February 17, 2004
NOW THEY'RE JUST FLAILING (via jd watson):
From Space, a New View of Doomsday (DENNIS OVERBYE, 2/17/04, NY Times)
Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation."In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year.
The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart.
Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. [...]
The idea of an antigravitational force pervading the cosmos does sound like science fiction, but theorists have long known that certain energy fields would exert negative pressure that would in turn, according to Einstein's equations, produce negative gravity. Indeed, some kind of brief and violent antigravitational boost, called inflation, is thought by theorists to have fueled the Big Bang.
Can you start with an "anti" ?
MORE
The Curious Case of the Exploding Universe: Stories from behind the scenes of science. (Catherine H. Crouch, January/February 2004, Books & Culture)
Astronomers Spy Massive Diamond (The Associated Press, 2/13/04) (via Rick Turley)
If anyone's ever promised you the sun, the moon and the stars, tell 'em you'll settle for BPM 37093. The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That's one followed by 34 zeros.Posted by Orrin Judd at February 17, 2004 10:41 AMThe hunk of celestial bling is an estimated 2,500 miles across, said Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Yes, you can, but it assumes there's something larger than our universe from which we sucked energy, both at the inflationary beginning and this recent expansion and ultimate 'Big Rip' ending.
Well, this theory would fit with Christian prophecies of Judgment Day ...
Posted by: pj at February 17, 2004 11:34 AMof course, in a few million years, our Sun will have expanded such that Earth will be a burned-out shell, so I'm not too worried about what might happen in a few billion years....
Posted by: Foos at February 17, 2004 12:03 PMActually, they're talking about 55 billion years (accourting to their current calculations).
There is something **funny** about all this speculation. This dark-energy anti-gravity causes the early, small universe to suddenly expand at a greater rate (inflation), this then abates, and then starting about 5 billion years ago it starts increasing again, all for unknown reasons.
I suspect these results are measurement errors. The latest results apparently indicating an increase are based on measurements of a few dozen Type 1A Supernova. This assumes all these are properly classified and have behaved the same throughout time. However, the unexplained QuasiStellar Objects indicate that the early universe was quite different from our current one.
I believe we will find there are errors similar to the problem of the Cepheid variables, when it was discovered that there were really two types which had been confused, resulting in inaccurate distances.
Posted by: jd watson at February 17, 2004 12:40 PMOh When the sun refuse to shine.
Lord, I want to be in their number,
When the sun refuse to shine.
trad.
Lift up your eyes to the heavens,
And look upon the earth beneath:
For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke,
And the earth shall wear out like a garment,
And its inhabitants shall die with them: but
My salvation shall be for ever, and
My righteousness will never fail.
Is 51:6
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 17, 2004 12:50 PMShould I sell now or hold to see what happens?
Posted by: Genecis at February 17, 2004 12:56 PMHold
Posted by: Uncle Bill at February 17, 2004 1:02 PMI blame it all on a lack of phlogiston.
For "anti-gravity" just substitute "expansive" or some similar term and you avoid the problem. Of course, you have a much less "catchy" phrase for your story...
Bob Kirshner is right on in my opinion when he says "We're in trouble; the way out is going to be new imaginative things. It might be our ideas are not wild enough, they don't question fundamentals enough."
I also found the phrase "If the dark energy is virulent enough..." amusing. Why not call it "evil"?
One should also note that the statement "attempts to calculate the cosmological constant using the most high-powered modern theories of gravity and particle physics result in numbers 1060 times as great as the dark energy astronomers have observed" is in fact a typo. It should read more like 10^60, a discrepancy so large as to be comical.
All in all, a fairly decent story, in that all it really needs to convey is that we have no idea what the heck is going on with the universe.
Posted by: brian at February 17, 2004 3:32 PMCan you have expansion without an "it"?
Posted by: oj at February 17, 2004 3:39 PMI need some sort of antecedent for your "it". I assume you mean an "it" for the expansion to expand into. If so, your question makes no more sense with our current physical understanding that to ask what happened before the big bang.
Posted by: brian at February 17, 2004 4:12 PMAt any rate, I bet that Bob Kirshner and Adam Riess (but not Saul Perlmutter) are pretty peeved at Dennis Overbye for throwing that last little section about Hubble in there. It's basically a forced attempt to include this article in the political battle going on over funding for Hubble, and feels totally superfluous. Unfortunately, Bob and Adam are among those who will be doing reviews of the arguments for overturning the current decision not to service the space telescope again, and so they need to be seen as impartial. This article won't help that.
Posted by: brian at February 17, 2004 5:29 PM