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Some Physicists See Signs of Cosmic Strings from the Big Bang
- qubex 6y agoI always bristle whenever I see Sagan’s quote “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. That is unscientific. Extraordinary claims require proportional evidence, as does any other claim. There’s no magic transition between ordinary and extraordinary claims.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Voloskaya 6y ago> Extraordinary claims require proportional evidence Extraornidary being proportional to itself, it seems you actually agree.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoIt's more that the word "extraordinary" seems to be used as an excuse to dismiss perfectly valid evidence of interesting and unusual events because the evidence isn't "extraordinary" enough. There is no SI unit for extraordinariness [1], so these assessments are rhetorical and subjective, not scientific. [1] Not to be confused with statistical significance, which happens at a later stage in investigations.
- guerrilla 6y agoThen you don't mean proportional and you mean something else like sufficient or something.
- rcxdude 6y agoIt's basically a statement of bayes' theorem: if you observe an event which is extremely unlikely based on your prior, you should probably expect that it was an issue with your observation or random chance, and your expectation should not change very much until you get more evidence.
- slowmovintarget 6y agoIt was an artful way of saying that we have to be very careful in our collection of data, in the analysis of the data, and in our reproduction of the work before such claims can be believed. He wasn't speaking to scientists. Otherwise he would have spoken of rigor. What needs to be extraordinary is the rigor that produces such evidence.
- hikerclimb 6y agoThese scientists don’t know what they are doing... just like with COVID... hope there is no cure for COVID...
- Zenst 6y agoWhen most people see the word `string` in science, `string theory` comes to mind and maybe best to think of them as Space dendrites.
- dfischer 6y agoHow self-similar in thinking so, from the cosmos, to the roots, to the nerves, to the brain.
- sidcool 6y agoGenuine curiousity. Do these mean strings from string theory.
- WORLD_ENDS_SOON 6y agoFrom my understanding of the article, they aren't necessarily the same but could be related: Another more speculative possibility is that cosmic strings could come from the tiny vibrating strings of string theory. Some string theory models propose that strings could have grown to colossal proportions during the initial rapid expansion of the cosmos. Differences in the tension of these kinds of cosmic strings and in how string loops break away would create a unique gravitational-wave signature distinguishing them from other kinds.
- mhh__ 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string Not far enough down the line to understand either theory but "string" is overloaded.
- dfischer 6y agoI'm confused, "It is expected that at least one string per Hubble volume is formed." (10^31 cubic light years.) ... one string per an observable universe? Or am I not thinking clearly?
- recursivecaveat 6y agoThe observable universe is much larger than the hubble volume. I understand this to be due to changes in the rate or expansion of the universe over time, though I'm no astronomer myself.
- dfischer 6y agoThe amount of "observable universes" would be at what number given that each one is a string? How many potential strings from the initial moment? Seems... just mind boggling.
- ericbarrett 6y agoI wonder how this meshes, or clashes, with the recent reinvigoration of primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (versus non-interactive particles). It’s really an exciting time in astronomy!
- privong 6y agoIt's alluded to in the Quanta Mag article, but it's worth repeating the information from the NANOgrav discovery paper[0], as stated in the paper's abstract: However, we find no statistically significant evidence that this process has quadrupolar spatial correlations, which we would consider necessary to claim a GWB detection consistent with General Relativity. So I'm inclined to think that all the "explanation" papers are premature. It's an interesting (low-significance) signal in the data, but more data are needed. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04496 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04496
- dfischer 6y agoInteresting - feels related to Sungchul Ji's work: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/8/1/24 https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/8/1/24 Waves as the Symmetry Principle Underlying Cosmic, Cell, and Human Languages Waves being a unifying concept of communication (language). It's quite interesting and rooted in strong fundamentals. Take a look if you're curious! There's more recent work published that you may find elsewhere other than that paper linked.
- alec_kendall 6y agoI had a thought today that entanglement between particles could be the result of strings wrapping around two quantum particles, and that pulling on the string would result in a motion on one quantum particle that is inversely enacted on the other. The knot around each quantum particle would have to be an inverse of the other knot for this to work. In theory, this idea would also make the entanglement of N-particles possible. Although, it wouldn’t be obvious to determine since for every even number of entangled quantum particles it would look like log2(N) pairs of entangled quantum particles and with every odd number of entangled particles each odd set would look like an even set of entangled quantum particles with an additional particle reflecting some seemingly uncorrelated state. I do not have a deep understanding of quantum mechanics but wanted to share because my ideas like this often die with the last thought. Although, I am doing an independent study on quantum computing this semester and have found it to be very stimulating.
- drdeca 6y agoI'm not sure what you mean by "an inverse of the other knot". If you mean an inverse with respect to the operation of a connected sum of knots, then note that knots do not have inverses with respect to this operation. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected_sum#Connected_sum_of_knots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connected_sum#Connected_sum_of... ) But I'm guessing you mean something else by inverse. Like, maybe just the mirror image of the knot, if the knot is a chiral knot?
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- dfischer 6y agoWhat you described reminds me of these two things (visually): 1. 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds with Ricci flatness https://vimeo.com/81756249 https://vimeo.com/81756249 2. Hopf vibrations: https://juliahub.com/docs/Porta/4MpHD/0.1.1/_packagesource/flower.gif https://juliahub.com/docs/Porta/4MpHD/0.1.1/_packagesource/f...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]