Posted on 03/23/2006 4:37:32 PM PST by Brilliant
If our universe was purposefully created — perhaps by a deity or an advanced civilization in another universe — could the Creator have left a calling card? The idea is not as crazy as it seems. Renowned cosmologists such as Andre Linde (Stanford University) and Alan Guth (MIT) have speculated that an advanced civilization could, in principle, cook up a new universe in a lab by concentrating huge quantities of energy into a tiny volume of space. And even the avowed agnostic Carl Sagan concocted a story at the very end of his sci-fi novel Contact of how scientists discover a message from the Creator embedded deep inside the number pi.
In a paper posted on astro-ph, physicists Stephen Hsu (University of Oregon) and Anthony Zee (University of California, Santa Barbara) come up with an alternative idea: astronomers can look for a message from the Creator in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the echo of the Big Bang.
"Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message," write the authors.
The trick, say Hsu and Zee, is for the Creator to fine-tune the inflaton field — the field responsible for inflating the early universe — to encode a binary message in the subtle hot and cold spots of the CMB. As the authors note, the CMB is a "giant billboard on the sky" visible to all civilizations in all galaxies. Because different regions of the universe are so far apart that they are not causally connected, only a cosmos Creator could place a message in the CMB that all civilizations could detect.
Given the limited number of distinct regions of the sky of any fixed size, Hsu and Zee calculate that the message could include up to 100,000 bits of information. Such a message might, for example, reveal fundamental laws of physics. While current experiments like NASA's WMAP satellite do not have sufficient angular resolution or sensitivity to detect the extremely small-scale temperature fluctuations that would encode the message, future instruments might be capable of doing so. The authors urge that scientists analyze subsequent CMB data for possible patterns. "This may be even more fun than SETI," they conclude (SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
In another paper posted on astro-ph, Douglas Scott and James P. Zibin (University of British Columbia, Canada) counter that Hsu and Zee overestimate the amount of information that can be encoded in the CMB.
Hsu responds, "Both groups agree that one can encode a universal message in the CMB. But we disagree as to its maximal information content."
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is leftover radiation from the Big Bang redshifted (stretched) by the universe's expansion into the microwave region of the spectrum. In this image NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) records minuscule temperature fluctuations in the CMB as different colors. In principle, an advanced civilization could create a universe and encode information in the CMB that would let civilizations in the offspring universe know that their universe had been purposefully created. NASA / WMAP Science Team.
Makes sense if this Creator didn't have any idea who was going to be watching, if anybody, so spreads it all over the place.
That was the Next Generation ep ("The Chase") where they found that the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians and humans all had their primordial soups seeded by the same advanced civilization 4Bn years ago.
Cyclical evolution. New agey.
If it wasn't coming from Stanford and MIT....
TG,
If I am not mistaken, you have suggested a theory like this, so I am pinging you to this thread.
It would certainly settle the question of religion if it turned out God sent us a space email from the beginning of time. We know we're in trouble if the message is formatted for OSX :-p
Thus, it's not that God isn't readily seen. It's whether one really wants to see Him.
it was the clouds in the third panel that look like hooters that did it.
Yes, if you want on the ping list you have to insult some Creationists and make your bones.
It's turtles. All the way down.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is leftover radiation from the Big Bang redshifted (stretched) by the universe's expansion into the microwave region of the spectrum.
Given my admittedly limited understanding of cosmology I may not be able to understand this concept completely.
However I will have to say that this theory has some problems at least from my level of understanding.
Space is from a general understanding 3 dimensional (some theories say space has 16 or more dimensions). A binary code would under any circumstances I can envision would be in two dimensions.
Due to the continuous expansion of the universe any message written in the CMB would have a limited lifespan of readability.
Any message written in the CMB would appear differently from different points in the cosmos and so would have to be written with a particular planet and a particular point in the history of the universe in mind from the beginning.
The previous advanced civilization.
And so on...which gets evolutionarily less evolved in each previous advanced civilization .
Thus aka a fibonacci sequence which eventually reduces down to pi and voila, the message will appear!!!! ;)
I think the original ripples are still visible.
Any message written in the CMB would appear differently from different points in the cosmos and so would have to be written with a particular planet and a particular point in the history of the universe in mind from the beginning.
All observers should see the same thing, regardless of their location. That's the nature of the CMB.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I am will explain it better.
that should be easy enough to accomplish, as some creationists certainlty seem to consider any FReeper's failure to fanatically espouse biblical inerrancy to be gravely insulting.
Why binary?
Poor little hootiebird, run while it's still time
GMTA. That's what I was going to say!
What are you mostly? Neo-Thomist? Pragmatist? Positivist? Some other-ist?
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