It was Fred Hoyle who first used the term “Big Bang” but it is difficult not to associate Stephen Hawking with the Big Bang Theory.
But for me Stephen Hawking will forever be my inspiration for considering the ultimate question — What is time?
The Rig Veda was probably written between 1500 and 1200 BC and consists of 10 mandalas (books). The first and tenth books were probably written last. The 129th verse of the tenth mandala contains what is called The Hymn of Creation. Nasadiya sukta
It begins:
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence,
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
It is not difficult to equate this “then” to “before” the Big Bang and the “it” to all the compressed matter which participated in the Big Bang. (Accepting, of course, that “before” is meaningless when time does not flow).
Then there was neither death nor immortality
Nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.
“arose at last, born of the power of heat” sounds very like a modern description of the Big Bang. Even though the Rig Veda’s main 8 mandalas are in praise of various deities, the first and tenth books take a much more agnostic position – perhaps written to bring some balance. The plethora of gods are effectively made subservient to an unknowable, unfathomable creation event. “An atheist interpretation sees the Creation Hymn as one of the earliest accounts of skeptical inquiry and agnosticism”.
Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The gods came later, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?”
First even nothingness was not and existence was not. Then came the creation of the Universe whether by Big Bang or otherwise. And the Gods came later (made by man in the image of man).
I was listening to some lectures on Relativity to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. What struck me, again, was how claims to be entirely rational all contain an element of magical belief.
The concept of “time” is not, I think identical to “the elapse of time”. Suppose that “the elapse of time”, along with space-time and all matter and all energy, came into existence only with the singularity called the Big Bang. Then the Big Bang theory and the Genesis Creation myth are similar in that both ultimately rely on the invocation of Magic. Genesis labels the Magic as “God”. The Big Bang theory either assumes that the singularity just Magically came to be, or claims it was inevitable and due to the laws of quantum physics, which just Magically came to be. Both Genesis and the Big Bang theory begin with “In the beginning….”, which inherently contains the assumption of a concept not only of “time”, and the existence of a “before” and an “after” but also the concept of being “timeless”. The state of “before” applied to “the beginning of time”, can only be a timeless state (stasis) or a state where time exists but does not elapse.
Magic is to the Big Bang theory what God is to the Genesis Creation myth.
Physicists (cosmologists) claim that the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago (definitely less than 15 billion years ago according to Hawking), but I question that. Physicists are being illogical here. The existence of a singularity on the time axis itself requires that a “speed of time” exist. Since, at the singularity the “speed of time” was – must be – zero, it must have subsequently, in the first apparent moments after the singularity, accelerated to the current rate of elapse of time. So the 13.8 billion years ago is only an apparent, perceived point along the time axis where ℜeal time actually goes back to infinity (and must do so).
The Big Bang does not, apparently, mathematically permit of a time older than 13.8 billion years. Magical ℜeal time, of course, goes back to infinitely long ago. All can be resolved merely by accepting that ℜeal time elapsed at zero rate at the Big Bang and then gradually built up to the rate of elapse we are subject to now.
There are those (Stephen Hawking) who say that anything before the Big Bang is indeterminate and indeterminable because all the laws of physics, and even the conservation of matter, break down at a singularity. Therefore, Hawking claims, “time” starts with the Big Bang. He claims that whereas the Genesis Creation myth requires the external imposition of a God, the Big Bang theory is just an extrapolation backwards of the “dynamical laws that govern the universe” and is therefore “intrinsic to the universe, and is not imposed on it from outside”. Really? And pray by what Magic did the “dynamical laws of the Universe” come to exist or to apply? Hawking may be an atheist but he invokes Magic whenever he refers to the singularity of the Big Bang theory (even if he claims not to).
There are others (Alex Filippenko) who claim that quantum theory is the cause of the Big Bang and that the laws of physics are sufficient to bring about the singularity. But Filippenko is a little more honest than Hawking and admits that the “laws of physics” are in themselves Magical.
“The question, then, is, ‘Why are there laws of physics?'” he said. “And you could say, ‘Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one.'”
“The ‘divine spark’ was whatever produced the laws of physics,” Filippenko said. “And I don’t know what produced that divine spark. So let’s just leave it at the laws of physics.”
What we don’t know lies in the Space of Ignorance. One Magic (and there are surely as many Magics as humans have ignorances) is that which transcends perceived “time” and applies even across singularities such as the Big Bang. But this, let’s call it, “Creation Magic” – like all Magics – lies in the Space of Ignorance. And if some people wish to do so, they can give this Magic (which we are ignorant of) the label of “God” or of “Nirvana”.
