Friday, December 12, 2008

The Universe may be recycled!


You have got to love IO9 for articles that just twist the top of your head to let the evil spirits out.

For those of you that are Poul Anderson fan and just ate up his novel Tau Zero, you're, like me, going to see Anderson's novel come to life in this recent OP9 article.

As theories of the Universe go, the most popular is the "big bang" theory of how things started. It's pretty well thought out and supported almost, excuse the pun, universally. Well along comes Martin Bojowald and his associates with a theory that closely resembles Anderson's cyclic Universe. Bojowald postulates that there is a possibility that our universe was created by the death of an earlier universe. How do ya like dem apples!

Martin Bojowald and Abhat Ashtekar began researching their theory of loop quantum cosmology (LQC), an approach to cosmology that combine’s Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics.

From the IO9 article:
  • Bojowald's major realization was that unlike general relativity, the physics of LQC did not break down at the big bang. Cosmologists dread the singularity because at this point gravity becomes infinite, along with the temperature and density of the universe. As its equations cannot cope with such infinities, general relativity fails to describe what happens at the big bang. Bojowald's work showed how to avoid the hated singularity, albeit mathematically.
  • The researchers have found that when applying LQC, the universe does not revert back to a singularity as it contracts. Instead of seeing a big bang, the models indicate that the universe experienced a big bounce, with a predecessor universe contracting as it ended and then reemerging as our new, expanding universe. ....it could mean that our universe does not have a finite beginning and end but is, instead, part of a chain of universes that expand and then contract to give way to a brand new universe.
<- New Scientist article ->

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