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Big Bang Theory Challenged By Big Chill
The start of the Universe should be modeled not as a Big Bang but more like water freezing into ice, according to a team of theoretical physicists at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University.
Lead researcher on the project, James Quach said current theorising is the latest in a long quest by humans to understand the origins and nature of the Universe.
“Ancient Greek philosophers wondered what matter was made of: was it made of a continuous substance or was it made of individual atoms?” he said. “With very powerful microscopes, we now know that matter is made of atoms.”
“Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales.
“A new theory, known as Quantum Graphity, suggests that space may be made up of indivisible building blocks, like tiny atoms. These indivisible blocks can be thought about as similar to pixels that make up an image on a screen. The challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly.”
However James Quach and his colleagues believe they may have figured out a way to see them indirectly.
“Think of the early universe as being like a liquid,” he said. “Then as the universe cools, it ‘crystallises’ into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorised this way, as the Universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice.”
RMIT University research team member Associate Professor Andrew Greentree said some of these defects might be visible.
“Light and other particles would bend or reflect off such defects, and therefore in theory we should be able to detect these effects,” he said.
This is an artist’s concept of the Universe expansion, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the Universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated with WMAP images on the left and with the representation of stars at the appropriate level of development.
Credit: Wikipedia
The team has calculated some of these effects and if their predictions are experimentally verified, the question as to whether space is smooth or constructed out of tiny indivisible parts will be solved once and for all.
The team is supported by the Australian Research Council, and their research was published in the latest edition of the journal Physical Review D.
Contacts and sources:
Katherine Smith
University of Melbourne
lol how was it ‘hot ‘ , or even if it was cold , how??
“Credit: Wikipedia” – fail
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning Allah created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of Allah was hovering over the waters.
Genesis orginates in ancient Sumeria, who followed a pantheon of deities called El of the Elohim, consisting of El, his two wives Asherah and Rhomerah, their only begotten son Baal and many other subdeities. What you think that has to do with a new diety called Allah whose earliest history is only just over 1000 years old Not a single mention in history prior to that. There is not so much as a single scrap of evidence that Muhammed existed. And even if he did exist, what sort of a role model is a middle age merchant, who sat idly by watching other men beat his wives up and married to a 9 year old kid he was shagging. He’s a criminal women bashing pedophile.
Technically speaking… the universe doesn’t look like ice. Maybe the crystal hunters are so into their crystals that they thought ice would be a good example. Linguistically, it doesn’t encapsulate the whole scene, but it provides an interesting point.
It’s quite amusing how some people cling to ‘theories of everything’ that don’t work and never have worked passed galactic level. There are far better ‘theories of everything’ these days. one in particular ‘the electric universe’, is gaining ground fast by predicting events. Not that the average Joe public ever gets to hear about theories that actually work. It upsets the old school gang still in charge.