Related:
The fundamentals of physics are just magic
Dark energy and dark matter are just fudge factors for cosmic models that don’t work
Physics and cosmology are more magical than alchemy as dark energy goes phantom
The methodology is quite simple. First, invent a theory to explain what we don’t know. Then do some fancy maths to back up the theory. Whenever the theory fails, define a magic particle or event or property which brings credibility back to the theory. Spend vast amounts of money on Big Science experiments to find the magic particle or event or property. Find something other than the magic particle or property or event that was predicted. Claim that what was found was a special case of the magic “thing” that was predicted and due to some new magic particle or event or property. Demand more money to do more and bigger Big Science experiments. Magic demands more magic. And so an ad infinitum.
And so came the 4 magic forces of nature which cannot be explained – Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Strong Force and the Weak Force. The magic forces exist and can be calculated but they cannot be explained. Universal magic that just is. One of the characteristics of modern physics is that magical things are given names in lieu of explanations. Then came the Standard Model of Particle Physics and new magic particles named the Higgs Boson to be found by the very expensive Large Hadron Collider. Some data is interpreted as having found a form of the Higgs boson – but that leaves other magic particles and the true Higgs Boson still to be found. (The same data could also be used – probably with more certainty – to predict the next winner of the Triple Crown or even the next President of the United States). Finding the missing magic particles will naturally require more money, more physicists, more cosmologists and more mathematicians. More and Bigger Science.
Cosmology has not been far behind in inventing magical events and magical “things”. A magical Big Bang was to be followed by a mysterious Big Crunch or possibly a fantastical Big Freeze. Now comes another speculative paper and another Magical Event – the Big Rip. We know that the magical expansion of the universe is fuelled by magical dark energy. And we know, of course, that dark energy is simply that which causes the universe to expand. And so the Big Rip may be due to deeper magic which gives phantom dark energy. It is only a matter of time before we find that even phantom dark energy can be further classified into that which spins clockwise or that which is tall.
But not to worry. The Ripping end to the Universe is still 22 billion years away. Maybe the United Nations could pass a resolution condemning this future event. And then establish an International Panel on Universe Change to put a stop to this development.
Marcelo M. Disconzi, Thomas W. Kephart, Robert J. Scherrer. New approach to cosmological bulk viscosity. Physical Review D, 2015; 91 (4) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.91.043532
A time line of the universe from Big Bang to Big Rip.
Credit: Jeremy Teaford, Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt Press Release: …… for decades cosmologists have had trouble reconciling the classic notion of viscosity based on the laws of thermodynamics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. However, a team from Vanderbilt University has come up with a fundamentally new mathematical formulation of the problem that appears to bridge this long-standing gap.
The new math has some significant implications for the ultimate fate of the universe. It tends to favor one of the more radical scenarios that cosmologists have come up with known as the “Big Rip.” It may also shed new light on the basic nature of dark energy.
The new approach was developed by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Marcelo Disconzi in collaboration with physics professors Thomas Kephart and Robert Scherrer and is described in a paper published earlier this year in the journal Physical Review D.
……… In the 1990s, the physics community was shocked when astronomical measurements showed that the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. To explain this unpredicted acceleration, they were forced to hypothesize the existence of an unknown form of repulsive energy that is spread throughout the universe. Because they knew so little about it, they labeled it “dark energy.”
Most dark energy theories to date have not taken cosmic viscosity into account, despite the fact that it has a repulsive effect strikingly similar to that of dark energy. “It is possible, but not very likely, that viscosity could account for all the acceleration that has been attributed to dark energy,” said Disconzi. “It is more likely that a significant fraction of the acceleration could be due to this more prosaic cause. As a result, viscosity may act as an important constraint on the properties of dark energy.”
Another interesting result involves the ultimate fate of the universe. Since the discovery of the universe’s run-away expansion, cosmologists have come up with a number of dramatic scenarios of what it could mean for the future.
One scenario, dubbed the “Big Freeze,” predicts that after 100 trillion years or so the universe will have grown so vast that the supplies of gas will become too thin for stars to form. As a result, existing stars will gradually burn out, leaving only black holes which, in turn, slowly evaporate away as space itself gets colder and colder.
