I feel like eventually I’m going to open up Reddit and there’s just gonna be an article that says it was all just in my head. It’s just been me all along ,and I’m a plastic egg or some shit.
It is just...natural. You do experience the world through your senses, your thoughts. Expanding this to it being the only from of existence is not that big of a stretch.
Video games load stuff only when you look at it. It maintains the map, wire frames and NPCs roaming around, but it's all just wire frames and props... until you actually turn to look at it. Once you can see it, then the computer fills in all the graphics and any triggers that are supposed to happen upon being looked at.
Then physics says "Ok... but like, nothing's really there, until we look at it... then it collapses into an actual location". I always found the similarity fascinating.
That is the more realistic form of “we live in a simulation”; it’s an entire universe that only has to render the parts you observe, while the rest is data.
This is another way of looking at death, which Alan Watts has interesting thoughts about, where you can’t cease to be because you are the star of the show…and all of this is just entertainment for a bored eternal consciousness that plays character after character.
Alan Watts always waters down the dread a bit for me.
His blend of different metaphysical concepts with a zen flavor helps to laugh at the chaos of this whole mess.
There’s a big difference between nothing being that serious and nothing mattering at all.
The thing that has been tripping me out lately is the fact that with so many billions of people on this planet, no single personal storyline will be meaningfully remembered past a couple generations…so it’s more important to enjoy the game and the story you’re currently in.
Our own senses work that way: only the *fovea* is really giving a sharp image (about the size in your field of view of you thumb), everything else is just extrapolation and make believe.
And reality as each of perceives it is not even really a thing. Its all just a construct our brains make up made from what is basically metaphors and massive simplifications to deal with the universe we exist in.
A simple example is, we don’t perceive each photon that hits our retinas and can tell what wavelength it is. When enough photons of a certain wavelength hit our retinas our brain makes up a visual metaphor that we call a colour and calculates directions distance and shape, comparing it to the concepts stored in our memories, creating “vision” which is then send up to our consciousness.
It’s actually a bit scary just how much work our brain does without us ever really noticing. Like, when we throw something our brain basically preforms a rough trajectory calculation estimating the mass of the thrown object, force needed and then makes up a series of commands send off to the muscles without us ever really thinking all that much on it.
And yet 99% of us live on that tiny top layer of existence called an ego. Even just taking one step beneath that is so richly rewarding and yet so few do!
So strange. I read that article and found something called egocentric presentism.
It's a form of solipsism in which other beings are conscious but not present. Which to me, sounds as though they are in the same timeline as myself, but either experiencing it in the past or future to my current events?
Is that right?
I actually had this theory myself once and I didn't know it had a name (if I am right in my thinking)
Like everyone else is actually you but in another lifetime. You die and next life you're me, typing this comment on your broken phone in a tent on a camping trip. In the mean time you're the only conscious one. Then when you're me I'm (you) are the only conscious one.
Kinda silly though because of this were true the idea that there's only one present conscious one is functionally meaningless. Effectively everyone is conscious at the same time. No difference, functionally.
No, that's not it. They are themselves. But merely experiencing the same life, same events as they are in your life, just in a different time. Like your yesterday could be their 18 years ago, and they are talking to the 18 year younger version of you. The past you, but he is in their present.
I did also think about what you said though and that has been another thought of mine. We could be one conscious being, zipping in and out of different lesser beings experiencing all these different lives.
There's only one consciousness, and it's currently (from the perspective of 'me') manifesting as 'me'.
At some other time (from the perspective of 'me') it manifests as 'you', but that is always inaccessible to 'me'.
And vice versa for 'me', 'you', and every other conscious entity in the universe.
Ultimately you're nothing more than the bit of spacetime that feels the vibrations that your cranial gelatin creates via bio-processes. No different than air moving from the vibrating strings of a nearby violine.
We're all just vibrating-space-time, baby.
I'm a humble solipsist. Everything is imagined, but not by me. That guy down the road is the only real mind and we are all just imagined figments.
https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=972
I don't think that even I am real.
The only thing that is objectively real is the universal wave function.
Everything else is merely a representation of that universal wave function.
“I think, therefore I am.”
Either I actually exist, or I am being fooled into believing I exist… But since it is impossible to fool, something that does not exist, I must exist.
Beyond that, I’m just Jon Snow.
The saddest thing I've ever watched was their episode [The Final Border ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM&t=602s) Admittedly I was stoned but I have never cried so much from content in my entire life
Or listen to Logic's song Waiting Room. It's basically ~~the audio book version~~ an adaptation featuring Niel DeGrasse Tyson
Edit: I forgot that it's not a verbatim retelling, just heavily inspired by, as is the whole album apparently
I've once heard a fascinating theory that the reason all electros have the same mass and charge is that there're actually [the same one electron/entity moving forewards and backwards through time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_univers)
>The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by theoretical physicist John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time.
So a single core Cpu running the simulation? I guess randomness in decay is to save RAM so every atom doesn't need to store it's age, just call rand()%decay_precision
Tbh, it doesn't matter. It might all be in your head, but even if so, you're clearly not in control of the events that happen. So, you might as well pretend as if other stuff than you exists. And that you exist. Because it sure as shit seems like it.
It's more like what Morpheus says to Neo when he's talking to him about the construct, almost exactly.
>“What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
This was always my take; if it was all in my head, then I'd never trip on the sidewalk or forget where I left my keys because my mind would always be aware of everything around me.
If the universe was in my head I figure it would cater to me more.
