Posted on 02/26/2015 11:50:10 AM PST by Mount Athos
Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with.
"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle's; one without a beginning or end.
They found that when using Bohm's work to make quantum corrections to Raychaudhuri's equation on the formation of singularities, they described a universe that was once much smaller, but never had the infinite density currently postulated.
Das and Ali propose that the universe is filled with a quantum fluid made up of gravitons, particles that probably have no mass themselves but transmit gravity the way photons carry electromagnetism. The follow-up paper suggests that in the early universe these gravitons would have formed a Bose-Einstein condensate, a collection of particles that display quantum phenomena at the macroscopic scale. Moreover, the paper argues that this condensate could cause the universe's expansion to accelerate, and so explain dark energy, and might one day be the only surviving component of the universe.
Although Das and Ali's vision appears to resolve a number of problems with the dominant cosmological models, it still requires extensive elaboration to test whether it has even larger problems of its own.
(Excerpt) Read more at iflscience.com ...
Only before the inflationary period of the early universe.
“The more we know, the more realize that we don’t know.”
I have a friend with a doctoral in physics. He told me once that theories should be prefaced with the statement “At our present level of ignorance we assume that.....”
“[working backwards,] you must inevitably get to a time when no physical laws existed.”
Not necessarily. The laws may exist, the issue is when there is nothing for those laws to apply to. The law of gravity still exists, even if there is no mass for it to act on.
Dang! I was hoping there WAS a Big Bang. It’s the only thing that explains why I’ve had ringing in my ears my entire life.
It’s getting to be a joke now. Why don’t they admit they really don’t know.
That’s pretty funny thinking that there was only one big bang. In the space of infinity there could be an infinite number of big bangs. I figure god got the franchise rights to our bang, but how many more bangs have happened and will happen?
Because you got the music in you???
You can’t use “something” to work back to a time when there was “nothing”. An empty universe with physical laws isn’t empty at all.
I’m all for speculation as necessary to find new paths to explore unto a better understanding of reality. I’ve got plenty of my own nutcase-level speculations.
What’s irritating is those who take a speculation and immediately use it to assault a well-established theory (nigh unto fact) - not because they want to understand reality, but because it challenges their preconceived notion thereof.
Information, after all, is a thing.
“In the beginning, there was the Word. . . “
If gravity didn't exist then how could there be a law 'governing' it? I mean, mass has gravity. It's not an outside magical force that acts upon mass. No mass, no gravity.
Are you sure?
Yet none of these “scientist” understand everything in their own backyards other than at a very superficial level...
My wife loves that show. I only watch it to get a look at Penny and Bernadette.
The more I watch what the cosmologists are doing, the more I believe they’ve missed something fundamental.
Dark matter? Dark energy? That mysterious inflation?
It’s all reasonable suppositions, based on their initial assumptions. But are their initial assumptions correct?
Here’s a thought - the cosmologists pretty much ignore everything but mass and gravity, under the assumption that electromagnetic forces cancel each other out, on the large scale. But do they?
We’ve invented dark matter because the gravity generated by the mass that we can see does not generate sufficient force to create the drive the movement that we see. Is it possible that rather than there being matter that we can’t see, that there are forces that we’re ignoring?
Ping
Which came first... the mass or the gravity?
Why shouldn’t laws exist absent something on which to apply them?
Because at least Schroedinger had a box. Even if you didn’t believe there was a cat inside.
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