I've never liked big bang as a concept. It sounds cartoonish for me like heliocentric model. It's way too convenient that entire space evolved from a single point long time ago. It sounds like a child story in comparison to everything else we can prove so far.
> while also matching the universe’s historical expansion rate without requiring dark energy.
I wonder which number this matches, since we’ve repeatedly measured 2 different values and we can’t figure out why they disagree. As much as this is currently non-peer reviewed ideas that probably won’t lead anywhere (as with most news articles about new research), radical ideas like this are probably what is needed to get to the truth of the Hubble tension and other paradoxes in cosmology.
Fascinating idea. It reminds me of an attempt from a few decades ago where scientists recalculated all fundamental constants from fundamental properties instead of the rather arbitrary quantities we're used to. A surprising finding of that project was that all fundamental constants ended up very close to 1, with two big exceptions: and the age of the universe at 10^40 and the gravitational constant at 10^-40, suggestiong an inverse relationship between the two.
It was probably a coincidence, but now there's another model with changing constants. I'd love to see where this goes.
That was most likely some bogus research paper written by people who did not understand what they were computing.
Even among professional physicists, a surprisingly number of them do not have clear ideas about the meanings of the fundamental constants and of the fundamental units of measurement. The reason is that the subject of metrology, even if it is the fundament of physics, is almost never treated correctly is physics textbooks, if it is mentioned at all.
Ignoring the extra constants that might be needed in the theory of nuclear strong and weak forces, and also the extra constants that may be needed in certain variants of Einstein's theory of gravitation (e.g. "the cosmological constant"), in the physics that is encountered by the majority of people there are only 2 fundamental constants, which determine the strength of the electromagnetic interaction and the strength of the gravitational interaction, i.e. the constant of Coulomb's law of electric attraction and the Newtonian constant of gravitation.
None of these 2 constants can be claimed to be particularly close to 1. These 2 constants can be expressed in several equivalent ways, but none of the different values obtained thus has any unexpected values.
For example, a constant that is equivalent with Coulomb's constant is the so-called "fine structure constant" a.k.a. Sommerfeld's constant, about a huge number of aberrant research papers have been written by people who did not know what it means. The "fine structure constant" is the speed of a particle with unit charge that revolves around a fixed particle with unit charge, when having unit angular momentum (in natural units). That speed is determined by the equality between the electric attraction force and the inertial centrifugal force, so it is a measure for the strength of the electric force and it is inversely proportional with the constant from Coulomb's law.
Probably a misunderstanding of the concept of normalizing units to '1' so that, for example, the speed of light is is simply unity instead of arbitrary Terran units like 299 792 458 m/s or 186 282 miles/s.
Alternatively, and more likely, it's based on the "relative" strengths of the different forces, where ratios of about 10^40 do tend to turn up.
For example, the ratio of electric force versus gravitational attractive forces for a proton and an electron is 2.3 x 10^39 which is close.
PS: A fun thing to numerological coincidence to consider is that 2^128 is about 3.4 * 10^38, which is weirdly close. It's almost like gravity is "rounding error" on a universe simulator made with 128-bit CPUs. Similarly, 2^256 is close to the Eddington number of ~10^80, which is the estimated number of particles in the Universe...
If true, then that's a heavy hit for the big bang theory intro song.
I don't think they can just replace the fourteen with a twenty-seven, without the whole flow breaking completely.
i used to think it was cringe and maybe it is, but many normies love that show and watching it with them when they find it funny is actually endearing.
i could do with the jokes and watching it passively as a timesink, but my genz brain just can't get used to the canned laughs and claps. doesn't even matter which show, it feels soooo weird to see actors freeze for 1-2 seconds after every joke, like non-stop, repeating 4th-wall breaks.
There's no way that it hasn't existed for infinity, for the value where universe = literally everything. It can't come from nothing, so it has always existed. I am obviously not aware of the formal definition of universe, considering there are theories of our universe being one of many bubbling in the cosmic foam.
Since Hubble launched there's been a near complete consensus on the bounds that were radically reduced down from before. Perhaps you were born in the seventies or earlier? Well before CMB studies and the Hubble telescope launched.