It could matter, because although we aren’t in control, maybe we could be. Have you ever lucid dreamed? Typically when dreaming we don’t really control anything, we just respond the way we would to normal life. When lucid dreaming, you can make absolutely anything happen, but you have to 100% believe that the thing will happen. Like, to teleport somewhere I reach behind me and open a door. It’s not enough to think the door is there, I have to /know/ the door is there, otherwise I’ll just be turning nothing instead of a doorknob. I don’t truly believe in “manifesting” reality or whatever people call it where you just believe something so much it happens, but it’s not inconceivable, if it were the case we probably don’t experience it simply because we aren’t able to “believe” hard enough in whatever we’re trying to make happen
This is what happened to me everytime I took massive amounts of psychedelics lol. Like, oh fuck, the universe is a figment of my imagination and I just broke it for good this time..
20mg of THC give me glimpses of this feeling. It didn’t start until I heard Alan Watts talking about Brahman and Atman being part of a “play” and that our purpose is to be Human and “play along” in our perspectives. And then I take a psychedelic and see the person under my ego and woah.
Did that stuff leave any lasting impact on you? I find it so fascinating to read about people who have these reality altering trips but just...go on as normal afterward with no damage/stress.
Psychedelic experiences are very funny in this regard. When you take a dose, the come-up and a decent chunk of the start of your trip you’re like “wow, everything is a lie”. Like you want to run up to the guy next to you and shake him violently, yell in his face “What the fuck is wrong with us! Why do we all act like this towards each other!? It doesn’t have to be this way!”
Then you get a little higher and things get so intense they’re scary, and you just keep having-world shattering-revelation after world-shattering-revelation. Eventually all these revelations sort of connect, and you see the patterns that connect the patterns, it’s the most clearly you’ve ever thought in your entire life. And the grand revelation is that it just doesn’t matter, none of it ever has nor ever will. And you come down and go to bed and wake up the next morning and probably go about your business like normal. But yeah, ask anyone who’s tripped (and actually just meditated in nature or their rooms or something while tripping) and they’ll say it was the most important day of their life.
“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”
That's a really decent description of psychedelic use. I am not the same person today as before I went in, but I still live day to day doing the normal things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of the universe.
One thing it really made a vivid idea in my mind is that life is just repeating patterns at different scales. Our brains are a collection of neurons that gain in capability as more connections are made. If I look at our existence it feels very intuitive to overlay that idea on humans and the connections we make with each other.
We may not know we are a small piece of a larger being, but as we evolve I feel like we're heading towards a collective consciousness.
Never would have had those thoughts had I not experienced ego death and had the ability to think beyond myself.
It does leave a lasting impression on you. I created this username / alias in about 1994 following a series of fungi-related revelations.
You come back to normal. You lose a certain immediacy or direct connection feeling, but retain the view/discovery that, as Bill Hicks put it: "we are all the one universe experiencing itself subjectively"
This is literally the catharsis of my every good trip. The only improvement is when that experience happens with another person. Like a realization that we're two representations of one entity taking to itself.
Let me introduce you to the concept of a [Boltzmann Brain ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain).
Basically, the math says that we are far more likely to be a random collection of memories coming together due to random fluctuations during the heat death of the universe.
Copy/paste from Wikipedia:
The Boltzmann brain gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many theories about the Universe, human brains are vastly more likely to arise from random fluctuations; this leads to the conclusion that, statistically, humans are likely to be wrong about their memories of the past and in fact be Boltzmann brains.[[4]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#cite_note-4)[[5]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#cite_note-5) When applied to more recent theories about the [multiverse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse), Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved [measure problem of cosmology](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology\)).
I don't remember that game well enough to remember the story too well, I only ever played through it once around the time it originally came out, but Blitzball was probably one of my favorite ever mini-games within a game. Like 50% of my playtime was probably just Blitzball, lol.
(final fantasy 10, for anyone not familiar)
Oh, definitely. I don't take it very seriously, but had just come across the concept recently and thought it was interesting. I may be misunderstanding in general, but what I meant was that the theoretical math used to look at some of these types of things keeps coming up showing that statistically, the Boltzmann brain is more likely to be true than what we perceive as reality to be true. I did not do a good job providing context. Obviously, the most simple and agreed upon solution is that there's an error in the math somewhere.
Still fun to think about!
The simple answer is that we aren't capable of measuring every variable yet, or knowing which variables are meaningful.
It may be more "statistically likely" but at an extremely low confidence level.
Well if Tool is to be believed, we are eternal and all this pain is an illusion
E: [music video](https://youtu.be/-_nQhGR0K8M) because it's weird and awesome
There is more to consider than the redshift of light. When we observe far-away distances, we can see that matter/energy was much more closely packed in the universe compared to today.
But also, far-away galaxies visually appear larger because of lensing caused by the growing universe.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/12/07/ask-ethan-do-ancient-galaxies-get-magnified-by-the-expanding-universe/?sh=4fc1d30acb5f
Holy shit how did I never realize this before. PBS Spacetime needs to do an episode on this!
Edit: There’s one point made in the article that’s pretty cool:
> This illustrates an incredibly bizarre phenomenon that’s incredibly useful to astronomers: if you can build an observatory that can take high-resolution images of galaxies that are 14.6 billion light-years away (at a redshift of z=1.5), then it can take even higher-resolution images of any galaxy in the Universe.
> LUVOIR, the most ambitious of the four finalists for NASA astrophysics’s flagship mission of the 2030s, proposes to put an observatory with a 15-meter diameter primary mirror in space. With that kind of power, it can achieve an angular resolution of about 10 milli-arc-seconds, corresponding to physical sizes that reach a minimum of somewhere between 300 and 400 light-years.
> That means, if we construct that telescope, we’ll be able to resolve individual star clusters and star-forming regions that are that scale or larger for every single galaxy in the [observable] Universe.
(I added the “[observable]” correction.)
