highly recommend Martin Amis' Time's Arrow
Posted on 01/07/2004 2:10:38 AM PST by kattracks
ATLANTA (AP) — The first stars after the Big Bang were immense, superhot giants that lived briefly and then exploded as brilliant supernovae, but they seeded the universe with basic elements that were the building blocks for the sun and the Earth, and for life itself, according to a new study.Current theory holds that the universe began with the Big Bang, an event that caused space to expand in a fraction of a second from a tiny speck to an immensity bathed in heat and radiation. It took an estimated 300 million years for the universe to cool and for the first stars to form from hydrogen and helium.
But those were far different from the Earth's star, the sun, and most other stars in the universe now.
"The stars were simple, pure hydrogen and helium," said Volker Bromm, an astronomer for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And the universe was "smooth and boring." The vital ingredients that eventually turned the universe into a complex and lively place did not then exist.
Bromm and Abraham Loeb, also of Harvard-Smithsonian, used supercomputers to model the cycles of star formation that occurred after the Big Bang. They reported their findings Tuesday at the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Those early stars were immense, extremely hot and very short-lived. After just a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as supernovae.
In that violence were created the heavier elements "that completely changed the universe," said Bromm. Elements from oxygen to carbon to iron were blasted into space where they eventually became part of a new generation of stars.
The next generation of stars were rich in carbon and oxygen, but had little iron. These stars shone longer than the first generation, but spent a long, lonely existence, with no planets.
"These stars were like the sun, but a very lonely sun," said Bromm. There was still not enough heavy metals to form planets, he said, and those stars "would live and die in solitude."
Supernovae continued to explode, seeding the universe with more and more heavy metals. Eventually, there were enough of these metals to create long-lived stars and for planets to accrete into their orbits. On at least one planet, the Earth, all the ingredients came together in the right place and time for life to evolve.
"The window for life opened sometime between 500 and 2 billion years after Big Bang," Loeb said in a statement.
Precisely when conditions were right for planets is still a mystery, Bromm said.
"The threshold for planet formation is still a question and we don't know the answer as yet," he said.
But what is clear, said Bromm, is the role those very early stars played in the universe of today.
"We owe our existence in a very direct way to all the stars whose life and death preceded the formation of our sun," he said. "And this process started right after the Big Bang with the very first stars."
The solar system may not be the only place it happened. More than 100 extra-solar planets — planets orbiting stars other than the sun — have been discovered. All of these planets orbit stars that are rich in heavy metals, supporting the idea that stars with heavy elements are more likely to have families of planets.
Now, tell me again, evolution does not deal with the origin of life?
ev·o·lu·tion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (v-lshn, v-) n. A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. See Synonyms at development. The process of developing. Gradual development. Biology. Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species. The historical development of a related group of organisms; phylogeny. A movement that is part of a set of ordered movements. Mathematics. The extraction of a root of a quantity.
You will notice that evolution cannot occur, nor claims to occur, until life exists. This is fundamental to the process. Life must exist. No life = no evolution. Scientists or whomever that comment on abiogenesis are not discussing evolution, they are discussing origins. I don't care if they are "High Priests" of Evolution or Christianity, when it comes to abiogenesis, it's not Evolution.
"Formation of memories" implies time in its very construction. "Formation" indicates a process requiring a time difference (delta-T).
Barbour suggests that "The Arena" consists of every possible configuration of subatomic particles in "spacetime". "Time" in his view--if I have him correctly--is simply a selection process of some sort among "slices" of the arena. The circularity is that this idea seems to me to require an "instruction pointer" to order the "nows" (which he cutely terms 'time capsules'). "Motion" of this "instruction pointer" is what I refer to as the necessity of "meta-time" in his theory.
I wrote him (after reading the book twice) with many questions. I think a bot responded: "The questions you pose are deep. I hope someday soon to have time to begin to answer them" (irony is mine). I suspect that if I had emailed him that time was made of peanut butter, I would have received the same response!
--Boris
--Boris
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