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Trouble with Einstein


KOYAANISQATSI
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Are Einstein's theories correct?  

46 members have voted

  1. 1. Are Einstein's theories correct?

    • Einstein's ok by me
      30
    • Something seems amiss
      8
    • It's the twilight zone I tell you
      9


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Damn it, I find a point to argue with everyone on and the damn mac starts it multiple crash routine.

Will return when I find some sausage to fix this heap. :(

 

"There manifests itself in the fully developed being , Man, a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives.... Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance."
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A chunk from the description of the "endless universe" theory

 

Cosmologists first offered an oscillating universe model, with no beginning or end, as a Big Bang alternative in the 1930s. The idea was abandoned because the oscillations could not be reconciled with the rules of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics, Frampton said.

 

The second law says entropy (a measure of disorder) can't be destroyed. But if entropy increases from one oscillation to the next, the universe becomes larger with each cycle. "The universe would grow like a runaway snowball," Frampton said. Each oscillation will also become successively longer. "Extrapolating backwards in time, this implies that the oscillations before our present one were shorter and shorter. This leads inevitably to a Big Bang," he said.

 

Frampton and Baum circumvent the Big Bang by postulating that, at the turnaround, any remaining entropy is in patches too remote for interaction. Having each "causal patch" become a separate universe allows each universe to contract essentially empty of matter and entropy.

 

Creating a new property of entropy is the kind of thing that will tend to open up all sorts of new options, but does leave you with quite a burden of proof.

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Why is the 'infinite, endless universe' theory always called into question while people seldom publicly call the 'infinite, endless God' theory into question?

 

I dont understand how people can think that there is an magical infinite deity but not think there is an infinite universe.

 

But I'm sidetracking the debate here, apologeez.

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Think I'm bonkers? Watch Einstein maths vanish down the rabbit hole to new levels of crazy.

“General relativity can be used to describe the universe back to a point at which matter becomes so dense that its equations don’t hold up,†says Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State. “Beyond that point, we needed to apply quantum tools that were not available to Einstein.†By combining quantum physics with general relativity, Ashtekar and two of his post-doctoral researchers, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parmpreet Singh, were able to develop a model that traces through the Big Bang to a shrinking universe that exhibits physics similar to ours.

 

In research reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, the team shows that, prior to the Big Bang, there was a contracting universe with space-time geometry that otherwise is similar to that of our current expanding universe. As gravitational forces pulled this previous universe inward, it reached a point at which the quantum properties of space-time cause gravity to become repulsive, rather than attractive. “Using quantum modifications of Einstein’s cosmological equations, we have shown that in place of a classical Big Bang there is in fact a quantum Bounce,†says Ashtekar. “We were so surprised by the finding that there is another classical, pre-Big Bang universe that we repeated the simulations with different parameter values over several months, but we found that the Big Bounce scenario is robust.â€

 

While the general idea of another universe existing prior to the Big Bang has been proposed before, this is the first mathematical description that systematically establishes its existence and deduces properties of space-time geometry in that universe.

 

The research team used loop quantum gravity, a leading approach to the problem of the unification of general relativity with quantum physics, which also was pioneered at the Penn State Institute of Gravitational Physics and Geometry. In this theory, space-time geometry itself has a discrete 'atomic' structure and the familiar continuum is only an approximation. The fabric of space is literally woven by one-dimensional quantum threads. Near the Big-Bang, this fabric is violently torn and the quantum nature of geometry becomes important. It makes gravity strongly repulsive, giving rise to the Big Bounce.

 

"Our initial work assumes a homogenous model of our universe," says Ashtekar. "However, it has given us confidence in the underlying ideas of loop quantum gravity. We will continue to refine the model to better portray the universe as we know it and to better understand the features of quantum gravity."

 

The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060515232747.htm

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Possibly interesting physics, but not so much to do with Einstein, as they say themselves they are extending things to a hypothesized combination of GR and QM beyond any formulation that Einstein presented.

 

I've maybe been reading too much, but I also don't find the quantum bounce any more "crazy" than the big bang, or an endless infinite universe for that matter.... they are all far beyond anything we are comfortable thinking about.

 

Not quite sure if it's Einstein, GR, QM or physics in general that is causing you concerns.....hard to tell from the stream of the thread. Also hard to tell if anything anybody else is saying is of interest to you, or if you're just keeping us up to date with links to your own reading....... ;)

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Why is the 'infinite, endless universe' theory always called into question while people seldom publicly call the 'infinite, endless God' theory into question?

Because there's little point in debating a subject that hasn't got a shred of tangible evidence to its name.

 

Appologeez also. I'll include this so as not to seem like a complete troll: Religion

 

*Edit* - And no, I don't see the fact the universe even exists at all as evidence... but then again... :wink:

 

 

 

Where am I?

