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The Big Bang should have made cracks in spacetime–why haven’t we found them?
- taylodl 4y agoSo we’re in a situation where we strongly suspect that there should be cosmic strings riddled throughout the Universe. And yet decades of direct and indirect searches haven’t found any. At all. We’re left with two conclusions. Either our understanding of the physics of the early Universe is way off base and cosmic strings aren’t nearly as generic as we think they are, or we’re not understanding how cosmic strings manifest themselves in the modern-day cosmos and our observations are missing something. I think it's safe to say our understanding of the physics of the early Universe is way off base, and by early, I mean a few seconds old. We're going to have to unify GR and QM before we have a shot at understanding the physics of the early Universe.
- pvaldes 4y agoMaybe black holes are those strings and cracks? Any point can turn to be a line if seen from the correct perspective. As all came from the big bang all lines would radiate from the original point and travel with us all would be seen as points from our perspective. Just an opinion. Probably stupid.
- ddingus 4y agoMy own belief is there is one universe, it is cyclical, and just is. No beginning, no end, just cycles between states. There is no big bang. There is a minimum size state that could resemble a big bang.
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- stevenhuang 4y agoPBS Spacetime did a video on this recently https://youtu.be/Thw43hzXlDA https://youtu.be/Thw43hzXlDA Well worth a watch!
- simne 4y agoThank you! I have looong time looked for so good explanation. So the right answer is that large cracks are not too numerous, and fortunately you will not find such artifact under your bed. Even more - if I understand right, they are fragile, and cannot survive in places with high gravitational wave activity, like galaxies. So we should search them in old voids, where they only trouble each other, and nothing else intervene. This is acceptable start point for research, but with huge drawback: this assume very expensive research, because only largest telescopes (or latest gravity wave detectors) have good chances to detect anything.
- sylware 4y agoBecause the maths of physics was modelled based on what we could observe from the various states of the univers. Outside of those contexts, it is only theorical exploration and does not tell us anything, until it is, aka the experiments say otherwise.
- shagymoe 4y agoBecause the engineering team pre-optimized for that?
- somenewaccount1 4y agoThe article starts with a fictional tale because it's a fiction article.
- monlockandkey 4y ago"He who created seven heavens in layers. You see no discrepancy in the creation of the Compassionate. Look again. Can you see any cracks?" - Clear Qur'an "[And] who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return [your] vision [to the sky]; do you see any breaks?" - Sahih international translation 67:3 Qur'an
- cwillu 4y ago
- dang 4y ago(I'm a moderator here.) I appreciate the comments you've posted, up to a point, but using HN primarily for religious comments is not allowed on HN. It's guaranteed to lead to religious flamewar, which we definitely don't want on HN. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on a variety of intellectually interesting topics. Intellectual curiosity can certainly overlap with comments drawn from religious experience, knowledge of religious history and scholarship, etc. All that is great—from time to time. What's not ok are religion-driven polemics or using the site primarily for religious comments. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- monlockandkey 4y agoThank you for reply. Yep that make sense. I understand that mentioning religion may result in threads that are low effort (insults, fallacious arguments etc). I will make sure that if I were to comment regarding religion in the future, it would be in the framework of this site's guidelines promoting interesting discussion and perspectives.
- robertlagrant 4y agoI thought it was fun to see the same sort of metaphor used.
- norwalkbear 4y agoI can't help but think the Mandela effect is an example.
- McNutty 4y agoUtter nonsense. Sincerely, A person who grew up in apartheid South Africa
- DangitBobby 4y agoCan you elaborate on that?
- bin_bash 4y agoAgreed, for others: the "Mandela effect" is a fake idea that there are things that we collectively remember wrong because of various pseudoscientific claims. It's like a conspiracy theory. It's called the "Mandela" effect based on the ridiculous claim that some people think that Nelson Mandela died in prison. That's absurd since it was after he was in prison that he did his most famous acts like becoming president and ending apartheid. The number of people that think he died in prison has to be vanishingly few. For someone that grew up in Apartheid South Africa I can't imagine how insulting this would be. People use it as an excuse when they remember anything wrong, just look at the subreddit and these ridiculous claims: https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/xg5a8o/meet_the_millers_or_were_the_millersmandela_effect/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/xg5a8o/meet_... JJ McCullough did a great video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKujYkEmwWM&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKujYkEmwWM&themeRefresh=1
- Moodles 4y agoI think your reply is a little too strident. It’s not a “fake idea”. It’s just someone’s idea. I hadn’t heard of it but I googled it upon reading this thread and it seems to be the idea that people tend to collectively remember things inaccurately in the exact same way. That phenomenon alone seems pretty plausible and not that dumb or fake, right? But what isn’t plausible is the part you left out that’s talked about in the video? That some people explain the Mandela effect through pseudoscientific bullshit like alternative timelines merging. You also seem to conflate the ridiculousness of what some people collectively remember with the Mandela effect concept as a whole. It’s a bit like saying hypnosis as an idea is dumb because people do dumb things when hypnotised? I also don’t understand what is deeply offensive about people misremembering that Mandela died in prison? They’re not saying (or even remembering) that he was a bad person, probably the opposite, they’re just ignorant of history. But having said all that I am perplexed by the OP comment: “I can’t help but think the Mandela effect is an example”. An example of what? Cracks in spacetime? Because yeah that’s dumb, though probably a joke.