An even more radical scenario is the “Big Rip.” It is predicated on a type of “phantom” dark energy that gets stronger over time. In this case, the expansion rate of the universe becomes so great that in 22 billion years or so material objects begin to fall apart and individual atoms disassemble themselves into unbound elementary particles and radiation.
As if invisible and undetectable dark energy is not magic enough, we must now postulate that there is a particular kind of this dark energy which is phantom dark energy. It is magic squared and of course the derivative is two-magic. This is not Space Opera, it is Cosmic Opera.
It is perhaps not so surprising that the more we know the more we don’t know and so modern physics and cosmology need much more magic to explain all we don’t know than alchemy ever did.
In the what, when there was no when,
It was the where before time began,
Nothing pre, nothing post, no before nor after,
Without any forces, or any slower or faster.
All matter in space hung still in the firmament,
And each particle stayed fixed within its own element,
Nothing went up so there was no coming down,
With nowhere to fall, nothing could go around.
In that what, when there was no when,
Nothing was stirring not even the zen.
Nothing could change not even a thought,
He was as bored as could be, with what He had wrought.
And so in that where, before time began,
His mind exploded in a mighty Big Bang.
And the rest is history.
There is now a mathematical proof that black holes cannot exist. Event horizons and singularities then also cannot exist. Without singularities being possible there could have been no Big Bang. And without a Big Bang, the “age” of the universe has no meaning. Where does that leave time? and space-time?
(And without a Big Bang I will have to revisit my view of stasis since my own little speculation is that while time periods – Δt – can be conceived of, time itself – t- is nothing other than an axis of change connecting states of stasis.)
Black Hole star eater – National Geographic
If the mathematics holds up then not only science but also science fiction will have to look for new concepts of space and space-time and pathways to different universes and worm-holes and warp-speeds.
PhysOrg: … By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe. ……
The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear. Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.
In 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation. Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe’s black holes.
But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.
Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon. The take home message of her work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole.
….. Many physicists and astronomers believe that our universe originated from a singularity that began expanding with the Big Bang. However, if singularities do not exist, then physicists have to rethink their ideas of the Big Bang and whether it ever happened.
In March this year there was a great deal of publicity about the detection of gravity waves after the Big Bang. There were Press Releases and promotional videos and blanket coverage in the media. There was talk about Nobel prizes. Not unlike the massive publicity mounted by CERN about the discovery of (or more accurately the potential discovery of a possible indication of a particle not inconsistent with) the Higgs boson particle. After that non-discovery also there was talk about the CERN team being awarded a Nobel Prize! Even a member of the Nobel Committee was taken in by the publicity and fought for CERN the organisation, to be awarded the physics prize. Most of the campaign in favour of CERN was initiated and orchestrated by the PR department at CERN and the CERN fan-club.
Now it turns out that the gravity waves may well have been cosmic dust.
BBC: One of the biggest scientific claims of the year has received another set-back.
In March, the US BICEP team said it had found a pattern on the sky left by the rapid expansion of space just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The astonishing assertion was countered quickly by others who thought the group may have underestimated the confounding effects of dust in our own galaxy.
That explanation has now been boosted by a new analysis from the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Planck satellite. In a paper published on the arXiv pre-print server, Planck’s researchers find that the part of the sky being observed by the BICEP team contained significantly more dust than it had assumed.
BIG Science of this kind needs BIG FUNDS. BIG FUNDS need BIG CLAIMS. A BIG CLAIM followed by a retraction is seen to be better – from a publicity perspective – than an uninteresting claim or no claim at all. The people who control the BIG FUND purse strings are generally governments in the form of bureaucrats and administrators and politicians. They don’t usually read the scientific papers themselves. But they do read the Press Releases and take note of the number of column-inches of newspaper articles that are generated. Promotional videos with many hits on You-Tube are also taken note of.
This is science by Press Release. Scientific quality is now judged by the amount of publicity generated.
I am not competent to judge the technical content of these “discoveries” and therefore have to rely on others who are. And so I take note of what Sean Carroll, a CalTech physicist writes on his blog:
Ever since we all heard the exciting news that the BICEP2 experiment had detected “B-mode” polarization in the cosmic microwave background — just the kind we would expect to be produced by cosmic inflation at a high energy scale — the scientific community has been waiting on pins and needles for some kind of independent confirmation, so that we could stop adding “if it holds up” every time we waxed enthusiastic about the result. And we all knew that there was just such an independent check looming, from the Planck satellite. The need for some kind of check became especially pressing when some cosmologists made a good case that the BICEP2 signal may very well have been dust in our galaxy, rather than gravitational waves from inflation (Mortonson and Seljak; Flauger, Hill, and Spergel).