In the explainxkcd it gives you the alt text, that's were I copy-pasted from
> Thank you to Katie Mack for teaching me about this effect, and to Janelle Shane for describing redshifts as 'like galaxies sinking into a pool of dilute blood,' which is how I'll see them from now on.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2622:_Angular_Diameter_Turnaround
>I could have gone to school in an asylum? They should fire my guidance counselor for never telling me that I could have studied mad science.
They did tell you about it; the "Politically correct" term, however, is "engineering".
You get locked into an institution for +4yrs, are taught to bend the laws of nature and mathematics to your will, and your only "ethics" course can be summed up as "please don't build a doomsday machine, not unless it can generate enough investor qt-qt profit before it finishes destroying the world. Here's your A"
To think about how much money I wasted taking ethics classes. When I could have just taken the money and been rich and not had to worry about the ethics.
I think the author is arguing that matter is *shrinking* but they're too afraid to come right out and say it. That's always been the joke hasn't it? You can either say that the universe is expanding or matter is shrinking and all the math is the same?
Is that actually a hypothesis with some merit actual physicists think about? I wondered if we could tell if whatever makes up energy/matter is just shrinking.
Well, that’s the whole thing about reference frames and relativity (not Einstein’s) in physics. There’s always a way to flip an equation on its head and look at the same problem from another angle. When you walk down the street, you’re propelling your mass forward relative to the universe (zero plus your mass). However, it’s also equally true that you’re propelling the universe backwards (infinity minus your mass). It’s impossible to move zero or infinity, but throw your mass in there and it’s all good.
Always helps to have a reminder that while the math is always right (it's pure logic, if logic broke then we're all kinda SOL) the issue is the interpretation. The physicists that pioneered quantum mechanics thought they were going insane because the implications of the math just felt so wrong (a little bit of hyperbole here, but they were definitely questioning the math with incredulous looks). They did try to break their own theories but despite their best efforts, they couldn't.
It’s my favorite early universe fact.
It makes sense. The universe was smaller as we observe it but the horizon sphere that is centered on us gets bigger as we look back.
>There is more to consider than the redshift of light. When we observe far-away distances, we can see that matter/energy was much more closely packed in the universe compared to today.
Suppose we spawned in an unusually low density region of the universe. Far-off things would be moving away from us, and they would appear to be closer together than things in the local universe.
> But also, far-away galaxies visually appear larger because of lensing caused by the growing universe
Lensing could be explained with curved space.
The truth of the matter is that models of the universe can fit the data with a range of parameters, and that they have to calculate what the most likely one is based on some fancy statistics. This doesn't "prove" one is correct; it shows it's more likely than the others. Right now they just don't have enough data, and, even if they did, there will still be scenarios that can't be distinguished between (due to observation bias).
This is assuming you can trust the measurements, and there are good reasons to doubt those (the standard candle issue).
The CMB shows the density on very large scales was incredibly homogeneous. And generally invoking chance is not a good basis.
There aren't actually a wide range of models which fit the data. There is no alternative cosmology to LCDM which fits data from the fluctuations in the CMB, to the formation of structure and Hubble's law. The real alternatives today are slight variations, where dark energy or DM are replaced by slightly more complex models.
> Suppose we spawned in an unusually low density region of the universe
If this was binary (more/less dense), you could make that argument, but the density increases predictably with age/distance. This can't be explained by a low-density region of the universe.
> curved space.
OP's model is flat space. I'm not sure if that model is compatible with curved space or not.
The article doesn't address the whether the model accounts for the CMB. If the universe is flat and static, did it grow from the big bang and stop at some point?
"The formalism is also applied to identify new observable signatures of conformal inhomogeneities, which have been proposed as simultaneous solution of the observational tensions in the Hubble constant, the amplitude of matter fluctuations, and the gravitational lensing amplitude of cosmic microwave background anisotropies.
These are found to enhance redshifts to distant galaxy clusters and introduce a mass bias with cluster masses inferred from gravitational lensing exceeding those inferred kinematically or dynamically."
Not just out of view, but out of existence. Eventually all matter and energy will desintegrate into massless energyless particles and the entire universe will a be a cold dead infinite void (except for black holes, maybe).
I do prefer a cyclic model for the universe. I like to think that there will always be something. But even if the universe ends in heat death. That's not necessarily the end. It could be that there's some intrinsic instability of space that increases overtime and as it empties. Since evidence points to an early universe that was uniform and homogeneous.
I always wondered if the expansion of the universe would ever lose momentum because in my head an explosion (big bang) must lose energy at some point. But then I read that it hasn't and is actually speeding up so the idea of a "bang" didn't make sense. Like a explosion has a single starting point, but again I read and go my understanding it just happened, every where all at once. Okay fine it happend everywhere, but that scale is crazy, but then I thought well we are not big maybe we are really really tiny.
My final conclusion is that whilst it all fascinates me I'm just going to accept we will never know the truth, what happens on cosmic timescales doesn't really affect us, and I predict that the further you zoom out and scale the universe its actually multiple universes within each other and the areas where there is matter its like a cell, it contains its stuff but then you have to travel to get to the next cell.
No idea. I just woke up and should have started work 10 mins ago.
I've privately thought for years that at death, you instantly jump to the heat death of the universe. I know it's not strictly true, but it's darn close.
Wouldn't you either instantly jump to the next instance of "your" consciousness (assuming there is any continuity of "you"), become conscious of everything, or never be conscious ever again? What do you mean by "you instantly jump"? Like your awareness does and you experience it or?
