Cool article: were we somebody's science project?

SamFisher · May 19, 2004

interesting.

egghead
The Big Lab Experiment
Was our universe created by design?
By Jim Holt
Posted Wednesday, May 19, 2004, at 7:59 AM PT

Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe?

To get a better understanding of this matter, I thought it might be wise to consult the man who has done more than anyone else to explain how our universe got going. His name is Andrei Linde, and he is a physicist at Stanford University. (He's also an artist and an acrobat, but never mind.) In the early 1980s, the then-thirtysomething Linde came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde's theory, called "chaotic inflation," explained the shape of space and how galaxies were formed. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation from the Big Bang that was observed by the COBE satellite in the 1990s. Linde has been amply honored for his achievement, most recently by being awarded the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation (along with Alan Guth, another pioneer of the theory of cosmic inflation).

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

"When I invented chaotic inflation theory, I found that the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter," Linde told me in his Russian-accented English when I reached him by phone at Stanford. "That's enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us. It looks like cheating, but that's how the inflation theory works—all the matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the gravitational field. So, what's to stop us from creating a universe in a lab? We would be like gods!"

Linde, it should be said, is famous for his mock-gloomy manner, and these words were laced with irony. But he insisted that this genesis-in-a-lab scenario was feasible, at least in principle. "What my theoretical argument shows—and Alan Guth and others who have looked at this matter have come to the same conclusion—is that we can't rule out the possibility that our own universe was created in a lab by someone in another universe who just felt like doing it."

It struck me that there was a hitch in this scheme. If you started off a Big Bang in a lab, wouldn't the baby universe you created expand into your own universe, killing people and crushing buildings and so forth? Linde assured me that there was no such danger. "The new universe would expand into itself," he said. "Its space would be so curved that it would look as tiny as an elementary particle. In fact, it might end up disappearing altogether from the world of its creator."

But why bother making a universe if it's going to run away from you? Wouldn't you want to have some power over how your creation unfolded, some way of making sure the beings that evolved in it turned out well? Linde's picture was as unsatisfying as Voltaire's idea of a creator who established our universe but then took no further interest in it or its creatures.

"You've got a point," Linde said. "At first I imagined that the creator might be able to send information into the new universe—to teach its creatures how to behave, to help them discover what the laws of nature are, and so forth. Then I started thinking. The inflation theory says that a baby universe blows up very quickly, like a balloon, in the tiniest fraction of a second. Suppose the creator tried to write something on it surface, like 'Please remember I created you.' The inflationary expansion would make this message exponentially huge. The creatures in the new universe, living in a little corner of one letter, would never be able to read the whole thing."

But then Linde thought of another channel of communication between creator and creation—the only one possible, as far as he could tell. The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, has the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. So says the theory. He can determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron's mass to the proton's will be. Such ratios, called constants of nature, look like arbitrary numbers to us: There is no obvious reason they should take one value rather than another. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits 6673?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these dozens of constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde hastened to point out, such a message would be legible only to physicists.

"You might take this all as a joke," he said, "but perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may be the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird. On the evidence, our universe was created not by a divine being, but by a physicist hacker."

Linde's theory gives scientific muscle to the notion of a universe created by an intelligent being. It might be congenial to Gnostics, who believe that the material world was fashioned not by a benevolent supreme being but by an evil demiurge. More orthodox believers, on the other hand, will seek refuge in the question, "But who created the physicist hacker?" Let's hope it's not hackers all the way up.

Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2100715/
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twhy77 · May 19, 2004

Yeah I mean he asks the essential question towards the end, who created the hacker/scientist, etc. etc. Where does this world exist.

Still the lingering metaphysical question behind all that stuff though.

Rocketman95 · May 19, 2004

Jon Stewart once called us God's second grade science project. I liked that.

MacBeth · May 19, 2004

To me the question of 'how' a supreme being would make a universe is never as frought with problems as the 'why'. We always ascribe human reasons for the being's so doing, but that in and of itself is problematic.

mc mark · May 19, 2004

Originally posted by MacBeth
To me the question of 'how' a supreme being would make a universe is never as frought with problems as the 'why'. We always ascribe human reasons for the being's so doing, but that in and of itself is problematic.
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Why does everything sound like a lesson plan with you?

DaDakota · May 19, 2004

Did Andy Moon write this after smoking his peace pipe?

DD

SamFisher · May 19, 2004

In other cosmological news, we keep on expanding, faster:

May 19, 2004
By X-Raying Galaxies, Researchers Offer New Evidence of Rapidly Expanding Universe
By DENNIS OVERBYE

bservations of giant clouds of galaxies far out in space and time have revealed new evidence that some mysterious force began to push the cosmos apart six billion years ago, astronomers said yesterday.

The results constitute striking confirmation of one of the weirdest discoveries of modern science: that the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, the galaxies flying apart faster and faster with time, under the influence of some antigravitational force. The work, astronomers said, opens up a powerful new way of investigating the nature of this "dark energy" and its effect on the destiny of the cosmos.

The astronomers used an orbiting X-ray satellite called Chandra to observe hot gases in the distant galactic clusters. By analyzing the X-rays emitted by those gases, they could calculate the distance from Earth and the speed of each of the clusters and thus trace the history of the expansion of the universe over the last 10 billion years, they said.

"The universe is accelerating," said Dr. Steve Allen of Cambridge University in England, leader of the international team that did the work. "We have found strong new evidence for dark energy."

