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Credits: Cover image courtesy of Pantheon Previous image Next image In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble, using data from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, found that the universe is expanding. This was “probably the most important cosmic discovery of all time,” writes Alan Lightman in his new book, “Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings.” Certainly it is among the most thought-provoking. Hubble’s discovery complicates how we grasp space and time. Can you picture a universe that expands infinitely? And if it is expanding, it must have had a starting point in time. But what existed before that, and how did things get started? ....
The Atlantic ‘It Seems That I Know How the Universe Originated’ The theoretical physicist Andrei Linde may have the world’s most expansive conception of what infinity looks like. Updated at 3:27 p.m. ET on February 9, 2021. In Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Book of Sand,” a mysterious Bible peddler knocks on the narrator’s door and offers to sell him a sacred book he came by in a small village in India. The book shows the wear of many hands. The stranger says that the illiterate peasant who gave it to him called it The Book of Sand, “because neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end.” Opening the volume, the narrator finds that its pages are rumpled and badly set, with an unpredictable Arabic numeral in the upper corner of each page. The stranger suggests that the narrator try to find the first page. It is impossible. No matter how close to the beginning he explores, several pages always remain between the cover and his hand: “It ....
I m curious as to what the hell the mechanism for Inflation is? Some kind of particle or field? By Brando (not verified) on 06 Jul 2009 #permalink I m a bit confused: the universe is about 14 billion years old so how can we look out to distances of 46 billion light years? By jdhuey (not verified) on 06 Jul 2009 #permalink What do you mean by the Universe being flat ? I guess your meaning, obviously, wasn t a 2D pool-table Universe. By auto focus (not verified) on 06 Jul 2009 #permalink We know the universe is finite in age? Wrong! We don t know anything. It s a bit silly to ask if time existed before or after anything. You see. without time there is no before or after. Likewise, there is nothing before or after the Big Bang. It just is. Not now, not here. it is ! ....
What interests me about Loeb s work is not the specifics of his case for the artificial origin of the Oumuamua object. (See Avi Loeb: Nature Does Not Produce Such Things. ) I don t know enough observational astronomy and physics to have a decent opinion about that. ID in Mainstream Science Rather, I am VERY interested in the logical structure of Loeb s argument, as it currently represents the most salient example of risky intelligent design reasoning in mainstream science. Risky is the appropriate adjective here, because while design inferences are commonplace throughout science, where any human activity is concerned (e.g., remote sensing of industrial pollutants, archaeological discovery, cryptanalysis), they are exceedingly rare or non-existent when the intelligence in question is not human. (I am excluding animals, such as crows, chimps, or octopuses.) Loeb s inference is risky because he is pushing against conventional wisdom, extending intelligent causation as a ....
Scientific American Experts in probability have spotted a logical flaw in theorists’ reasoning Advertisement We exist, and we are living creatures. It follows that the universe we live in must be compatible with the existence of life. However, as scientists have studied the fundamental principles that govern our universe, they have discovered that the odds of a universe like ours being compatible with life are astronomically low. We can model what the universe would have looked like if its constants the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the cosmological constant had been slightly different. What has become clear is that, across a huge range of these constants, they had to have pretty much exactly the values they had in order for life to be possible. The physicist Lee Smolin has calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance is 1 in 10 ....