Fortean Cosmology!

[rynner2]

This should strain the ol' brain about the nature of reality...

Return of the static universe

Back in the early 1900s, before Hubble showed that most galaxies are receding from us and that the universe is expanding, people thought the universe was unchanging, perhaps even eternal.

During this period, Einstein famously inserted a repulsive force called the cosmological constant into his equations so the universe would be static, something he later called his greatest blunder, though the recent discovery of dark energy suggests it wasn't such a daft move after all.

Since then, in addition to the motion of galaxies away from us, scientists have discovered two other key lines of evidence that indicate our universe began with a big bang.

We are flooded with low energy radiation from all directions in the sky, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The spectrum of this radiation is exactly what one would expect if it were radiation from the primordial fireball that gave birth to our universe.

The other line of evidence is the pattern of abundances of elements in our universe. The precise proportions of hydrogen, helium, deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron in its nucleus) and other atomic species found in pristine material in space are a remarkable match to what you would get from nuclear reactions in the hot, dense, early universe in the big bang scenario.

But now, physicists Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and Robert Scherrer of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, say that this evidence will eventually be erased, leaving cosmologists in the distant future to conclude once again that the universe is static.

Trillions of years in the future, dark energy – the mysterious repulsive force that is causing the universe to expand at an ever increasing rate – will have pushed everything so far apart, that only our "Local Group" of galaxies will be visible to us. By that time everything in our Local Group will have merged to form a single large galaxy, the physicists say in a paper that won a prize in an essay competition sponsored by the Gravity Research Foundation.

Any cosmologists trying to figure out the history of the universe will conclude that it is a static universe. Ironically, the expansion of the universe will have erased two key pieces of evidence that it occurred at all. Even though the universe will still be expanding, there will be no way to track it, because all other galaxies will be too far away to see. And the wavelength of the microwave background will have increased so much with the expansion that it will be impossible to detect.

Finally, the evolution and explosion of many generations of stars between then and now will pollute the local universe with so much helium and other elements that it will be impossible to discern the signature of the big bang using ratios of elements.

"We may feel smug in that we can detect a host of things future civilisations will not know about, but by the same token, this suggests we wonder about what important aspects of the universe we ourselves may be missing," Krauss muses.

http://tinyurl.com/22bx8b

Yeah, right!

Read that last sentence again, and ponder....

 

[eburacum]

We should record as much as possible of the universe for the benefit of our distant descendants; the distant galaxies seen in the Hubble Deep Fields will eventually fade from view as they leave our c-horizon.

That will be the last time we, or anyone we can talk to, will ever see those galaxies.

But so far we haven't even mapped more than a fraction of the visible universe.

I sometimes wonder if the same is true of our selves; we might look back at the Big Bang, and the Inflationary era, and be entirely unable to detect certain aspects of reality back then; the universe was hot, and opaque, and expanding much faster than light, and possibly full of exotic species such as monopoles and textures; could there have been some bizarre form of life back then?
Could that life have formed a civilisation, and experenced physical laws which we can only guess at now? And if so, that civilisation might too have said "We may feel smug in that we can detect a host of things future civilisations will not know about".

 

[rynner2]

...that civilisation might too have said "We may feel smug in that we can detect a host of things future civilisations will not know about".

Spooky, innit!

But how does this affect "We can measure a circle, starting anywhere.." when chunks of information disappear with time?

 

[eburacum]

A cyclical universe isn't really compatible with the concept of entropy, I'm afraid. There may be cycles of one kind or another, but they won't be repeating cycles.

 

[bazizmaduno]

eburacum wrote:

possibly full of exotic species such as monopoles and textures

I'm sort of ok with the concept of 'monopoles', but if you could elaborate on 'textures', I'd be most grateful, eburacum.

regards
Baz

oops! - excuse my previous laziness, I've now read a bit about 'textures' - interesting: variation in the 'primordial' Higgs field leading to non-symmetrical density distribution of matter/'dark energy' throughout the universe. cf inflationary model

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I continue to have a problem with this. Shouldn't any Universe which is capable of producing and evolving sentient entities eventually (that is, after billions of years) eventually produce intelligences / technologies / civilizations capable of deciding the future of that Universe?

ATTENTION! No unattended children will be permitted to play outside their respective solar systems during the scheduled reconstruction of the galaxy. Sorry for any inconvenience.

 

[Ermintruder]

I highly recommend that you take the time to watch this excellent insightful video.

You may find it helpful, during or afterwards, to hold on as tightly as you can, during the ride of your life.

This video will help you feel ungrounded, dated, rotated and maybe a little elated....

#ancient photons #great attractor #subsolar point #calendarwars

 

[eburacum]

Oh my lack of god! I forgot to elaborate on the concept of 'textures' for Bazizmaduno.
Oh, well, if anyone's interested nine years later, here goes.

Cosmic flaws in spacetime are believed to come in many types; the monopole is one, and a black hole is another; both of these flaws are points with zero dimensions. If you imagine a one-dimensional flaw, it becomes a line- this is known as cosmic string, and would be like a long, infinitely thin black hole. Note that in theory most black holes would rotate, which would cause them to change from a point to a hoop, something like a small, closed loop of cosmic string.

How about a two-dimensional space-time flaw? That would be something like an infinitely thin flat plane, and is known as a domain wall. These weird flaws have been incorporated into string theory and supersymmetry, but that's all over my head.

Now, how about a three-dimensional flaw? That would be a 'texture', and they are so weird and so massive that no-one has really found a way to integrate them into cosmology yet. No evidence of one has been found in the visible universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(cosmology)