8 ms·

A competing theory to 'dark energy' suggests universe has different time zones

73 points by wglb 1y ago

Gualdrapo 1y ago
> Instead, the basis of the timescape model is that, in fact, we see in the universe around us today that there are giant cosmic structures, enormous filaments and walls filled with galaxies and galaxy clusters. And in between those filaments and walls we have giant voids of nothing. Could explain we haven't found life elsewhere?
- XorNot 1y ago
  The scale here is "thousands of galaxies". The problem with where's the other life is already enormous due to the size of our one galaxy.
- chneu 1y ago
  Who says we haven't? We have absolutely no real idea what life will look like. What if there are already organisms that are so large or small that we just can't comprehend them? Also, the universe is likely so large that we'll never encounter life like us.
  - dgfl 1y ago
    Are you proposing that atoms are organisms and/or that astronomical objects may be organisms? I feel like you are just inflating the meaning of “life” without justifying why. Defining it properly is a very interesting problem, but I think this is an extremely active field of study. Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought.
    - iinnPP 1y ago
      It seems they are stating that life elsewhere may be vastly different than life on Earth. How did you arrive at your understanding of the comment?
      - mr_mitm 1y ago
        I arrived at the same understanding as GP due to this line: > What if there are already organisms that are so large or small that we just can't comprehend them?
    - lukan 1y ago
      "Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought." Questions usually can be productive. To answer it, we have to look up and apply the (debated) definitions of life and atoms in our understanding clearly don't meet it. But since we only know so very little when going really small or really big, I do say it is an interesting thought to give room for quark or dark matter based life, or the theoretical organism of a black hole. We simply don't know and we will never know, if we think we already know.
      - mr_mitm 1y ago
        We do know a lot about the very small and the very big, though. We understand quark interactions extremely well. It's very hard to imagine interactions at that scale complex enough to yield something anyone would be comfortable calling "life". The defining property of dark matter is no or only weak interaction (which we also understand very well), so imagining life there becomes even harder. > We simply don't know and we will never know, if we think we already know. That's a very defeatist and intellectually lazy point of view. As is "just asking questions" which lack support by even a shred of plausibility.
        lukan 1y ago
        "That's a very defeatist and intellectually lazy point of view. " In my opinion it is the opposite. Claiming we understand life and quarks and quarks can therefore not be part of subatomic life is the lazy approach to me. I am open for it. That doesn't mean I see indications for it, just that I am open for the concept. If I would not be open for unexpected ideas, I would never get them. And correct me if I am wrong, but I never met a scientist who claimed to really understand quantum mechanics. Well, I heard of some who do, but they are mostly not taken seriously by the rest. So sure, we do know a lot. But understanding it?
        mr_mitm 1y ago
        > quarks can therefore not be part of subatomic life is the lazy approach to me For the record, I wrote "very hard to imagine". If you claim it can be possible, it is you who must produce at least a suggestion on how it could be possible. > And correct me if I am wrong, but I never met a scientist who claimed to really understand quantum mechanics. I know that's a popular trope, but what they usually mean is that they don't understand it on an intuitive level. You can understand the math of it just fine. QM is by far the most successful theory we ever had and laid the foundations for the transistor, lasers, CCD chips, solar panels, MRIs, and much more. It's responsible for arguably the biggest transformation of society of all times. You don't get there without understanding even the smallest nook of that theory. Maybe we have different definitions of what it means to understand something, but that's not a discussion I'm interested it.
- exe34 1y ago
  > Could explain we haven't found life elsewhere? Or maybe we just haven't looked very far at all.
  - merek 1y ago
    Nor for very long.
- aswegs8 1y ago
  We did recently find something very promising https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o
  - philipov 1y ago
    As was discussed at the time, that news was overhyped. The finding is not strong evidence of life, it's strong evidence that we don't fully understand how that molecule gets formed. And the most recent news on that front is that the finding itself is being challenged.
    - matthewdgreen 1y ago
      Every finding gets challenged, and that challenge always becomes news. Trying to evaluate the progress of a scientific debate based on news stories is like guessing the record of a soccer team based on a couple of viral goal clips.
      - philipov 1y ago
        All the more reason why it's too early to be saying anything about that discovery.
- chongli 1y ago
  No. We’re only searching for life in a tiny area around the Sun within our galaxy, the Milky Way. To find life we first need to find planets, which involves looking at stars over extended periods of time to detect tiny dips in brightness (transit method) or tiny wobbles causing minute redshift-blueshift cycles (doppler shift method). Those cosmic filament structures are on the scale of millions and billions of galaxies over distances far larger than the size of a single galaxy. We can’t even resolve individual stars beyond our Local Group of galaxies and still most of the stars within the Milky Way are too far to use our exoplanet detection techniques (2 of them mentioned previously). Finally, to search for life we’ve been attempting to search for spectral absorption lines of the gases in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, which involves recording a spectrograph during the transit method. This only works for stars with their orbital planes edge-on to us so that we can actually detect the planetary transits and record enough light from them over time to see how the spectrograph changes during the transit events.
monkeycantype 1y ago
If it’s all a swirling spinning turbulent mess is there enough difference in relative velocity that we’ve had more or less time since the Big Bang than other places?
- monkeycantype 1y ago
