Big Bang and String Theory

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/22/science/22BANG.html

....i just read a heavy article in the new york times, about the combination of cosmology and physics...i saw a few post mentioning peoples interest in this area of science, so i though id post it...if it doesnt work just goto the science section of the new york times, its always got some mind blowing shit...i really only understand about 10% of the stuff, like when i read brief history of time, but with that 10% i never view my life, the stars, or the universe the same way...peace in this and all other dimensions of tyme/space-roe

yeah fuck the sun! i fuckin hate the sun!

long live the beast! the night time is the right time!

you need to be signed up at the NYTimes to read anything. it is free though...

mental could you post the article, i dont want to go through the trouble of signing up.. thanks.

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yes.. yes i am.

theres this kid know who i see daily.. who.. seems to always find a way of mentioning the string theory.

how did you know my bang was so big..

guess word got aroundism.

Well, I don't wanna go through the hassle of registering, but if you want to, pick up the book "The Elegant Universe". It has a whole chapter on the implications of string theory on the origins of the universe that are probably mentioned in the article. It explains why only 3 spatial dimensions and one expanded while the other 6 or 7 (depending of which branch of M-theory you talk about) remained curled up, why the universe has a pretty much even distribution of thermal radiation all throughout its expanse, and the possibility that there was actually a pre-Big Bang period. String theory, you see, places a minimum size on things (called the Planck length), and any physical object being compressed lower than that size would "bounce" back out, meaning that nothing can be smaller than it. So there is a possibility that the universe was actually infinite in expanse (all of its 10 or 11 dimensions) before the Big Bang, and some invariance caused all the dimensions to curl back on themselves down to a Planck-sized nugget, at which point it "bounced" back (aka: The Big Bang), and quantum fluctuations at near planck-length caused most dimensions to remain curled up while three expanded (plus one time dimension). Whoo, I'm getting dizzy here. Sure, I might be a nerd, but I love this shit. Beer,

El Mamerro

...hey junglecat, i just sent you an email with a word attachment where i cut and pasted the article, let me know if it works...its like three pages...so i didnt want to just paste it on the board....and holy shit mammero, are you really just stephen hawking! thats the whole article...hmm i see.......well if you or anyone else wants the article, join the new york times, or just email me and ill shoot ya a copy... mamero i was gonna send one, but what the fuck if fugly?

...and twinkie sure we can theorize on the origins of the universe and its beginnings, and whats abstract, i mean we theorize and discuss art, god/religion, philosphy

and psychology, etc. dont we?-roe

ps-hope oner it mentions your big bang in the article too...crazy...

How to Know God by Deepak Chopra.

...yo jungle cat i tried to email you that article and it got bounced back, if you want, hit me with an email, its listed in my profile, and ill shoot it over to you...

peace-roe

Hell yeah, send it over. The addy is halvarez@risd.edu. And no, I am not Stephen Hawking. I can get it up. Beer,

El Mamerro

Uhhh...I was being sarcastic while simultaneously making a comedic reference to Adam Sandler.

planes fly over head

whoa.

hmmmm.. carl sagan and his almost text book like winner cosmos really baked my noodle but i'd certainly like some others that you guys may suggest.

Originally posted by mental invalid:

...and twinkie sure we can theorize on the origins of the universe and its beginnings, and whats abstract, i mean we theorize and discuss art, god/religion, philosphy

and psychology, etc. dont we?-roe

true true....i just find it amusing that its taken sort of as law by alot of people....you know, that the big bang really happened and thats the way

everything became to be in an easy 2 word phrase....i don't know....its abstract, thats the only way i can describe it.....by abstract i mean its fleeting, hard to grasp, impossible to fathom..........blah.....

I really dont see the point. Is there no such thing as infinity to these scientists? Assuming time will never end, why should it have a beginning? Every fundamental building block of exsistence has eventually been broken down further into its sub-particles. I guess if it gives a bunch of mathematicians a better understanding of the world they feel the need to define then swell.

Originally posted by El Mamerro:

Well, I don't wanna go through the hassle of registering, but if you want to, pick up the book "The Elegant Universe". It has a whole chapter on the implications of string theory on the origins of the universe that are probably mentioned in the article. It explains why only 3 spatial dimensions and one expanded while the other 6 or 7 (depending of which branch of M-theory you talk about) remained curled up, why the universe has a pretty much even distribution of thermal radiation all throughout its expanse, and the possibility that there was actually a pre-Big Bang period. String theory, you see, places a minimum size on things (called the Planck length), and any physical object being compressed lower than that size would "bounce" back out, meaning that nothing can be smaller than it. So there is a possibility that the universe was actually infinite in expanse (all of its 10 or 11 dimensions) before the Big Bang, and some invariance caused all the dimensions to curl back on themselves down to a Planck-sized nugget, at which point it "bounced" back (aka: The Big Bang), and quantum fluctuations at near planck-length caused most dimensions to remain curled up while three expanded (plus one time dimension). Whoo, I'm getting dizzy here. Sure, I might be a nerd, but I love this shit. Beer,

 

El Mamerro

isnt that required reading for your physics class you geek.

if i only had some beerism.