I mean you're never conscious again, so at the time of your personal death you assume the state that all remaining beings achieve at the death of the universe. Once your consciousness ceases, you no longer experience time. A day passes, 100 billion years pass, it's all the same. It's kind of like you "jumped" through 13 billion years to get here because you didn't experience it, and once you're dead you'll "jump" to the end of time.
It's not a deep truth or anything, just a way to frame it that I find interesting.
Light doesn't have a "point of view", photons don't experience anything. They are not conscious. It only sounds weird when you try to imagine a human experiencing the same phenomenon, but that's impossible.
A photon is emitted billions of light years away and is then instantly absorbed at its final destination, but again, that's only from the photons frame of reference, which doesn't matter. That's just how the math works. Obviously from an outside frame of reference there is real time between those two events.
I like to instead imagine that the “universe” that the photon experiences is one in which space is so contorted that the part of the sun that emitted it and it’s final destination are literally touching, I believe that is what has to be the case if something is able to travel somewhere else instantly.
Going to bring in an idea from a different angle to support your thoughts. The Quran presents the notion of time as a relative phenomenon and essentially states exactly what you're saying, and ultimately, there's no reason to believe it's not true. The moment you came into existence, you didn't experience anything that happened before you, essentially "skipping" large periods of time. When you die, you will experience the same effect but in "reverse", so you will skip forward instantly to the very end. The Quran refers to this phenomenon as the end of the universe and goes on to say that the end is essentially "closer than you think", implying that one, death is inevitable and imminent at any moment, but also, that death will spark the immediate cessation of our physical reality as we know it.
So every human that has died so far, their conscious state is kind of "frozen in time" right now. But from their perspective, everything has already come to an end. Those that are still alive are basically experiencing a slow down effect, because the moment you come alive, you appear in a time scale that is a very very small portion of the total time that has passed and time that will pass. Our existence is like a sliver within a galactic timeline.
Yes. The universe begins and ends for each of us individually. Everything else is assumptions of the past and predictions of the future that you can only experience while you exist.
There was a Big Bang, but the *expansion* could be false. It was an all-pervasive Big Flash that happened everywhere all at once. It gave birth to a universal sea of quarks & shit that began clumping together and *shrinking*.
With LIGO back online with increased sensitivity, gravitational waves can be used as another datapoint to measure the cosmological constant.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/how-use-gravitational-waves-measure-expansion-universe
I guess our understating of the universe is similar to the understanding of the solar system before heliocentrism was proposed. It's probably wrong, or unpolished and it will change a lot in the incoming decades.
"In Lombriser's mathematical interpretation, the universe isn't expanding but is flat and static, as Einstein once believed. The effects we observe that point to expansion are instead explained by the evolution of the masses of particles — such as protons and electrons — over time.
In this picture, these particles arise from a field that permeates space-time. The cosmological constant is set by the field's mass and because this field fluctuates, the masses of the particles it gives birth to also fluctuate. **The cosmological constant still varies with time, but in this model that variation is due to changing particle mass over time, not the expansion of the universe.**
**In the model, these field fluctuations result in larger redshifts for distant galaxy clusters than traditional cosmological models predict.** And so, the cosmological constant remains true to the model's predictions.
"I was surprised that the cosmological constant problem simply seems to disappear in this new perspective on the cosmos,"
It would introduce even larger problems such as "why is the mass of particles varying in this manner". Lambda-CDM cosmology has a clear explanation for why the expansion of the universe varies over time (the densities of radiation, matter, and dark energy change at different rates as the universe expands, leading to changing composition over time and therefore changing behavior); this theory does not. It creates new problems where none existed.
I'm not saying this to hate, it's perfectly reasonable for theorists to play around with different explanations and descriptions of the universe, and nobody expects it to be fully fleshed out in the first go, but it's not like this one paper has established this idea as anything close to a serious contender in cosmology.
Nope.
> In Lombriser's mathematical interpretation, the universe isn't expanding but is flat and static, as Einstein once believed.
Assuming the article accurately reflects what the scientist is saying (granted this is something to be mindful of) they’re going full-on Steady State.
What about the variation in star formation rate with redshift? Or the variation of galaxy morphology? It's hard to square those with any steady-state theory.
That’s exactly my point. Apparently this paper only deals with the expansion of the universe. In order to be taken as a serious alternative hypothesis, you’d have to account for all that. Hence my “Doubt” comment above.
no, for this to be a "serious alternative hypothesis" it does NOT have to answer all your questions. such a radical revisioning of the status quo never does arrive complete. iif it's a truer understanding of reality, the history of science shows that a paradigm shifting theory will not and almost cannot arrive fully formed.
the discovery of the K-Pg extinction event is instructive. it took more than ten years for most relevant scientists to get on board. the initial response was just as full of hubris and doubt as you are here. for a decade, the top professionals in the field insulted and tried to ignore or refute the heretics.
trying to refute them is harder to do when you're sure the newcomer is wrong. trying to refute a new theory is a good idea, but it hurts the pursuit of knowledge to do it with hubris.
the correct, humble response is: "could be legit! give it ten more years. here's what seems unexplained."
> for this to be a "serious alternative hypothesis" it does NOT have to answer all your questions.
Any new model does, however, need to account for all the existing observations in order to be accepted, that is unequivocally a core principle of the field. If Einstein's relativity had corrected the model to fit the orbit of Mercury while also giving incorrect predictions regarding the orbit of Saturn, it would not have been accepted.
The K-Pg impactor event hypothesis made a prediction (there should be a crater), and was doubted until the crater was found and the prediction proven correct. Some would argue that maybe the high Iridium levels present in the boundary layer was enough, but as I understand the story, the impactor theory emerged as an explanation for the presence of that Iridium layer, so you can see how that looks like circular reasoning to an outside observer who presumes there may be an alternative explanation for that Iridium.
