Is the Big Bang in the Bible?

[Valka]

I still post once in awhile on CFC. The other female OT regulars seem to have all vanished, though.

[Buster's Uncle]

That is the way of it too often, unfortunately.

[gwillybj]

"we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars"

Not so.

Genesis plainly states:

1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

All the various "heavenly bodies" were made along with the earth.

2.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

The earth was dark; nothing was visible on it or from it.

3.  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

From the standpoint of an observer on the earth, light shone upon it. The earth's features became visible, as at dawn.

14.  And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15.  And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16.  And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17.  And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18.  And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

From the earth the sun and moon and stars became visible as distinct bodies in the sky.

[Buster's Uncle]

Does Dark Energy Spring From the 'Quantum Vacuum?'
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer  13 hours ago



Observations of Planck and other satellites help to solve the equation of the state of dark energy.



The mysterious dark energy that's driving the universe's accelerated expansion may have its roots in the background "vacuum energy" that pervades all of the cosmos, a new study suggests.

"What we think is happening is a dynamic effect of the quantum vacuum, a parameter that we can calculate," co-author Joan Sola, of the University of Barcelona in Spain, said in a statement. "Nothing is more 'full' than the quantum vacuum since it is full of fluctuations that contribute fundamentally to the values that we observe and measure."

Though dark energy constitutes about 75 percent of the universe, scientists don't know exactly what it is. They've developed several different ideas, including the theory of "quintessence," which proposes a sort of anti-gravitating agent that repels rather than attracts.

Another concept posits the existence of a "phantom field" whose density continues to increase with time. This theory predicts an accelerating expansion so powerful that it will eventually break apart the bonds that hold atoms together, tearing the universe apart in a "Big Rip" about 20 billion years from now.

The quintessence and phantom field hypotheses are based partly on data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite— spacecraft that have studied the cosmic microwave background, the ancient light that began saturating the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

In the new study, Sola and lead author Spyros Basilakos of the Academy of Athens in Greece analyze the same spacecraft observations and find less support for either quintessence or the phantom field idea.

"Our theoretical study demonstrates that the equation of the state of dark energy can simulate a quintessence field, or even a phantom field, without being one in reality," Sola said. "Thus, when we see these effects in the observations from WMAP, Planck and other instruments, what we are seeing is a mirage."

Basilakos and Sola instead suggest that dark energy is a type of dynamic quantum vacuum energy — something different than Einstein's cosmological constant, which describes a static vacuum energy density and is another possible explanation of dark energy's nature.

Basilakos and Sola acknowledge there are some issues with the quantum vacuum energy theory but say it's a promising idea.

"However, quintessence and phantom fields are still more problematic; therefore the explanation based on the dynamic quantum vacuum could be the more simple and natural one," Sola said.

http://news.yahoo.com/does-dark-energy-spring-quantum-vacuum-130628574.html

...

[sniffs]  What's that I smell?  -Oh.  Somebody been talkin' crap.  It dark all right, but I don' think it energy.

Behind all this vacuum energy talk is the Casimir effect.  In short, it has been observed that two plates suspended molecular distances apart are strongly pushed together.  It is theorized that it is the action of -- oh, just read the Wikipedia article and hope you can wade through the jargon.  I can't stomach repeating such nonsense.

I am not some crank who is always assuming science and scientists are wrong; it's just that "dark" ANYthing in cosmology is a bugbear of mine.  I cannot say that I have made any in-depth study of the Casimir effect - like that Wikipedia entry, it's a little rare to find anything about it in English; and I say that as someone with an excellent vocabulary and general grasp of scientific principals.

I just think there's got to be a better explanation for the phenomenon that they haven't considered/eliminated yet.  Zero Point energy just as well have dark in the name for all the sense it make to me.  It is -sorry Impaler- WAY too Steady State universe for my blood.

[Valka]

Since nobody's certain of what dark energy really is (although Star Trek authors have come up with novels full of technobabble on the subject), just think of it as the physicist's equivalent of "Terra Incognita" or "Here Be Dragons."

Somebody will figure it out eventually.

[Buster's Uncle]

The Wikipedia article does mention someone asserting

Relativistic van der Waals force[edit]

Alternatively, a 2005 paper by Robert Jaffe of MIT states that "Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be computed without reference to zero-point energies. They are relativistic, quantum forces between charges and currents. The Casimir force (per unit area) between parallel plates vanishes as alpha, the fine structure constant, goes to zero, and the standard result, which appears to be independent of alpha, corresponds to the alpha → infinity limit," and that "The Casimir force is simply the (relativistic, retarded) van der Waals force between the metal plates."[15]

Which describes exactly what I was thinking, only researched and articulated in well thought-out Scientific, as opposed to my vague notion.

[Buster's Uncle]

[Buster's Uncle]

Does Antimatter Fall Up or Down? New Device May Tell
LiveScience.com
By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor  6 hours ago



Antimatter refers to sub-atomic particles that have properties opposite normal sub-atomic particles.



