"There Was No Big Bang" - We Live in a Universe that Endlessly Expands and Contracts (VIDEO)

Daily Galaxy

Quote from source:
Does the universe repeat itself every trillion years? A new cosmological model appears to demonstrate that the universe can endlessly expand and contract, providing a rival to Big Bang theories and solving a thorny modern physics problem, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physicists. A new view that requires for a new take on our concept of time – one that has more in common with the “cyclic” views of time held by ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci, than the Christian Calender and Bible-influenced belief in “linear” time now so deeply imbedded in modern western thinking.

The cyclic model proposed by Dr. Paul Frampton, Louis J. Rubin Jr. distinguished professor of physics in UNC’s College of Arts & Sciences, and co-author Lauris Baum, a UNC graduate student in physics, has four key parts: expansion, turnaround, contraction and bounce.

During expansion, dark energy -- the unknown force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate -- pushes and pushes until all matter fragments into patches so far apart that nothing can bridge the gaps. Everything from black holes to atoms disintegrates. This point, just a fraction of a second before the end of time, is the turnaround.

At the turnaround, each fragmented patch collapses and contracts individually instead of pulling back together in a reversal of the Big Bang. The patches become an infinite number of independent universes that contract and then bounce outward again, reinflating in a manner similar to the Big Bang. One patch becomes our universe.

“This cycle happens an infinite number of times, thus eliminating any start or end of time,” Frampton said. “There is no Big Bang.”

Cosmologists first offered an oscillating universe model, with no beginning or end, as a Big Bang alternative in the 1930s. The idea was abandoned because the oscillations could not be reconciled with the rules of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics, Frampton said.

The second law says entropy (a measure of disorder) can’t be destroyed. But if entropy increases from one oscillation to the next, the universe becomes larger with each cycle. “The universe would grow like a runaway snowball,” Frampton said. Each oscillation will also become successively longer. “Extrapolating backwards in time, this implies that the oscillations before our present one were shorter and shorter. This leads inevitably to a Big Bang,” he said.

I highly recommend watching the lecture as it is done by Penrose, who is absolutely brilliant. I wanted to share this as the Big Bang is too mainstream and we should always be thinking about other possible theories.

The more thinking the better.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

Any pre Big Bang theories are fun to think about but are in serious danger of being untestable in principal. Current physics can project back to the big bang and get very close to the "bang," but then we arrive at a singularity and our laws/equations/physics breaks down. The theory discussed here still includes a "big bang" event, it's just that in this case that event is not the begining of time. We cannot - with current - physics investigate anything pre "bang event." It may be that it is impossible in principal to investigate; it may be that no information can be transmitted through the "bang" or it may be that quantum instabilities cause the universal constants in our equations to change in arbitrary and unpredictable ways, in either case we cannot have evidence for anything pre "bang."

Without any evidence we have no way to test the theories. We might as well talk about how there might have been dinosaurs before the big bang. As long as we are prohibited by physics from accessing any information about the time which we are speculating about, there is no way to do anything with any theories that we may devise about that time. It really comes down a silly matter of personal preference: do you want time to be cyclical or do you want a begining? You can pick either one and no one can prove you wrong, but you have no reason to believe that you are right.

reply to post by predator0187


Source:

During expansion, dark energy -- the unknown force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate -- pushes and pushes until all matter fragments into patches so far apart that nothing can bridge the gaps. Everything from black holes to atoms disintegrates. This point, just a fraction of a second before the end of time, is the turnaround.

Dark energy which we do not understand pushes everything apart till everything disintegrates. This implies that there is something, perhaps dark energy, holding everything (particles, atoms, molecules) together. It pushes everything apart far enough that "nothing can bridge the gap". Gravity? Probably not. Dark energy? Perhaps. But we don't understand how DE works.

It seems more likely that everything expands till some sort of equilibrium exists and there is more of a static state thereafter. Why would the forces that are pushing everything apart stop working and allow a reversal and contraction.