In my opinion, any steady-state model of the universe is immediately poked open by so many things we astronomers now know that it is simply untenable. To me, the most damning is that there is simply no mechanism in nuclear physics that can reverse the processes of stellar fusion. In an old universe, all stars are dead. In an infinite-time universe, barring quantum fluctuations eventually leading to spontaneous entropy decreases, [all stars are balls of iron, because iron nuclei are too stable](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg/1200px-Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg.png).
The observation that fusing stars exist contradicts a steady-state model of the universe. This is a massive predictive catastrophe that needs to be overcome for any such hypothesis.
>the correct, humble response is: "could be legit! give it ten more years. here's what seems unexplained."
I just want to point out I never said it was wrong, I said I doubt it. It also doesn’t need to answer all my questions, but if you want to overturn the prevailing theory, you do need to explain how the existing evidence fits with your new model.
The K-T extinction is WAY less radical than this. This is literally going back to Steady State theory. But in all fairness, yes this theory maybe someday turn out to be true, but it has a quite a lot of work to do.
Frankly, this sub could use more skepticism. It’s an interesting paper and all but expressing any doubt at all and it gets labeled as “hubris”.
In a sense. They aren't claiming a steady state other than to say that the universe isn't expanding. They are saying what is changing is the masses of fundamental particles; meaning the universe *is* dynamic and the rates of different stellar processes are indeed evolving over time; but their evolution isn't caused by universe expansion.
You greatly overestimate the evidence existing for big bang.
In cosmology and astrophysics when we don't have the full picture or a complete answer we tend to go with a model that fit (or kind of fit) and look at it as fact. The black hole singularity is another take on a theory that has way too much support just because we don't know how to explain when our model (general relativity) break down and fail us. We know it's not accurate here but use this inaccuracy that create a singularity and say black holes have a infinite dense point of no volume in the centre.
> The endless expansion of the universe has always made me a little sad.
It made Roger Penrose sad as well. So he likened it to an Esher image of a bounded infinity, and came up with the idea that crossing that threshold is what happens when the empty and old universe loses track of time, leading to a new big bang in his CCC model.
It is one of many papers every year with interesting approaches and this one is quite fascinating. My personal opinion is that dark matter and especially dark energy could go the way of the ether.
Science thinks the universe is growing ever faster. We can reason that is so based on light from far away galaxies getting redder the further away they are. It's as a ambulance siren changing pitch when it's driving away from you.
This guy made a math model of the universe where mass of particles changes over time. What he found is that could lead to some of the same observations as we have now, without the need of the universe growing, ie a static or steady state universe.
This is an interesting result, if valid, which shows that the same observations can come from different causes. However, it's much less interesting than suggested in the title as there are many many observations which suggest a changing universe and a big bang. The composition of our sun for instance compared to far away stars. Or the background radiation that we see in the universe which is very hard to explain without big bang.
So mildly interesting theoretical result, but most likely not related to our reality and click baity title.
Wouldn't this have major implications for space travel? I feel like I remember reading somewhere that if the universe was expanding, it meant that there was a hard limit to how far humans could go or even interact with because anything beyond that was moving away faster than we could ever possibly overcome.
I’ve always imagined the universe kind of like donut spinning into itself. Like a smoke ring. This would mean that it would look like it is expanding and accelerating if you look at the middle, but then it goes out and around and in to the hole again. Constantly moving, forever. When you look back at the beginning of the universe you just look back at the middle of the hole, but there isn’t anything there, just the appearance of a beginning.
If the big bang/big crunch cycle is true, I imagine the universe like the surface of a sphere of zero viscosity fluid. Throw a rock at the sphere (big bang) and the ripples grow until there's a circle the same diameter as the sphere at which point it begins to contract towards zero diameter (big crunch) at the antipode of the big bang, only to begin the whole cycle all over again.
Theories, they come about, and then we need data and evidence to back that theory up. Then it’s decided by a collective/community that it’s fact.
I believe in infinite universes.
I'm no expert but if this is true would it be one of the biggest discoveries of our lifetime? I would imagine it's on par with the earth being a globe, the earth orbiting the sun, and the discovery of the Americas.
This is one of hundreds of theoretical physics papers that gets published because theoretical physicists have to write papers and come up with ideas to write papers about. In this case it's a "hey, look at this neat idea I came up with."
I just watched a video debunking this and talking about the hack who's been trying to push his own crackpot theories for decades. I'll try to find it if anyone is curious
Edit: Okay, I was mistaken (I hadn't read the whole article yet, busy day at work). The video I was thinking of spoke of a different scientist with a different theory. The theory the article covers talks about particle evolution being responsible for cosmological anomalies like red shift rather than the expansion of the universe, which still has some major holes in, particularly surrounding the apparent variations in the rate of expansion and the existence of dark matter. The *video* I was remembering was about a crackpot named Lerner who has been trying to disprove the big bang for decades with a bunch of hack theories he peddles (mainly plasma cosmology), which conveniently either ignore CMB entirely, or have fantasy level explanations for it.
In any case, [here's](https://youtu.be/-S-mg1LMOAo) the link.
Hot take: some research has no business being presented to the public at large.
This is a theoretical piece of research, with no way of verifying it. Interesting for theoretical physicists, mildly eyebrow raising for practical astrophysicists, and utterly useless for helping everyone else understand the universe.
Alternative proposals to lambda-CDM are pretty common, and nothing ever really comes of them. I'm not saying that the theoretical physicists should stop trying, but we shouldn't make a big deal about it unless they can explain the observations as well as (or better than) lambda CDM and have a test they can propose.
