[FPSPACE] Universe ends: poor, minorities hardest hit

[Saunders B.Kramer Sr.]

Here is something for Cosmologists to chew on .  An "explanation" of 
how the big bang occurred. There are other universes. In one of these 
there are black holes (or their equivalent) which are trillions of 
times larger (i.e., contain much, much more matter/energy) than is 
found in our universe). One of these black holes (for lack of a 
different name) absorbed a huge portion of the matter/energy in its 
universe.  So large in fact that it was equivalent to much more than 
the matter in our entire universe. As a consequence of becoming so 
"engorged"  it distorted the space-time continuum and "discharged" from 
its self in to our universe an amount of matter/energy equal to that we 
find in our own universe in 10 (-51) seconds. Thus creating the big 
bang.  I can not think of any experiment that might disprove such an 
event or prove it either! It certainly gives a "start" to our universe. 
But, of course, "backing up" so to speak, how did the other universe 
commence?

Saunders Kramer
On Nov 21, 2004, at 12:35 PM, DwayneDay wrote:

> (subject line stolen from an old joke about National Public Radio)
>
> This was written by my former colleague, Joel Achenbach.
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A997-2004Nov20.html
>
> Cosmic Question
> Will the Universe Go Crunch, or Will 'Dark Energy' Rip It Apart? 
> Either Way, Your Head Will Pop.
> By Joel Achenbach
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page D01
>
> They say academic arguments are so vicious because the stakes are so 
> low, but Andrei Linde and Paul Steinhardt are arguing about something 
> huge, something truly cosmic: the fate of the universe.
>
> Linde and Steinhardt are two of the premier cosmologists of America 
> and, as far as we know, of this sector of the Milky Way galaxy. They 
> study the origin, structure and destiny of the universe, all the 
> classic 3-in-the-morning dorm-room questions that threaten to blow 
> your mind. How big is the universe? Is it infinite or finite, and if 
> it's finite, where's the edge? How did it begin? What will happen to 
> it? Why does anything exist at all?
>
> Linde, a Stanford professor, Russian-born, theatrical (he performs 
> magic tricks and acrobatics in his spare time), warned two years ago 
> that the universe might collapse in as little as 11 billion years. 
> Recently he revised his prediction, saying that the end might not come 
> for at least 24 billion years. "Cosmic doomsday delayed" reported one 
> online science journal earlier this month, throwing a sop to Democrats 
> desperate for good news.
>
> Regardless of the timing, The End as Linde sees it would prove to be 
> extremely fatal to any living thing. Linde says the entire cosmos will 
> begin to contract, the galaxies rushing back toward one another, space 
> itself heating up, our oceans boiling off, Earthlife frying, until 
> everything slams together in a cataclysmic Big Crunch, all matter and 
> energy, and indeed time and space itself, compressed into an 
> infinitely dense black hole.
>
> "All these galaxies will crash into each other, and the sky will be 
> shining in blue light, ultraviolet, then X-ray; the temperature will 
> be very large and everything will be just evaporated," Linde says.
>
> He isn't panicking. He speaks with a serenity that comes from knowing 
> that this bad stuff is a long ways away. He says, reassuringly, 
> "Mankind will find many ways of killing itself much earlier."
>
> But now comes Steinhardt, a Princeton professor, with a scenario that 
> is just the slightest bit sunnier. He suggests that our universe may 
> be just one of two universes, or "branes," that periodically collide. 
> These two branes, Steinhardt hypothesizes, have been bouncing off one 
> another for untold billions of years. The next time the invisible 
> brane comes crashing back into our universe, we'll see the laws of 
> physics start to change.
>
> Physical "constants" will cease being constant. Gravity will 
> strengthen (apples falling from trees will hit the ground faster). The 
> universe will collapse, as in the Linde scenario -- "Unless we found a 
> way of protecting ourselves, we would be evaporated in the crash 
> between these branes," Steinhardt says -- but there's good news at his 
> version of The End. There's a bounce! The whole enterprise begins 
> expanding again, inflating, and becoming once again a universe that is 
> sufficiently comfortable to permit people to wear shorts and T-shirts.
>
> Here is what Steinhardt says of Linde: "He will tell you many things 
> depending on which day you catch him."
>
> Linde on Steinhardt's bouncing branes: "Oh my God. Oh my God." (Deep 
> breath.) "It is a very interesting but a very wild speculation. . . . 
> It's not science."
>
> The two men don't exactly rage at one another, but in phone interviews 
> each makes it clear he finds the other irritating and unpersuasive.
>
> Every cosmologist would like to become known as the person who figured 
> out the destiny of the universe, but the facts are sparse and 
> ambiguous. Cosmologists tend to do a fair bit of arm waving. You get 
> the feeling that a clever scientist could prove on paper that the 
> universe is made of cheese.
>
> At some level it's the ultimate esoteric topic. Our lives are lived in 
> a certain slice of space-time, so narrow that it really doesn't matter 
> in any practical sense whether the universe will expand or contract or 
> contract-and-bounce. But we also wouldn't be human if we didn't try to 
> decode the universe. There's a story there, written in starlight.
>
> Cosmologists are rambunctiously creative, painting pictures that 
> inspire their colleagues to engage in furious art criticism. There are 
> art movements, and splinter groups, and mavericks. Someday the current 
> fascination with string theory, for example (you know: the universe is 
> made of very tiny strings that vibrate at different frequencies), 
> might be viewed as something lovely but a bit beside the point, like 
> Picasso's blue period.
>
> "The observations are not that definitive, so we have to build stories 
> behind our observations," says Alan Guth, a pioneering MIT 
> cosmologist.
>
> The race to figure out the fate of the universe has grown more intense 
