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“Our universe is perfectly tailored for life"..."Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation:"...

Three different trends in physics each suggest that our universe is just one of many.We usually think of the universe as being “everything there is.” But many astronomers and physicists now suspect that the universe we observe is just a small part of an unbelievably larger and richer cosmic structure, often called the “multiverse.” This mind-bending notion – that our universe may be just one of many, perhaps an infinite number, of real, physical universes – was front and center at a three-day conference entitled "A Debate in Cosmology — The Multiverse," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics...

~~~snip~~~ Electromagnetic waves are far too slow to be the only means of signalling in an immense universe. Gravity requires the near-instantaneous character of the electric force to form stable systems like our solar system and spiral galaxies. Gravitationally, the Earth ‘sees’ the Sun where it is this instant, not where it was more than 8 minutes ago. Newton’s famous law of gravity does not refer to time. We must have a workable concept of the structure of matter that satisfies the observation that the inertial and gravitational masses of an object are equivalent. When we accelerate electrons or protons...

A tangle of spidery filaments stretches outward from the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275 as if they were dendrites of an intergalactic nerve cell. NGC 1275, located 235 million light-years from Earth near the center of a clump of galaxies known as the Perseus cluster, has posed a puzzle: How have these filaments, which are made of gas much cooler than the surrounding intergalactic cloud, persisted for perhaps 100 million years? Why haven’t they warmed, dissipated or collapsed to form stars? Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, with 10 times the resolution of earlier photographs, reveal that the filaments,...

Goldilocks isn’t the only one who demanded everything to be “just right.” The Earth and its fellow seven planets also needed perfect conditions to form as observed, and those right conditions occur rarely, a new computer simulation shows. The new simulation, described in the Aug. 8 Science, is the first to trace from beginning to end how planetary systems form from an initial gas disk encircling a baby star. “The really striking result of the new model is how chaotic and even violent the average story of a planet’s birth is,” says Edward Thommes, an astrophysicist now at the University...

Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory. The background patterns of space could help us focus on quantum problems.NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics...

A telescope on the far side of the moon could probe the "dark ages" of the universe while blocking out the radio-wavelength noise of Earth civilizations. Up to one hundred thousand antennas would form the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer (DALI), the largest telescope ever built, and allow astronomers to hear faint whispering signals from a time when no stars even existed. "This will look at one of the most fundamental questions ever conceived, back when the universe was made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — no stars, no galaxies," said Kurt Weiler, senior astronomer at the U.S. Naval...

John Wheeler, giant on whose shoulders we stand, has died at 96.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic...

The history of cosmology – the study of the Universe – for the last five hundred years is often portrayed as a clash between science on the one hand, and the cold hand of religious dogma on the other. Part of this is rooted in fact – the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation for instance was suspicious of intellectual innovation and experiment, with its harsher elements longing for the certainties of the age before Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The desire to make the Universe fit into a pre-ordained and orderly scheme that needed no correction reached its infamous,...

Einstein's self-proclaimed "biggest blunder" -- his postulation of a cosmological constant (a force that opposes gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing) -- may not be such a blunder after all, according to the research of an international team of scientists that includes two Texas A&M University researchers. The team is working on a project called ESSENCE that studies supernovae (exploding stars) to figure out if dark energy – the accelerating force of the universe – is consistent with Einstein’s cosmological constant. Texas A&M researchers Nicholas Suntzeff and Kevin Krisciunas are part of the project, which began in October of...

Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too. The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang. The Boomerang Nebula, mankind ‘shortening the universe’s life’ Cosmologists claim by observing dark...

Predictions Part I astronomy and climatology http://home.earthlink.net/~gravitics/LaViolette/Predict.html Superwave Theory Predictions and their Subsequent Verification Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years. Prediction No. 1...

Freeman Dyson: My optimism about the long-term survival of life comes mainly from imagining what will happen when life escapes from this planet and becomes adapted to living in vacuum. There is then no real barrier to stop life from spreading through the universe. Hopping from one world to another will be about as easy as hopping from one island in the Pacific to another. And then life will diversify to fill the infinite variety of ecological niches in the universe, as it has done already on this planet. ... Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details...

Take one part unidentified goop. Add three parts mysterious energy. Throw in a dash of ordinary atoms. Mix. Compress. Explode. Let expand for 13.7 billion years. It's an absurd recipe, but it's one that makes cosmologists drool. Ten years ago, no one could agree on what the universe is made of, how it is shaped, or what its ultimate fate will be. But less than five years later, long-awaited measurements and one stunning discovery forever transformed our picture of the universe. The resulting model, often called the concordance model, holds that 22 percent of the universe is composed of dark...

It's official, Elvis lives Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/01/2007 It might sound a little crazy, but our standard theories of cosmology and physics suggest that an infinite number of Presleys still exist, says Marcus Chown. And if that's not scary enough, it also means that you, and these words, are repeated ad infinitum across the universeElvis is alive. No, really! He didn't die of a cardiac arrest in his bathroom at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Instead, he slipped out of the back door under cover of darkness dressed as a nun, had a sex change and worked for several years...

ON ANGELS IN GENERAL AND IN PARTICULAR I. Angels are substances merely spiritual, created after the image of God, not only that they might acknowledge, love and worship their Creator, and might live in a state of happiness with him, but that they might likewise perform certain duties concerning the rest of the creatures according to the command of God. II. We call them "substances," against the Sadducees and others, who contend that angels are nothing more than the good or the evil motions of spirits, or else exercises of power to aid or to injure. But this is completely...

Home About Edge Features Edge Editions Press Edge Search A striking consequence of the new picture of the world is that there should be an infinity of regions with histories absolutely identical to ours. That's right, scores of your duplicates are now reading copies of this article. They live on planets exactly like Earth, with all its mountains, cities, trees, and butterflies. There should also be regions where histories are somewhat different from ours, with all possible variations. For example, some readers will be pleased to know that there are infinitely many O-regions where Al Gore is the President...

An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the "double pulsar", a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein's theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton's - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay. The double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039A and B, is 2000 light-years away in...

The apparent absence of shadows where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a "Big Bang." In a finding sure to cause controversy, scientists at UAH found a lack of evidence of shadows from "nearby" clusters of galaxies using new, highly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background. A team of UAH scientists led by Dr. Richard Lieu, a professor of physics, used data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to scan the cosmic microwave background for shadows caused by...