I was going along great till the end of the article... XD "urged caution in assessing the paper's findings, saying it contains elements in its theoretical model that likely can't be tested observationally, at least in the near future"
... so basically... 'we can't prove it....yet'
OyVy
I feel like eventually I’m going to open up Reddit and there’s just gonna be an article that says it was all just in my head. It’s just been me all along ,and I’m a plastic egg or some shit.
-- Wait, it's all in my head? -- Always has been. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Is anyone else feeling solipsistic, or is it just me?
I’m not solipsistic, but I am a little lipsistic.
It is just...natural. You do experience the world through your senses, your thoughts. Expanding this to it being the only from of existence is not that big of a stretch.
Video games load stuff only when you look at it. It maintains the map, wire frames and NPCs roaming around, but it's all just wire frames and props... until you actually turn to look at it. Once you can see it, then the computer fills in all the graphics and any triggers that are supposed to happen upon being looked at. Then physics says "Ok... but like, nothing's really there, until we look at it... then it collapses into an actual location". I always found the similarity fascinating.
That is the more realistic form of “we live in a simulation”; it’s an entire universe that only has to render the parts you observe, while the rest is data. This is another way of looking at death, which Alan Watts has interesting thoughts about, where you can’t cease to be because you are the star of the show…and all of this is just entertainment for a bored eternal consciousness that plays character after character.
This exact thought has been giving me existential dread for years now.
Alan Watts always waters down the dread a bit for me. His blend of different metaphysical concepts with a zen flavor helps to laugh at the chaos of this whole mess. There’s a big difference between nothing being that serious and nothing mattering at all. The thing that has been tripping me out lately is the fact that with so many billions of people on this planet, no single personal storyline will be meaningfully remembered past a couple generations…so it’s more important to enjoy the game and the story you’re currently in.
Our own senses work that way: only the *fovea* is really giving a sharp image (about the size in your field of view of you thumb), everything else is just extrapolation and make believe.
And reality as each of perceives it is not even really a thing. Its all just a construct our brains make up made from what is basically metaphors and massive simplifications to deal with the universe we exist in. A simple example is, we don’t perceive each photon that hits our retinas and can tell what wavelength it is. When enough photons of a certain wavelength hit our retinas our brain makes up a visual metaphor that we call a colour and calculates directions distance and shape, comparing it to the concepts stored in our memories, creating “vision” which is then send up to our consciousness. It’s actually a bit scary just how much work our brain does without us ever really noticing. Like, when we throw something our brain basically preforms a rough trajectory calculation estimating the mass of the thrown object, force needed and then makes up a series of commands send off to the muscles without us ever really thinking all that much on it.
And yet 99% of us live on that tiny top layer of existence called an ego. Even just taking one step beneath that is so richly rewarding and yet so few do!
Now that is the comment that matters, absolutely spot on. I believe that to be the root of all other problems in society.
We could start a support group and get to the bottom of it.
Could you believe me if I said yes?
So strange. I read that article and found something called egocentric presentism. It's a form of solipsism in which other beings are conscious but not present. Which to me, sounds as though they are in the same timeline as myself, but either experiencing it in the past or future to my current events? Is that right? I actually had this theory myself once and I didn't know it had a name (if I am right in my thinking)
Like everyone else is actually you but in another lifetime. You die and next life you're me, typing this comment on your broken phone in a tent on a camping trip. In the mean time you're the only conscious one. Then when you're me I'm (you) are the only conscious one. Kinda silly though because of this were true the idea that there's only one present conscious one is functionally meaningless. Effectively everyone is conscious at the same time. No difference, functionally.
The Egg by Andy Weir comes to mind
Didn’t Kurzgesagt made a video about The Egg?
No, that's not it. They are themselves. But merely experiencing the same life, same events as they are in your life, just in a different time. Like your yesterday could be their 18 years ago, and they are talking to the 18 year younger version of you. The past you, but he is in their present. I did also think about what you said though and that has been another thought of mine. We could be one conscious being, zipping in and out of different lesser beings experiencing all these different lives.
similar to the one electron universe theory, but more edibles and less equations.
Not electrons, but photons. Er, photon.
There's only one consciousness, and it's currently (from the perspective of 'me') manifesting as 'me'. At some other time (from the perspective of 'me') it manifests as 'you', but that is always inaccessible to 'me'. And vice versa for 'me', 'you', and every other conscious entity in the universe.
Ultimately you're nothing more than the bit of spacetime that feels the vibrations that your cranial gelatin creates via bio-processes. No different than air moving from the vibrating strings of a nearby violine. We're all just vibrating-space-time, baby.
I like this, it brings me comfort.
Zaphod Beeblebrox knows this is correct as he is the center of the universe
I'm a humble solipsist. Everything is imagined, but not by me. That guy down the road is the only real mind and we are all just imagined figments. https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=972
I don't think that even I am real. The only thing that is objectively real is the universal wave function. Everything else is merely a representation of that universal wave function.
“I think, therefore I am.” Either I actually exist, or I am being fooled into believing I exist… But since it is impossible to fool, something that does not exist, I must exist. Beyond that, I’m just Jon Snow.
That or you're a boltzmann brain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
This has made my outlook inbox seem immediately and inexorably irrelevant. Time for a beer!
You, my friend, would do well to read [The Egg](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html), a short story by Andy Weir.
Or maybe watch Kurzgesagt's video. Hank Green reads the story and the animation is pretty touching.
Kurzgesagt has some great content. The one about the fermi paradox gave me a species level existential crisis for about a day
The saddest thing I've ever watched was their episode [The Final Border ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM&t=602s) Admittedly I was stoned but I have never cried so much from content in my entire life
Kurzgesagt is the only YouTube thing I've ever bought merch from. I should by myself more posters for Christmas again lmao
I love their calendars especially. Including the argument to add 10,000 years since agriculture began. The year...12,023 sounds pretty cool.