  Finishing off above question… Is that What this model is suggesting or is the uneven distribution of mass contributing too?
  - scotty79 1y ago
    I think the idea is mostly about the distribution of mass influencing time flow.
__alexs 1y ago
Can Vernor Vinge please spend just one day not being right about everything?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fifticon 1y ago
  I think he is dead, there is little he can do now?
  - wiml 1y ago
    Dang. I hadn't heard. RIP.
- b800h 1y ago
  Came here to say the same thing - this is uncanny. In some of his novels - most notably A Fire Upon the Deep (from 1992), he imagines the galaxy as divided into concentric zones, each with different physical laws and limits on intelligence and technology. These are referred to as "Zones of Thought," each affecting the potential for intelligence and technological development. It's not a perfect match, as I think the new theory refers to relative time based on the density of matter at a given location. Part of me wonders if this analogous to the "watched pot never boils" issue. Wander into the wilderness to do magic...
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    Deepness in the sky is top 5 scifi. Great programmer tropes hidden in there. Others: - first bobiverse book (followed by all the rest) - permutation city (next: diaspora, etc) - Diamond age (so relevant now with spread of LLMs) - count to a trillion (A cowboy lawyer mathematician takes enough drugs to invent antimatter tech)
- at_a_remove 1y ago
  Or Poul Anderson's Brainwave (1953), in which the Earth finally leaves a part of the galaxy which inadvertently made thinking hard. And everything with two neurons to rub together gets smarter, not just humans. Essentially, we evolved in what Vinge would later call "The Unthinking Depths" (if memory serves) to deal with the strain.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
This is timescape cosmology’s inhomogenous universe hypothesis [1] that competes with ΛCDM’s cosmological principle [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
madaxe_again 1y ago
I love the smell of vindication in the morning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353482
- codethief 1y ago
  Vindication of what exactly? The claims in your comment, e.g. > if you have less time in an area (i.e. due to a gravity well, like Earth's) you can equally view it as more space are so nonsensical (with all due respect), they are not even wrong[0]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
- exe34 1y ago
  You should do a collab with Deepak Chopra!
alphazard 1y ago
This is the worst analogy I have heard in a long time. It's even bad for physics journalism. And the subtitle says "timescape", which immediately clues me into what the theory is about, instead of "time zone" as in the title.
sega_sai 1y ago
While it is possible that relaxing the homogeneity assumption is needed to resolve the tensions observed among different cosmological measurements, it is also worth noting that supernovae are a quite messy tracer, because we don't really understand their explosions well enough. So a lot of things are just empirically calibrated. We are also now limited by systematics when using supernovae for cosmology.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  > We are also now limited by systematics when using supernovae for cosmology. Could you say more about this part? I don't know what that means.
  - sega_sai 1y ago
    For every sort of measurement, or constraint derived from data, you have uncertainties related to random noise (either related to do measurement error, or sampling error caused by finite number of objects in your sample). But you also have systematic errors, for example, if your measurements are biased in some way. For supernovae, we know that the galaxies in which they explode are different in different redshifts, so it is possible there are effects that make supernovae brighter or fainter in different redshifts that have nothing to do with dark energy, but instead are related to chemical composition of stars. This is an example of systematic effect that can affect any cosmological measurement using supernovae. People try to control for those, but at the moment the uncertainty on cosmological parameters from SN is dominated not by random component of the error (i.e. related to number of SN), but the systematics and our ability to constrain them.
    - throwawaymaths 1y ago
      type IA Supernovae have ~the same energy output because of the chandrasekhar limit. can you elaborate on how stellar composition affects TIA output?
      - sega_sai 1y ago
begueradj 1y ago
The problem with quantum physics is that it's also a matter of interpretation. It's like interpreting the body language: what you think could true only from your cultural perspective about people who share your culture.
- techwiz137 1y ago
  I do not particularly agree with this. I don't think this analogy works.
  - ryandvm 1y ago
    Well... that's just your cultural perspective, man.
  - begueradj 1y ago
    Otherwise, what explains that there are those who say dark matter exists and build other opinions above it, and others dismiss its existence completely.
    - exe34 1y ago
      It means each is focussing on one subset of all the available observations. If three blind men discover an elephant and one gropes his trunk, another gropes a leg and a third gropes something else, they will come to very different conclusions about what an elephant is.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
PaulHoule 1y ago
In the homogenous cosmology there is the parameter Ω which determines if the universe is flat or not. Observations seem to show that Ω = 1, but if Ω>1 it will collapse back into a black hole and if Ω<=1 it expands forever. Since the universe as a whole is balanced I'm wondering if you're in the dense part of the timescape your fate is to wind up in a black hole.
Ono-Sendai 1y ago
What I don't get about this timescape theory, is what is the mechanism for time passing faster in the 'voids'? Or equivalently, what makes time pass slower along the edges of the voids? Is it supposed to be gravitational time dilation? (e.g. 'low is slow') Surely this can't have an effect of this magnitude (a 2x speedup in the voids)? As I understand it gravitational time dilation only has significant effects (like the 2x slowdown) in the strong gravitational region regime, around black holes etc.
karmakaze 1y ago
If these filaments and spaces have enough gravitational differences to affect the flow of time, wouldn't we also be unable to resolve distant objects as their light would be bent slightly and repeatedly in a random fashion?
whoomp12342 1y ago
oh come on! Can't we all just use UTC and get along?

