the Gaia hypothesis rather than takes away from it. In my estimation will go from 'New agey theory' to 'Mainstream scientific theory' within 10-20 years!

http://www.everythingselectric.com/forum/index.php?topic=146.0
http://www.everythingselectric.com/forum/index.php?topic=146.0
http://science.jrank.org/pages/2900/Gaia-Hypothesis.html


I also believe informational processes and perhaps intelligence is key to the evolution of universes. I don't believe this from a spritual viewpoint but from the viewpoint that intelligence is an evolutionary outgrowth of natural laws of the universe, the evolution of intelligence given enough time would have capabilities to direct universal laws and spawning of new universes. It may not mean there is a God running the universe but the setup of the universe could have an intelligence involved somewhere along the line...a strong possibility.

Even if intelligence is not involved it is not too farfetched to think the universal evolution may have a strong input from living things somewhere along the line, perhaps in the way they use energy or stabilise systems much as Earth may be stabilised within certain parameters by the interaction the biota on it. They have no conscious direction to interact, but living systems that interact to stabilise the environment to their benefit will be favoured by evolution. So now you can see why the forces of evolution, in a system that depends on replication, are the strongest of all!

Anonymo

maninasia wrote: »

According to my understanding of multiverse theory universes constantly bubble off new universes, some universes may be more common than others due to their speed of bubbling or the stability of the bubbled universe. It starts off as random but becomes selected for certain traits. So you see that with any system that replicates there are certainly evolutionary or selective effects. Sure they are not in competition directly (as far as I can see) but it would make it more likely that certain universes strongly predominate in the multiverse, no?

Yes this is correct. However the nucleation of universes and their rate of creation is very model dependent. But I still don't see why you would want to invoke a complicated picture like evolution to describe it. Daughter universes do not carry information from their parent universe (in the standard lore). Neither, as you say, is there a direct form of competition. The idea of the multiverse, as is usually invoked by the anthropic principle is that given a sea of universes one of these will have the conditions necessary for life to form. This is unlike the idea of evolution where more complex structures form. In a sense it doesn't matter when our universe formed within the multiverse picture, all that's important is that it can form. There is no selection criterion for offspring universes within the picture. This makes it very different from evolution.

Maybe I'm being a bit over-pedantic on the point. But I think you are complicating the picture by imagining an evolving sea of universes that lead to ours.The point is that there is nothing special about our universe within this picture.

However, to elaborate on some of your discussion. You are right in saying that some universes dominate over others in this multiverse. Some universes will form in a manner such that they contain too much density so that they will close over on themselves very quickly, etc.

stevoslice

Penrose's Cyclic Cosmology

Roger Penrose and his collaborator Vahe Gurzadyan made a splash recently by claiming that there was evidence in the cosmic microwave background for a pre-Big-Bang era in the history of the universe. (Here’s the paper.) The evidence takes the form of correlated circles in the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, as pictured here. They claim that they have found such circles at a level of significance much higher than would be predicted in a conventional scenario, where perturbations were random and uncorrelated on various scales.

That would be pretty amazing, if true. But it looks like it isn’t. Here are two skeptical papers that just appeared on the arxiv. (Hat tip to David Spergel. Peter Coles was an early skeptic.)

A search for concentric circles in the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps
Authors: I. K. Wehus, H. K. Eriksen:

Abstract: In a recent analysis of the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps, Gurzadyan and Penrose claim to find evidence for violent pre-Big Bang activity in the form of concentric low-variance circles at high statistical significance. In this paper, we perform an independent search for such concentric low-variance circles, employing both chi^2 statistics and matched filters, and compare the results obtained from the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps with those obtained from LCDM simulations. Our main findings are the following: We do reproduce the claimed ring structures observed in the WMAP data as presented by Gurzadyan and Penrose, thereby verifying their computational procedures. However, the results from our simulations do not agree with those presented by Gurzadyan and Penrose. On the contrary we obtain a substantially larger variance in our simulations, to the extent that the observed WMAP sky maps are fully consistent with the LCDM model as measured by these statistics.

No evidence for anomalously low variance circles on the sky
Authors: Adam Moss, Douglas Scott, James P. Zibin:

Abstract: In a recent paper, Gurzadyan & Penrose claim to have found directions on the sky centred on which are circles of anomalously low variance in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These features are presented as evidence for a particular picture of the very early Universe. We attempted to repeat the analysis of these authors, and we can indeed confirm that such variations do exist in the temperature variance for annuli around points in the data. However, we find that this variation is entirely expected in a sky which contains the usual CMB anisotropies. In other words, properly simulated Gaussian CMB data contain just the sorts of variations claimed. Gurzadyan & Penrose have not found evidence for pre-Big Bang phenomena, but have simply re-discovered that the CMB contains structure.

The basic message is simple: sure, you can find some circles in the sky if you look there. But they are simply what you would expect from random alignments, not a new signal over and above the usual predictions. The authors here are respected CMB analyzers, and I strongly suspect that they are correct. Which reminds us of an important lesson: analyzing the CMB is hard! It’s a very messy universe out there, and if you don’t take every single source of error correctly into account, you can convince yourself of all sorts of things.