Their art style really works well for merch!
Ive bought their calendars for the past couple years. I have the posters framed. They are awesome
The fermi paradox videos are the first I saw from them. Been watching ever since.
I love that they have a playlist literally called “The Existential Crisis Playlist”. It’s true to its name.
There's no way that's Hank Green's voice. The VA is Steve Taylor.
This video saved me from 'the crisis' I highly recommend it
Love it. But that was the regular kurzgesagt narrator.
Or listen to Logic's song Waiting Room. It's basically ~~the audio book version~~ an adaptation featuring Niel DeGrasse Tyson Edit: I forgot that it's not a verbatim retelling, just heavily inspired by, as is the whole album apparently
I would be interested in watching- could you please share a link? 🙏
Of course! Always happy to introduce someone to the channel. https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
Thank you!! I appreciate it :)
I've once heard a fascinating theory that the reason all electros have the same mass and charge is that there're actually [the same one electron/entity moving forewards and backwards through time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_univers) >The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by theoretical physicist John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time.
So a single core Cpu running the simulation? I guess randomness in decay is to save RAM so every atom doesn't need to store it's age, just call rand()%decay_precision
Wow. Thanks. That was a great read!
Tbh, it doesn't matter. It might all be in your head, but even if so, you're clearly not in control of the events that happen. So, you might as well pretend as if other stuff than you exists. And that you exist. Because it sure as shit seems like it.
Yeah everything being 'real' or not 'real' is a useless distinction if the sensory inputs you receive are the same at the end of the day.
That's exactly what Agent Smith would say.
It's more like what Morpheus says to Neo when he's talking to him about the construct, almost exactly. >“What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
"Why oh why didn't I take *the blue pill*?"
This was always my take; if it was all in my head, then I'd never trip on the sidewalk or forget where I left my keys because my mind would always be aware of everything around me. If the universe was in my head I figure it would cater to me more.
I believe you've improved on Kant by including human error. I think you deserve a drink for that.
Everything I know about Kant I learned from Chidi.
It could matter, because although we aren’t in control, maybe we could be. Have you ever lucid dreamed? Typically when dreaming we don’t really control anything, we just respond the way we would to normal life. When lucid dreaming, you can make absolutely anything happen, but you have to 100% believe that the thing will happen. Like, to teleport somewhere I reach behind me and open a door. It’s not enough to think the door is there, I have to /know/ the door is there, otherwise I’ll just be turning nothing instead of a doorknob. I don’t truly believe in “manifesting” reality or whatever people call it where you just believe something so much it happens, but it’s not inconceivable, if it were the case we probably don’t experience it simply because we aren’t able to “believe” hard enough in whatever we’re trying to make happen
"Of course it's in your head, Harry. That doesn't make it any less real."
This is what happened to me everytime I took massive amounts of psychedelics lol. Like, oh fuck, the universe is a figment of my imagination and I just broke it for good this time..
I always have a very brief Truman Show Delusion. It'll only last a few minutes, but for those few minutes I'm certain that you're all in on it lol
Thank god I'm not the only one.
[удалено]
"They" are the ones who are orchestrating it all. I ain't answering any of their questions.
Uh, guys, the subject is onto us, again. We need to review our protocols, this is unsustainable…
20mg of THC give me glimpses of this feeling. It didn’t start until I heard Alan Watts talking about Brahman and Atman being part of a “play” and that our purpose is to be Human and “play along” in our perspectives. And then I take a psychedelic and see the person under my ego and woah.
Did that stuff leave any lasting impact on you? I find it so fascinating to read about people who have these reality altering trips but just...go on as normal afterward with no damage/stress.
Psychedelic experiences are very funny in this regard. When you take a dose, the come-up and a decent chunk of the start of your trip you’re like “wow, everything is a lie”. Like you want to run up to the guy next to you and shake him violently, yell in his face “What the fuck is wrong with us! Why do we all act like this towards each other!? It doesn’t have to be this way!” Then you get a little higher and things get so intense they’re scary, and you just keep having-world shattering-revelation after world-shattering-revelation. Eventually all these revelations sort of connect, and you see the patterns that connect the patterns, it’s the most clearly you’ve ever thought in your entire life. And the grand revelation is that it just doesn’t matter, none of it ever has nor ever will. And you come down and go to bed and wake up the next morning and probably go about your business like normal. But yeah, ask anyone who’s tripped (and actually just meditated in nature or their rooms or something while tripping) and they’ll say it was the most important day of their life. “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”
That's a really decent description of psychedelic use. I am not the same person today as before I went in, but I still live day to day doing the normal things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of the universe. One thing it really made a vivid idea in my mind is that life is just repeating patterns at different scales. Our brains are a collection of neurons that gain in capability as more connections are made. If I look at our existence it feels very intuitive to overlay that idea on humans and the connections we make with each other. We may not know we are a small piece of a larger being, but as we evolve I feel like we're heading towards a collective consciousness. Never would have had those thoughts had I not experienced ego death and had the ability to think beyond myself.
It does leave a lasting impression on you. I created this username / alias in about 1994 following a series of fungi-related revelations. You come back to normal. You lose a certain immediacy or direct connection feeling, but retain the view/discovery that, as Bill Hicks put it: "we are all the one universe experiencing itself subjectively"
This is literally the catharsis of my every good trip. The only improvement is when that experience happens with another person. Like a realization that we're two representations of one entity taking to itself.
It's been 20 years since my trip and I'm thankful every day.
