July 2, 2007
nATURE LOVES ME THIS I KNOW... (via The Other Brother):
The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin (John Timmer, June 29, 2007, Ars Technica)
Back around the early 1900s, the universe was a fairly simple place. It was static, had always been there, and largely consisted of our own galaxy and a few neighboring bits of matter. Over the course of the 20th century, that view collapsed. Many sources of light were revealed not be stars, but rather galaxies like (and, in many cases, unlike) our own. Distant galaxies were found to be rocketing away from us, propelled by the unfolding of the universe itself, which has accelerated since the big bang. Modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation.According to a paper that will appear in October (arXiv link), we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. The authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology. [...]
The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that's got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there's another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle because we came along at the right time. Too much earlier, and we wouldn't be able to detect that the universe is in a new inflationary era, which tells us that it's dominated by dark energy. Too much later, and we wouldn't be able to know that there's a universe at all. As the authors put it, "we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe: the time at which we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!"
That no one would be a Darwinist by the end of the 20th Century was pretty predictable, but it was harder to forsee that no one would believe in Galileo any more either. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2007 8:00 AM
It's as if somebody planned it.
Posted by: Gideon at July 2, 2007 12:34 PMI see, and by "no one" you mean just about everyone, except for a handful of people who decide to believe these guys?
Posted by: Brandon at July 2, 2007 3:58 PMBrandon: Actually, this is a pretty common sentiment in cosmology. Of course, looking at it from any reasonable scale perspective, the "special time" phrasing is pretty silly. They say that a universe that was ~1 billion years old would not yet be manifesting the effects of "dark energy" (no intelligent life could have been around at that early time anyway) and a universe that was ~100 billion years old will be so diffuse that no cosmology will even be possible (not that there is likely to be intelligent life possible in such an aged universe anyway), so we live in a "special time" where we are able to properly determine the structure & energy content of the universe. But this "special time" of which they speak is many, many tens of billions of years long, and would only seem "special" if you experience time logarithmically, which I know I sure don't. Do you? In other words, this merits a big yawn.
Posted by: b at July 2, 2007 4:58 PMI might experience time logarithmically. It sure seems to go by faster the older I get.
Posted by: Brandon at July 2, 2007 9:52 PMNo, I mean no one including you.
Posted by: oj at July 2, 2007 10:58 PMThere are a lot of other anthropic coincidences that, (when taken together, as they should be), indicate that we're only going to be around for about... not much longer... ;)
If, by some freak "coincidence of nature", I'm right, and the anthropic connection to the forces means that the universe is Darwinian, AND that we, (in conjunction with many in the goldilock zone that are like us), are the mechanism that will enable it to "leap"... then, all I have to say is...
Fire up the LHC, baby, because tension between the vacuum and ordinary matter has been growing for about 13.7 billion years now... and all our finite balloon needs is a needle to give Einstein the last big laugh.
Posted by: island at July 3, 2007 4:39 AM