"Was the Universe Created By A Big Bang?" -Several of the World's Leading Cosmologists Say "No"

January 25, 2010
"Was the Universe Created By A Big Bang?" -Several of the World's Leading Cosmologists Say "No"



"What banged?" Sean Carroll, CalTech -Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology & Physics

Several of the worlds leading astrophysicists believe there was no Big Bang that brought the universe and time into existence. Before the Big Bang, the standard theory assumes, there was no space, just nothing. Einstein merged the universe into a single entity: not space, not time, but spacetime.

Proponents of branes propose that we are trapped in a thin membrane of space-time embedded in a much larger cosmos from which neither light nor energy -except gravity- can escape or enter and that that "dark matter" is just the rest of the universe that we can't see because light can't escape from or enter into our membrane from the great bulk of the universe. And our membrane may be only one of many, all of which may warp, connect, and collide with one another in as many as 10 dimensions -a new frontier physicists call the "brane world." Stephen Hawking, among others, envisions brane worlds perculating up out of the void, giving rise to whole new universes.

One of the most important space probes of the century is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) launched in 2001 to measure the temperature differences in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatiion -the 14-billion year old Big Bang's remnant radiant heat . The anisotropies then in turn are used to measure the universe's geometry, content, and evolution; and, perhaps most importantly, to test the Big Bang model, and the cosmic inflation theory. WMAP data seem to support a universe that is dominated by dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no supportative data to date for Big Bang theory, although the results aren't sensitive enough to rule out the pervasive Big Bang/inflation model.

The influence of gravitaional waves on polarization is different from that of overall energy distribution, so it should be possible to tell from polarization in the WMAP scans whether the variation is coming from contrasting energy density (heat) or gravitational waves that a Big Bang should have produced.

The world's leading astrophysicists are confidemt that with a sensitive enough probe such as that by the new Planck telescope with its more detailed CMB plots, that they can reduce the level of uncertainty low enough so that they can say definitively whether the gravitational waves that should have been created by the Big Bang as present.

If this next generation Planck Telescope shows that there is no onvious distortions caused by gravity waves, it will rule out the Big Bang plus inflation theory -an add-on theory that explains the phenomenal sudden expansion of space from a tiny point. In it's place will be new models that support what many leading cosmologists see as our universe to be proved to be one of just many in an eternal cycle of birth and rebirth.



Models of the universe that involve a bouncing brane or a Big Crunch rather than a start from scratch Big Bang predict much smaller gravity waves being produced than would come from a Big Bang. If the universe actually went through cycles of expansion and contraction, it is possible that the uneven distributions in the early post-Big Bang universe that resulted in the formation of galaxies were leftovers from the universe before.

Only gravity can't exist soley in a specific brane, but wanders where it will, leaking off our brane into what physicists call "the bulk" -- the rest of space-time. Brane theory offer an fascinating and plausable explanation for why gravity is such a weakling: Maybe it's not any weaker than the other forces, but just concentrated somewhere else in the bulk, or on another brane, providing the key to understanding the dark matter that makes up 90 % of our universe.

If our brane is but a small slice of a much larger cosmos, however, the "dark matter" might be nothing but ordinary matter trapped on another brane. Dark matter is no longer some mysterious unknown, but the force at the heart of the brane-brane interaction. With the brane model the universe goes through an eternal cosmic cycle over a vast timescale of attraction, bounce with a spread out bang, springing apart, and expansion until attraction (gravity) takes over again.Such a shadow world, Hawking speculated, might contain "shadow human beings wondering about the mass that seems to be missing from their world."

Are branes the key to understanding the origin of our universe? "Who knows?" says Sean Carroll. "they will have taught us a useful lesson that we should have known all along, which is that we don't have a clue to what's going on."

Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, creator of the currently accepted model of the Big Bang, said recently "he felt a little like Rip Van Winkle -- picking up his head from a long sleep only to notice that the landscape of physics he thought he knew had suddenly, drastically, changed."

Casey Kazan.

Source Credits:

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/17/science/sci-branes

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327226.000-review-before-the-big-bang-by-brian-clegg.html

Image Credit: http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/stringtheory01.htm

Posted at 01:00 AM

The Big Bang Clock: A Thermodynamic Theory For The Origin Of The Universe

The universe’s clock has neither a start nor finish, yet time is still finite, according to a New Zealand theorist.