> in recent years as a result of a startling discovery. In 1998, the 
> Hubble Space Telescope obtained images of distant supernovae 
> (exploding stars) that revealed that the universe not only is 
> expanding but is doing so at an accelerating rate. A few years later, 
> new observations showed that, many billions of years ago, the 
> expansion was actually decelerating. So the cosmos apparently 
> downshifts and upshifts. Second gear awhile back, fifth gear today.
>
> Something is causing the current acceleration, and this force, 
> whatever it is, seems to account for about 70 percent of the total 
> energy in the universe. Scientists call it "dark energy." That sounds 
> better than "secret energy" or "invisible energy" or "we-got-no-clue 
> energy."
>
> Scientists had long thought that the universe might have just the 
> right amount of stuff in it to allow gravity to slow the cosmic 
> expansion to a nice, stable, steady cruising speed, such that the 
> universe would always be around, always habitable. But what we see 
> through telescopes doesn't support that happy scenario.
>
> It looks for all the world as though dark energy will rip the universe 
> apart. It might take a trillion years, but everything we see -- every 
> star, planet, asteroid, comet, speck of dust and molecule of gas -- 
> will decay and dissipate, and in the end there will be essentially 
> nothing at all -- the universe ending with a whimper.
>
> "The universe will go on expanding forever. And will get cold and dark 
> and presumably ultimately lifeless," explains Guth, describing this 
> scenario.
>
> Scientists have to follow the data, but they'd also like to find a 
> model for the future that's more interesting than an eternal 
> wasteland. "I don't like it," Steinhardt says.
>
> Perhaps, Steinhardt says, dark energy is not a constant force but 
> something that can grow less dominant over time. If dark energy 
> weakens, gravity could reassert itself as a shaper of the universe, 
> and the whole business could contract again.
>
> Unfortunately, none of this can be measured directly at the moment. 
> There's no such thing as a dark energy detector. No one has figured 
> out how to catch this particular kind of lightning in a bottle.
>
> It could be that we're nowhere close to understanding what's happening 
> in the universe. The place always turns out to be bigger and more 
> complicated than we thought. In the 1920s we discovered that we live 
> in but one of countless galaxies of stars, and that all these galaxies 
> are moving away from one another. The universe is expanding. Hit 
> rewind and we see that about 13.7 billion years ago, everything in the 
> universe was compressed into an unimaginably hot, dense wad of energy. 
> Something happened to transform that cosmic knot into a vast universe. 
> It all went bang -- but why? How?
>
> In the early 1980s, Guth, Linde, Steinhardt and others developed a 
> provocative theory called "inflation," which suggests that the tiny 
> embryonic universe went through an extremely brief (fraction of a 
> second) inflationary epoch, increasing from something smaller than a 
> pinhead to something cosmic in scale.
>
> Steinhardt has more recently developed the hypothesis of colliding 
> branes, an attempt to incorporate string theory into cosmology. 
> Steinhardt's scenario has many moving parts and requires unseen 
> dimensions of space. He admits it's still a maverick view, and perhaps 
> it will always be hard to get converts to a new theory that is built 
> on the assumption that we're going to collide with a hidden universe.
>
> Steinhardt, however, has no monopoly on mind-bending theories. Linde 
> has spent years talking about the possibility that a scientist might 
> be able to create an entire universe in a laboratory.
>
> You'd only need a speck of matter, Linde says. If you could get it to 
> start inflating, it would eventually turn into a whole new gigantic 
> galaxy-filled universe. For reasons that are pretty much lost in 
> translation between scientist and journalist, the creation of this new 
> universe somehow doesn't destroy the laboratory, or even break any 
> beakers or flasks, but rather the new cosmos squirts off into unseen 
> dimensions while continuing to look like a tiny little thing to the 
> physicist.
>
> Linde sees this as a potential means of surviving the demise of our 
> own universe.
>
> "Maybe we can create the universe and transfer our knowledge to the 
> inhabitants of the universe that is created in our laboratory," Linde 
> says.
>
> Or maybe, he suggests, someone already did that. The creator of our 
> cosmos might be a "physicist hacker" in some other universe, he says. 
> Again, this is a theory that has yet to yield a lot of support.
>
> The ultimate question is why the universe exists at all. Guth says the 
> equations for inflation allow the universe to expand forever, with new 
> universes constantly popping into existence, but the equations don't 
> permit an eternal past. There has to be a beginning, back there 
> somewhere. Where did that first pulse, that first little spark, come 
> from?
>
> Guth says he's worked out scenarios in which the laws of physics allow 
> something to pop into existence from nothing. But he adds, "I was 
> implicitly assuming that the laws of physics already existed, even 
> when there was no space, no time, no matter. I think that's all I need 
> to assume. Nevertheless I am clearly making a big assumption there. 
> That does raise the question of what caused the laws of physics, where 
> they came from."
>
> What's his answer?
>
> "I don't have the foggiest idea."
>
> So let's quickly summarize where we are: We're not sure if the 
> universe will keep expanding or start contracting. We don't know if 
> The End, if there ever is such a thing, is many billions of years away 
> or many trillions of years away. We don't know the nature of dark 
> energy, this strange force that's shaping the universe. We don't know 
> if constants are constant. We don't know why there are laws of 
> physics. We don't know why there's something rather than nothing.
>
> And thus we might guess that scientists will not soon put theologians 
> out of business.
>
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