- hulitu 4y ago> The Big Bang should have made cracks in spacetime–why haven’t we found them? As the song says: We tried to look but they were gone.
- ojciecczas 4y agoBecause there was no big bang. The universe slowly goes to the "black side" through black holes, and when it's finished, it goes to the "white side" in a kind of big bang, but no so violent. And the cycle repeats.
- nsilvestri 4y ago[citation needed]
- throwawayuydw 4y agoIn a thread about scientific questions so out-of-reach that we can barely put names to the yawning chasms in collective human understanding... It might be unrealistic to expect any proffered answer to come with a reputable citation.
- sound1 4y agoI think the OP meant Cyclic Universe theory by Penrose: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FUlo8BF9Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FUlo8BF9Y
- pndy 4y agoSounds more like an inspiration taken from Clarke's 2001, when Bowman travels through the Monolith to space Grand Central in inverted universe
- ojciecczas 4y agoI'm sharing my own idea.
- dTal 4y agoI think you rather badly misunderstand what physics is. It's not a field where you try to convince people of some kind of emotionally compelling origin story you just invented. It's a field where you measure a bunch of things, relate the numbers with some sort of equation, and (optionally!) describe the equation with some sort of layman-friendly metaphor, to build intuition. You can't skip straight to the metaphor! Where are your numbers? On what basis do you claim this radical departure from established physics? Why should we listen to you?
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- ladyattis 4y agoI believe one of the possible reasons for the spatial defects, like cosmic strings, not being found could be that they've essentially stabilized over time which means the slight differences between patches of spacetime effectively mended and thus wouldn't leave anything detectible. But I do believe there's still some consensus that we should see some of these defects in deep sky observations despite this possbility.
- pmayrgundter 4y agoThere's renewed debate about the Big Bang theory now that JWST is beginning to return images of earlier times than we've seen before. Eric Lerner has been making the case that there was no BB for a long time now. I think these are valid criticisms and he's now updated them wrt to JWST https://youtu.be/ZlFpq49Ri8Y https://youtu.be/ZlFpq49Ri8Y
- eurasiantiger 4y agoPerhaps the entire universe is like a Game of Life space in which the observable universe has emerged as ongoing complex activity, with patterns of stable and chaotic oscillations forming emergent functional parts, which then interact and join to create more emergent functional assemblies now with more features to interact by, such as mass and gravity. This would explain the apparent expansion of the universe, as the observable universe could still be forming new ”massy assemblies” at its periphery, thus increasing the gravitational pull towards the outer limits of ”our bubble”.
- roywiggins 4y agoI don't think anyone at the JWST thinks so. https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-science-denial https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-science-den...
- pmayrgundter 4y agoYep. I don't think that article you linked is fair to Lerner though. Casting him as a pseudoscientific denier is a recognizable trope, but is incorrect by their own criteria: - Published in reputable sources? Yes, well-published on this topic in journals and leading newspapers[scholar,wiki] - Associated with a University, with related credentials? Yes, has a BS in physics from Columbia[wiki], some grad work at UMD. More importantly, he's a notable plasma physics theorist/engineer (most of his career and publications). - Anyone else agree? Yes, he's following in Alfen's plasma cosmology[alfven]; Alfven is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who also criticized the BBT. - Cited references? Yes, the video I linked is well-cited, e.g. the 16 failed predictions of BBT vs 1 correct. See 23m45s for citations of this claim. - Follow the logic? Well, Lerner's video is pretty straight forward and extensively reviews the primary lit, but the space.com article is mostly a string of ad hominem, comparing him to "people who deliberately peddle anti-science narratives" and flat-Earthers, and that "the tactics employed in Lerner's article are classic misdirections used by science deniers". Which.. is bad journalism but to me signals its own bias and likelihood he's saying something important. I'm very much looking forward to the next few years on this! [scholar]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=eric+lerner+big+bang&btnG=&oq=eric+lerner https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=eric... [wiki]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner [alfven]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfv%C3%A9n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfv%C3%A9n, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology
- jjkaczor 4y agoProof that we are in a simulation, not all details are accurately or correctly simulated. /sarcasm
- lioeters 4y agoThe fact that things are not perfect or correct seems to me like an argument that it's not a simulation. In other words, I'd be suspicious if things are too "perfect" from our primitive primate intelligence.
