Comments on: Bouncing Back

By: Val pupa

Val pupa — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:32:04 +0000

This is a really outstanding, this is science.
The universe is hanging out in the darkness. After the big bang formed the universe, two main forces which you mentioned earlier chose the big stars to control the universe. Time after time, level after level, civilization after civilization raises a question. How many civilizations are in the universe? We are the first or are we the last? You have to know the shape of the universe to answer these questions. I will show you what it looks like but you have to find a way but not here. No one is going to find data for that. Everything has timing. No one sees what you see, no one hears what you hear, and know one knows what you know. This is not a dream, its more than that.

By: katesisco

katesisco — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 22:55:42 +0000

I like it because it demonstrates that there is nothing new under the sun. Astronomers Burbidge proposed this expanding/contacting theory decades ago.

By: genialityofevil

genialityofevil — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 09:33:26 +0000

In the immortal words of Dara Ó Briain: Science doesn’t know everything, and science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it’d stop.

By: M.saiful islam

M.saiful islam — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 04:37:29 +0000

The universe will be folded up and recreated.

By: Jean Tate

Jean Tate — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:04:40 +0000

The “it just happened” is not part of the scientific explanation, surely.

There are lots of “fundamental questions” whose answers are, today, some variation of “we don’t know” or “no one knows”. One example: the nine Yukawa couplings for the quarks and leptons (equivalent to specifying the rest mass of these elementary particles; thank you Wikipedia) … why do they have the values they are observed to have? No one knows.

And it’s quite easy to re-cast such questions in a form very similar to Drew Hoffmann’s quote: “A very long time ago the nine Yukawa couplings for the quarks and leptons got the values we observe them to have today … no one knows what caused this to happen.”

So why does a fundamental question in cosmology make scientists seem like a bunch of dum dums, but similar questions about particle physics do not?

By: Jean Tate

Jean Tate — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 23:55:49 +0000

I think there’s some confusion over “before”. If it refers to time, and if time itself has an origin at the Big Bang (that’s two “ifs” ;-)), then asking about what happens before is a bit like asking where is north when you’re standing at the North Pole. Or what happens when the temperature of something is reduced “below 0K” (actually, negative temperatures do have some meaning, in certain, very carefully defined, situations). Etc.

If, on the other hand, “before” refers to something other than time, …

By: Drew Hoffmann

Drew Hoffmann — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 21:05:36 +0000

I have always considered this a fantastic theory, the big bang theory itself in my opinion makes scientists seem like a bunch of dum dums. “A very long time ago there was just a big bang… no one knows what causes big bang it just… happened?”

By: Bernardo

Bernardo — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 19:20:52 +0000

Exactly Jean: we still don’t know.

By: Bernardo

Bernardo — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 19:18:44 +0000

I guess that since the “beggining” of the universe, there isn’t Nothing anymore, but the Nothing could have been existed before, I don’t know (I’m just a chemical engineer, jajaja) But even if it is as you propose, that perhaps never was nothing, whatever was before the Big Bang must have had an origin, at least is what we humans tend to think, that everything had an origin.

By: Jean Tate

Jean Tate — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 19:14:54 +0000

@Bernardo: the idea that the universe could have arisen “from nothing” (at its origin) is common in popsci articles. In the relevant papers on this, I suspect that the authors (scientists) did not propose anything like this. Rather, at least two distinct possibilities: a) that the two most powerful theories in physics – QM and GR – are so mutually incompatible that it’s impossible to say anything sensible about this physical regime; b) that everything, including time, began “then” (i.e. no primordial quantic fluctuations, or anything else).

In his article, Brian was careful to write this “While it’s possible that the answer is “nothing,” that hasn’t stopped some theorists from postulating an earlier cause for the Universe”, with the N-word in quotes.

As we have, as yet, no testable ideas re the physics which applies in the extremely dense, hot state that the observable universe was likely in, all that time ago, the best (scientific) answer is surely “we don’t know”?

By: genialityofevil

genialityofevil — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 18:55:50 +0000

Let me ask that in a different way. Where does nothing come from? Is nothing a natural state in the universe? We’ve never found anything in space that could be described as nothing, not even black holes. I’m not sure there’s anything in the laws of physics that would require the universe to have been nothing at some point.

By: Bernardo

Bernardo — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 18:35:14 +0000

Thank you Jane for answering. As far as I could read and understood, scientists have theorized about how the Big Band could have appeared from nothing, but there is always a primordial “something”, i.e. quantic fluctuations or whatever. Well, but how did this “whatever primordial” appear from The Nothing? I mean, let’s try to imagine the really Nothing: nothing, nothing, nothing. No quantic fluctuations, no any mathemathical construct used to initiate anything: Nothing. How any primordial seed appear? This is the Last Question, in my opinion,