73 points by wglb 1y ago

> Instead, the basis of the timescape model is that, in fact, we see in the universe around us today that there are giant cosmic structures, enormous filaments and walls filled with galaxies and galaxy clusters. And in between those filaments and walls we have giant voids of nothing. Could explain we haven't found life elsewhere?

XorNot 1y ago
The scale here is "thousands of galaxies". The problem with where's the other life is already enormous due to the size of our one galaxy.
chneu 1y ago
Who says we haven't? We have absolutely no real idea what life will look like. What if there are already organisms that are so large or small that we just can't comprehend them? Also, the universe is likely so large that we'll never encounter life like us.
- dgfl 1y ago
  Are you proposing that atoms are organisms and/or that astronomical objects may be organisms? I feel like you are just inflating the meaning of “life” without justifying why. Defining it properly is a very interesting problem, but I think this is an extremely active field of study. Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought.
  - iinnPP 1y ago
    It seems they are stating that life elsewhere may be vastly different than life on Earth. How did you arrive at your understanding of the comment?
    - mr_mitm 1y ago
      I arrived at the same understanding as GP due to this line: > What if there are already organisms that are so large or small that we just can't comprehend them?
  - lukan 1y ago
    "Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought." Questions usually can be productive. To answer it, we have to look up and apply the (debated) definitions of life and atoms in our understanding clearly don't meet it. But since we only know so very little when going really small or really big, I do say it is an interesting thought to give room for quark or dark matter based life, or the theoretical organism of a black hole. We simply don't know and we will never know, if we think we already know.
    - mr_mitm 1y ago
      We do know a lot about the very small and the very big, though. We understand quark interactions extremely well. It's very hard to imagine interactions at that scale complex enough to yield something anyone would be comfortable calling "life". The defining property of dark matter is no or only weak interaction (which we also understand very well), so imagining life there becomes even harder. > We simply don't know and we will never know, if we think we already know. That's a very defeatist and intellectually lazy point of view. As is "just asking questions" which lack support by even a shred of plausibility.
      - lukan 1y ago
        "That's a very defeatist and intellectually lazy point of view. " In my opinion it is the opposite. Claiming we understand life and quarks and quarks can therefore not be part of subatomic life is the lazy approach to me. I am open for it. That doesn't mean I see indications for it, just that I am open for the concept. If I would not be open for unexpected ideas, I would never get them. And correct me if I am wrong, but I never met a scientist who claimed to really understand quantum mechanics. Well, I heard of some who do, but they are mostly not taken seriously by the rest. So sure, we do know a lot. But understanding it?
        mr_mitm 1y ago
        > quarks can therefore not be part of subatomic life is the lazy approach to me For the record, I wrote "very hard to imagine". If you claim it can be possible, it is you who must produce at least a suggestion on how it could be possible. > And correct me if I am wrong, but I never met a scientist who claimed to really understand quantum mechanics. I know that's a popular trope, but what they usually mean is that they don't understand it on an intuitive level. You can understand the math of it just fine. QM is by far the most successful theory we ever had and laid the foundations for the transistor, lasers, CCD chips, solar panels, MRIs, and much more. It's responsible for arguably the biggest transformation of society of all times. You don't get there without understanding even the smallest nook of that theory. Maybe we have different definitions of what it means to understand something, but that's not a discussion I'm interested it.