Just because this particular signal is there doesn’t mean the underlying model — Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) — isn’t right. I’m all in favor of pre-Big-Bang cosmologies myself, and Penrose more than anyone has been correct in insisting that the low entropy of our early universe is a crucial problem that is not well-addressed in modern cosmology. But I’ve been hesitant because, frankly, I don’t really get it.

As far as I know, there isn’t any exposition of the CCC in the form of a freely-available technical paper. There is a book, which hasn’t officially been released in the U.S. but you can get your hands on if you try hard enough, which I did:

Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

Even with the book in my hands, however, I can’t quite discern the underlying physical mechanism that makes it all work.

The basic point is this. The very early universe is smooth. The universe right now is lumpy, with stars and galaxies and black holes all over the place. But the future universe will be smooth again — black holes will evaporate and the cosmological constant will disperse all the matter, leaving us nothing but empty space. (Just wait about 10100 years.) So, Penrose says, we can map the late universe onto a future phase that looks just like our early universe, simply by a conformal transformation (a change of scale). Do this an infinite number of times, and you have a cyclic cosmology — the universe goes through a series of “aeons” that start with a smooth Big Bang, get lumpy as structure forms, smooth out again, and then gets matched onto another smooth Big-Bang-like phase, etc.

If you’re sketchy on that last bit, join the club. Sure, mathematically we can map the smooth late universe onto the smooth early universe. But what physical process would actually cause that to happen? Despite having the book in my hands, I’m still unclear on this. (I absolutely confess that the answer might be in there, but I simply haven’t read it carefully enough.) While the early and late universes are both smooth, they are very different in other obvious ways, such as the energy density. What causes the low-density late universe to come alive into something like the high-density early universe? Something like that happens in the Steinhardt-Turok cyclic universe, but in order to make it happen you need to specify some particular matter fields with very specific dynamics. This isn’t a trivial task; there are things you can try, but they generally are plagued by instabilities and singularities. I don’t see where Penrose has done that, so I’m not even sure what there is to be criticized.

Regardless, I am highly skeptical of cyclic cosmologies no matter what flavor they come in. The most obvious empirical fact about our observable universe is its temporal asymmetry — the early phase is very different from the late phase, even though no such difference is to be found in the fundamental laws of physics. (I wrote a book about this, if you’re interested — Roger Penrose blurbed it.) Our goal should be to explain that asymmetry. But cyclic cosmologies simply extend it over an infinite number of cycles, without any explanation. If you took a typical state of the universe today and played it backwards in time, you wouldn’t expect to get anything like these cyclic cosmologies; it would just collapse into a mess. What you would need to do is argue that this kind of behavior arises robustly from a wide variety of possible initial conditions. If you need some special conditions, fine — but you’re not doing any better than the ordinary Big Bang.

Response from Penrose and Gurzadyan

Two groups [3,4] have confirmed the results of our paper concerning the actual existence of low variance circles in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky. They also point out that the effect does not contradict the LCDM model - a matter which is not in dispute. We point out two discrepancies between their treatment and ours, however, one technical, the other having to do with the very understanding of what constitutes a Gaussian random signal. Both groups simulate maps using the CMB power spectrum for LCDM, while we simulate a pure Gaussian sky plus the WMAP's noise, which points out the contradiction with a common statement [3] that "CMB signal is random noise of Gaussian nature". For as it was shown in [5], the random component is a minor one in the CMB signal, namely, about 0.2. Accordingly, the circles we saw are a real structure of the CMB sky and they are not of a random Gaussian nature. Although the structures studied certainly cannot contradict the power spectrum, which is well fitted by LCDM model, we particularly emphasize that the low variance circles occur in concentric families, and this key fact cannot be explained as a purely random effect. It is, however a clear prediction of conformal cyclic cosmology.

maninasia

Anonymo wrote: »

Yes this is correct. However the nucleation of universes and their rate of creation is very model dependent. But I still don't see why you would want to invoke a complicated picture like evolution to describe it. Daughter universes do not carry information from their parent universe (in the standard lore). Neither, as you say, is there a direct form of competition. The idea of the multiverse, as is usually invoked by the anthropic principle is that given a sea of universes one of these will have the conditions necessary for life to form. This is unlike the idea of evolution where more complex structures form. In a sense it doesn't matter when our universe formed within the multiverse picture, all that's important is that it can form. There is no selection criterion for offspring universes within the picture. This makes it very different from evolution.

Maybe I'm being a bit over-pedantic on the point. But I think you are complicating the picture by imagining an evolving sea of universes that lead to ours.The point is that there is nothing special about our universe within this picture.

However, to elaborate on some of your discussion. You are right in saying that some universes dominate over others in this multiverse. Some universes will form in a manner such that they contain too much density so that they will close over on themselves very quickly, etc.

I guess the point revolves around whether the ancestor universe influences the state of the daughter universe. If so then the forces of evolution will mean certain universes will quickly predominate in the multiverse.
They are not in direct competition to each other, but there will definitely be a skewing from randomness.