Posted on 09/09/2001 1:05:44 PM PDT by telos
A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists. Cosmology - the study of the origins and future of our universe - became popular in the early 20th century for physicists who wanted to think the unthinkable about creation. Einstein's theory of relativity, which describes how gravity controls the behaviour of our universe, was one of cosmology's greatest triumphs. But Einstein said there was an even deeper issue, which he described as whether God had any choice. In other words, could the laws that governed the way our universe formed after the big bang have worked any differently? He concluded that they could not. In the past 40 years, however, the increasing power of astronomical instruments has turned cosmology from a theoretical science into a practical one and forced scientists to re-examine Einstein's conclusions. Among the most striking claims is that our universe only exists because of a fine balance between several crucial factors. One is the rate at which nuclear fusion releases energy in stars such as the sun by squashing hydrogen atoms into helium and then other elements. Astronomers have found that exactly 0.7% of the mass of the hydrogen is converted into starlight and that if this figure had been just a fraction different then carbon and other elements essential to life could never have formed. Another puzzle is the so-called "smoothness" of our universe, by which astronomers mean the distribution of matter and radiation. In theory, the big bang could have produced a universe where all the matter clumped together into a few black holes, or another in which it was spread out evenly, forming nothing but a thin vapour. "It could be that the laws that govern our universe are unchangeable but it is a remarkable coincidence that these laws are also exactly what is needed to produce life," said Rees. "It seems too good to be true." What he, Hawking and others such as Neil Turok, professor of maths and physics at Cambridge, are now looking at is the idea that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, with different laws of nature operating in each. Some universes would have all their matter clumped together into a few huge black holes while others would be nothing more than a thin uniform freezing gas. However, Hawking and his colleagues increasingly disagree over how this "multiverse" could work. At the conference Hawking dismissed the idea of a series of big bangs on the grounds that it extended into the infinite past and so could never have a beginning.
No, I don't see how there would be.
Stay Safe....
Perception of the speed of light in a vacuum does not change with motion of the observer. That is, if the observer is moving at nearly the speed of light, he will not see the oscillations of the light wave traveling alongside him as nearly frozen. The frequency or the wavelength of the oscillation will change, but not the perceived speed.
I now hear that it is 10 billion years old.
Wow, to think I have lived 8 billion years.
I wonder how old it will be by the time I kick the bucket.
No reason why not except we are made out of particles that are linked to photons, electrical and magnetic fields. If we can disconnect from that linkage somehow . . .
Glad you you didn't 'see' proctologist!;-)
Where does the energy go from photons that are redshifted by the expanding Universe?
There's a great deal of disconnect going on around here. Some people are very good at it.
It doesn't go anywhere. It's a Doppler shift. If you were comoving with the distant galaxy right now, you'd see the photons at exactly the frequency that the source sent them. If you were comoving with the Milky Way back when the photons were emitted, and were close to the source, you would see them as redshifted as we see them today. The photons haven't changed at all; it just that frequency depends on point-of-view.
That is not a physically tenable position. There have been entire threads on FR debunking that hypothesis.
Anyhow, physics shows we live in a closed system and any thought to the contrary is alot of vain imagination.
It seems to me that that assertion redounds more to my position than to yours. I do not assume any "outside" to the universe. By introducing a tinkering creator, you have to.
What do you mean by maniplative? I would love details. I have to friends who literally work with/for Berry(and either Brian Schimmer or Matthew Fox.) What do you know about Berry? My buddy gave my a book co-authored by Berry and one of the other two, and I couldn't get past the first few pages b/c it was so insipid. I am a bit of a physics buff (actually took several graduate level quantum and relativity classes whild I was persuing an engineering degree, and read a bit to this day), but my friends wouldn't undestand the implications of something like Bell's Inequality if it slapped them in the face...
Does we actually understand why the red shift exists? I remember talking to some physics grad students (I was a lowly math/physics undergraduate at the time) who said that no one really understood why there was a red shift, as opposed to the Doppler effect which clearly exists because there is a medium in which the waves are being produced, and against which the source moves. There is no medium for light, ie. no ether if you believe Michelson/Morley.
Take a tour of Frenchman's Flat sometime. Or Eniwetok.
Probably what you are thinking of is the question of whether the red shift observed in astronomical objects is due to motion of the objects away from us or some other cause, and whether one can reliably say that a quasar with a red shift X is really a distance Y away, as calculated from hypothesis regarding the origin of the cosmological red shift, and whether one can reliably infer that the universe is expanding at such and such a rate, is such and such an age, etc. On this it is fair to say there is considerable consensus, but some room for challenge.
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