Severian

I seriously doubt it is a black hole. It is much more likely just to be a quark-gluon plasma. If it were a black hole it would imply that the Planck energy (the energy at which gravity becomes strong) is much much lower than we thought. There are theories around nowadays which have extra dimensions in them which are not very curled up like they are in string theory. If that were the case, gravity could be diluted by spreading itself out in these extra dimensions, so the true Planck scale could be just around the corner. However, Rhic is colliding copper atoms together at about 130GeV, so to make a black hole at all would need the Planck mass to be <130GeV. I am fairly sure that we would have seen something at LEP if this were the case, which probed up to about 208GeV. Also, the theories which have low Planck scales like this are rather contrived and unnatural. Anyway, as previously posted, these are not 'real' black holes. It is just sensationalism run rampamt for the press to suggest that they are.

An infinite universe can still have size and age, because there are charateristic sizes inherent with the metric.

The problem is, it doesn't matter what mechanism you come up with it will be untestable becasue all observations by you require you to interact with the system. So you can never show what it is which is collapsing the wavefunction. You can make some statements though, since we see interference effects for electrons in slit experiments we know that the electron travelled a macroscopic distance without its wavefunction being collaped. One viewpoint is that it is not us who is collapsing the wavefunction, but any very complicated system. The interaction of the electron with a large ensemble of particles (eg. a measuring device such as a lens, an eye or a colorimeter) collapses the wavefunction. This is impossible to test though (until we have an observer who is a couple of particles only...)

He is winding you up.

It doesn't make any difference. QED has something called crossing symmetry, which means that I can move a particle from the initial state into the final state (as an anti-particle) without changing the matrix elements. So probabilities associated with two electrons exchanging a photon are the same as those associated with an electron-positron annihilation to a photon together with the subsequent decay to electron-positron again. In other words a photon exchanged between two electrons [math]e^- e^- \to (e^- \gamma) e^- \to e^- (\gamma e^-) \to e^- e^-[/math] (if you see what I mean) need not be on-shell, and in exactly the same way as the decay processes it will generally pick a momentum-squared in line with how long it lived. This is slightly confusing because its off-shellness is the same for the entire flight but how does it know the other electron is going to be there to absorb it? This is the same non-locallity phenomenon as collapsing the wavefunction in QM. With the decay it is not a conceptual problem because one simply imagines that the photon 'picks' a virtuality and then when its time is up (with Heisenberg knocking on the door) it must decay and so (being a well behaved photon) does. This nice conceptual picture is really not right though. In QFT what actually happens is that the photon picks all possible virtualities and only the one which works survives (in fact there is an integration over the virtuality in the equations). Of course, they can be very nearly on-shell. The most on-shell photons we can observe are those coming from the 'surface of last scattering' which is the point just after the big bang when the universe first became transparent to photons. So the photons have been travelling for 14 billion years. Since that is a pretty long life-time they will be very very close to on-shell, but still not exactly....

OK, I am familiar with these 'ekpyrotic' models, and they are quite a nice idea. My only objection to this model would be that the shape of the potential is rather unmotivated apart from the desire to explain cosmological data. You need to constrain the slope of the curve in a particular region (region 'a' I think it is usually called) to make the universe flat and isotropic. Why the potential has this shape is unexplained. To a certain extent this is an unfair comment since the inflation potential is also unmoticated as yet (although there are candidate models). (Incidentaly I met Neil Turok in Cambridge recently and he seems a very smart guy.) However, the use of the term 'Big Crunch' is not really very accurate since the Ekpyrotic model has no Big Crunch in the traditional sense. It is an oscillitory model, so the contraction is stopped before a Big Crunch can happen.

I feel I should point out that in quantum mechanics one can only measure differences in energy, not absolute values. So zero-point energy in the sense of the harmonic oscillator doesn't really mean much. However, GR does give us a distinction since this energy 'should' curve space-time. Since we don't have a quantum theory of gravity this inconsistancey is as yet unresolved. As for inertia, do you mean inertial mass? Inertial mass is explained using the vacuum by the (as yet unverified) Higgs mechanism. The key here is that vacuum is not the usual shape and the minimum energy configuraton (so the ground state) has a non-zero field configuration. This means that everywhere in the universe there will be fields which are non-zero and couple to ordinary matter (they have isospin) and this is what provides the mass (basically this extra non-zero field provides a route for left handed particles and right handed particles to mix with one another). The Higgs mechanism is explained in a very non-scientific hand wavy way here: http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/epp/higgs.html

Reference please?

From your initial post: So why post here in the first place if you are not willing to engage ina scientific discussion? Of course! Usually someone else does it for me, but I would be willing to refute any other theories which contradict experimental evidence. That is what science is all about! Please do! I would be very happy to see evidence which disproves the current cosmological model! The people working on WMAP are well qualified and describe their analysis in scientific papers well enough that my intervention is unnecessary. I trust them to have done a good job. I am not going to re-examine the LEP data either but I will still believe their number for the Z mass. It would take me years to re-examine this sort of data (and I am not paid to do that anyway). Its what I do for a living. I am a particle physicist.

