Rosner’s opinion on physics and cosmology carries no expert merit whatsoever. Not a speck. Big Bang is not going anywhere until data is acquired that falsifies it. So far that has not happened. His belief that the universe resembles an ‘information system’ is poetic and rather touching, but is not supported in reality.
As a piece of science fiction, creative writing or “alternate steampunk physics”, the article is pretty cool! I don’t see any professors of Astrophysics taking those ideas seriously, though.
We all know the universe was started thusly:
login: god
password: ******
# sudo universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27 Does BoingBoing need a science correspondent? Is Maggie A.W.O.L.? Hit me up…
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She’s at Harvard. Subscribe to her newsletter (it’s not as good as her posts here were, mind):
http://maggiekb.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6d32b85afe89d936dcc221ab8&id=45a09e9d38
The Fellowship of Three Things is a weekly newsletter that brings you cool stuff you won’t find anywhere else on the Internet. No viral content you’ve seen 15 times already. No giant pile of links to stories you won’t read. Instead, the Fellowship is an invitation; a chance for to join science journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker as she spends 2014-2015 as a Nieman-Berkman Fellow at Harvard University.
For nine months, Maggie will go to classes at Harvard and MIT, attend lectures, visit museums and archives, and meet fascinating people. Each week, she’ll bring you three really awesome things from that experience. It might be a photograph and information about a museum object; a video of a laboratory tour; a short interview with a ground-breaking scholar; or a fact that will give you something new to think about. Whatever Maggie turns up each week, if you’re in the Fellowship, you’ll see it. If you aren’t, you’ll miss out. Maggie won’t be writing or posting anywhere else those nine months.
At least those 9 months will be up soon and hopefully she’ll come back.
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Edit
Added path to crontab, pathless scripts always screw up.
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i agree, i didn’t finish my thought, which was, “what if something and nothing are the same thing?” that’s actually the part that blows me mind
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again, read Guth and Linde - Linde’s quantum chaotic inflation is exactly this. the observable universe sprang into being due to tiny quantum fluctuations.
the 13.8 billion year figure is not off by that much. we have multiple sources of information about this and they all converge on 13.798±0.037 billion years. check the wikipedia page for all the experiments that have been used to triangulate this number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
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Hey everybody -
Quite a few people who value responsible science reporting are annoyed with this article. So, I should clarify -
The Big Bang Theory is in no immediate danger of being disproved. No celestial objects which are conclusively or even purportedly older than the Big Bang have been found.
I’m a TV comedy writer, former bouncer and occasional stripper who was a mediocre physics major. I’ve been thinking about an information-based theory of the universe for more than 30 years, but I’m no scientist (except in my own mind) and there’s no guarantee my theory doesn’t suck.
I became aware of some objects - a quasar, heavy-element dust, cosmic filaments - which arose surprisingly early in the universe’s history. I got excited and wrote about it, saying that if astronomers keep finding younger and younger highly developed objects, the Big Bang could be in trouble. But it hasn’t happened yet. I’m speculating in light of my enthusiasm for my own crackpot theory.
I think the universe is made of information. So do some people who aren’t idiots. But that doesn’t mean the Big Bang Theory will be cancelled as a theory before The Big Bang Theory is cancelled as a sitcom or that the Big Bang is necessarily inconsistent with an information-based theory of the universe.
I think it’s fun and exciting to discuss potential challenges to Big Bang Theory. But I am a stripper and comedy writer who’s been punched in the head.
Thank you.
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So the Big Bang may just be the Recent Bang. No surprise there. Every time we look a little farther out, we see more stuff, and older stuff, then we declare “Okay, that’s it.” And then we get to look a little farther, and repeat the mistake.
Maybe infinity really is infinite, and the number of past Bangs is too. Heck, maybe our Bang is just a local Pop in the bigger picture. The truth is out there!
oh also, one more tidbit… the big bang is not an explosion that happened “somewhere else” and we are all flying away from it. the big bang happened everywhere in the entire observable universe. right where you are sitting. and also right where i am sitting. all the space that is here was already here, it’s just been expanding ever since. recently things took a turn for the extreme in that the universe’s expansion became dominated by dark energy, and it’s now expanding exponentially as a function of time.
finally if you like to read about this stuff, sean carroll’s blog is really good: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/
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no, that’s just not true. the CMB is the surface of last scattering of the pre-recombination era, and is as far back as we can ever see. beyond that, the universe is opaque. note that the CMB, just like the big bang, is everywhere, even right here in the room with you. when you tune an old analog TV to a nonexistent channel, some small part of the static you see on the screen is from the CMB.
oh… i see that we were all punked, but that’s okay. the more that people are discussing science (and cosmology) the better.
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I became aware of some objects - a quasar, heavy-element dust, cosmic filaments
- which arose surprisingly early in the universe’s history. I got
excited and wrote about it, saying that if astronomers keep finding
younger and younger highly developed objects, the Big Bang could be in
trouble. But it hasn’t happened yet. I’m speculating in light of my
enthusiasm for my own crackpot theory.
Maybe if you backed off the use of the term “theory” in describing your ideas, people wouldn’t be as hot and bothered. If you place them properly on the conjecture, hypothesis, theory continuum, it rankles less.
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Why is this article in BB if even the article’s author admits it’s garbage.
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Whoa, petzl -
I don’t think it’s garbage. I over-enthusiastically stated that the universe is made of information. Don’t have proof, but it’s not a garbagey POV. And there are objects which are surprisingly highly developed for having had less than a billion years to form after the Big Bang. It’s an interesting subject. (It’s the only subject!)
Lighten up. Seriously (heh :D)
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The modifier for “theory” was “crackpot”. Come on, case closed.
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Six character password. Let me guess IMWHIM. But what is the true universal question, Mac or PC?
OS/390, duh
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Yeah, but tropo -
Kinda think I have a whole theory. Not simply saying the universe is made of information, but explaining how this plays out with a reasonable degree of detail and some stuff that can be tested. Not in a 600-word article, of course, but in many thousands of words, here. Think it’s mostly in sections 3 and 4.
IF the Universe is a CompuSimulation (~plz no “ughs”~),
then who cannot claim ‘taint not riddled by bugs,
and vuln avec virii: all diverse abject-orient Anomale,
weekly-typed true-whiling Geist in der Maschale?
Might the bitter bite in the pain qualia we suffer
be born from bad bits overflowing a buffer?
ELSE it may be that such supposed glitch-creatures
are rather instead the most essentiallest features,
like the Digimon from Digimon or the denizens of ReBoot:
sad self-sentient beings suspent onto a monadic soup,
which bubbling binary broth we but know to
be boolean boilt with the most harmfullest GOTO;
Aye, this app, ‘twill be the first (so I fear)
course served for the last supper of great Fenrir,
who in 1337speak is the alpha WolframOmega,
that who, as proph’sied in the Revelations o’ Sega:
“gets too crunk off this Singulär Tea, bro,
and, by Odin’s neckbeard, is divode by zero.”
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I wasn’t trying to be belligerent, and the “crackpot” modifier did not show up in the original when the ideas were held up against an actual theory. (Yes, I myself can get very touchy about people throwing around the word theory.)
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