Only way I see that happening is if all matter suddenly became disconnected from whatever force is maintaining its structure. I have never heard any physicist admit that such a maintenance force exists although I have suspected it does exist because its hard to believe for instance that electrons would spin endlessly in their quantum orbits without some maintenance force (again, dark energy?).

Going on, DE or momentum from the bang is pushing everything apart but gravity has the opposite effect. It would seem that somewhere there would be an equilibrium situation.

reply to post by plumranch


The forces holding the fundamental structure of matter together are well understood: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetism, and on large scales(and not as well understood at the deepest level), gravity. These "maintenance" forces are described in detail(with the exception of gravity on quantum scales) in the Standard Model:
cms.web.cern.ch...
www2.slac.stanford.edu...


[edit on 3/24/10 by OnceReturned]

reply to post by OnceReturned


Well understood with a lot of qualification...

Standard Package

.it is not time for physicists to call it a day just yet. Even though the Standard Model is currently the best description we have of the subatomic world, it does not explain the complete picture. The theory incorporates only three out of the four fundamental forces, omitting gravity. Alas, Newton would be turning in his grave! Nor does it explain why the many well-established basic parameters such as particles' masses have the values they do. There are also important questions it cannot answer, such as what is dark matter, what happened to the missing antimatter, and more. Last but not least, an essential ingredient of the Standard Model, a particle called the Higgs boson, has yet to be found in an experiment. The race is on to hunt for the Higgs – the key to the origin of particle mass. Finding it would be a big step for particle physics, although its discovery would not write the final ending to the story.

So despite the Standard Model's effectiveness at describing the phenomena within its domain, it is nevertheless incomplete. Perhaps it is only a part of a bigger picture that includes new physics that has so far been hidden deep in the subatomic world or in the dark recesses of the Universe.

So that might be where dark energy is involved?

big bang makes most sense

Originally posted by plumranch
reply to post by OnceReturned

 

Well understood with a lot of qualification...

Standard Package

.it is not time for physicists to call it a day just yet. Even though the Standard Model is currently the best description we have of the subatomic world, it does not explain the complete picture. The theory incorporates only three out of the four fundamental forces, omitting gravity. Alas, Newton would be turning in his grave! Nor does it explain why the many well-established basic parameters such as particles' masses have the values they do. There are also important questions it cannot answer, such as what is dark matter, what happened to the missing antimatter, and more. Last but not least, an essential ingredient of the Standard Model, a particle called the Higgs boson, has yet to be found in an experiment. The race is on to hunt for the Higgs – the key to the origin of particle mass. Finding it would be a big step for particle physics, although its discovery would not write the final ending to the story.

So despite the Standard Model's effectiveness at describing the phenomena within its domain, it is nevertheless incomplete. Perhaps it is only a part of a bigger picture that includes new physics that has so far been hidden deep in the subatomic world or in the dark recesses of the Universe.

So that might be where dark energy is involved?

No one knows.

reply to post by plumranch


Could be. Dark energy is undeniably as mysterious as anything. I thought you were talking about a sort of "scaffolding" force, providing structure and coherence to fundamental particles. I think that the standard model does describe such forces in detail. The big mystery is gravity, and with it mass. Gravity cannot be meaningfully described at the smallest scales, but luckily it is so weak that it doesn't seem to play an important role on those scales.

I would be hesitant to try to bring dark energy in the quantum realm. It's such a mystery that we really have absolutely no idea what it is; it's just a constant in our equation for how fast the universe is expanding. Dark energy might not be energy and it might not be dark; the term dark energy is completely interchangeable with the cosmological constant in cosmology. Other than being the constant which defines the rate of universal expansion, nothing at all is known about it. Yet, we are able to describe interactions and physical behavior at many scales very, very well without appealing to anything "dark." The dark stuff is so far only useful for explaining wierd behaviors of huge bodies over cosmic space and time scales. There doesn't seem to be room for dark stuff in the quantum world, or in the conventional human scale world. Our equations work without it.