They announced their results at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington. A paper describing the work has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Other astronomers hailed the X-ray cluster method as a potential complement to other ways of investigating dark energy but said they would withhold judgment about this particular calculation until they could study the details. Most of the previous studies, including those that led to the discovery of dark energy, used exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovas as cosmic distance markers.

Dr. Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, an original discoverer of dark energy, hailed the work as another sign of the new age of "precision cosmology.''

Dr. Riess said in an e-mail message: "Cosmologists are all from Missouri, the Show-Me State. It appears that X-ray clusters have been added as a new tool in our surveyor's tool kit. All tests point to a strange form of gravity we call dark energy. Some love it, some hate it; it appears we have to deal with it."

Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge who was not part of the team, called the results "neat work and a promising method," which, he noted, involved "very straightforward assumptions and simple physics."

Another cosmologist who was not part of the team, Dr. Michael Turner of the University of Chicago, said: "We can now be quite confident that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. It's not a fluke, it's not going away."

Dark energy has confounded experts and everybody else since two competing groups of astronomers discovered six years ago that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down due to cosmic gravity, as had been presumed, but was speeding up.

At the news conference, Dr. Andrew Fabian of Cambridge, a team member, compared the phenomenon to tossing an apple in the air and watching it go up faster and faster rather than falling back down. "It requires new physics beyond everyday experience, even the experience of an astronomer," Dr. Fabian said.

In recent years theorists have filled the journals with ever more fanciful explanations of what might be causing this behavior.

One possibility, first suggested and then rejected by Einstein, is that space itself has a repulsive force. But according to modern particle physics theory, this cosmological constant, as this force is known, should be about 1060 times bigger than what astronomers have measured, causing theorists seek other explanations. Among them have been extra unseen dimensions to space, interactions with other, parallel universes and as-yet-undiscovered particles or forces.

Or perhaps, some theorists say, Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, which has been the backbone of cosmology for nearly a century, needs modification.

Astronomers hope that some answers will come if they can find out whether the density of dark energy - estimated to make up 75 percent of the universe - is changing with time.

If dark energy were constant, it would mean that Einstein's cosmological constant is in effect, and that most of the galaxies would move away too fast to be seen a mere 100 billion years from now.

If dark energy is increasing, it could mean the universe could end in a "big rip," in which even atoms would be torn apart. On the other hand, the dark energy could decrease and even turn into an attractive force, drawing the universe to an end in a "big crunch."

The new results are consistent with Einstein's cosmological constant but also allow for the possibility that the dark energy could be changing, echoing recent results from the supernova surveys.

"The nice thing is that this is a completely independent method based on very simple physics," Dr. Allen said. "It's the physics of hot gas and the physics of gravity."

Clusters of galaxies are the largest objects in the universe, containing thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars. But in a big cluster, the stars themselves are greatly outweighed by intergalactic gas, which has been condensed and heated to 100 million degrees or so by the cluster's immense gravity.

The X-rays that are spit out by this gas can be seen far across the universe. From their brightness astronomers can gauge the amount of gas in the cluster, and from the temperature of the gas, they can estimate the total mass in the galaxy cluster. Most of that mass is mysterious dark matter, which has been detected only by its gravitational effects on the luminous parts of the universe.

The astronomers made what they said was the simple assumption that clusters were a fair sample of the universe as a whole and that the cosmic ratio of dark matter to ordinary matter applied in each individual cluster. That allowed them to calculate distances to 26 clusters, from 1 billion to 10 billion light-years away, and thus measure how fast the universe was expanding when the light left those far-away galaxy clouds, confirming the cosmic acceleration.

"It's nice our results agree with previous experiments," Dr. Allen said. "It lets you feel rather more secure that everything is as it should be in those experiments."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/science/19dark.html?pagewanted=print&position=
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Faos · May 19, 2004

Maybe we are just part of one huge Sims game.

nyrocket · May 19, 2004

I like the fact that many physicists now believe that our universe is dominated in terms of mass by dark matter, but no one has any idea what it is or where it is or how to find it. Pretty cool.

yipengzhao · May 20, 2004

"were we somebody's science project"?

I read to the end because I was sure that Sam would postulate that this sinister "somebody" was the republican party. surprisingly, there was no mention of the republican party. weird.

SamFisher · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by yipengzhao
"were we somebody's science project"?

I read to the end because I was sure that Sam would postulate that this sinister "somebody" was the republican party. surprisingly, there was no mention of the republican party. weird.
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this explains a lot.

yipengzhao · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by SamFisher
this explains a lot.
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why don't you tell me what that explains?

SamFisher · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by yipengzhao
why don't you tell me what that explains?
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Exactly.

yipengzhao · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by SamFisher
Exactly.
Click to expand...

aardvark.

SamFisher · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by yipengzhao
aardvark.
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zebra

I win.

yipengzhao · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by SamFisher
zebra

I win.
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that explains a lot.

BrianKagy · May 20, 2004

Tang bi dang che.

GladiatoRowdy · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by DaDakota
Did Andy Moon write this after smoking his peace pipe?

DD
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BrianKagy · May 20, 2004

yipengzhao · May 20, 2004

Originally posted by BrianKagy
Tang bi dang che.
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i know...

gu zhang nan ming

although i do hope the chariot you refer to is liberals in general and not one liberal in particular.

anyway... my political views, as i've said before, are not fierce enough for me to post in this forum.

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