New Theory of the Universe

[Rasteroid]

This is the most interesting thing I've read all day:

www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1768191,00.html

Discuss.

[assmonster]

nothing new here. i remember being taught this in astronomy some 5 years ago.

[Rasteroid]

Oh. So, there's a big split in the scientific community? Either the universe ends at a recent, approximable time, or way far off in the distant past?

I find the latter much more appealing. In infinite playground makes our current existance seem far less improbable.

[jc]

I don't buy it. You don't have to have "time" before the big bang in order to explain dark energy (although dark energy really doesn't make much sense).

Just look at the universe how it is - it seems to be at approximately the right density to continue flying apart, never managing to compact down into a "big crunch" - we're either constant or we're expanding... there's no way we can slow down and start to collapse, at this point...

Also, it's rather ridiculous to start talking about "time" when you get back to the extremely early universe. Spacetime is one thing, and so when the universe was a single point, there WAS no time or space. Then space expanded out of "nothing" and time with it. So time is getting distorted too.

I'm a big stickler to the anthropic principle - it's very likely other universes also exist that have different variables for gravity and so on. It's just that they don't have suitable living conditions for us We never happened to show up in those. *shrugs*

[assmonster]

there's always a split in the scientific community. they can't even agree on what they ate for breakfast.... which helps with my upcoming defence. they may disagree but they can't tell me i'm WRONG.

anyway, i like the idea of a big crunch... every so many billion or trillion years the universe says "i've had enough of you lot... let's start over"

[Rycchus]

We already knew that the Universe will either continue until it gets far enough apart for the gravity of stars not to be strong enough to pull them back together, or we will have a Big Crunch followed by another Big Bang.

It's surely not much of a leap to say that maybe our Big Bang wasn't the first?

[jc]

Except that the way things are currently looking, we are NOT going to crunch. Our universe will continue to expand at an accelerating rate.

Our bang may not have been the first, but it's probably the last of this universe.

However, there could always be lots of other universes banging all over the "place" , not causually connected at all to our own.

[Rycchus]

Surely if we're not going to crunch, it implies that we never crunched before. Why should this Bang be any bigger than the previous ones?

[vilhazarog]

Just because something happened one way before does not mean it will always happen that way. You know what they say, the only thing constant in the universe is change.

[psiweapon]

vilhazarog said:

Just because something happened one way before does not mean it will always happen that way. You know what they say, the only thing constant in the universe is change.

And one "last" big bang would end change. Unless you bring into the picture more universes (talking about multiple universes is just nonsense, as the universe is everything that is)

[RedSpectratooLazytologin]

I don't know about that, Psiweapon. M, or string theory suggests that our universe is something of a 11 dimensional film on a multiverse-sort-of soap bubble. each film would be a separate universe, and gravitons (The particle of gravity) are actually borrowed particles from another universe.

I don't know much about all of these things, I'm a biologist, not a physicist, but I would not call the concept of there being multiple universes to be folly.