The mystery of whether antimatter falls up or down could be solved with a new experiment to weigh matter's odd cousin, researchers say.

Antimatter is identical to normal matter in some respects but the exact opposite in others. For instance, although the antiproton has the same mass as its counterpart the proton, it is negatively charged instead of positively charged.

When a particle meets its antiparticle, they annihilate each other, giving off a burst of energy — a proof of Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, which revealed mass can be converted to energy and vice versa. A gram of antimatter annihilating a gram of matter would release about twice the energy as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. (Have no fear of antimatter bombs popping up anytime soon — researchers are very far from creating anywhere near a gram of antimatter.)

Scientists have long wondered if antimatter falls down, responding the same way to gravity as ordinary matter. Physicists have generally assumed it does, but many have kept an open mind regarding antimatter's behavior since much about it remains a mystery.

"We don't really understand antimatter," study author Holger Müller, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Live Science. "For instance, the fundamental laws of physics suggest there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe, but our observations tell us there is vastly more matter than antimatter in the universe, and there is no agreed-upon explanation for that."

In addition, there is much about gravity that remains uncertain. For instance, astronomers looking at how galaxies rotate discovered there is far more gravity holding them together than there should be, "which is usually ascribed to gravity from dark matter, but nobody knows what that is," Müller said.

Direct evidence of whether or not antimatter falls downward remains difficult to experimentally gather. Antimatter is rare, and annihilates when it comes into contact with regular matter.

"The combination of antimatter and gravity has never been directly experimentally tested before," Müller said. "There are indirect observations others have obtained, but the very simple experiment of letting a chunk of antimatter drop and seeing what happens has never been done."

Now researchers have proposed a device they suggest could help solve the mystery of whether antimatter falls up or down.

"We don't understand 100 percent about antimatter, and the same is true for how gravity works, so looking at them in combination seems a good spot to look for a new discovery in physics," Müller said.

The instrument, a light-pulse atom interferometer, could measure the behavior of any particle — atoms, electrons and protons, as well as their antimatter counterparts. It works by studying cold particles — ones cooled to a degree above the coldest possible temperature, absolute zero.

At such cold temperatures, scientists can see particles behaving much like waves, rippling up and down within a chamber. By analyzing how these "matter waves" interfere with each other, the researchers can distinguish the force of gravity each particle is experiencing.

Müller and his colleaguesare working to construct their device and integrate into the ALPHA experiment at the CERN physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland, which makes, captures and studies atoms of anti-hydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of the simplest atom, hydrogen.

"Currently the production rate of anti-hydrogen at CERN is four atoms per hour, or an atom every 15 minutes," Müller said. "This production rate currently cannot be sustained 24-7, so 300 anti-hydrogen atoms a month or so is all we can hope for right now."

Since the researchers have very few anti-hydrogen atoms for experiments, their system essentially "recycles" each atom. Magnetic fields trap the atoms so the device can potentially measure the way each atom behaves multiple times.

"We need to get a signal out of each and every single atom — we can't afford to lose a single one," Müller said.

The scientists expect their system will reach an initial accuracy of better than 1 percent for measuring how anti-hydrogen falls, and they noted they could eventually improve this accuracy 10,000-fold.

The scientists detailed their findings online March 25 in the journal Physical Review Letters.


http://news.yahoo.com/does-antimatter-fall-down-device-may-tell-144324040.html

[Buster's Uncle]

How a Medieval Philosopher Dreamed Up the 'Multiverse'
SPACE.com
by Katia Moskvitch, SPACE.com Contributor  7 hours ago



The universe as envisioned in Goussin de Metz' "L'image Du Monde," published in 1245. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fr.14964, fol. 117 (reproduced with permission).



The idea that our universe may be just one among many out there has intrigued modern cosmologists for some time. But it looks like this "multiverse" concept might actually have appeared, albeit unintentionally, back in the Middle Ages.

When scientists analyzed a 13th-century Latin text and applied modern mathematics to it, they found hints that the English philosopher who wrote it in 1225 was already toying with concepts similar to the multiverse.

The study, published on the pre-print server Arxiv and accepted by the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, has brought together two traditionally quite separate subjects: cosmology and history.

"The results give us a much deeper appreciation of science in the 13th century," said one of the lead authors of the study, physicist Richard Bower of Durham University in the United Kingdom. "From a scientist's perspective, I find I had previously completely underestimated the depth of logical argument in the Middle Ages."

The international team first translated the original Latin text — called De Luce, which means "On Light," and written by a philosopher named Robert Grosseteste — into English.

Grosseteste was "one of the most dazzling minds of his generation, lauded by his successors as a mathematical genius, theologian, politician and church leader; he was the bishop of Lincoln from 1235-53," said the principal investigator of the research, medieval historian Giles Gasper of Durham University.