To understand that, we need to take a “cyclic” view of time similar to the one held by ancient thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci, rather than the Christian Calender and Bible-influenced belief in “linear” time so deeply imbedded in modern western thinking.

This theory, which tackles the age-old mystery of the origin of the universe, along with several other problems and paradoxes in cosmology, essentially calls for a new take on our concept of time.

Following its initial publication on the arXiv physics archive at Cornell University earlier this year, the author of the theory, Peter Lynds, will present a second paper about it at the International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston on the 1st of November.


"A good way to think about it is to picture a clock, with the big bang being at time %3D 0, the universe beginning to contract at 6 o'clock, and the big crunch being at 12 o'clock. Just before 12, the clock resets and immediately resumes at 0. Although the hands of the clock will continue to rotate indefinitely, it is the very same 12 hour interval that plays over, not a later one%3B there are no past or future cycles of the universe. It is one and the same." Credit: Bryce Glover



Lynds’ theory involves the second law of thermodynamics, a bedrock of physics and the explanation behind why we only ever experience events evolving in one time direction in nature. This law is related to the fact that heat can never pass spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body. As a function of heat’s ability to disperse, hot flows to cold. Because of this, natural processes that involve energy transfer tend to have one direction and to be irreversible. However, what would happen if, due to certain extreme physical conditions, heat was unable to flow to cold and was forced to flow to hotter?

In his theory, Lynds posits that rather than this inevitably happen and the second law of the thermodynamics be breached just before the universe gravitationally collapses to a big crunch or matter reaches the centre of a black hole, the order of events should reverse direction.

As all of the laws of physics – with the exception of the second law of thermodynamics – are time reversible and work equally well in opposing directions, Lynds asserts that no laws of physics would be contravened by such a reversal, while it would also allow the second law of thermodynamics to continue to hold.

This is contrast to previous theories involving thermodynamic time reversal, including those by Thomas Gold in the 1960s and Stephen Hawking in the 1980s, which all involve the second law of thermodynamics being breached. Such theories have generally been dismissed by physicists because of contradictions directly resulting from such a second law violation – contradictions that Lynds says his theory avoids.

Lynds asserts that if many billions of years from now the universe stops expanding and contracts to a big crunch, such a revised conception of thermodynamic time reversal leads to a coherent picture of the cosmos in which there is no differentiation between past and future, and the so-called beginning of the universe, the big bang, can equally be said to be in the past or future of the big crunch. This means that the big bang and the big crunch can also equally be said to cause one another, therefore providing an answer to that most intractable of questions: what caused the big bang?

Furthermore, because events are always evolving away, rather than ever towards one, there are no gravitational “singularities” – hypothesized points where gravity and heat become infinite and the laws of physics break down.

Aside from proposed avoidance mechanisms in theories such as String theory and Loop quantum gravity, singularities have been a troublesome but inescapable feature of mathematical physics ever since the 1960s when work by Sir Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking showed that they must result at the big bang, the big crunch, and inside black holes – provided Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct and some basic assumptions are met. One of the assumptions underlying the Penrose and Hawking singularity theorems is that events and times converge towards a singularity.

In Lynds’ theory, events and times are always diverging or evolving away from a potential singularity, so none are encountered. “The reversal of the order of events so that the second law of thermodynamics can continue to hold, would appear to be a very good way on Nature’s part of avoiding singularities, while also guaranteeing that the universe can remain continuous and without causal contradiction,” says Lynds.

Significantly, the theory also addresses a famous paradox posed by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, which concludes that the idea of the universe extending back infinitely in time is contradictory, while its antithesis – the idea that the universe began at some finite time in the past – also results in contradiction.

Kant asked that if the universe did have a beginning, what happened beforehand to cause it? And what before that? Kant noted that there would always be an infinite number of “what before that’s.” On the other hand, if time extended back forever, there would be an infinite period of time before any event – something that Kant also considered absurd.

“With a universe that stretches back infinitely in time and has no starting point, it would also be impossible for the universe to evolve forward, not only to where it is today, but at all,” says Lynds. Because his theory asserts that the universe is finite, but yet also has no beginning or first cause (because the big bang is caused by the big crunch, which would normally be thought of as being in the future of the big bang), Kant’s paradox disappears.

verder lezen? onderstaande link;

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_account/the_big_bang_clock_a_thermodynamic_theory_for_the_origin_of_the_universe