I got mine in 3 years.

Yes it is. If you advocate a theory it is up to you to explain any data which contradicts your theory. In this case, your Big Crunch hypothesis does not explain why Omega is so close to one. The flat hypothesis does (inflation). Clearly the probability of a 'come back' is not 0, but it is very small indeed. I would not bet any money on a Big Crunch. We have sufficient data and yes I am sufficiently qualified to analyze that data (although I haven't in detail) such that I can state categorically that the data is conclusive in saying that the Big Crunch (in the sense that you mean) is a very unlikely hypothesis. (I am a little bit cagey here since even Omega=1.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 would eventually lead to a big crunch, but that would not be acceptable in the theory which you are advocating because it would be fine-tuned.)

You are correct to a certain extent. Once can never prove that that the density is exactly 1 and any value of Omega>1 would eventually lead to a Big Crunch. Nut WMAP's number is: [math]\Omega_{tot} = 1.0 \pm 0.02 [/math] This looks pretty conclusively 1 to me. If it is not exactly 1, it is up to you to explain why it isn't 1 but is so damn close to it. Since this is a fine-tuning problem, the Big Crunch is on shaky ground...

Observations of very distant supernovae tell us that the universe is actually accelerating away from us. This is pretty hard to explain since one usually expects mass in the universe to pull things together using gravity and thus any extra mass should be slowing down the expansion - not speeding it up. What you need is something which provides negative pressure. This is ecatly what Einstein's cosmological constant did - it pushes the universe outwards to stop it collapsing. Einstein said afterwards that this was has biggest mistake since a zero cosmological constant naturally leads one to postulate the Big Bang, but t is looking like it wasn't a mistake after all.... Yes, it is (almost) the same thing. However, vacuum energy gives the wrong sign and is far too large to be dark energy (by something like 120 orders of magnitude!).

Dark Matter and Dark energy are quite distinct. They are both needed to explain why the universe appears flat. The amount of mass and energy (density) in the universe would leave the universe very open, but other observatons indicate that it is flat. See http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/mr_content.html for more detail. The data seems to indicate that Dark Matter is some type of particle, and since we haven't seen it yet it must be massive and weakly interacting. These are known as WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). One of the prime candidates is a 'neutralino' in models of supersymmetry. Basically the neutralino is weakly interacting and is massive but is also stable so it hangs around in the galaxy for a long time. This extra mass just hasn't been observed yet, but is there and provides enough mass to make up the shortfall. Dark Energy is even weirder since it cannot be attributed to a particle. One possibility is that there is some sort or energy which is inherent to space-time itself (basically Einsteins cosmological constant). This is still not well understood.

In a way it is completely the other way round. Since the propogation of a particle is inversely proportional to the square of [math]E^2-p^2-m^2[/math] an on-shell particle has an infinite life-time (since [math]E^2-p^2-m^2=0[/math]). Therefore it is actually impossible to observe a 'real' on-shell particle because in observing it you end its life. Any particle which we observe has a finite lifetime and is therefore 'virtual'. If you are unwilling to accept this, you still must accept that we have indirectly observed virtual particles in processes such as [math]e^+e^- \to Z^* \to \mu^+ \mu^-[/math]. This evidence is as direct as the evidence for quarks...

If they are the same particle type, i.e have the same mass, then in your case the collision will be stationary in the lab frame (ie. to a scientist standing watching). Notice that colliders are not always like that: the LHC for example will be colliding gluons whose cntre-of-mass frame will not be stationary (because the gluons have differnet energies).

The e+ and e- both have positive mass. It is not the mass which is important, but the energy. In the vacuum just outside the black hole the e+ and e- are created by 'borrowing' energy from the Heisenberrg Uncertainty Principle. Normally, they would have to annihilate again to give back the energy before the loan time is up. If one of them goes into the black hole, it cannot get back to the other (which has in the meantime absconded) then the black hole will have to pay the debt by giving up some of its energy. Since the energy it has to pay back is the mass of the positron and the electron, but it has only gained the mass of one of them back (by absorbing it) it loses energy (and thus mass).

I agree

I think you are being far to specific. the axioms of physics are much simpler, and have nothing to do with the actual observations themselves (ie. nothing to do with the theory we find). They are things like: Any physical motion or interaction in the universe can be explained by a finite number of fundamental laws. All experiments are repeatable. etc. The things which you are stating as axioms should come out of the above by applying the knowledge from the experiments themselves.

What do you want to know?

1. A finite quantum description of gravity. 2. A unification of the 3 non-gravity forces into one Yang-Mills theory. 3. A unification of 2 with gravity (supergravity?) 4. A solution to the hierarchy problem. 5. A solution to the baryon asymmetry problem. 6. Explain why masses have the values they have (including neutrinos). 7. A mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. 8. An explanation of why there are 3 generations. 9. A solution to the strong CP problem. 10. Don't screw up anything which the Standard Model already correctly predicts. I am sure there are more but these are the most important...

Energy is a frame dependent concept - it changes from frame to frame. But in any given frame one can measure the energy of most particles to reasonable precision. This has been done in high energy physics experiments for decades.