- kaptainscarlet 4y agoIt's just a simulation with geometry, physics, detailed textures and ray tracing.
- ralala 4y agoI think we also have lazy evaluation, heuristics (wave-particle duality), out-of-memory killers (black holes, hawking radiation) and bandwidth limitations (speed of light). It seems obvious, hopefully it's not going to kernel panic!
- CoastalCoder 4y agoWell if that's true, then who created Jensen Huang?
- nvahalik 4y agoOr, as many people since ancient times have believed, that we live in a universe created ex nihilo by a being capable of doing so…
- coldacid 4y agoWhich very well could be a simulation on some god's computer :^)
- superb-owl 4y agoThis is your annual reminder that The Big Bang is just one of many valid cosmological models.
- roywiggins 4y agoWait, which models don't envisage a period where everything is hot enough to unify the fundamental forces? If that happened, you need some mechanism to let the universe cool off without producing these kinks...
- superb-owl 4y agoI'm under the impression you know more about the subject than I do :) I'm mostly replaying what I learned in Penrose's Road to Reality...it's possible that _all_ current cosmological theories predict "cracks," though given the sheer number of models out there, that would surprise me.
- roywiggins 4y agoI'm certainly a layman. But it seems that the predicted strings are supposed to have been caused by the hot-dense early universe cooling off in a particular way, rather than anything to do with how the hot-dense state happened. So it's not clear that making the universe cyclic helps you solve the problem. A much simpler solution would be just that the behavior of the early universe somehow prevented them forming or made them much rarer than we thought.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> And here's something wild: At those energies, there are only three forces of nature, not four. oh ok does this field just lack words to convey a shared concept? I often see these language anomalies only in reference to physics and outer spaaaace. Its like a bad attempt at skeumorphing when different words should have been used from the start. Like in this article “Did you knooow, this is so interesting, that space-time has cracks!? I know right! at these energy levels electroweak force (appropriately named) merges!” Why are PhDs communicating like this? How does this article conveyed a shared concept (the point of language) to anyone except a few people that went to the same school? who is this for?
- superb-owl 4y agoYes. Physics concepts are notoriously hard to communicate in natural language. You need to see the math in order to go any deeper than "spacetime cracks." I highly recommend Leonard Susskind's "Theoretical Minimum" course if you would like to go deeper, and see this fact for yourself: https://theoreticalminimum.com/ https://theoreticalminimum.com/
- EamonnMR 4y agoI'm actually reading his Black Hole War book right now and he does a great job of explaining things conceptually.
- roywiggins 4y agoThe universe doesn't really play nicely with human metaphors. That's why physics spends so much time deep in mathematics, because it turns out our metaphors don't line up with reality very well at all. Or, alternatively, mathematics provides a really, really intricate set of interlocking metaphors that you can train yourself to use, but most people haven't. So anyone without the right training is left with a relatively impoverished understanding (including me!)
- prometheus76 4y agoWe need ~~priests~~ scientists who speak ~~Latin~~ mathematics to interpret what truth really is because none of the rest of us have been trained. EDIT: I thought HN used markdown for comments, but I guess not. The double tilde is strikethrough in markdown.
- pvaldes 4y agoFrom the ignorance, I don't think that the problem is why. The problem is how? How we could find that the light that comes from star A is ... two minutes or one week or one decade delayed respect to the light received from star B? We automatically would convert any anomaly into more distance to earth. This distances could be just wrong and we would not know it.
- stonemetal12 4y agoIf light were delayed we would know because the triangulated distance wouldn't match.
- roywiggins 4y agoTired light theory is quite testable! It's failed. https://www.science.org/content/article/tired-light-hypothesis-gets-re-tired https://www.science.org/content/article/tired-light-hypothes...
- robertlagrant 4y agoI don't see the connection between that and what OP said?
- roywiggins 4y agoI mean that distant galaxies are both definitely distant and definitely getting further away, and that's been measured and tested in lots of ways. Tired light is one proposed alternative to the expanding universe cosmology that's failed.
- robertlagrant 4y ago> distant galaxies are both definitely distant and definitely getting further away That doesn't seem to conflict with what the OP said. > Tired light is one proposed alternative But not by the OP. I don't see how your comment relates.
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- Zenst 4y agoWas there space or even time before the big bang? Didn't the big bang create space and with that time?
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThe cracks are supposed to have occurred in the first few seconds after the Big Bang, when spacetime would already be a thing.
- collyw 4y agoWhen they can't answer that, it's about as credible as religion.
- Timon3 4y agoActually, it's the other way around - if they answered it, they wouldn't be credible. The idea that you can't have any reliable knowledge without being omniscient is fundamentally denying the concept of acquiring knowledge, and science is our best process for acquiring knowledge so far.
- lebuffon 4y agoBecause the simulation maker patched those bugs. :)