Posted on 10/26/2004 7:36:36 PM PDT by ckilmer
But there's a problem with that scenario: a "skeleton in the closet," Carroll said. To begin inflation, the universe would have encompassed a microscopically tiny patch in an extremely unlikely configuration, not what scientists would expect from a randomly chosen initial condition.
"The conditions necessary for inflation are not that easy to start," Carroll said. "There's an argument that it's easier just to have our universe appear from a random fluctuation than to have inflation begin from a random fluctuation."
Carroll and Chen's scenario of infinite entropy is inspired by the finding in 1998 that the universe will expand forever because of a mysterious force called "dark energy." Under these conditions, the natural configuration of the universe is one that is almost empty. "In our current universe, the entropy is growing and the universe is expanding and becoming emptier," Carroll said.
But even empty space has faint traces of energy that fluctuate on the subatomic scale. As suggested previously by Jaume Garriga of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University, these flucuations can generate their own big bangs in tiny areas of the universe, widely separated in time and space. Carroll and Chen extend this idea in dramatic fashion, suggesting that inflation could start "in reverse" in the distant past of our universe, so that time could appear to run backwards (from our perspective) to observers far in our past.
I'm supposed to take any of this seriously?
Time runs both forwards and backwards at the same time, while it also doesn't run at all and stands still. The Universe was created at the time of the Big Bang but is continuously experiencing little "Big Bangs" at the same time, which is flowing both forwards and backwards at the same "time" while also standing still.
"Dark energy" is all around us but undetectible except for theory. Since our theories can't be wrong it must exist and we just have to find it. That will explain why the Universe is expanding in a fashion that we can't explain and how time runs both forwards and backwards at the same time.
I'm going back to be now, my dreams have more coherence than this.
Not when I wrote the reply, since I had been searching on that darned word in search engines looking for that web page. The first time, however. . .
Also, while you're here: are you related to A.Pole?
Not that I know of. But hey, if you ever want to know what "The People" are thinking, just ask me, T.P.Pole. I got so sick last election cycle of the media saying "The American People" want this and "The People" want that, that I decided to prove them wrong.
Time is the ordering of cause and effect. The effect can't precede the cause.
Just remember...In comedy timing is everything.
A $2 billion dollar study on why water is wet!
The article isn't clear but I think they want to say that local entropy is increasing (this is measurable) but in an infinite universe, the total would be infinite. But, maybe the authors meant something else entirely.
Are you sure it isn't the other way around. If event A always preceeds event B, then we call A the cause, and B the effect. The concept of causa efficiens works this way. But if A and B always occur together, one could choose to call the earlier the cause or just call the cause the earlier (were there some non-temporal method of determining cause.)
LOL
That's good!
OlBlue, you were reading my mind...
Better check with AlGore. He may have been involved with the Big Bang ;)
I think that's about it, at least as I read it. Measurable local increase in entropy. There's no limit, in principle, to how far the BB might continue to expand, thus in a universe of ever-increasing volume, entropy would approach the infinite.
God did it.
time is simply the movent of an object in space. if nothing moved, there would be no time. And, since and object cannot move in two directions at the same time, time only goes in one direction. forward.
The motion you refer to is just a sequence of events. "Time" is the duration of a sequence of events, as measured against another sequence used as a standard -- usually something astronomical, such as the rotation of the earth.
I wish!!!! LOL
Molecules?
Because otherwise, poop would fly up our butt.
(For more details read, Phillip K. Dick's "Counterclock World" (one of his few stories not made into a movie yet))
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