...ah, what...iphs lay of the lsd....excuse me, but im only trying to find intelligent life on this message board...you can fuck the sun and be nocturnal, or you can join an anti-government militia, i dont give a fuck, just dont be fuckin' stupid...the article has nothing to do with the government or the fuckin sun!...can you read or do you just write?...yes you have to become a member at the new york times, but infering from your sub-neanderthalish responses, dont bother....i think youd enjoy the news section on iwon.com perhaps...any other brilliant observations?....by the way if anyone knows a book similar to brief history let me know....the retarted astro-physicist

hmm, we don't even know exactly how we came about, but we can theorize on the origins of the universe and its beginnings........?

pure abstraction.....

Wow, someone who's into this type of shit.

I've actually studied alot of the whole big bang/string theory myself. Shit is pretty fascinating once you start translating all the hard-to-understand stuff.

The illest of all these theories I've read about is one that makes the assumption that the universe is really just a series of images the milky way has left behind. If the theory is actually true (I doubt it), then the universes is finite (as opposed to INfinite), and shaped sort of like a donut. All of the stars would be light reflections that have traveled around this donut shaped plane, and reached our viewpoint billions of years later. So basically, by looking into the stars at night, we'd just be looking at a picture of ourselves from a really fuckin long time ago, and no other galaxies and planets, beyond ours, would even exist.

Also, nowadays, the big bang theory is basically being supported as fact. Most scientists in the astrophysics/planetary astronomy field are pretty much convinced that it happened. There was a probe that went up into space a few years back (I cant remember the name of it) whose job was to find isotropic waves in space (changes in the temperature of space itself). The temperature changes indicate a ripple effect in space from the initial "big bang", and the probe came back with evidence that they do exist.

Also, aliens were recently found in the south bronx rocking FUBU and bumping ICE-T tapes from the late 80's. No joke.

[This message has been edited by Raels (edited 05-23-2001).]

Originally posted by Raels:

The illest of all these theories I've read about is one that makes the assumption that the universe is really just a series of images the milky way has left behind. If the theory is actually true (I doubt it), then the universes is finite (as opposed to INfinite), and shaped sort of like a donut. All of the stars would be light reflections that have traveled around this donut shaped plane, and reached our viewpoint billions of years later. So basically, by looking into the stars at night, we'd just be looking at a picture of ourselves from a really fuckin long time ago, and no other galaxies and planets, beyond ours, would even exist.

[This message has been edited by Raels (edited 05-23-2001).]

...one of the coolest theories ive heard...it hurts to think about that..jeebs

"...shaped sort of like a donut..."-raels

..mmmmm doonnuuttss, ggrararar(drool).....

-h.simpson

---sorry, it was my first thought when i read our universe mite be a donut...TO MUCH SIMPSONS....thats some crazy shit though...my head is spinnin'-great all i need to distract more from my already 'inconsequential to the overall good of humanity or to the impact of the universe workload'-are there any open positions for disllusioned 20-something, fed up with everything, star gazer, imagination and creativity a must, must be able to discuss objects and philosophies for hours, filling tyme with painting, writing poetry, and reading, duties include documenting sunrises and sunsets, meeting strangers, havin' lots of muses to inspire, and exploring different aspect of cultures through obsessive traveling, and the ability to get wasted and not slur speech, with a useless marketing and advertising background, and the threat of insanity due to overload-IS THERE? IS THERE? IS THERE?....my mind is lost and im hopin' itll come back soon...roe

-blah- b.twinkie

...perfect word for today.....

If the universe is a Donut, would that make GOD a cop?...I just cant accept this theory. Please leave me to my ignorance, Thank you.

isnt that required reading for your physics class you geek.

Yeah, but does it count that I read the book a year before and just re-read it again for class? Classes sure do go a lot easier when you've read the text a year before taking them.

Rael, that donut theory is pretty damn crazy. Hadn't heard it before, and I doubt it has any hold on truth, but it's still dope as hell to think about. The probe you mentioned is NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer), sent out in the early 90's. The info it came back with supported the big bang because it showed that there is an existing radiaton ripple, and that's just what the big bang would cause, scientists figured. Just like how air in a bicycle tire cools down as it expands, so would the temperature of the universe. This radiation was found to be the exact temperature physicists had predicted using the big bang theory. Not only was the temperature right, but it was evenly distributed throughout the universe. There is one setback, called the horizon problem.

To have the temperature be so evenly distributed, it means that all these portions of space must have been in contact with each other long enough for heat to be transmitted between the two. This is the same principle at work as in how a hot soup cools down to room temperature when placed in cold air. Eventually, if left in there long enough, the soup and the air will have the same temperature. So you figure that moments after the Big Bang, all these portions of space were crammed together, so they were in contact and heat was distributed, ta daa.