 

 

 

 

Who's shoes are these?

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The Universe hasn't felt the same of late, all my black holes have imploded and they dont feel likely to return and since Einstein had his maths tied to them, he kinda got sucked in.

feeling a bit perplexed, I thought I'd bring my boggle home to youz for a kick aboot.

 

The big bang theory postulates that the entire universe originated in a cosmic explosion about 15 billion years ago. Such an idea had no serious constituency until Edwin Hubble discovered the redshift of galaxy light in the 1920s, which seemed to imply an expanding universe. However, our ability to test cosmological theories has vastly improved with modern telescopes covering all wavelengths, some of them in orbit. Despite the widespread acceptance of the big bang theory as a working model for interpreting new findings, not a single important prediction of the theory has yet been confirmed, and substantial evidence has accumulated against it. Here, we examine the evidence for the most fundamental postulate of the big bang, the expansion of the universe. We conclude that the evidence does not support the theory; and that it is time to stop patching up the theory to keep it viable, and to consider fundamentally new working models for the origin and nature of the universe in better agreement with the observations.

 

http://metaresearch.org/home.asp

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Good timing!

 

One of the big unresolved things in the Big bang theory is why there is an imbalance of matter and anti-matter left over, since theories suggest the big bang itself should have been very very closely balanced between the two.

 

It had been suggested that this may be linked to the fact that the weak nuclear force, unlike the other forces, does not act equally on mater and anti-matter. An experiment carried out recently has shown a stronger effect on this CP violation than the standard model predicts.

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0659

 

That's science.... not good news if you want to pick one thing and never never have to adapt, but fascinating if you see it all as an on-going journey towards new ideas.

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I was questioning the credibility of the entire site, not just the Cydonia pages!

Although over 10,000 asteroids have well-determined orbits, the combined mass of all other asteroids is not as great as that of the largest asteroid, Ceres. That makes the total mass of the asteroid belt only about 0.001 of the mass of the Earth. A frequently asked question is, if a major planet exploded, where is the rest of its mass?

 

Consider what would happen if the Earth exploded today. Surface and crustal rocks would shatter and fragment, but remain rocks. However, rocks from depths greater than about 40 km are under so much pressure at high temperature that, if suddenly released into a vacuum, such rocks would vaporize. As a consequence, over 99% of the Earth’s total mass would vaporize in an explosion, with only its low-pressure crustal and upper mantle layers surviving

The above quote shows just how ridiculous that site is. When something vaporizes, it turns into vapour. It does not just disappear into the vacuum. If a Planet between Mars and Jupiter exploded, the Sun would be ringed like Saturn. If that's the level of scientific rigour shown at a planetary level, how can you take anything claimed at the cosmic level seriously? :roll:

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I'm not much of one for crop circles or religious headbangers myself.

You will have a tricky time finding any approved science link which hints away from GR, all are shot down on site by Einsteins fan club ruling modern science.

Yet aether type theorys may yet need a recheck, despite the flat rubber sheets with weights on of GR.

 

At the end of last century astronomers discovered the startling fact that the expansion of our universe is not slowing down, as all our previous understanding of gravity had predicted. Rather the expansion is speeding up. Nothing in conventional physics can explain such a result. It means that either the universe is made up of around 70% 'dark energy' (something that has a sort of anti-gravity) or our theory of gravity is flawed.

In modern terms the cosmological constant is viewed as a quantum mechanical phenomenon called the 'energy of the vacuum'. In other words, the energy of empty space. It is this energy that is causing the universe to accelerate. The new data shows that none of the fancy new theories that have been proposed in the last decade are necessary to explain the acceleration. Rather, vacuum energy is the most likely cause and the expansion history of the universe can be explained by simply adding this constant background of acceleration into the normal theory of gravity.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070116130456.htm

Could it be that the same force that pushes galaxys apart keeps your feet on the ground?

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The accelerating expansion of the universe is one of the leading research subjects at the moment, and whichever explanation you go for - dark energy, variable cosmological constant, string theory, brane cosmology - you are going beyond Einstein's formulation of GR.

 

Some theories look to add to GR, which is not a bad idea when a theory has held up to experimental study for so long, and others propose a simpler explanation is a modification or replacement of GR. Vacuum energy is going to come into it somewhere along the way, but is an area that is not well covered by theory at the moment, with predictions for it's effects from quantum theory 100 orders of magnitude greater than that observed......

 

Whatever the cause of the expansion, it appears to be an effect that only acts noticeably on the intergalactic scale, with established theories not showing any measurable deviations on the smaller scale, so while a new overall theory may come along that brings them all together and adds new insights, I think it's safe to say that gravity on earth acts pretty much as Newton showed.

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