Posted on 12/18/2010 4:14:00 PM PST by LibWhacker
The signatures of a bubble collision: A collision (top left) induces a temperature modulation in the CMB temperature map (top right). The “blob” associated with the collision is identified by a large needlet response (bottom left), and the presence of an edge is determined by a large response from the edge detection algorithm (bottom right). Image credit: Feeney, et al.
(PhysOrg.com) -- By looking far out into space and observing what’s going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this was the beginning of everything, but lately a few scientists have been wondering if something could have come before that, setting up the initial conditions for the birth of our universe.
In the most recent study on pre-Big Bang science posted at arXiv.org, a team of researchers from the UK, Canada, and the US, Stephen M. Feeney, et al, have revealed that they have discovered four statistically unlikely circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The researchers think that these marks could be “bruises” that our universe has incurred from being bumped four times by other universes. If they turn out to be correct, it would be the first evidence that universes other than ours do exist.
The idea that there are many other universes out there is not new, as scientists have previously suggested that we live in a “multiverse” consisting of an infinite number of universes. The multiverse concept stems from the idea of eternal inflation, in which the inflationary period that our universe went through right after the Big Bang was just one of many inflationary periods that different parts of space were and are still undergoing. When one part of space undergoes one of these dramatic growth spurts, it balloons into its own universe with its own physical properties. As its name suggests, eternal inflation occurs an infinite number of times, creating an infinite number of universes, resulting in the multiverse.
These infinite universes are sometimes called bubble universes even though they are irregular-shaped, not round. The bubble universes can move around and occasionally collide with other bubble universes. As Feeney, et al., explain in their paper, these collisions produce inhomogeneities in the inner-bubble cosmology, which could appear in the CMB. The scientists developed an algorithm to search for bubble collisions in the CMB with specific properties, which led them to find the four circular patterns.
Still, the scientists acknowledge that it is rather easy to find a variety of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB. The researchers emphasize that more work is needed to confirm this claim, which could come in short time from the Planck satellite, which has a resolution three times better than that of WMAP (where the current data comes from), as well as an order of magnitude greater sensitivity. Nevertheless, they hope that the search for bubble collisions could provide some insight into the history of our universe, whether or not the collisions turn out to be real.
“The conclusive non-detection of a bubble collision can be used to place stringent limits on theories giving rise to eternal inflation; however, if a bubble collision is verified by future data, then we will gain an insight not only into our own universe but a multiverse beyond,” the researchers write in their study.
This is the second study in the past month that has used CMB data to search for what could have occurred before the Big Bang. In the first study, Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan found concentric circles with lower-than-average temperature variation in the CMB, which could be evidence for a cyclic cosmology in which Big Bangs occur over and over.
TEOTWAWKI by universal bump!
To me just the word “uni” designates an individual thing.
It’s the pre-word ‘uni’ meaning singular as in uni-cycle and uni-verse. There are singular things ... ‘mono-rail’ is another. There are singular things out there.
God created the dimensions which express in ways we have yet to even imagine, much less touch.
I RUN THIS SH*T
Perhaps there is a universe out there which was not started with a Big Bang but a Little Phhhtttt
They call that one 0bama.
ROFLOL -That’s great!
I think it was a comic book writer. At least, that's where I first heard the word a few decades ago.
Cheers!
At the edge of the universe: Owens Corning fiberglas insulation. Keeps our universe cozy, and its acoustical properties suppresses the noise of nearby big bangs.
Or an atom about to be launched into a giant supercollider. Might wanna tighten that safety belt...
It was a truly brilliant show, and could not have been made even a few years later than it was, because of the rapid advance of political correctness.
Even its parody, The Venture Brothers, is extremely popular today, and its fans cannot get enough of references to the original JQ, and other pop science and superhero culture from the 1960s.
Thats my point— there is no “sides of the universe”whats on the other side of the “side”? or if we are in a bubble- then whats on the outside of the bubble?- the human mind cant understand a no beginning and no end of space— its forever and ever with no end never..
If you think about it, the concept isn’t really that hard. For instance, what is “the other side” of a common Möbius strip? At first you think “it is the other side of the strip”, but the truth is that the strip has only one side.
The universe is like a 3 dimensional Möbius strip. If you go far enough on an exactly straight line in any direction, you will end up where you started.
What was in between them before they bumped?
Imagine a 2-D universe. It’s a sheet of paper. It’s infinitely large. Cartoon characters can crawl on that sheet; but they don’t know the meaning of “up” or “down.” That’s your Flatland.
Now imagine that there is a stack of such sheets. Sometimes they hang one over the other, sometimes they “bump” into each other. (They are all parallel to each other.)
Can you explain “what is between them” sheets, using only the terminology of Flatlanders? You and me would say “air” or whatever else represents the 3rd dimension. But those poor Flatlanders have no such concept.
If we bump the whole model up a notch, the 4th dimension can be visualized as a gradual change of things that may already exist in our 3-D world. For example, what will happen when a 4-D sphere crosses through our 3-D plane of existence? First, there is nothing. Then a tiny sphere appears from nowhere. Then it grows. Then it shrinks, down to a tiny point, and then vanishes. What we see are 3-D sections of a larger, 4-D object.
So if there are multiple Universes that are separated by one or more other dimensions then when those Universes intersect they become visible to each other - just like when two paper sheets cross, the drawings on them (points, actually) become visible to both sets of Flatlanders. Also a Flatlander then can cross from his plane of existence onto the other one because the fact that the surface is sharply bent in 3rd dimension is lost on him.
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Thanks, now I will have to study this. I’ll do it during the eclipse on Tuesday morning.
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