1. Welcome! Please take a few seconds to create your free account to post threads, make some friends, remove a few ads while surfing and much more. ClutchFans has been bringing fans together to talk Houston Sports since 1996. Join us!

[Science] Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout' started by BDswangHTX, Mar 17, 2014.

  1. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    What created the gods, if that were the case...? Isn't this what some religious peoples reason their stance on scientific discoveries when they cause that ignorant foundation of religious belief to recede once more...

    Science explains away a previous unexplained part of our existence.... and the spiritual/religious crowd says... explain beyond that point... Science responds, it hasn't been able to obtain that information yet... The spiritual/religious crowd says.... aha! That's because god is behind all you can't understand...

    Rinse and repeat....

    Using that reasoning... What created the gods then...?
     
  2. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    Precisely...


    It would be foolish to claim to know everything, including definitive arguments against the existence of a god/s.... It would be equally foolish if not more so to cling to ignorance by citing everything you've still yet to learn as definitive evidence of a greater being...
     
  3. heypartner

    heypartner Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Oct 27, 1999
    Messages:
    62,567
    Likes Received:
    56,290
    The edge of the universe can expand faster than the speed of light.

    next
     
  4. heypartner

    heypartner Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Oct 27, 1999
    Messages:
    62,567
    Likes Received:
    56,290
    When thinking about it, you have to breath through you eyelids like Fernando Valenzuela. That always helped me.
     
  5. rimrocker

    rimrocker Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Dec 22, 1999
    Messages:
    22,309
    Likes Received:
    8,162
    Tomorrow, I plan on copyrighting the term Miss Multiverse and then see if I can sell it to Trump.
     
    1 person likes this.
  6. heypartner

    heypartner Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Oct 27, 1999
    Messages:
    62,567
    Likes Received:
    56,290
    I did clip out some text, but I think I preserved the best...I think he said, "HeyP is dangerously twisted beyond comprehensively repugnant offensiveness

    I'm so proud of myself.

    who's got next
     
  7. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Jun 3, 2002
    Messages:
    56,268
    Likes Received:
    48,142
    For those curious about multiverse... link
     
  8. robbie380

    robbie380 ლ(▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿ლ)
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2002
    Messages:
    23,268
    Likes Received:
    9,624
    To take that a step further we are moving away from objects within the universe faster than the speed of light due to the expansion of spacetime. I don't think it is the "edge" of spacetime expanding, but simply spacetime is inflating.

    It's Hubble's Law to whoever was wondering. I forgot how many light years something in spacetime has to be away from us to be moving away at a faster than light speed.
     
  9. robbie380

    robbie380 ლ(▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿ლ)
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2002
    Messages:
    23,268
    Likes Received:
    9,624
    Also, we really have to get out of the habit of calling spacetime simply space. Space and time are not separate entities. They are the same. I guess it is just "time" that is the confusing part since it is more of a construction of living beings.
     
  10. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2011
    Messages:
    28,443
    Likes Received:
    43,639
    Something had to have always existed, period. Wether it be God or a particle. If you argue one came from nothing you can argue the other could have too.

    Thing is, we don't know ****, science doesn't know anything. Any scientist would admit that science probably knows about .00000000001% about the big picture.

    Anybody who sits on that .000000001% and trys to act like they got it figured out is a jackass, especially if they try to shootdown other peoples beliefs. Same to religions.

    Really, our existence makes no ****ing sense (to me), the thought of life completely baffles me everytime i think about it. How cam this whole universe come from nothing, how can God come from nothing, how can a particle come from nothing, how the hell am i alive right now. Nothingness is truley the biggest misconception in my mind.
     
  11. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    Ah, human pride... the emotional crest of the intellectually impotent...
     
  12. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    There, there... stop before you fry a circuit.... Leave the deep thinking to the mentally stable...

    No one reasonable in this thread has claimed to know everything, or have it all figured out... Take the time to read the post that started it all...

    Found it, yet...? Yes, that's the unreasonable religious man that was the only one to make any definitive claim on the subject of existence....
     
  13. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    And, you're pretty much agreeing with me here... The difference is science never makes definitive claims until substantial information is collected and verified.... Religion does so with no need for verification, and expects to be taken as seriously.... It's laughable...
     
  14. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2011
    Messages:
    28,443
    Likes Received:
    43,639
    Seriously you jackass?
     
  15. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    Ran out of words...?
     
  16. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2011
    Messages:
    28,443
    Likes Received:
    43,639
    No, your just being a jackass by trying to talk **** to me.
     
  17. Hmm

    Hmm Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2001
    Messages:
    6,361
    Likes Received:
    115
    Are you sure.. because, this is coming off like an earsplitting yes...
     
  18. Jontro

    Jontro Member

    Joined:
    Feb 3, 2010
    Messages:
    34,415
    Likes Received:
    22,164
    Brehs... brehs... can't we all just hug it out and get along?

    Here are pictures of Chandler Parsons

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Bonus:

    [​IMG]
     
    2 people like this.
  19. B-Bob

    B-Bob "94-year-old self-described dreamer"

    Joined:
    Jul 26, 2002
    Messages:
    34,713
    Likes Received:
    33,757
    I don't want to be picky, but this is important. I totally get what you're saying, but there's more in this onion.

    Even in general relativity, they are not "the same" but definitely linked together in a critical way. In Quantum Field Theory (which we still can't reconcile with General Relativity), time and space are definitely separate entities! It's one of the central conundrums in physics now.

    So yes, we should properly say "space-time" when talking of cosmological topics, but the term is still less appropriate to microscopic problems, for instance.
     
  20. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Jun 3, 2002
    Messages:
    56,268
    Likes Received:
    48,142
    Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the "Multiverse"

    Gravitational waves detected in the aftermath of the Big Bang suggest one universe just might not be enough.

