Just ask their fjord designer.
Posted on 11/29/2006 4:19:47 PM PST by LibWhacker
Is this a joke? No, say a bunch of physicists. One day, it may be possible for a person to create a universe!
This is not going to happen tomorrow. Not even close. But according to Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene, it is theoretically not impossible (which is his way of saying the possibilities are not zero) that one day, a person could build a universe.
The very idea is so startling it's hard to know what this means.
Think about it this way: One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a "seed" -- a device that could grow into a universe -- and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate, infinite, unexplorable but very real alternate universe.
Got that?
This isn't Greene's notion. But he was willing to describe, in very broad outline, how it might work.
The seed, he suggests, could be a black hole. Not the big black holes that sit near the centers of so many galaxies, but what he calls a "mini black hole." Black holes, he says, don't have to be big. They can, in theory, be very small.
I asked him how small, and together we conducted an imaginary (very imaginary) experiment. If you listen to my interview, you will hear us build a mini black hole from an ordinary watermelon.
It's a fanciful experiment done with imaginary sound effects, but it playfully suggests these mini black holes might be manufactured one day. There may even be a real-life attempt. Plans are afoot to detect mini black holes at the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Greene also describes a kind of energy, called a "repulsive force," that might be capable of turning that seed into a new universe. The problem is, no one is yet sure how this force works or why. But Eduardo Guendelman, a physicist at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel, and Nobuyuki Sakai and his team at Yamagata University in Japan are working on the problem right now.
But suppose it is possible to create something that grows infinitely and becomes a universe somewhere else, why do it if you can't go and visit your creation? If you can't pop in, take a look and come back, why bother?
In the July 8, 2006 issue, New Scientist writer Zeeya Merali put that question to Stanford cosmologist Andre Linde.
"I sat down and really thought about why we should even care about creating a universe in the laboratory, " he told New Scientist, "We don't seem to be able to communicate with it at all."
Once it's formed, the inventor couldn't meet its inhabitants, mine its minerals, collect souvenirs or judge his or her success. The biblical god who many believe created our universe inspected us on the first through sixth day and decided that what He'd done "was good."
That's not an option for the human scientist who creates.
So why do it? Well, Greene says given the chance to make a universe of his own, "I might have a little trouble resisting this possibility. Just because it's so curious, this idea that because of your volitional act, you are creating a universe that could give rise, perhaps, to things we see around us."
Linde seconded that in his New Scientist interview.
"Just imagine if it's true and there's even a small chance it really could work," he said. "In this perspective, each of us can become a god."
Oh, the vanity of it all!
Remember Linde's work on this theory?
"Inflationary cosmology is different in many respects from the standard big bang cosmology. Domains of the inflationary universe with sufficiently large energy density permanently produce new inflationary domains due to stochastic processes of generation of the long-wave perturbations of the scalar field. Therefore the evolution of the universe in the inflationary scenario has no end and may have no beginning."
The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe; November 1994; Scientific American Magazine
But Spacetime has to expand into something (which was, in the original big bang, nothingness.) A Spacetime expansion will likely push out the Spacetime that already exists in that Space. Maybe they can overlap with each other. Maybe they will act like the branes that string theorists predict, never touching each other.
But probably not. A new big bang will likely rewrite the Spacetime that it expands into.
Just ask their fjord designer.
grand slam!
Masterful!
Our universe may have gotten started by some entity playing around in a physics lab. Maybe it sowed a bunch of universes but only a few were viable -- the rest self-aborted or just never got off the ground.
Then maybe those physics experimenters put their playthings away and left this and maybe other universes to fend for themselves -- for better or worse. Could we call those entities deadbeat dads?
That would explain a lot.
It's a fairy tale. For grown ups.
I think though my objection stems from the idea of creating a universe in the lab, which given the energy of the big bang/inflationonary event that evidently created this one could really pose a major - understated! - problem for us.
I thought you could just make one come out of your butt like God did with his cigarette lighter on Family Guy...
Even if this did happen the real trick is to make something out of nothing.
Create your own elements!
So why do it? Well, Greene says given the chance to make a universe of his own, "I might have a little trouble resisting this possibility. Just because it's so curious, this idea that because of your volitional act, you are creating a universe that could give rise, perhaps, to things we see around us."
Maybe we could create custom universes, such as ones that only contain consciousness. Of course that would depend on discovering what consciousness actually is and whether it could be engineered.
Re: "something out of nothing"
I once had a book (lost with the rest of my home library during Katrina) that proposed a method where energy waves during a certain form of compression, which I cannot begin to explain, can form the basic components of atomic matter. This would have happended during the "Big Bang'. It made sense when I read it. To my dismay, I cannot recall the name of that book or the author. It was convincing, however.
...do you suppose that our current universe is the result of some sharp teen-ager playing around in a higher universe with a school homework lab?
Someone on FR the other day mentioned something very similar to what you just said. It floored me when I read it then. Perhaps it was you. Anyhow, it just happened again.
In 1982 while pondering cosmic questions related to my life and the human species I imagined a guy with long white hair and beard wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket working on his college thesis paper and created a universe in the process.
Three years prior to that I imagined scenario of multiple universes as chicken broth soup and how the oil spots separate and collect. About a year later I read a similar scenario using boiling steam bubbles.