exe34 1y ago
> Could explain we haven't found life elsewhere? Or maybe we just haven't looked very far at all.
- merek 1y ago
  Nor for very long.
aswegs8 1y ago
We did recently find something very promising https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39jj9vkr34o
- philipov 1y ago
  As was discussed at the time, that news was overhyped. The finding is not strong evidence of life, it's strong evidence that we don't fully understand how that molecule gets formed. And the most recent news on that front is that the finding itself is being challenged.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    Every finding gets challenged, and that challenge always becomes news. Trying to evaluate the progress of a scientific debate based on news stories is like guessing the record of a soccer team based on a couple of viral goal clips.
    - philipov 1y ago
      All the more reason why it's too early to be saying anything about that discovery.
chongli 1y ago
No. We’re only searching for life in a tiny area around the Sun within our galaxy, the Milky Way. To find life we first need to find planets, which involves looking at stars over extended periods of time to detect tiny dips in brightness (transit method) or tiny wobbles causing minute redshift-blueshift cycles (doppler shift method). Those cosmic filament structures are on the scale of millions and billions of galaxies over distances far larger than the size of a single galaxy. We can’t even resolve individual stars beyond our Local Group of galaxies and still most of the stars within the Milky Way are too far to use our exoplanet detection techniques (2 of them mentioned previously). Finally, to search for life we’ve been attempting to search for spectral absorption lines of the gases in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, which involves recording a spectrograph during the transit method. This only works for stars with their orbital planes edge-on to us so that we can actually detect the planetary transits and record enough light from them over time to see how the spectrograph changes during the transit events.

monkeycantype 1y ago

If it’s all a swirling spinning turbulent mess is there enough difference in relative velocity that we’ve had more or less time since the Big Bang than other places?

monkeycantype 1y ago
Finishing off above question… Is that What this model is suggesting or is the uneven distribution of mass contributing too?
- scotty79 1y ago
  I think the idea is mostly about the distribution of mass influencing time flow.

__alexs 1y ago

Can Vernor Vinge please spend just one day not being right about everything?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fifticon 1y ago
I think he is dead, there is little he can do now?
- wiml 1y ago
  Dang. I hadn't heard. RIP.
b800h 1y ago
Came here to say the same thing - this is uncanny. In some of his novels - most notably A Fire Upon the Deep (from 1992), he imagines the galaxy as divided into concentric zones, each with different physical laws and limits on intelligence and technology. These are referred to as "Zones of Thought," each affecting the potential for intelligence and technological development. It's not a perfect match, as I think the new theory refers to relative time based on the density of matter at a given location. Part of me wonders if this analogous to the "watched pot never boils" issue. Wander into the wilderness to do magic...
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Deepness in the sky is top 5 scifi. Great programmer tropes hidden in there. Others: - first bobiverse book (followed by all the rest) - permutation city (next: diaspora, etc) - Diamond age (so relevant now with spread of LLMs) - count to a trillion (A cowboy lawyer mathematician takes enough drugs to invent antimatter tech)
at_a_remove 1y ago
Or Poul Anderson's Brainwave (1953), in which the Earth finally leaves a part of the galaxy which inadvertently made thinking hard. And everything with two neurons to rub together gets smarter, not just humans. Essentially, we evolved in what Vinge would later call "The Unthinking Depths" (if memory serves) to deal with the strain.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