Any connection between gravity and dark energy would come as quite a surprise, because - on the surface at least - their effects seem to be opposite. It's counter-intuitive to think that the same force is both pulling everything together and pushing everything apart, at the same time. No connection between the two is self evident.

reply to post by OnceReturned

There doesn't seem to be room for dark stuff in the quantum world,

And why not? Since you cannot explain many phenomena at the subatomic level this is all new territory.

Why did they build the Hadron facility if everything was "well understood"?

Our equations work without it.

Sounds nice but permit me to doubt! Sounds like you understand the mysteries of the universe!

Show me your equations and how they "work without it" so we all can be convinced.

reply to post by predator0187


Awesome post OP! They wanted simple? They got simple. Everything (literally) in our "uni"verse expands until a critical quantum point, upon which everything (once again, literally) implodes and creates an entire new... set of "uni"verses.

Fun stuff to think about, at least! Perhaps then gravity is not abnormally weak, but only weak on the local scale that we perceive. The missing element of our equations may reside outside of our own "uni"verse!

Cheers,
Strype

reply to post by plumranch


The main reason that the LHC was built is to find evidence for the Higgs boson. This fundamental particle is predicted by the Standard Model but hasn't been found. The idea is that the Higgs is the source of mass in all particles, and therefore the basis of gravity. Finding the Higgs will go a long way towards helping explain gravity, which is really the missing link for a Theory of Everything. Equally as valuable would be the event that we don't find the Higgs. This would mean that something is wrong with the Standard Model, and we have misunderstood something very deeply somewhere along the way. It would certainly usher in a race for a new paradigm in physics, but it would be hard to reconcile with the successful predictions made by our current models.

I understand parts of the universe at some levels, but there seem to be infinite levels, so I don't and I can't understand the universe in a complete way. No one can. I'm not trying to come across as having all the answers. I just think that some of this stuff is better explained than many people would think. A wierd property of the universe which will keep scientists in business until the end of time is that it appears to be infinitely reductive( and infinitely additive). Whenever we can explain some physical process on a larger scale perfectly well, we find that when we investigate its constituent parts we have to come up with a whole new set of explanations for why those parts are the way they are. We have equations that work very well at the scale that we live at: we can send people to the moon, build nuclear power plants, computers, and jet aircraft. We are still working out the details at the smaller and bigger scales. It's interesting to note that it doesn't seem to matter that we don't fully understand wierd stuff in the quantum world. We can still explain larger scale phenomenon without havng to have a good description of that phenomenon's constituent parts.

What I mean when I say that there isn't room for the dark stuff at smaller scales is that we can predict the behavior of physical objects without having a term in our equations for dark energy. This probably means that dark energy doesn't contribute meaningfully to the behavior of these objects. It only seems to contribute meaingfully to the behavior of objects at the very largest scales, and once we include a term for it(the cosmological constant) we can predict the behavior of those objects( fairly well that is; we have yet to find the "dark matter" which exerts a gravitational force). Also, we have a tendancy to insert interesting mysteries into eachother; ie. We don't understand quantum gravity and we don't understand dark energy, so maybe we can relate these two mysteries. Or, we don't understand consciousness and we don't understand the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, so maybe we can relate these two mysteries. This general trend of "mystery mongering" is very common and seems to be a product of the way humans are hard wired to deal with the unknown. I discourage such practice when we don't have good evidence to connect the two mysteries.

Dark energy is the name for the observation which we have made about how fast the universe is accelerating outwards. We have me no analogous observations at the quantum scale. The deep( non-trivial in terms of their implications for the paradigm of physics as well as for philosophy of science and reality) mysteries at the quantum scale are 1) the measurement problem 2) how nonlocality works and 3) why don't our equations for gravity work. Anything is possible, of course, but intuitively it looks to me like using dark energy to explain these mysteries would be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

reply to post by predator0187

I especially like in the video where he refers to the word "Fantasy" before he starts talking about branes, and everybody laughs. Yes it's funny and yes it seems like fantasy, I don't know why this fantasy has such widespread acceptance, or maybe based on all the laughs that got, it's not as accepted as some would like us to believe.