Sixteen years prior to that in second grade learning about the solar system the teacher said then there is the Universe and that's it. As soon as she said that I imagined a picture beyond the Universe. Told my mom about it that afternoon.
Jumping ahead. After the leather jacket guy image, in 1987, again pondering the cosmos and my and the human species relation with it I created an animation in my mind of a guy sitting with his dog on the stoop of his country home -- looking up at the clear night sky and pondering how it all came about. Suddenly he remembered his bowl of soup waiting for him in the kitchen was probably getting cold. He stood up, turned and opened the door.
The dog followed him though the door and they were in the kitchen. There in the center of the kitchen was a lone table with a red and white checkered table cloth and a bowl of soup. He sat at the table and peered into the soup. His mind wandered back to his thoughts out on the stoop. As he pondered this his subconscious was aware of a speck of pepper floating across the coup t the edge. It moved up the edge of the bowl, down the outside of it and proceeded across the table cloth to the edge -- down the table cloth to the table leg all the way to the floor. Continuing toward the door it was getting larger -- going though the doorway, on the other side, it was him sitting on the stoop with his dog looking up at the night sky pondering how it all come about. It was like a daydream. I thought about it for awhile. Latter that day I conveyed the animation it to a friend. I did the same years earlier with the multiple universe day-dream like image.
Almost there.
Three years later, April 1990, I listened to the author of The Long Wave give a presentation of it on audio cassette. Originally developed/written in 1985, he disturbed it back then as a litmus test. Now on the WWW titled A Cosmology of Infinite Riches. I was astonished. For, it paralleled what I had developed but his was in much greater detail -- scientific as well as traversing the five branches of philosophy.
Here it is.
1) Conscious beings acquire new knowledge. Knowledge begets new knowledge inductively and deductively.
2) Technology advances exponentially. The Law of Accelerating Returns explains how it has progressed in history of life on earth and man's advancement of technology. A brief glimpse to empasize: How communications technology advanced over the past 150 years. Telegraph used to track train movements > radio > telephone > telex > computer networks > Internet > FAX > cell phone > WWW > WiMAX broadband. Another one -- computation technology is on the cusp of it's fifth wave advancement. The second waive of computation was the vacuum tube computer -- ENIAC. Moore's law over 35 years has doubled the transistors per unit measure on a CPU and reduced the cost from ten dollars per transistor to a hundredth-of-a-penny per transistor. A video wherein Ray Kurzweil explains the law of accelerating returns and much more is here. One more. Conscious humans have far outpaced evolution. 3,000 yeas ago man lived to the age of 25. That was normal throughout most of man's pre-conscious history. Today, human longevity is 78 years. We're at the knee of the curve in advancing technology. The cusp of an explosion of rapidly advancing technology.
3) Conscious beings increasingly understand nature to increasingly control nature. Man has certainly progressed and increased prosperity by advancing technology -- ever increasing control of nature. Man is in his infancy of advancing technology.
4) Albert Einstein identified/acknowledged two macro components of existence. 1) matter, and 2) energy. There's a third macro component. 3) consciousness.
5) Conscious beings are the controllers of mater and energy.
When will conscious humans have the information, knowledge, tools and technologies to create universes? What traditions and status quos -- some having endured for thousands of years -- will be rendered obsolete by conscious man and woman coming into their own? The answer to the first question probably won't be known for at least fifty years. The second question is mostly knowable now. Take in the information at the three links given in this post.
Maybe if you Google the Higgs particle you could find something similar to what was in your book.
Now maybe I can add that to my selling inventory of Florida swamp land and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Some of the theories bouncing around:
The Protouniverse
This theory involves the formation of matter from nothingness before the explosion of the big bang. It is related to the white hole theory. A white hole is a theoretical opposite of a black hole, wherein matter would continuously appear at the speed of light, as if from nowhere. Although there is believed to be no observational evidence of white holes, the protouniverse theory was created in an attempt to explain the non-uniformity and the varying density of the universe.
The Inflationary Theory
In 1981, a particle physicist named Alan Guth created a new theory. Guth knew about the matter in physics that explained how elementary particles got their mass. This matter is called scalar field matter. Combining the mathematical equations for scalar field with Einstein's equations describing the expansion of the universe, Guth developed a theory in which large amounts of matter and energy were created from nothing! After matter and energy were created, the universe experienced an accelerated expansion, becoming exponentially large prior to continuing its evolution according to the big bang model. This theory has been worked on and modified by many cosmologists since its introduction.
The Bubble Universe / Andre Linde's Self Creating Universe
These are the theories discussed in class. The bubble universe concept involves creation of universes from the quantum foam of a "parent universe." On very small scales, the foam is frothing due to energy fluctuations. These fluctuations may create tiny bubbles and wormholes. If the energy fluctuation is not very large, a tiny bubble universe may form, experience some expansion like an inflating balloon, and then contract and disappear from existence. However, if the energy fluctuation is greater than a particular critical value, a tiny bubble universe forms from the parent universe, experiences long-term expansion, and allows matter and large-scale galactic structures to form.
The "self-creating" in Andre Linde's self-creating universe theory stems from the concept that each bubble or inflationary universe will sprout other bubble universes, which in turn, sprout more bubble universes. The universe we live in has a set of physical constants that seem tailor-made for the evolution of living things.
exerpted from: http://web.uvic.ca/~jtwong/newtheories.htm
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