    Bored with your old dimensions—up and down, right and left, and back and forth? So tiresome. Take heart, folks. The latest news from Big Bang cosmologists offers us some relief from our humdrum four-dimensional universe.

    Gravitational waves rippling through the aftermath of the cosmic fireball, physicists suggest, point to us inhabiting a multiverse, a universe filled with many universes. (See: "Big Bang's 'Smoking Gun' Confirms Early Universe's Exponential Growth.")

    That's because those gravitational wave results point to a particularly prolific and potent kind of "inflation" of the early universe, an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos in the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago.

    "In most models, if you have inflation, then you have a multiverse," said Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. Linde, one of cosmological inflation's inventors, spoke on Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics event where the BICEP2 astrophysics team unveiled the gravitational wave results.

    Essentially, in the models favored by the BICEP2 team's observations, the process that inflates a universe looks just too potent to happen only once; rather, once a Big Bang starts, the process would happen repeatedly and in multiple ways. (Learn more about how universes form in "Cosmic Dawn" on the National Geographic website.)

    "A multiverse offers one good possible explanation for a lot of the unique observations we have made about our universe," says MIT physicist Alan Guth, who first wrote about inflation theory in 1980. "Life being here, for example."

    Lunchtime

    The Big Bang and inflation make the universe look like the ultimate free lunch, Guth has suggested, where we have received something for nothing.

    But Linde takes this even further, suggesting the universe is a smorgasbord stuffed with every possible free lunch imaginable.

    That means every kind of cosmos is out there in the aftermath of the Big Bang, from our familiar universe chock full of stars and planets to extravaganzas that encompass many more dimensions, but are devoid of such mundane things as atoms or photons of light.

    In this multiverse spawned by "chaotic" inflation, the Big Bang is just a starting point, giving rise to multiple universes (including ours) separated by unimaginable gulfs of distance. How far does the multiverse stretch? Perhaps to infinity, suggests MIT physicist Max Tegmark, writing for Scientific American.

    That means that spread across space at distances far larger than the roughly 92 billion light-year width of the universe that we can observe, other universes reside, some with many more dimensions and different physical properties and trajectories. (While the light from the most distant stuff we can see started out around 14 billion light-years away, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, stretching the boundaries of the observable universe since then.)

    Comic Mismatches

    "I'm a fan of the multiverse, but I wouldn't claim it is true," says Guth. Nevertheless, he adds, a multiverse explains a lot of things that now confuse cosmologists about our universe.

    For example, there is the 1998 discovery that galaxies in our universe seem to be spreading apart at an accelerating rate, when their mutual gravitational attraction should be slowing them down. This discovery, which garnered the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, is generally thought to imply the existence of a "dark energy" that counteracts gravity on cosmic scales. Its nature is a profound mystery. About the only thing we understand about dark energy, physicists such as Michael Turner of the University of Chicago have long said, is its name.

    "There is a tremendous mismatch between what we calculate [dark energy] ought to be and what we observe," Guth says. According to quantum theory, subatomic particles are constantly popping into existence and vanishing again in the vacuum of space, which should endow it with energy—but that vacuum energy, according to theoretical calculations, would be 120 orders of magnitude (a 1 followed by 120 zeroes) too large to explain the galaxy observations. The discrepancy has been a great source of embarrassment to physicists.

    A multiverse could wipe the cosmic egg off their faces. On the bell curve of all possible universes spawned by inflation, our universe might just happen to be one of the few universes in which the dark energy is relatively lame. In others, the antigravity force might conform to physicists' expectations and be strong enough to rip all matter apart.

    A multiverse might also explain away another embarrassment: the number of dimensions predicted by modern "superstring" theory. String theory describes subatomic particles as being composed of tiny strings of energy, but it requires there to be 11 dimensions instead of the four we actually observe. Maybe it's just describing all possible universes instead of our own. (It suggests there could be a staggeringly large number of possibilities—a 1 with 500 zeroes after it.)

    Join the "multiverse club," Linde wrote in a March 9 review of inflationary cosmology, and what looks like a series of mathematical embarrassments disappears in a cloud of explanation. In a multiverse, there can be more things dreamt of in physicists' philosophy than happen to be found in our sad little heaven and earth.

    Life, the Universe, and Everything

    The multiverse may even help explain one of the more vexing paradoxes about our world, sometimes called the "anthropic" principle: the fact that we are here to observe it.

    To cosmologists, our universe looks disturbingly fine-tuned for life. Without its Goldilocks-perfect alignment of the physical constants—everything from the strength of the force attaching electrons to atoms to the relative weakness of gravity—planets and suns, biochemistry, and life itself would be impossible. Atoms wouldn't stick together in a universe with more than four dimensions, Guth notes.

    If ours was the only cosmos spawned by a Big Bang, these life-friendly properties would seem impossibly unlikely. But in a multiverse containing zillions of universes, a small number of life-friendly ones would arise by chance—and we could just happen to reside in one of them.

    "Life may have formed in the small number of vacua where it was possible, in a multiverse," says Guth. "That's why we are seeing what we are seeing. Not because we are special, but because we can."

    link
     
    1 person likes this.

Share This Page

  • About ClutchFans

    Since 1996, ClutchFans has been loud and proud covering the Houston Rockets, helping set an industry standard for team fan sites. The forums have been a home for Houston sports fans as well as basketball fanatics around the globe.

  • Support ClutchFans!

    If you find that ClutchFans is a valuable resource for you, please consider becoming a Supporting Member. Supporting Members can upload photos and attachments directly to their posts, customize their user title and more. Gold Supporters see zero ads!


    Upgrade Now