I've always had a hard time visualizing singularities, but just because I can't visualize something doesn't mean it can't exist, or isn't real. But imagine the entire Earth the size of a pinhead. That already seems nearly impossible, right? Now the sun, a million times bigger, the same size. Now imagine a star 5 times as big as our sun, even smaller than that, in a black hole singularity. Now imagine a galaxy of 100 billion stars in the same "space", and as the big bang proposes, imagine 100 billion such galaxies in the same space. If true it's simply beyond our comprehension.

Now if the recycling universe theory relies less on a singularity, that would make it easier for me to visualize, but I'm still stuck with the black hole singularities no matter which model I accept.

At least some scientists are examining alternatives to the big bang, I'm not married to the big bang theory. I only accept it because I have yet to see a theory that explains all available evidence better. This theory isn't quite there yet, but given time maybe someone will come up with a better theory that does explain all the evidence better.

reply to post by OnceReturned

OnceReturned, that's an excellent post and eloquently stated, so much so that I'm adding you to my friends list! I share your views, and tend to think of 3 scales, quantum, sub-galactic (smaller than a galaxy but larger than quantum), and cosmic (the size of a galaxy or larger). And I agree that the sub-galactic scale we live in is certainly the one we understand the best.

We seem to have the greatest difficulties explaining things outside that in either the direction of the cosmic scale, or the quantum scale. The cosmic scale is just a matter of profound curiosity, but we are actually encountering real-world limitations on the quantum scale in for example the semiconductor world. As we continue to scale down the sizes of transistors smaller and smaller, the number of molecules comprising each transistor shrinks to the point where quantum effects can become significant at some point in how the transistor performs.

I think we are a long way from warping space and time ourselves to travel cosmic distances so for the time being, the quantum world is the one we will be bumping up against more in practical applications.

The mystery mongering you mention is a big problem I see. Probably the biggest blunder is to say "the big bang theory has some problems (which in fact it does) therefore let's believe in "X theory" instead. And most commonly "X theory" is of course "electric universe" which explains nothing better than the big bang theory. Any theory has to stand on it's own proof and merits.

One thing I've said about the big bang theory before is consistent with this cyclical theory. When we look at redshifts, we can say the universe was smaller in the past and will be bigger in the future, but we can't say for sure that projecting the past will definitely lead to a single point or singularity, there are lots of other options IMO so I'm glad to see some other people thinking about such possibilities, even if we don't yet have a viable replacement for the big bang theory.

What's interesting is that a few decades ago we thought we had a lot figured out about the universe. But after discovering dark matter, and dark energy, our apparent' level of understanding seems to be going backwards, we are just realizing we don't understand it as well as we once thought we did. So the field is more wide open for new theories than it has been in decades, to explain the new evidence.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thank you for the favorable response, I've added you to my friends list as well.

The part of science where cosmology and quantum physics overlap is one of the most interesting things to think about. I am infinitely amused by the absurdity of the situation with the LHC: The best way to answer the most fundamental questions about the nature of reality - the basic building blocks, the beginig of the time, the theory of everything - is to build an 8 billion dollar race track and smash s**t into eachother going opposite directions at near the speed of light. It's just funny that that is what it comes down to, that's how we access the mysteries of the universe, smash stuff together as hard as we can. Anyway, that's off topic but I like to remind myself and others of it in case we ever have doubts about whether or not the universe has a sense of humor.

I think in the big picture cosmologists need to step back and think for a second about what they are doing. They've sort of painted themselves into a corner and are left with a logically impossible-to-solve problem, in principal. Within modern cosmology there are only three possible states of affairs:

1. If you proceed according to the two premises that 1) The universe had a begning and 2) We explain things in terms of their causal predecessors; you are stuck. You will never be able to explain the initial conditions; the initial state of the universe and the initial laws and constants which govern the developement of that universe. They cannot be explained within the paradigm because at the moment that the universe said "go" there had to have been some conditions which were instantiated and which had no causal predecessors.