The problem arises when you consider the fastest way for information to be transmitted across the universe: the speed of light. This means that matter in two regions of psace can exange heat to attain a common temperature only if the distance between them at a given moment is less than the distance light can have traveled since the big bang. If you watch a film of the life of the universe in reverse, you'll see these regions of space cramming closer together. For these two given locations to be 186,000 miles apart, we have to turn the film back to less than a second ATB (after the bang). Even though the locations are much closer at that moment than they are right now, there is still no way any information could be distributed among them, since light would require an entire second to reach that distance. We can still turn the film back even further to 186 miles of separation, but the same conclusion follows: They can't influence each other since in less than a thousandth of a second light can't travel the 186 miles separating them.

So the way the big bang is commonly viewed can't explain why how regions of space that are widely separated ever had the exchange of heat that would result in their having the same temperature. Inflationary expansion theory is a modification to the standard cosmological model that suggests that, for a brief flicker of time(around a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second ATB), the early universe underwent an accelerated expansion rate, which becomes deccelerated contraction if you turn the film backwards. This reduction of speed allows light (and therefore heat) to actually have the time to travel between the two regions of space.

So now we see that the big bang wasn't actually a bang... It had a gradual expansion that started off slowly and then gained speed (even though this acceleration is still fast as fuck, but not so when compared to the speed of light). It was more like the big... I don't know, something not as exciting as a bang. And on a totally unrelated note, here's Carmen Electra's crotch:

http://seanbaby.com/stupid/images/crmcrtch.jpg'>

Beer,

El Mamerro

Originally posted by SCOTCH WHISKEO:

If the universe is a Donut, would that make GOD a cop?...I just cant accept this theory. Please leave me to my ignorance, Thank you.

I think that theory is full of shit myself, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Gets the brain working.

There's another theory that's closer to einstein's thoughts on gravity. It suggests that because a "big bang" (or "big expansion" .. whatever you might call it) happened, that there must also, eventually, be a "big un-bang", or implosion of sorts.

I'm not an expert on this shit either, but I remember it being based on the premise of gravity. According to the theory, when our universe has expanded to a certain "point", it will start an opposite reaction, and begin reversing in on itself. The final result - I'm not sure. But if you consider the way gravity works, it actually makes a decent amount of sense.

Having just scratched the surface of understanding ideas like this, I cant help but wonder what einstein might have come up with had he lived a little bit longer.

Wall-less rooms? A smokeless ashtray? Edible toothpicks? The possibilities are mind numbing.

[This message has been edited by Raels (edited 05-24-2001).]

just makin sure...

The big bang theory is interesting because with todays technology scientists can tell what happened 5 minutes after the big bang, but they can tell what happened 5 minutes before it. This question also leads to the question of what kind of universe this is. One theory is that we have a big bang the universe opens to a point then closes back down toa little ball then explodes and everything happens over again exactly that way it happened before. That would mean there is such thing as fate, which I cant tolerate. The theory I like to believe in is that the universe is continuing to expand and doesnt stop. This would be that we've got one life and got one chance and have to make the best of it.

Don't worry, Harpo, there is no such thing as fate. Quantum mechanics, the laws that rule the small world of particles, are by nature probabilities. You can't tell where a particle is and where it's going with precision. The more you know about one of these options, the less you know about the other. Even if you were an infinitely smart computer that could calculate what every particle in the universe does, you'd still couldn't get over this quantum uncertainty. The best you could do is calculate the probability waves of these particles, and come up with a vague description of the future. Rael, I think I read somewhere that there is a possibility the universe ISN'T gonna collapse. If I find the info I'll let you know. Beer,

El Mamerro

Originally posted by Harpo Marx:

The theory I like to believe in is that the universe is continuing to expand and doesnt stop.

i like to think.. that the universe is infinite.. my reasoning is.. well.. how is the universe just going to stop?.. there is the whole black hole thing.. but those move around.. and it isnt like there is some kind of invisble.. or visible wall surrounding the universe.. or is there? my friend.. who i actually havent talked to in awhile.. believes there is something bigger then the universe (i also really like this theory.. im not sure if he thought it up himself.. or if he got it from somewhere) but our universe is like.. one of many 'bubbles' in a larger, greater space.

these are the times that i wish i focused more on science instead of reading plato. peace.

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yes.. yes i am.

.. carmen electras crotch!! haaa!

good read fella.

i need urls for this stuff. google aint cutting it. nerd a brother out...

http://d21c.com/walpurgis9/hellish2/invpentfade.gif'>

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$$$666MAKROS666$$$

......ok so my head is spinnin'...mamero what the deal with the idea of bubbles that hawking touches on in brief history....does this question make any sense? i figure you mite know and raels thought made me think of it.....and im glad there is no fate, i never did buy into the fact that there is free will and gods plan-you cant have both...so there is no fate, but remember there is karma...roe

ps-good lookin on carmens crotch shot....sometymes i feel like the universe does revolve around a womans, uh, well, ya know......