Arch2008

Or so they say... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/08/hadroncollider108.xml And the Earth was not swallowed into a mini black hole! http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

Thanks for the deep insights into the scientific process, Martin. Your posts don't leave me much to dislike, either.

(Thanks Martin for the link, which I have added to my "favorites") As a casual observer, it seems that prior to the scientific method being rigidly enforced to prove something, the methods used for research seem more appropriate to a Las Vegas racetrack (and they’re off!). For the Manhattan Project, the General in charge didn’t let the scientists critique each other. Each group had a specific mission and worked alone directly toward that goal. I know that this is not a good general (no pun intended) plan for research, but a Free Market gives us what we want, not necessarily what we need. If a hundred great minds get funding to work on a super spoon theory, is anyone working on forks? Again, whatever method is used, someone chooses what we get to know. I hope that they choose well.

On a more general level, what do we do with research into theories that cannot be proved…yet? I am told that it took more than twenty years to conceive, design, fund and construct the LHC. What if it takes a century for technology to come up with the hardware to earn M theory its surname? Should we just shelve discoveries until we can prove them? Envy is not scientific, but scientists with projects that are not funded are envious of scientists whose projects are. Ridicule for new theories is nothing new in science, but should a lack of immediate progress be the deciding factor in funding further research? Scientists are still human and ideas that develop via a network fraught with human frailty could be as wrong as anything else. What if Einstein had been persuaded by a well meaning peer to forget about relativity? Who should decide which discoveries become fact and why? In World War One, a politician remarked that”War is too important to be left to the generals.” Perhaps, theoretical research is too important to be left to the scientists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Even if something else initiated the Big Bang, the Big Bang created everything in the universe. Besides, my point is, when does recent research become what the rest of us know?

Since we say that the Big Bang event created “the universe”, then any references to the universe would already have a meaning. Something not created by the Big Bang, would then be “outside this universe”. That said, can we prove that there is anything outside this universe? If we cannot interact in any way with what’s outside, then we will never have a scientific definition, because the statement isn't falsifiable. As I have already mentioned, WMAP may give an answer to this question. However, this also presents a challenge if it doesn’t. Let’s say that we discover something controversial. To prove it requires an accelerator the diameter of the solar system. Assuming that Congress won’t fund our Totally Freaking Large Hadron Collider right away, what do we do in the mean time? Should we just ignore the discovery, or refuse to discuss it or even think about it? Maybe it has interesting applications to other branches of science. Should we only concern ourselves with the “easy science” and ignore anything else? Everything that we know today was once speculation. What should we do with current speculation until it gets to be falsifiable?

M theorists explore an 11 dimensional hyperspace where membranes of energy float. The ‘branes’ move as a result of the tension that causes strings to vibrate. This tension causes ripples as a result of angular momentum. A brane and an anti-brane are attracted to each other the way particle-antiparticle pairs are. As they move toward each other, potential energy is created. When the ripples connect between the brane-antibrane pair, they “bang” and the potential energy gets translated into inflation in a new universe. The ripples can connect at many points and at different points in a time that has an effect throughout, not just locally. “There is nothing outside of the universe.”, whoever said it, seems to me to be the antithesis of the above scenario. This statement doesn’t mention a word about M theory, hyperspace or the possibility of multiple universes created by a similar mechanism, but is instead intended to refute them. I think that when one hears “the universe” in this context, the obvious definition would mean everything created by “the Big Bang event” and people saying this exclude the possibility of anything else. It’s also not a tautology, because, as I pointed out, it is really only true for a very narrow set of values. Why wouldn’t there be something in another universe created by a similar mechanism? I don’t think that Ed Witten would be considered a “bubble boy” or that M theory should otherwise be trivialized by unscientific statements that are quoted before they are examined. P.S., I found this link: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/mysteries/html/smolin-1.html

Energy and matter are the same. Energy has mass. Matter has mass. Mass causes gravity. If you rocket to the moon, the rocket’s energy pushes you up and gravity pulls you down. Therefore, gravity has the effect of negative energy. Positive energy plus negative energy equals zero. Everything in the universe plus its own gravity equals zero energy. Therefore, you can create the universe with zero energy, i.e., nothing, because the universe is still zero energy (nothing). We do not know if there was time before the Big Bang event, but we will know it someday. Scientists are using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe to determine if something happened prior to the event that caused it.

The statement is a declarative sentence, "There is nothing outside the universe." As you well know, a declarative sentence must be falsifiable to be considered a scientific fact. Therefore, I am simply pointing out that it should be proven before it is accepted.

You are absolutely correct, Snail. The beautiful thing about the scientific method is that it is the brutal guardian of what we know. So when people like Smolin say, “Well Johnny, you see, there just is nothing outside the universe.” Then the first words out of your mouth should be, “Okay, prove it.” String theorists aren’t philosophers or gurus, they are scientists trying to answer basic questions, one way or the other. If there is no hyperspace of extra dimensions, then they should prove this. Until then, intelligently discussing hyperspace is not like trying to pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby.

Scientists can detect magnetic disturbances on the surfaces of tiny red dwarf stars. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071205095342.htm A red dwarf is only a few percent of the size of our Sun, so it may be possible to detect the magnetic side effect of “solar spots” on larger stars. It’s just never been attempted. http://www.grantchronicles.com/astro25.htm As to the second question, I think that we know enough about stars to say that they have spots too.

