New universes will be born from ours?

[Tenacious Del]

Astro Dave - Robert - Shevill - Radar and others who dare to read it -

Please tell me what you think of this, because my brain aches just thinking about it.

http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325904.400&feedId=space_rss20

Asprin?

[Astro Dave]

I don't like this because its messy, complicated, and is what we call an 'hypothesis'. A theory is something formulated based on known fact/s or observational evidence. An Hypothesis is a theory built on a theory.

I see the current ideas of the universe , the BB, the expansion et al as thoeories because we have 'evidence' of that happening and so can extrapolate further. This stuff is trying to solve a mystery by invoking another mystery ... messy.

Hypotheses are good, don't let me be mistaken, they are attempts to answer questions and in some cases hypotheses have become theories, then after being tested, have become facts.

I think the universe, as I've stated before, will simply become another singularity and explode again, and again, and again, ad infinitum.

Let us invoke Occam's razor here. The principle states that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."

Many scientists have adopted or reinvented Occam's Razor and long ago, Isaac Newton stated the rule: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."

The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is, "when you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."

How will the universe end. God Knows! Really, that's about the best we can do.

[Robert TG]

"Paul Steinhardt, a cosmologist at Princeton University, would like to see the model developed further. "I'm curious to see how far they can carry this idea," he says."

An interesting model of the universe that should be explored. But there are many models of the Universe and only ONE will be correct. All the other models will be wrong.

The question I ask is: What proof do they have? Well none at this stage, it's just an idea that needs to be tested to find out if it fails the reality test.

This model depends upon the mysterious "Dark Energy" caused from an unknown source. And the theory contains a big "IF"..."If it increases without limit, it will eventually tear everything apart, destroying the universe in an event called the big rip."

There are a few reasons that could explain why the light we see from distant stars are Redshifted. One of these is that the universe is expanding. Another is that the universe ran on a different time scale in the early universe. Another is that light looses energy as it travels over extremely large distances.

To sort out why we see the redshifts we do, scientists have come up with various theories (models) and test them to see which models work and which fail. When the redshifts indicated that the universe is accelerating, one way to explain this was to invent a force that could drive this acceleration hence term “Dark Energy” was born. What proof is there that dark energy actually exists? Well the universe is accelerating isn’t it? So whatever is causing the acceleration is dark energy.

It seems to me to be a bit of circular logic. My opinion is the evidence for dark energy is very weak. The problem is we don’t understand the Redshift completely.

This theory is an interesting variation on the Big Rip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

[Noel Carboni]

Personally, I'm fond of thinking "time" is not constant, nor has it been constant.

To me, it seems clear that fluctuations in the 4th dimension - the rate of time passage - cause obvious things we see every day - for example, gravity.

A collection of mass distorts time - slows it down - so if we get a bunch of mass together time passes more slowly there. Moreover, there is a gradient by which the effect "bleeds away" as one gets further from the mass. What is gravity? Acceleration. Time is squared when measuring acceleration. We arbitrarily consider time constant when thinking of acceleration, and instead try to dream up things like gravitons to explain this long distance attraction of things.

I'm not sure I've seen sufficient thinking on this when people consider the early universe. All the mass was in a small space. This had to affect the passage of time, and no doubt some of that is what we see in the light from the most distant objects. Seems to me it's quite likely the laws of physics as we know them were distorted beyond recognition 13 and a half billion years ago.

It is also not difficult, when one imagines time as a 4th dimension, to imagine that it can flow in both directions. What happens in a black hole? Perhaps time actually stops, or even flows backward. Hey, that's not much more difficult to grasp than imagining a singularity! The theory of relativity actually, as I understand it, does not preclude time travel.

Dark energy... Bleh, I think this is a fudge factor folks who don't fully understand the universe are using rather than to admit there are whole dimensions of complexity to this universe we haven't fathomed (or can't possibly fathom).

Question all assumptions.

I have a tee shirt that sums it all up nicely. It says, "2 + 2 = 5" then "...for extremely large values of 2".

-Noel

[Robert TG]

Everything is Cosmology is all interconnected and is based on how we interpret the light we see today.

Distances are measured by red shifts and Gravity redshifts light. Even the light spectrum from our Sun is redshifted by a few parts per million as it leaves the Gravity Well of the Sun on it’s way to Earth.

Quasars are thought to be very distant objects because their light is greatly redshifted.
Because they are bright they are thought to have extreme energy. If they are massive, that would add to the redshift of the light leaving their collective Gravity Well and so they may actually be closer and less powerful than first thought.

Relativity says that all observers measuring the speed of light in a vacuum will agree. So for the speed of light to be used as a constant then everything else must vary, Time included.
Mass distorts Space-time and the distortion is call Gravity.


"2 + 2 = 5" ...for an extremely large value of 2

In this strange universe that makes sense. lol