Reading it was just like any other bullshit April fools blarp.
“And the younger universe is wired like a humongous brain”
If it honks like a goose! Just saying
you should probably read Guth’s eternal inflation paper, or his followup linked below.
there’s no center of the universe. also the universe is not expanding into anything. our observable universe is, under eternal/chaotic inflation, just a small part of the universe that happened to stop inflating and start to cool down. under this theory there are an infinite number of baby universes that have been produced and continue to be produced; the bulk of the universe is still undergoing inflation right now. as far as we know, some form of inflation is the only thing that can explain the smoothness of the CMB. the existence of an infinite # of universes also neatly takes care of the anthropic principle.
also time and distance are very slippery concepts as of course as far as we know relativity is real, plus in an expanding universe distances have been changing with time.
as others have pointed out, information theory already plays a part in many modern cosmological theories.
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Hey rknop -
Not sure I’m really saying all you’re accusing me of saying. Not saying that particle physics is stuck. However, it is a little codependent with the $13 billion, 10,000-scientist CERN. And, while not understanding string theory to any degree that qualifies me to talk about it, I do understand that it’s been disappointing.
I live in a wish-fulfillment fantasy that it may still be possible to do some physics via gedankenexperiments. Yes, this is a dead giveaway for crackpotism. But does suggesting that classical Big Bang theory may need to be modified or replaced by some larger framework which admits events before the Big Bang put me in the same boat as the evil, science-denying pricks on Fox News? Believing that an information-based theory of the universe might be inconsistent with some one-and-done aspects of Big Bang theory doesn’t make me a science denier. No one reading my dumb little article should have her or his confidence in the scientific enterprise to decipher the universe shaken one little bit.
I read your piece on why the Big Bang is a terrible name for the theory. You’re asking some of the same questions I am (with the advantage of having much more education in the field than I have). Hey - what if the scale of space, which includes what looks like expansion, is due to the interactions of matter defining itself within that space? Few people who are competent in quantum mechanics still believe that you need conscious beings within the universe to define the universe through observation. The universe observes and defines itself. Weird (but not really) quantum effects such as two-slit interference of a single photon with itself occur when the universe lacks information about a situation. (If the universe doesn’t know which slit a photon passed through, then it has to pass through both.)
So - what if the Big Bang is what a self-defined universe looks like? The universe is just a big old gunfight, locating everything in space and time via particles shooting particles at each other. Because you don’t have an infinite number of particles, locations aren’t infinitely precise, and you get quantum effects, including, I assert, the scale of space.
This doesn’t make me a craven science denier. It makes me a more ignorant version of John Archibald Wheeler, looking for “it from bit.”
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Hey joeblough -
William of Ockham would’ve loved “an infinite number of baby universes,” because an infinity of things, especially of universes we can’t see, is about as simple as you can get. Certainly simpler than the one universe we can see.
I think your argument that there are problems with the Big Bang theory is interesting. The gist seems to be that there are cosmic things that we have recently discovered in the distance and distant past, that are barely newer than the big bang is supposed to be, but given our current knowledge seem to require longer than that to evolve to their observed state. A smoking gun would be discovering something that is actually older than the big bang, but that hasn’t happened yet.
So the anomaly is that two different ways of measuring the age of these structures are inconsistent: 1) measuring forward from the big bang at how long it should take certain structures to evolve, and 2) measuring backward from today at how old things seem to be.
The obvious first thought is that one of these two conflicting measurements has an error. But what kind of error? My thought is that time is not linear over those two domains. It’s been a while since I studied relativity in college, but time dilation in the presence of large masses is a known phenomenon. Is it possible that the very early, dense structure of the universe warps time in a way that makes it possible for cosmic structures to evolve in what seems like a short time in our frame, but is actually a long time in their frame?
And furthermore, is it possible that the filamentary structure of the mass of the early universe may create a corresponding filamentary structure in the flow of time around those filaments, so that cosmic objects in that lattice may not actually be the age they appear to be or even the same age as nearby objects due to the non-uniformity of time progression across the lattice? At the extreme mass densities we are talking about in the early stages of the universe, those time differences could be extremely large.
Could this explain the anomaly without throwing out the entire Big Bang theory? At least until someone discovers the smoking gun.
very funny, but no touché. we have a serious problem with the physical constants of this universe being apparently fine-tuned for the existence of life. the physics predicts all kinds of other possibilities where the fundamental forces are all out of whack… such that even forming an atom is impossible. positing an infinity of possible configurations takes care of that problem, and also explains what we see when we point our telescopes at the sky.
i guess if a theory is not beautiful then it’s not correct? that’s a trap.
when he says we observe something older than the big bang, that’s not really what he’s saying. he’s saying that our current understanding of what happened dictates that certain types of structures could only have formed at times greater than X, so if we see some structure like that at a time earlier than X, we have a problem.
but that problem might be that we don’t understand physics well enough and have made an error predicting that these structures could not exist at that time. it does not automatically mean that the “big bang is wrong.”
it’s not like we see something in our telescope and ask it “how old are you?” we can only observe something and compute its redshift, and figure out how long in the past we are seeing.
it is a scientific fact that the universe was hotter and denser in the past than it is now. if you keep running the clock back it seems that there is a point of infinite density and temperature. but that’s actually just a naive interpretation, no one in physics is saying that we understand that the universe came from such a singularity. we don’t have the tools to determine what happened before a certain time in the past.
