To See Before Time

Seeing before time sounds like a poetic fancy or the end of a bad SF story in which God's hand is seen creating the universe, but an upcoming ESA satellite, Planck, may allow scientists to do just that, in a manner of speaking.

A recent challenge for scientists has been that fact that the universe seems to have larger "fluctuations in the density and temperature of the radiation left over from the theoretical Big Bang" on one side of the universe. Clara Moskowitz notes on MSNBC.com that Planck, launching this year, should be able to determine if the universe's lopsidedness is real or merely an artifact of less sensative data collection.

The standard model of Inflation cannot account for this perceived variation but a recently published model by Caltech astrophysicists Sean Carroll and Marc Kamionkowski and graduate student Adrienne Erickcek theorizes that two separate fields are necessary for inflation to account for this.

If the universe's unevenness is real then the new model will provide not only an explanation for current conditions but also a small window into pre-Big Bang conditions, effectively seeing before the begining of time (the Big Bang).

The Universe may be recycled!

You have got to love IO9 for articles that just twist the top of your head to let the evil spirits out.

For those of you that are Poul Anderson fan and just ate up his novel Tau Zero, you're, like me, going to see Anderson's novel come to life in this recent OP9 article.

As theories of the Universe go, the most popular is the "big bang" theory of how things started. It's pretty well thought out and supported almost, excuse the pun, universally. Well along comes Martin Bojowald and his associates with a theory that closely resembles Anderson's cyclic Universe. Bojowald postulates that there is a possibility that our universe was created by the death of an earlier universe. How do ya like dem apples!

Martin Bojowald and Abhat Ashtekar began researching their theory of loop quantum cosmology (LQC), an approach to cosmology that combine’s Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics.

From the IO9 article:

• Bojowald's major realization was that unlike general relativity, the physics of LQC did not break down at the big bang. Cosmologists dread the singularity because at this point gravity becomes infinite, along with the temperature and density of the universe. As its equations cannot cope with such infinities, general relativity fails to describe what happens at the big bang. Bojowald's work showed how to avoid the hated singularity, albeit mathematically.
• The researchers have found that when applying LQC, the universe does not revert back to a singularity as it contracts. Instead of seeing a big bang, the models indicate that the universe experienced a big bounce, with a predecessor universe contracting as it ended and then reemerging as our new, expanding universe. ....it could mean that our universe does not have a finite beginning and end but is, instead, part of a chain of universes that expand and then contract to give way to a brand new universe.

<- New Scientist article ->

Is the evidence for multiple universes all around us?

I thought that this article that Shaun Saunders sent me was particularly interesting. A few weeks ago we read his story "Hubble" and we just finished reading Paul Melko's "The Walls of the Universe" both about the effects and possibilities of multiple universes. Good tales both, but your often left thinking that its much too fantastic. Well some scientists seem to feel differently! Here is an excerpt.

IT HAS long been accepted, at least in theory, that other universes might exist and might even collide with ours. Yet the idea that we would ever be able to see the aftermath of such collisions, and so find evidence of other universes, has seemed beyond the scope of science. According to the standard model of cosmology, our universe underwent a phase of exponential expansion, known as inflation, just after the big bang. In theory, inflation could still be happening, with bubbles of space-time suddenly blowing up to create new pocket universes. The usual assumption is that these other universes are disconnected from us, and that we can't enter them and look around, or observe them in any way. "People often criticise discussions of multiple universes as meaningless because we can't detect whether they actually exist," says Anthony Aguirre of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Aguirre thinks the proof of cosmic collisions could be all around us, as imprints in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) left over from the big bang.

click the article title for more. This is very interesting reading especially if you listened to Shaun's Hubble and Paul's The Walls of the Universe.