God in Super Cosmos?
From: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti_at_pacbell.net)
Date: 06/12/04
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Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 20:54:50 GMT
On Jun 12, 2004, at 1:34 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:
There are similarities between the idea of eternal inflation and a
self-reproducing universe and the version of the Steady State hypothesis
developed in England by Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar, with their
C-field playing the part of the scalar field that drives inflation. As
Hoyle wryly pointed out at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society
in London in December 1994, the relevant equations in inflation theory
are exactly the same as in his version of the Steady State idea, but
with the letter "C" replaced by the Greek "Ø". "This," said Hoyle
(tongue firmly in cheek) "makes all the difference in the world". John
Gribbon
Is the Hoyle-Narlikar C-field my <0|e+e-|0> ?
On Jun 12, 2004, at 11:40 AM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:
To see the error in:
On Jun 9, 2004, at 4:50 PM, michael ibison wrote:
Jack
Even though you may not agree with its disposition, I'd appreciate it if you
were to post the Cosmological Smugness link
http://www.fisica.ufmg.br/~dsoares/ncgc/ncgc.htm
to your list.
Thanks
Michael
Dan et-al start here http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/
selected excerpts:
"The reason why something like inflation was needed in cosmology was
highlighted by discussions of two key problems in the 1970s. The first
of these is the horizon problem -- the puzzle that the Universe looks
the same on opposite sides of the sky (opposite horizons) even though
there has not been time since the Big Bang for light (or anything else)
to travel across the Universe and back. So how do the opposite horizons
'know' how to keep in step with each other? The second puzzle is called
the flatness problem This is the puzzle that the spacetime of the
Universe is very nearly flat, which means that the Universe sits just
on the dividing line between eternal expansion and eventual re-collapse.
Inflation became established as the standard model of the very early
Universe in the 1980s. It achieved this success not only because it
resolves many puzzles about the nature of the Universe, but because it
did so using the grand unified theories (GUTs) and understanding of
quantum theory developed by particle physicists completely
independently of any cosmological studies. These theories of the
particle world had been developed with no thought that they might be
applied in cosmology (they were in no sense "designed" to tackle all
the problems they turned out to solve), and their success in this area
suggested to many people that they must be telling us something of
fundamental importance about the Universe.
On that picture, the first puzzle is how anything that dense could ever
expand -- it would have an enormously strong gravitational field,
turning it into a black hole and snuffing it out of existence (back
into the singularity) as soon as it was born. But it turns out that
inflation can prevent this happening, while quantum physics allows the
entire Universe to appear, in this supercompact form, out of nothing at
all, as a cosmic free lunch. The idea that the Universe may have
appeared out of nothing at all, and contains zero energy overall, was
developed by Edward Tryon, of the City University in New York, who
suggested in the 1970s, that it might have appeared out of nothing as a
so-called vacuum fluctuation, allowed by quantum theory.
Quantum uncertainty allows the temporary creation of bubbles of
energy, or pairs of particles (such as electron-positron pairs) out of
nothing, provided that they disappear in a short time. The less energy
is involved, the longer the bubble can exist. Curiously, the energy in
a gravitational field is negative, while the energy locked up in matter
is positive. If the Universe is exactly flat , then as Tryon pointed
out the two numbers cancel out, and the overall energy of the Universe
is precisely zero. In that case, the quantum rules allow it to last
forever. If you find this mind-blowing, you are in good company. George
Gamow told in his book My World Line (Viking, New York, reprinted
1970) how he was having a conversation with Albert Einstein while
walking through Princeton in the 1940s. Gamow casually mentioned that
one of his colleagues had pointed out to him that according to
Einstein's equations a star could be created out of nothing at all,
because its negative gravitational energy precisely cancels out its
positive mass energy. 'Einstein stopped in his tracks," says Gamow,
"and, since we were crossing a street, several cars had to stop to
avoid running us down'.
The reason why the GUTs created such a sensation when they were applied
to cosmology is that they predict the existence of exactly the right
kind of mechanisms to do this trick. They are called scalar fields, and
they are associated with the splitting apart of the original grand
unified force into the fundamental forces we know today, as the
Universe began to expand and cool."
These scalar fields are vacuum coherence fields of different kinds.
"Unfortunately, if a quantum bubble (about as big as the Planck length)
containing all the mass-energy of the Universe (or even a star) did
appear out of nothing at all, its intense gravitational field would
(unless something else intervened) snuff it out of existence
immediately, crushing it into a singularity. So the free lunch Universe
seemed at first like an irrelevant speculation -- but, as with the
problems involving the extreme flatness of spacetime, and its
appearance of extreme homogeneity and isotropy (most clearly indicated
by the uniformity of the background radiation), the development of
the inflationary scenario showed how to remove this difficulty and
allow such a quantum fluctuation to expand exponentially up to
macroscopic size before gravity could crush it out of existence.. All
of these problems would be resolved if something gave the Universe a
violent outward push (in effect, acting like antigravity) when it was
still about a Planck length in size. "
This is the exotic vacuum w = -1 zero point "dark energy" /\zpf > 0 of
negative pressure that is the "exotic matter" Kip Thorne needed to make
a Star Gate and Alcubierre needed to make a zero g-force warp drive with
no time dilation. Hermann Bondi called dark energy "negative matter"
back in ancient times. Indeed this same zero point energy /\zpf field
prevents our solar system from escaping our galaxy into inter-galactic
space and it also prevents a single bare electron, as a
spatially-extended shell of electric charge ~ 10^-13 cm across, from
exploding. As Above, So Below. The electron shrinks to ~ 10^-17 cm when
hit hard with energy in scattering from the enormous space warp from its
zero point energy induced strong short-ranged Sakharov-Salam gravity.