Now some initial results from Planck are in … and it doesn’t look good for gravitational waves.
Planck intermediate results. XXX. The angular power spectrum of polarized dust emission at intermediate and high Galactic latitudes
Planck Collaboration: R. Adam, et al.
The light-blue rectangles are what Planck actually sees and attributes to dust. The black line is the theoretical prediction for what you would see from gravitational waves with the amplitude claimed by BICEP2. As you see, they match very well. That is: the BICEP2 signal is apparently well-explained by dust.
….. Planck has observed the whole sky, including the BICEP2 region, although not in precisely the same wavelengths. With a bit of extrapolation, however, they can use their data to estimate how big a signal should be generated by dust in our galaxy. The result fits very well with what BICEP2 actually measured. It’s not completely definitive — the Planck paper stresses over and over the need to do more analysis, especially in collaboration with the BICEP2 team — but the simplest interpretation is that BICEP2’s B-modes were caused by local contamination, not by early-universe inflation. …..
“Science by consensus” and “science by press release” and even “science by press release about the consensus” have infected much of what passes for science today.
This is beyond Rapture.
Not just the end of our world, but the end of the entire Universe.
It could happen tomorrow or many billion years later. It may not be the classic Big Crunch which will negate the Big Bang but it could be a phase transition which will cause the entire Universe and all its galaxies and all their suns and all their planets to collapse in on themselves.
Collapse of the universe is closer than ever before
Journal of High Energy Physics: Standard Model Vacuum Stability and Weyl Consistency Conditions, Authors: Oleg Antipin, Marc Gillioz, Jens Grund, Esben Mølgaard, Francesco Sannino (CP3 – Origins and DIAS). arXiv:1306.3234 arxiv.org/abs/1306.3234
PhysOrg: Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction – and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.
Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything – every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy – will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
This violent process is called a phase transition and is very similar to what happens when, for example water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its magnetization. The phase transition in the universe will happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value results in lower energy and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass, that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will be pulled together and form supermassive centers.
“Many theories and calculations predict such a phase transition– but there have been some uncertainties in the previous calculations. Now we have performed more precise calculations, and we see two things: Yes, the universe will probably collapse, and: A collapse is even more likely than the old calculations predicted”, says Jens Frederik Colding Krog …….
The theory of phase transition is not the only theory predicting a collapse of the universe. Also the so-called Big Crunch theory is in play. This theory is based on the Big Bang; the formation of the universe. After the Big Bang all material was ejected into the universe from one small area, and this expansion is still happening. At some point, however, the expansion will stop and all the material will again begin to attract each other and eventually merge into a small area again. This is called the Big Crunch.
“The latest research shows that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, so there is no reason to expect a collapse from cosmological observations. Thus it will probably not be Big Crunch that causes the universe to collapse”, says Jens Frederik Colding Krog.
Although the new calculations predict that a collapse is now more likely than ever before, it is actually also possible, that it will not happen at all ….
Oh Well! No need to stock up anything just yet. No real possibility of some Universal-Engineering to put off the evil day.
I’ll just get more warm clothes for the global cooling that is happening!!
Idle thoughts:
The riddle of whether change and time are interrelated or independent. And which comes first? Within our cosmos perhaps we have many different states of stasis with paths by which these states can be connected. Our universe could then just be one specific change journey, on one particular path between two states of stasis along an axis of change. Perhaps time begins after change gets going. Where the change journey started with the Big Bang and where the end will be in another state of stasis at the end of time – and the end of change.
Time and change and states of stasis (pdf)
The Cosmos
There have been headlines today regarding Stephen Hawking’s new book The Grand Design (co-written by US physicist Leonard Mlodinow) to be published on 9th September.
Image via Wikipedia
is the BBC headline.
Citing the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun, he said: “That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings.” He adds: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. ….Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist…..It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
But if The Big Bang and all the subsequent creation events flow naturally and inevitably from the law of gravity, what still remains is to explain where the law of gravity came from or from what it flows naturally and inevitably……….
No matter how much more is discovered by science we will still have the space of the “unknown unknowns” (a la Rumsfeld) where we do not even know what questions are feasible – let alone what question to ask.
The k2p blog 