The scientists then tried to understand what Grosseteste was aiming to explain, and wrote down his ideas as if they were modern mathematical equations. The team used a computer to solve these equations, and to see whether they explained the universe as Grosseteste imagined it.


Concentric spheres

In Grosseteste's time, the dominant cosmological model was the one developed mainly by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He postulated that there were nine planets (called spheres), one inside the other, with planet Earth at the center.

In De Luce, Grosseteste assumed that the universe was born from an explosion that pushed everything, matter and light, out from a single point — an idea that is strikingly similar to the modern Big Bang theory.

At first, wrote the philosopher, matter and light were linked together. But the rapid expansion eventually led to a "perfect state," with light-matter crystallizing and forming the outermost sphere — the so-called "firmament" — of the medieval cosmos.

The crystalized matter, Grosseteste assumed, also radiated a special kind of light, which he called lumen. It radiated inward, gathering up the "imperfect" matter it encountered and piling it up in front, similar to the way shock waves propagate in a supernova explosion.

This left behind "perfect" matter that crystallized into another sphere, embedded within the first and also radiating lumen. Eventually, in the center, the remaining imperfect matter formed the core of all the spheres — the Earth.

After they ran a computer simulation using modern equations, the researchers found that the universe imagined by Grosseteste indeed could have formed exactly the way he described it.

"Amazingly, the computer simulation shows that Grosseteste's description is accurate," Bower said.

However, Grosseteste's reasoning only works if there is the right number of properly ordered celestial spheres — and this only happens in the simulations if there are very specific starting points.

"On their own, Grosseteste's laws aren't enough to produce the universe he thought he lived in," Bower said.

The medieval philosopher realized this problem, too. To deal with it, he added an extra reason to explain why there were "exactly nine celestial spheres plus one, an 'imperfect' Earth," Bower said.


Today's physics

Grosseteste's explanation was remarkably similar to the reasoning applied in modern cosmology. Today, the laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics are used to explain the origin of the cosmos, but they do not tell us the amounts of normal matter, dark matter and dark energy in the universe.

"To explain this, cosmologists often appeal to some new theory, such as a super-symmetry theory, for example," Bower said.

In other words, current models work for only certain specific values, and if the values are chosen at random, the explanation fails. So to satisfy these conditions, some physicists suggest that we, in fact, live in a multiverse — that there is not one universe, but an infinite number of them. In this way, any outcome can be accounted for, if not in ours, then in a neighboring universe.

In the same way, if the parameters in Grosseteste's model are modified, there will be a different number of spheres around the Earth.

And although De Luce never mentions the term "multiverse," Bower said that Grosseteste "seems to realize that the model does not predict a unique solution, and that there are many possible outcomes. He needs to pick out one universe from all the possibilities."

"Robert Grosseteste works in a very similar way to a modern cosmologist, suggesting physical laws based on observations of the world around him, and he then uses these laws to understand how the universe formed," Bower said.

Although Grosseteste's description of the origin of the cosmos is not accurate and not based on modern physics, his theory makes sense, and — when one accepts Grosseteste's initial assertions — it is "a logical argument that a modern physicist would be proud of," Bower added.

"Personally, it reminds me that in future centuries, a new generation of physicists will look back at how we understand the universe today, and think, 'How could they not see that?'" Bower said. "Modern cosmology is a grasping towards a more complete understanding of creation, but we do not yet see the full picture."

The study was funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is described in more detail on the team's Ordered Universe blog (http://ordered-universe.com).


http://news.yahoo.com/medieval-philosopher-dreamed-multiverse-115848565.html

[Impaler]

The anti-matter gravity experiment is one I've heard of before (I thought it would be done by now).  It would indeed be mind-blowing if anti-matter was anti-gravitational too.  Though their would be a strange kind of symmetry.

The Electra-magnetic force is characterized by 2 charges which are like-repulsive and unlike-attractive.  If matter attracts matter and mater repels anti-matter then it will be safe to assume that anti-matter attracts antimatter (we would need StarTrek quantities of anti-matter to directly test it's self gravitating effects).   This would mean gravity is like-attractive and unlike-repulsive, the exact inverse of EM.

[Buster's Uncle]

It would close off the anomaly of gravity among the fundamental forces - no known anti-force/repulsive effect.  That seeming lack offends one's sense of symmetry and proper order, somehow...

[Buster's Uncle]

[Geo]

Mmm... how about this? The expansion doesn't accelerate (with distance), but time itself, and since we're positioned within, it looks like the expansion accelerates.
Which could mean, that the timescale told in the Bible is closer to 'reality' then mere mortals could perceive.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

That's close to what Yitzi has posited, and has elements of what I suspect.  What if inside each black hole is a micro universe, that seems in no way micro from that POV?  What would the relative size and position of everything look like to beings evolved for the environment?  Has anyone wrapped their head around it or thought of at least an approach to the math?

[Buster's Uncle]

And leaving out the (distracting) black hole/microverse part, is it just possible that universal expansion is really a POV issue?