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No Big Bang?
Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end.
Is this really true? I'm definitely not qualified to say. I can say that it scores very low on the crackpot meter when compared to say, Time Cube or Neil Adams' hollow earth.
Whether it's correct or not, I do want to say that I personally like this idea better than the big bang. I've always asked "Why does there have to be a beginning? Can't it just be infinity in both directions?" mostly because I wanted it to be infinity in both directions. I mean, just try to imagine that. The universe always having existed. Crazy shit.
Is this really true? I'm definitely not qualified to say. I can say that it scores very low on the crackpot meter when compared to say, Time Cube or Neil Adams' hollow earth.
Whether it's correct or not, I do want to say that I personally like this idea better than the big bang. I've always asked "Why does there have to be a beginning? Can't it just be infinity in both directions?" mostly because I wanted it to be infinity in both directions. I mean, just try to imagine that. The universe always having existed. Crazy shit.
Comments
Also it is also weird that the "constant" speed of light changes through the evolution of the universe, that would mean that in one time something could be able to approach the speed of light from a different time.
Or else something from a time where light is faster is just automatically slowed down when it is in a time where light was slower.
A big band made from 19 scientists that work at NASA jet propulsion labs.
The fact that this is not peer reviewed, that the author doesn't seem to have any other papers published, and that it is published in the "General Physics" section of the arXiv, lead me to think that this is more of a mental exercise than actual research. If this guy were famous, there would probably be a couple of grad students somewhere being given assignments to check this out, as it stands I am very sure this will sink into obscurity unless Shu pursues it further.
Finally, the original article for this was posted on the Technology Review arXiv Blog, which I can heartily recommend for anyone interested in Science. The arXiv holds approximately all of what is published in Physics, in addition to being a sort of high level bulletin board for ideas such as the one we are discussing here, and every week the TR blog picks the weirdest/funniest/most interesting submission and explains some of the background in a way laymen can understand.
Edit: E.g. last week's Big Bang Parallel Universe Bubble Collision fit's the theme here.
If the universe is infinite in time then you have been here on this, or a really really close version there of, earth before and will be again.
If the universe is infinite in space there exists another you, someplace else, right now. There also exists more yous, a word I don't think was ever meant to be pluralized, that are not quite you. One who's an Olympic swimmer, one who was born in africa, one who is a ladies man (sorry couldn't resist ^__^), All of whom exist right now on slightly different earths, or perfectly the same as, from this one.
While I like the idea of infinite space, It leads to some weirdness that I'm not quite sure I like.
On the other hand, a finite universe leads to weird questions like, What was "before"?, What happens at the "Edge" of space?
As for infinity space, I don't have any issues with that idea because we already know that there is not infinite matter/energy. Even if space goes for infinity in all directions, most of it is empty. Going far away from all the matter could be like going out into the middle of the pacific ocean. Nothing to see here, just more empty space.
Also, something related that always bothers me, maybe some smarter people can unbother me, is the fact that we can only see so far. The speed of light is constant. The furthest away things we can see are x hojillion light years away. We are seeing them as they were x hojillion years ago. If the universe was infinitely old, then that means that what we see is almost all the matter and energy that has been lit up in some way or another. If there was indeed a firm beginning point, like the big bang, then that means two things. One is that every year we should be able to see things that are one light year further away than before, since that light finally got to us from x hojillion + 1 years ago. It also means that if we fly far enough away into space faster than the speed of light, we should be able to watch the big bang.
EDIT: Scott beat me to the punch.
Now to answer your second question, imagine that you could instantly travel to that point. Just open a door here on Earth and arrive on a suitable planet somewhere 46 billion light years away. There is no big bang there! That place is just as old as this particular spot in the universe is. In fact you could travel 400 billion light years and it'd be the same (probably, the real size of the universe is debatable).
As for watching the big bang, IF i'm getting the theory right, its been a long time since I were in college, every point in the universe is still 13.whatever billion years away from the big bang. There was no one point from which the big bang happened, it supposedly happened everywhere at once. We really can't model what would happen if you go faster than the speed of light, mostly because current theory states that local time stops/doesn't exist if you are going at the speed of light and your mass goes towards infinity.
my brain hurts ><
As to the multiverse, I mean that these places would have to be in the same space, as it were, but beyond what we can see. It does require that with space, matter and energy are infinite as well. None of those things I am comfortable with.
Time is insubstantial and thus infinite. Matter has substance and is thus finite.
As for getting close enough to see the big bang 1 second after it happened, I am unsure if this is even possible, mostly because we haven't found a way to go back into time, but even more so because we don't know that there was anything to see! The name evokes an explosion but really it could have been nothing but blackness until the first stars started to light up.
Going further this analogy breaks down pretty quickly because a sphere is the wrong shape, and, as Neito pointed out, there are more imensions involved.