luc

The article is here for free http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=1356B82B-E7F2-99DF-30CA562C33C4F03C&pageNumber=1&catID=2 Interesting, I thought that the Milky way, along with the rest of the Local group would end up absorbed by the Virgo cluster, though the article says that due to the effect of Dark Energy, that won't happen.

Nevr heard about that constraint, as quantum states of some particles have yet been teleported, and string are still a hypothesis.

Voyager 1 recently crossed the Termination shock, and is currently in a zone called the heliosheath. Its next goal is to cross the heliopause (it will cross it in about 10 years), and then it will go on forever gosh knows where. A true adventurer

I'd be happy if some expert could estimate the volume of a closed Universe (we all agree that a closed universe has a finite volume). I've spent the last months trying to find this information, to no avail. The possibility of a closed and finite Universe is exciting, I wonder if we could ever find a way to map it in its totality. (I mean, create a map containing the localization of each galaxy in the whole Universe). If the expansion continues its accelerated pace this would be impossible, but if the Universe starts to contract, then maybe...

According to this page is a graduate student at California-Berkeley http://astron.berkeley.edu/people.html Is the man appearing in the article that bascule posted. He thinks that gravitational lensing caused by a gigantic concentration of mass (the example offered is the Shapley supercluster), can explain the coincidences in the disposition of the multipoles. It would save the face of the Lambda-CDM model, that it seems to be attacked by Magueijo, that suspects that the data may indicate a universe that has a preferred direction

I find utterly curious that the dipole should be at a right angle with the axis of evil. Then again, I'm no expert in gravitational lensing, so maybe Chris Vale is correct

i find the crystal model fascinating, but it seems that it will be inaccurate, given that recently it was found that the Perseus arm is twice as close as was previously believed. but I could be wrong, becuase I don't know when the artwork was finished Nonetheles, the model is surely a magnificent gift for this christmas

What's the primordial atom? It reminds me to Lemaitre's "Cosmic egg". It's the thing that you had in mind? Do remember that in Big Bang theory, atoms were not created until 380000 years after Big Bang, during an epoch called "recombination"

quintessence is the other major candidate for dark energy. It's possible that the energy density of dark energy is not constant, but shows time dependence. Then the cosmological constant wouldn't be appropriate, because its energy density is constant. Quintessence is an hypothetical scalar field proposed by Steinhardt, and has an energy density that is not constant. There's an article in wikipedia about quintessence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_%28physics%29

That's right. Indeed recent observations seem to reinforce the idea that Dark energy is the Cosmological constant. In that case Einstein equations should add a term involving the Cosmological constant (that term was rejected by Einstein, after having introduced it himself) I have a question: I know the form of the Einstein equations if dark energy turns out to be the Cosmological constant, but what's the form of the equations if it turns out to be, say, quintessence?

I'm thinking about the possible messages that "God" could have written in the CMB One obvious would be: "The answer is 42" Other possibles: -Sorry for the inconvenience -Hey, how are you doing? -I want to have a conversation with you (that would let us bewildered because we couldn't know how to answer!) -Be good -I'm watching you etc. actually, if a creator exists, can't be so mischievous to scare the hell out of us with a cosmic message. Leaving aside the fact that I don't believe in any creator

Blimey! This is the same Anton Zee that wrote my appreciated book "Quantum Field theory in a Nutshell". I think that is time to eat that book

There're a lot of good candidates, but if a cosmologist win, I will be happy. Maybe Alan Guth?

bump