Big Shock for Big Bang

[Treeden]

18 weeks Olly. Now that is what I call a measured response!

[JulianO]

I confess that things like string theory are beyond my ability to say whether I think they are crackpot or genius :-). My instinct says crackpot but I'm sure I'm wrong.

Theory guides, experiment decides -- Izaak Kolthoff

[Polar Bear]

you can understand why folks believe in God. Makes things much simpler !

[jason.p]

It's an interesting thought as Lawrence Krauss says that we are in a uniquely privileged cosmic era (give or take a few billion years here or there) where we can actually make observational confimation of mathematical theories. If the universe is expanding, as scientific consensus seems to accept at the moment, the time will come when the restriction of the speed of light will make observation back to the origins of the universe impossible. Any surviving scientist in such times will only have mathematics to base theories on. I am by no stretch of the imagination a mathematician but I believe that maths is the basis of all science, and can imagine how it must feel when a "beautiful" equation works out, but without observational data to back it up they will be very much in the dark (literally)

[Treeden]

.... and as we base our scientific theories on observations, where does that leave future generations of scientists and Astronomers? Will they take our old historical documents and records at face value, or will they demand a greater level of proof... as we do now?

[JulianO]

Given how far we've come in a few thousand years, if we wind the clock forward a few billion years - I don't think they'll be worried about observation. They may well be tinkering with the fabric of the universe at that point!

[ollypenrice]

It's an interesting thought as Lawrence Krauss says that we are in a uniquely privileged cosmic era (give or take a few billion years here or there) where we can actually make observational confimation of mathematical theories. If the universe is expanding, as scientific consensus seems to accept at the moment, the time will come when the restriction of the speed of light will make observation back to the origins of the universe impossible. Any surviving scientist in such times will only have mathematics to base theories on. I am by no stretch of the imagination a mathematician but I believe that maths is the basis of all science, and can imagine how it must feel when a "beautiful" equation works out, but without observational data to back it up they will be very much in the dark (literally)

Hmmm... We have no means of observing anything prior to the last scattering surface since before then the primordial plasma was opaque to light. But that light from the last scattering surface, the CMB, is everywhere and will remain everywhere, no? On the other hand it will presumably rarify and drop in effective temperature, becoming increasingly difficult to detect. I can see that galaxies will become unobservable due to the Hubble Flow but the CMB?

Am I up a gum tree here?

Olly

[jason.p]

Hmmm... We have no means of observing anything prior to the last scattering surface since before then the primordial plasma was opaque to light. But that light from the last scattering surface, the CMB, is everywhere and will remain everywhere, no? On the other hand it will presumably rarify and drop in effective temperature, becoming increasingly difficult to detect. I can see that galaxies will become unobservable due to the Hubble Flow but the CMB?

Am I up a gum tree here?

Olly

It appears that as the universe expands the CMBR gets stretched to a point where the wavelength is too long (and frequency too low) for it to be detected. This would apparently be when the universe has expanded to fifty times it's present size. These future scientists would be isolated from the deep past with no clues about previous inflation etc. and therefore not be able to work back to a big bang. I don't pretend to understand the nuts and bolts of this and may have misunderstood it. Perhaps we're up the same gumtree

[Cath]

Yes but you're assuming that our current level of knowledge about what we have so far deduced from what we have so far discovered about the universe around us is all their is to it. I have no doubt in my own mind that their is so very much more to it all than we have so far been able to imagine (with experimental proof or otherwise), much more than what we perceive as outwards into the larger universe or what we perceive as inwards down to the smaller sub-atomic 'particles', that's just two directions as it were.

[ollypenrice]

It is perhaps not inconceivable that some form of information, as yet unknown, was able to pass through the primoridal plasma?

Olly

[Cath]

I don't doubt it at all. Whatever happened/is happening is well outside our current way of thinking.

I do my best to try to get people thinking 'out of the box' as it were to try to encourage new ways of thought, new ideas, less restricted imagination, etc, because if we stay firmly fixed in our current thought processess we'll have no more Mr Newtons, or Mr Einsteins, which we so very much need!

[JulianO]

It is perhaps not inconceivable that some form of information, as yet unknown, was able to pass through the primoridal plasma?

In some models information is predicted to leak through, and be detectable in structure and CMB signals. So far not within our capabilities.