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I saw a bumper full of fundamentalist sloganeering stickers on a car once. the funniest one was:
The Big Bang theory: God said “Let there be light!” and BANG! it happened!
I’ve often wondered whether this is true. We see cause and effect within our universe, but was there necessarily a cause to the existence of the universe itself? Maybe it happened without reason. And one can’t ask why did it happen at one point in time rather than another, because with the universe not in existence, time itself didn’t exist.
Hawking suggested that time may have started logarithmically, so that having zero time actually makes no sense. So the universe may be around 13.8 billion years old, but without a beginning in the sense that t=0 makes any sense. This might also lead to the “happened without a cause” conclusion.
And maybe the 13.8 billion years figure is off by a good 5 to 10 billion years. Maybe that would eliminate some of the problems of the original poster (e.g., metals created “too soon”).
Infinite universe’s implies there is another me somewhere. Which is a chilling thought.
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Hey muser -
Measurement errors account for many (probably most) theory-wrecking discoveries. Remember the faster-than-light neutrinos from 2011? So, yeah, you’d expect for many (maybe most) “Whoa - here’s a thing that’s older than the universe!” discoveries to eventually be accounted for by the existing Big Bang paradigm, which, however much I think it’s going down, accounts for a lot of stuff.
However, in my (crackpot) theory, it’s not that I’m saying that the Big Bang is going down because there’s stuff that’s older than it is. Rather, I’m saying that what looks like a Big Bang is the universe doing more or less a single humongous processing task - rendering a single, 30- or 40-billion-year moment (which is just one in a series of moments).
The universe processes a series of moments the way our brains process a series of thoughts. It takes information that’s relevant during one of its long moments, throws it into its active Big Bang-looking center, and processes it, with lit-up galaxies being the processing engines. Eventually, the galaxies use up their protons and go dark. But other galaxies light up (get re-lit), based on the contingencies of further moments, and the process continues - a rolling boil of successive moments - 30 billion years times a zillion moments.
Where my theory gets really crackpotty is that I don’t think the universe is everywhere uniform after a universal and ongoing expansion. I think only part of the universe is Big Bangy at any one time, and the rest of the universe - collapsed and proton-depleted - hangs out around T=0 - what looks like the origin of a Big Bang universe. There’s not much space or time around T=0 - space and time are part of the active part of the universe that looks like it’s having a Big Bang. The collapsed stuff around T=0 functions as memory, sitting there waiting (but not really waiting, because there’s not much time happening there) to be re-lit up as needed.
You don’t throw out the whole Big Bang. The Big Bang is what information that’s being processed looks like - an information map - with clusters of information - galaxies - that are highly relevant to each other located near to each other, and less-relevant galaxies more distant and red-shifted, like that classic New Yorker cover.
And yeah, I think the universe is wired along its filamentary structure, with most of this structure having been formed in ultra-deep time during a series of little bangs, not emerging from relative formlessness as a single Big Bang unfolds. The filamentary structure might be ancient as heck because the universe spans ultra-deep time, while being not that old in elapsed time, because where it is, time barely elapses.
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At some point cause and effect approach meaninglessness (so I think I am agreeing with you). Perhaps there is, but I don’t think there needs to be 
I have just settled into the philosophy that we are all avatars in a giant game of World of Warcraft. At some point our universe begins and ends, buy we don’t get to peek at the source code or uptime statuses.
Hey joeblough -
You say[quote=“joeblough, post:69, topic:54554”]
it is a scientific fact that the universe was hotter and denser in the past than it is now. if you keep running the clock back it seems that there is a point of infinite density and temperature. but that’s actually just a naive interpretation, no one in physics is saying that we understand that the universe came from such a singularity. we don’t have the tools to determine what happened before a certain time in the past.
[/quote]
That’s a problem with my theory. I think that around T=0, behind the veil of the primordial hotness and noisiness, there’s all this ahmahzing hidden organization, artifacts of previous little bangs. Very convenient (unless it turns out to be truish).
yeah, it boggles the mind. sometimes, very occasionally, i have this very strange feeling - “why is there something, rather than nothing?” it’s almost a religious experience. likewise with the notion that there could be infinite copies of all of this stuff, some differing in only the minutest and insignificant detail, and some diverging wildly from what we see here.
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So what you are really saying… Is our particle smashers just need more power?
Yeah, it reduces the question from “what’s the point” to “here are all the points”.
Edit
Which by the way makes it even more important to be moral and ethical, cause there are other yous screwing it up 
Hey again joeblough -
It’s completely natural to ask “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” But the question contains the semi-hidden assumption that nothingness is the default state of things. Probably mostly because of conservation laws - creating everything from nothing seems like the ultimate violation.
But what if nothingness is a special state just like every other state of existence and needs to be justified just as much as every other state?
Is Maggie not on Boing Boing anymore? Time was, this site had half an ounce of scientific sense. Now… yipers.
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From your article:
"General Relativity (which describes gravity) without worrying about Quantum Mechanics. However, before that moment, you have to worry about both at once. Here’s the rub: the two theories don’t work together. "
Heh, what is the next freaky, odd, incongruous observation after we figure that out. I love science.