Ditto for quarks inside the hadron bags.
"The next step forward came with the realization that there need not be
anything special about the Planck- sized region of spacetime that
expanded to become our Universe. If that was part of some larger region
of spacetime in which all kinds of scalar fields were at work, then
only the regions in which those fields produced inflation could lead to
the emergence of a large universe like our own. Linde called this
"chaotic inflation", because the scalar fields can have any value at
different places in the early super-universe; it is the standard
version of inflation today, and can be regarded as an example of the
kind of reasoning associated with the anthropic principle"
Gribbon writing before WMAP confirmed COBE with much higher precison:
"observations of the background radiation by COBE showed exactly the
pattern of tiny irregularities that the inflationary scenario predicts.
One of the first worries about the idea of inflation (long ago in 1981)
was that it might be too good to be true. In particular, if the process
was so efficient at smoothing out the Universe, how could
irregularities as large as galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on
ever have arisen? But when the researchers looked more closely at the
equations they realised that quantum fluctuations should still have
been producing tiny ripples in the structure of the Universe even when
our Universe was only something like 10(exp-25) of a centimetre across
-- a hundred million times bigger than the Planck length.
The theory said that inflation should have left behind an expanded
version of these fluctuations, in the form of irregularities in the
distribution of matter and energy in the Universe. These density
perturbations would have left an imprint on the background radiation at
the time matter and radiation decoupled (about 300,000 years after the
Big Bang), producing exactly the kind of nonuniformity in the
background radiation that has now been seen, initially by COBE and
later by other instruments. After decoupling, the density fluctuations
grew to become the large scale structure of the Universe revealed
today by the distribution of galaxies. This means that the COBE
observations are actually giving us information about what was
happening in the Universe when it was less than 10^-20 of a second old.
No other theory can explain both why the Universe is so uniform
overall, and yet contains exactly the kind of "ripples" represented by
the distribution of galaxies through space and by the variations in the
background radiation. This does not prove that the inflationary
scenario is correct, but it is worth remembering that had COBE found a
different pattern of fluctuations (or no fluctuations at all) that would
have proved the inflationary scenario wrong. In the best scientific
tradition, the theory made a major and unambiguous prediction which did
"come true". Inflation also predicts that the primordial perturbations
may have left a trace in the form of gravitational radiation with
particular characteristics, and it is hoped that detectors sensitive
enough to identify this characteristic radiation may be developed within
the next ten or twenty years.
One of the reasons why theorists came up with the idea of inflation
in the first place was precisely to get rid of magnetic monopoles --
strange particles carrying isolated north or south magnetic fields,
predicted by many Grand Unified Theories of physics but never found in
nature. Standard models of inflation solve the "monopole problem" by
arguing that the seed from which our entire visible Universe grew was a
quantum fluctuation so small that it only contained one monopole. That
monopole is still out there, somewhere in the Universe, but it is
highly unlikely that it will ever pass our way.
But Linde has discovered that, according to theory, the conditions that
create inflation persist inside a magnetic monopole even after
inflation has halted in the Universe at large. Such a monopole would
look like a magnetically charged black hole, connecting our Universe
through a wormhole in spacetime to another region of inflating
spacetime. Within this region of inflation, quantum processes can
produce monopole-antimonopole pairs, which then separate exponentially
rapidly as a result of the inflation. Inflation then stops, leaving an
expanding Universe rather like our own which may contain one or two
monopoles, within each of which there are more regions of inflating
spacetime.
The result is a never-ending fractal structure, with inflating
universes embedded inside each other and connected through the magnetic
monopole wormholes. Our Universe may be inside a monopole which is
inside another universe which is inside another monopole, and so on
indefinitely. What Linde calls "the continuous creation of
exponentially expanding space" means that "monopoles by themselves can
solve the monopole problem". Although it seems bizarre, the idea is, he
stresses, "so simple that it certainly deserves further investigation".
One World or Many?
"The conventional version of inflation says that our entire visible
Universe is just one of many bubbles of inflation, each doing their own
thing somewhere out in an eternal sea of chaotic inflation, but that
the process of rapid expansion forces spacetime in all the bubbles to
be flat. A useful analogy is with the bubbles that form in a bottle of
fizzy cola when the top is opened. But that suggestion, along with
other cherished cosmological beliefs, has now been challenged by Linde,
working with his son Dmitri Linde (of CalTech) and Arthur Mezhlumian
(also of Stanford)."
On Jun 12, 2004, at 10:09 AM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:
On Jun 12, 2004, at 9:01 AM, Dan Smith wrote:
The Infinite Worlds Hypothesis is the biggest blunder of science.
The infinity of worlds model has SOME, but admittedly, not conclusive as
yet, observational support. Indeed, the very existence of The Visitors
suggests that they may well come from Universes Next Door in hyperspace.
Postulating an Infinity of Worlds can explain anything, and so it explains
nothing.
It is NOT a mere postulate. You are mistaken. You have not understood
Max Tegmark's web site.
Start here
http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/
also
http://physics.stanford.edu/linde/
read Max Tegmark who disagrees with all this. WAP suffices. Our
universe is not alone.
http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/multiverse1.html
The new cosmology data tends to confirm this.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302495
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