EnlargePosted on 09/19/2013 6:56:01 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Artist’s conception of the event horizon of a black hole. Credit: Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library
Could the famed "Big Bang" theory need a revision? A group of theoretical physicists suppose the birth of the universe could have happened after a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole and ejected debris.
Before getting into their findings, let's just preface this by saying nobody knows anything for sure. Humans obviously weren't around at the time the universe began. The standard theory is that the universe grew from an infinitely dense point or singularity, but who knows what was there before?
"For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity," stated Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada who co-authored the new study.
So what are the limitations of the Big Bang theory? The singularity is one of them. Also, it's hard to predict why it would have produced a universe that has an almost uniform temperature, because the age of our universe (about 13.8 billion years) does not give enough time—as far as we can tell—to reach a temperature equilibrium.
Most cosmologists say the universe must have been expanding faster than the speed of light for this to happen, but Ashford says even that theory has problems: "The Big Bang was so chaotic, it's not clear there would have been even a small homogenous patch for inflation to start working on."
Representation of the timeline of the universe over 13.7 billion years, from the Big Bang, through the cosmic dark ages and formation of the first stars, to the expansion in the universe that followed. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science TeamThis is what the physicists propose:
The long and the short of it? To bring this back to things that we can see, it is clear from observations that the universe is expanding (and indeed is getting faster as it expands, possibly due to the mysterious dark energy). The new theory says that the expansion comes from this 3-D brane's growth. But there is at least one limitation.
While the model does explain why the universe has nearly uniform temperature (the 4-D universe preceding it would have existed it for much longer), a European Space Agency telescope called Planck recently mapped small temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, which is believed to be leftovers of the universe's beginnings.
This artist’s impression shows the surroundings of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the active galaxy NGC 3783 in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). New observations using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have revealed not only the torus of hot dust around the black hole but also a wind of cool material in the polar regions. Credit: ESO/M. KornmesserThe new model differs from these CMB readings by about four percent, so the researchers are looking to refine the model. They still feel the model has worth, however. Planck shows that inflation is happening, but doesn't show why the inflation is happening.
"The study could help to show how inflation is triggered by the motion of the universe through a higher-dimensional reality," the researchers stated.
Personally I think it all started not with a 4D star but rather with WD-4D
So there is the technological singularity a la Kurzweil. In math, it's a function that goes to infinity and you can't do anything with it at that point. In physics, the only kind of singularities I can think of are stellar black holes, supermassive black holes and universes in some kind of giant multiverse.
IMO, when we're talking about all the mass of our universe being compressed into an infinitely dense black hole, we're talking about something that is many, many orders of magnitude more massive than a regular black hole and may therefore, perhaps, be a totally different kind of creature, as we've seen so many times before in physics when our focus changes by many orders of magnitude. Just my two cents; I'm definitely no physicist!
What? No Way! Leave the Big Bang Theory alone!. We would miss Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, Raj, and Penny...
Yet another theory that will no doubt be knocked down by other physicists within 2 months. These things pop up more than Japanese porn sites on an unsecure computer. Loop quantum gravity models, oscillating models, etc.
It seems to be a contest to see who can come up with the most bizarre way of refuting an absolute beginning to the universe. A four dimensional star collapsing? What is this, Twilight Zone?
Nothing comes from nothing...ever
If you believe evolution then:
Rocks + heat + billions of years = humans
Something from nothing, if you believe evolution
Gas+Billions of Years= The Democrat Party
But I thought the science was settled and there was consensus?
And God's not talking...
Interesting.
From the collapse of the five dimensional star?
Just like the Hindu model of the cosmos, the universe is a sphere riding on the back of a giant tortoise. Which in turn is riding on the back of a still larger tortoise, and so on ad infinitum.
Like the old guru said, "it's tortoises all the way to the bottom!"
Regards,
GtG
PS The large fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bitem.
The smaller fleas, still smaller fleas and so ad infinitum.
Not if nothing is something. Matter and antimatter react by being something dissolving into "nothing." So what is the nothing made of?
no thing
I do too, but it was a science fiction story. Been a long time, and I forget which one.
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