There's just been a ton of science trying to reconcile the difference in the upper and lower bounds that are far closer than they were before. But it's a few billion years, not doubling or halving.
We know nothing about the true nature of consciousness, and we can't describe time except through our own subjective experience of it. Spacetime might not even be the fundamental layer of the universe, it's just what we all collectively experience through consciousness. So until we figure out what we are, these questions will remain unanswered.
In a sense, time is just different fractions of counting the number of times a planet of monkeys goes around the sun. The monkeys then apply this limited concept of time to the entire universe. But then in the grand scheme of things, everything that is now was nothing at one point and presumably will also be nothing again, then the only evidence of time are the monkeys who tried to keep count of how many times they orbited a star. When everything returns to nothingness, time will have been an illusion.
Every year or so we hear that super intelligence is around the corner and is also impossible, so I'll ignore LLMs entirely until there's new information.
I wonder which number this matches, since we’ve repeatedly measured 2 different values and we can’t figure out why they disagree. As much as this is currently non-peer reviewed ideas that probably won’t lead anywhere (as with most news articles about new research), radical ideas like this are probably what is needed to get to the truth of the Hubble tension and other paradoxes in cosmology.
It was probably a coincidence, but now there's another model with changing constants. I'd love to see where this goes.
Even among professional physicists, a surprisingly number of them do not have clear ideas about the meanings of the fundamental constants and of the fundamental units of measurement. The reason is that the subject of metrology, even if it is the fundament of physics, is almost never treated correctly is physics textbooks, if it is mentioned at all.
Ignoring the extra constants that might be needed in the theory of nuclear strong and weak forces, and also the extra constants that may be needed in certain variants of Einstein's theory of gravitation (e.g. "the cosmological constant"), in the physics that is encountered by the majority of people there are only 2 fundamental constants, which determine the strength of the electromagnetic interaction and the strength of the gravitational interaction, i.e. the constant of Coulomb's law of electric attraction and the Newtonian constant of gravitation.
None of these 2 constants can be claimed to be particularly close to 1. These 2 constants can be expressed in several equivalent ways, but none of the different values obtained thus has any unexpected values.
For example, a constant that is equivalent with Coulomb's constant is the so-called "fine structure constant" a.k.a. Sommerfeld's constant, about a huge number of aberrant research papers have been written by people who did not know what it means. The "fine structure constant" is the speed of a particle with unit charge that revolves around a fixed particle with unit charge, when having unit angular momentum (in natural units). That speed is determined by the equality between the electric attraction force and the inertial centrifugal force, so it is a measure for the strength of the electric force and it is inversely proportional with the constant from Coulomb's law.
This does not mean anything, at all.
Or it’s just humans project meaning into a meaningless universe.
What else is there to do?
What could that possibly mean?
There's a few ways of doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
Alternatively, and more likely, it's based on the "relative" strengths of the different forces, where ratios of about 10^40 do tend to turn up.
For example, the ratio of electric force versus gravitational attractive forces for a proton and an electron is 2.3 x 10^39 which is close.
PS: A fun thing to numerological coincidence to consider is that 2^128 is about 3.4 * 10^38, which is weirdly close. It's almost like gravity is "rounding error" on a universe simulator made with 128-bit CPUs. Similarly, 2^256 is close to the Eddington number of ~10^80, which is the estimated number of particles in the Universe...
i used to think it was cringe and maybe it is, but many normies love that show and watching it with them when they find it funny is actually endearing.
Until we get radically new data, I'll consider the universe ageless. This is the most elegant solution anyway.
Not any reputable ones. The consensus on the estimated age of the universe has shifted only slightly in the last several decades.
Since Hubble launched there's been a near complete consensus on the bounds that were radically reduced down from before. Perhaps you were born in the seventies or earlier? Well before CMB studies and the Hubble telescope launched.
There's just been a ton of science trying to reconcile the difference in the upper and lower bounds that are far closer than they were before. But it's a few billion years, not doubling or halving.