2. Only slightly different than 1, if you accept the two premises that 1) Universe is cyclical and each cycle begins with a big-bang like event which starts as a singularity and which physics cannot extrapolate back "through"(ie. no information about before the bang is accessable after the bang) and 2) that we explain things in terms of their causal predecessors, we are left in the same spot as with case 1. We can't know the causal predecessors to the initial conditions, but we think they exist. This is the same in practice as if they didn't exist. An explanation of the initial conditions is impossible.

3. Premises: 1) The universe is cyclical in such a way that it is possible - in principal - that some advanced physics could extrapolate "through" the start of each cycle and provide information about the previous cycle, and 2) we explain things in terms of their causal predecessors. In this case we have access to an infinite amount of information describing these cyclical universes. But, in the reductionist paradigm of modern science we will seek and probably find equations which govern the progression/change of that information over time. These would be what we would call the equations in the theory of everything. Even in this case, the equations - even if they change over time according to some self-referencing term - are impossible to explain because they have no causal predecessor.

In every conceivable cosmological paradigm, you get to a point where you can ask why things are the way they are but an answer can't exist, even in principal.

Space does not expand since space is nothing.

Nothing can not expand.

To anyone with more than 2 functioning brain cells this should be obvious.

Matter may expand and contract, matter and only matter within a space and time.

Space does not warp, bend, break, expand, contract, or do anything other than exist.

Engineers view black holes as the laughing stock of physics - untestable, unprovable, and in violation of every known provable law of physics.

Similarly with the "Big Bang" or the big crunch or the big whatever.

Mainstream theoretical physicists are a bunch of lying gurus that spew endless agitation propaganda to justify their continued existence and hording of tax payer dollars.

They provide us nothing. They provide no answers. They provide no insight. All of their predictions have been wrong. Their theories have no basis in reality. They are thieving jokers that loot the public and spin fantasy behind a curtain of obscure math and tell us we are simply too dumb to understand their genius.

Sorry, not buying it.

reply to post by mnemeth1

You are right, they lie so well about physics that it allowed them to figure out how to land 2 remote rovers on Mars to explore it.

Physics is so good at lying, that they actually made me believe all those GPS coordinates in my GPS receiver.

And all these computer systems are amazing at how they make me believe they actually work, when they really don't work at all.

It's all a big lie.

Originally posted by harrytuttle
reply to post by mnemeth1

 

You are right, they lie so well about physics that it allowed them to figure out how to land 2 remote rovers on Mars to explore it.

Newton figured out how to do that a few centuries ago.

GPS also adheres to Lorentz Relativity, meaning a steady state universe.

In fact, I might add, that no experiment ever preformed has invalidated Lorentz Relativity.

None.

That is to say, no experiment ever performed has invalidated "steady state" physics.




[edit on 25-3-2010 by mnemeth1]

Originally posted by Faiol
big bang makes most sense

Maybe so. I may not be that knowledgeable about it, but that theory has never made much sense to me.


[edit on 25-3-2010 by _Phoenix_]

Originally posted by _Phoenix_

Originally posted by Faiol
big bang makes most sense

Maybe so. I may not be that knowledgeable about it, but that theory has never made much sense to me.


[edit on 25-3-2010 by _Phoenix_]

Its not supposed to.

If the physicists actually did their job and weren't lying to us, they would have had the fundamentals of matter and the existence of the universe figured out decades ago.

Hence, they would have put themselves out of jobs.

Its not very profitable to be a theoretical physicists that actually finds the solution to everything.

reply to post by mnemeth1


i'm inclined to agree with you.

also the ideas that the OP brings to our attention remind me of the inbreathing and outbreathing of the universe mentioned in ancient indian texts.