This is timescape cosmology’s inhomogenous universe hypothesis [1] that competes with ΛCDM’s cosmological principle [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhomogeneous_cosmology [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

madaxe_again 1y ago

I love the smell of vindication in the morning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353482

codethief 1y ago
Vindication of what exactly? The claims in your comment, e.g. > if you have less time in an area (i.e. due to a gravity well, like Earth's) you can equally view it as more space are so nonsensical (with all due respect), they are not even wrong[0]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
exe34 1y ago
You should do a collab with Deepak Chopra!

alphazard 1y ago

This is the worst analogy I have heard in a long time. It's even bad for physics journalism. And the subtitle says "timescape", which immediately clues me into what the theory is about, instead of "time zone" as in the title.

sega_sai 1y ago

While it is possible that relaxing the homogeneity assumption is needed to resolve the tensions observed among different cosmological measurements, it is also worth noting that supernovae are a quite messy tracer, because we don't really understand their explosions well enough. So a lot of things are just empirically calibrated. We are also now limited by systematics when using supernovae for cosmology.

sanderjd 1y ago
> We are also now limited by systematics when using supernovae for cosmology. Could you say more about this part? I don't know what that means.
- sega_sai 1y ago
  For every sort of measurement, or constraint derived from data, you have uncertainties related to random noise (either related to do measurement error, or sampling error caused by finite number of objects in your sample). But you also have systematic errors, for example, if your measurements are biased in some way. For supernovae, we know that the galaxies in which they explode are different in different redshifts, so it is possible there are effects that make supernovae brighter or fainter in different redshifts that have nothing to do with dark energy, but instead are related to chemical composition of stars. This is an example of systematic effect that can affect any cosmological measurement using supernovae. People try to control for those, but at the moment the uncertainty on cosmological parameters from SN is dominated not by random component of the error (i.e. related to number of SN), but the systematics and our ability to constrain them.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    type IA Supernovae have ~the same energy output because of the chandrasekhar limit. can you elaborate on how stellar composition affects TIA output?
    - sega_sai 1y ago

begueradj 1y ago

The problem with quantum physics is that it's also a matter of interpretation. It's like interpreting the body language: what you think could true only from your cultural perspective about people who share your culture.

techwiz137 1y ago
I do not particularly agree with this. I don't think this analogy works.
- ryandvm 1y ago
  Well... that's just your cultural perspective, man.
- begueradj 1y ago
  Otherwise, what explains that there are those who say dark matter exists and build other opinions above it, and others dismiss its existence completely.
  - exe34 1y ago
    It means each is focussing on one subset of all the available observations. If three blind men discover an elephant and one gropes his trunk, another gropes a leg and a third gropes something else, they will come to very different conclusions about what an elephant is.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

PaulHoule 1y ago

In the homogenous cosmology there is the parameter Ω which determines if the universe is flat or not. Observations seem to show that Ω = 1, but if Ω>1 it will collapse back into a black hole and if Ω<=1 it expands forever. Since the universe as a whole is balanced I'm wondering if you're in the dense part of the timescape your fate is to wind up in a black hole.

Ono-Sendai 1y ago

What I don't get about this timescape theory, is what is the mechanism for time passing faster in the 'voids'? Or equivalently, what makes time pass slower along the edges of the voids? Is it supposed to be gravitational time dilation? (e.g. 'low is slow') Surely this can't have an effect of this magnitude (a 2x speedup in the voids)? As I understand it gravitational time dilation only has significant effects (like the 2x slowdown) in the strong gravitational region regime, around black holes etc.

karmakaze 1y ago

If these filaments and spaces have enough gravitational differences to affect the flow of time, wouldn't we also be unable to resolve distant objects as their light would be bent slightly and repeatedly in a random fashion?

whoomp12342 1y ago

oh come on! Can't we all just use UTC and get along?