Cosmology is the study of the physical universe considered as a totality of phenomena in time and space. So, are there phenomena in the physical universe that can be explained as originating outside of the physical universe? The answer is yes. Dr. Lisa Randall has reason to say this: http://discovermagazine.com/2006/jul/interview-randall/ She’s not alone. Many physicists are spending their careers analyzing extra dimensions beyond the commonly recognized ones with M theory. Basically, we’ve done all of the ‘easy’ science, only the really challenging stuff remains. Our understanding of the subatomic part of the universe is through mathematics and the scientific method. No one has directly seen a quark or an electron. However, if a scientist uses those same tools of math and the scientific method to explore dimensions that no one can see, a lot of people get skeptical. Remember that it took decades to discover the neutron or the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) after they were proposed. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data may give experimental evidence of other dimensions by using the CMB as a ‘fingerprint’ of what caused the Big Bang. Saying that oil prices will spike in September is pure, unadulterated speculation. Saying that the universe may be contained in some kind of hyperspace is not. IMHO, of course.

Not a problem. We're even.

The value for omega determines the future of the universe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe An open universe could expand theoretically forever to an infinite size. However, this value of omega does not mean that the universe is currently infinite in size.

Neil Turok claims that the cosmological constant is artificially low and that this can be explained by a “cyclic” universe, that grows from a Big Bang and then collapses into a Big Crunch only to Big Bang again. http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/lambda16.pdf Thus, our own universe may have existed in multiple iterations. Also, colliding energy branes in hyperspace may have caused the BB and this process may have created other universes. http://universe-review.ca/F15-particle.htm#manifold Scientists hope to use the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data to determine what may have happened prior to the BB. This may settle the matter. However, no hard evidence has been found…yet.

The whole deal with finding the value for omega was because inflation predicts that the value for omega should be one. Determining this was proof for some inflationary universe models. The discovery of Dark Energy ten years ago boosted the value up to nearly one. Also, Dark matter, the universe is not infinite. For the universe to be infinite it must have expanded at an infinite rate for a short time or at a finite rate for an infinite time, neither of which is the case.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19526123.900-cosmologists-spot-a-knot-in-spacetime.html “The team then noticed that in 1989 Turok had predicted that a space-time texture would produce a cold spot of exactly this size, and so they joined Turok to create computer models to show how the texture could indeed create such a cold spot as it unravels.” I think that the paper in Martin’s third link explains this anomaly. If the ESA satellite can find more of the smaller voids then that should prove that Turok’s prediction explains these cold spots correctly as textures. That would make them a further proof of the Big Bang model, although perhaps a problem for some inflation models.

http://www.ringnebula.com/is_the_universe_flat.htm If the expansion of the universe continues to accelerate, due to DE, then you get the Big Rip. I was trying to address the three possible futures.

At the present rate, the universe would expand forever while gradually slowing, but never stopping. However, if the effect of Dark Energy continues to grow, then in approximately fifty billion years DE would overcome the Strong force locally and all the atoms would fly apart (the Big Rip). For the universe to “crunch” in the distant future, DE would have to “decay” into something with normal mass.

Well, the Orion project is being delayed due to budget cuts. I watched a German story about it that said when the Shuttle is retired there will be a five year gap before a U.S. spacecraft becomes available to service the ISS. NASA plans on using ‘commercial’ capacity. My backyard catapult is at their service. http://www.space.com/news/070301_orion_delay.html

I suppose that what we really need is for the LHC to make a mini black hole so that we can get some actual observational evidence. It's too bad that Congress didn't fund that super collider in Texas. To paraphrase Tom Hanks in "The Bonfire of the Vanities": "All I need is a measely, f-ing billion dollars."

According to NASA, there are two ways to look at this: “You are correct that there are multiple ways to visualize the generation of Hawking radiation. The first is indeed the separation of virtual matter/antimatter pairs by the intense gravitational force exerted by the black hole and the other is the quantum tunneling of a particle, such as a photon out of the black hole event horizon.” http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/011125b.html However I suppose that the real “culprit” for particle creation is Hawking. Here is Hawking’s paper: http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?view=body&id=pdf_1&handle=euclid.cmp/1103899181

I was able to find this: http://biblioteca.universia.net/html_bura/ficha/params/id/36186330.html “The ISW effect gives us information about dark energy (DE), because DE modifies the evolution of dark matter gravitational potential. In principle, the ISW effect can probe dark energy independently from other observations, such as Supernovae Ia.” So, right you are! It might still be interesting to correlate data from Type Ia with ISW to see if they are in agreement.

Type Ia supernovae are “standard candles” in that the light that these stars emit is at a known rate during the phase after they explode. Thus the distance to a galaxy with a Type Ia can be measured by detecting the brightness of the supernova. Realization that Type Ia’s were dimmer than they should have been was evidence that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. The ISW effect detects stretching in microwaves that pass through galaxy clusters and superclusters. I don’t believe that this can be used to measure distance to the supercluster or acceleration in the expansion of the universe. http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/cosmowave/supervoids/ It wouldn't be the first time I was wrong though.

Bearing in mind that none of this is supported by observational evidence, this is the theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation Supposedly, the infalling particle is made of “negative energy” and causes the singularity to lose mass. Simply put, the particle with negative mass falls in so that the real particle can get away.