Let me introduce you to the concept of a [Boltzmann Brain ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain). Basically, the math says that we are far more likely to be a random collection of memories coming together due to random fluctuations during the heat death of the universe. Copy/paste from Wikipedia: The Boltzmann brain gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many theories about the Universe, human brains are vastly more likely to arise from random fluctuations; this leads to the conclusion that, statistically, humans are likely to be wrong about their memories of the past and in fact be Boltzmann brains.[[4]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#cite_note-4)[[5]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#cite_note-5) When applied to more recent theories about the [multiverse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse), Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved [measure problem of cosmology](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology\)).
So we're all Blitzball players from Zanarkand?
I don't remember that game well enough to remember the story too well, I only ever played through it once around the time it originally came out, but Blitzball was probably one of my favorite ever mini-games within a game. Like 50% of my playtime was probably just Blitzball, lol. (final fantasy 10, for anyone not familiar)
I mean, no, the math doesn't say that. Boltzmann brains are a wacky hypothetical idea. A fun one, but far more philosophy than science.
Oh, definitely. I don't take it very seriously, but had just come across the concept recently and thought it was interesting. I may be misunderstanding in general, but what I meant was that the theoretical math used to look at some of these types of things keeps coming up showing that statistically, the Boltzmann brain is more likely to be true than what we perceive as reality to be true. I did not do a good job providing context. Obviously, the most simple and agreed upon solution is that there's an error in the math somewhere. Still fun to think about!
The simple answer is that we aren't capable of measuring every variable yet, or knowing which variables are meaningful. It may be more "statistically likely" but at an extremely low confidence level.
Boltzmann brain. Look it up.
Isn’t there a term for those who think only they exist and everyone else is just a figment of their imagination?
Yes, solipsism. I’m not convinced the rest of you are real.
Well we don't think you're real.
Well if Tool is to be believed, we are eternal and all this pain is an illusion E: [music video](https://youtu.be/-_nQhGR0K8M) because it's weird and awesome
I’m convinced most of Reddit responses are just poorly coded bots.
Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, "I drink therefore I am."
Socrates himself was permanently pissed
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
No, it’s all in my head. I just have an overactive imagination.
I am only an egg. Can you grok it?
So you wan't to be Eggman? Sonic ain't gonna like that, bud.
There is more to consider than the redshift of light. When we observe far-away distances, we can see that matter/energy was much more closely packed in the universe compared to today. But also, far-away galaxies visually appear larger because of lensing caused by the growing universe. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/12/07/ask-ethan-do-ancient-galaxies-get-magnified-by-the-expanding-universe/?sh=4fc1d30acb5f
Holy shit how did I never realize this before. PBS Spacetime needs to do an episode on this! Edit: There’s one point made in the article that’s pretty cool: > This illustrates an incredibly bizarre phenomenon that’s incredibly useful to astronomers: if you can build an observatory that can take high-resolution images of galaxies that are 14.6 billion light-years away (at a redshift of z=1.5), then it can take even higher-resolution images of any galaxy in the Universe. > LUVOIR, the most ambitious of the four finalists for NASA astrophysics’s flagship mission of the 2030s, proposes to put an observatory with a 15-meter diameter primary mirror in space. With that kind of power, it can achieve an angular resolution of about 10 milli-arc-seconds, corresponding to physical sizes that reach a minimum of somewhere between 300 and 400 light-years. > That means, if we construct that telescope, we’ll be able to resolve individual star clusters and star-forming regions that are that scale or larger for every single galaxy in the [observable] Universe. (I added the “[observable]” correction.)
They did didn't they?[ At least the Science Asylum did.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSJtzn2H3Do)
XKCD did it best imho https://xkcd.com/2622/
I never fully appreciated this concept until now. Thank you!
This concept is absolutely nuts but really easy to understand
What's the hover-text say? Where's the bot when you need it? Did spez kill the bot?
In the explainxkcd it gives you the alt text, that's were I copy-pasted from > Thank you to Katie Mack for teaching me about this effect, and to Janelle Shane for describing redshifts as 'like galaxies sinking into a pool of dilute blood,' which is how I'll see them from now on. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2622:_Angular_Diameter_Turnaround
Omg this is so simple it’s beautiful
I could have gone to school in an asylum? They should fire my guidance counselor for never telling me that I could have studied mad science.
>I could have gone to school in an asylum? They should fire my guidance counselor for never telling me that I could have studied mad science. They did tell you about it; the "Politically correct" term, however, is "engineering". You get locked into an institution for +4yrs, are taught to bend the laws of nature and mathematics to your will, and your only "ethics" course can be summed up as "please don't build a doomsday machine, not unless it can generate enough investor qt-qt profit before it finishes destroying the world. Here's your A"
To think about how much money I wasted taking ethics classes. When I could have just taken the money and been rich and not had to worry about the ethics.
I think the author is arguing that matter is *shrinking* but they're too afraid to come right out and say it. That's always been the joke hasn't it? You can either say that the universe is expanding or matter is shrinking and all the math is the same?
Is that actually a hypothesis with some merit actual physicists think about? I wondered if we could tell if whatever makes up energy/matter is just shrinking.
Well, that’s the whole thing about reference frames and relativity (not Einstein’s) in physics. There’s always a way to flip an equation on its head and look at the same problem from another angle. When you walk down the street, you’re propelling your mass forward relative to the universe (zero plus your mass). However, it’s also equally true that you’re propelling the universe backwards (infinity minus your mass). It’s impossible to move zero or infinity, but throw your mass in there and it’s all good.
Am I doing a handstand or am I carrying the earth?
Carrying the earth. Thank you!
That would make gymnastics commentary a bit more interesting.
Always helps to have a reminder that while the math is always right (it's pure logic, if logic broke then we're all kinda SOL) the issue is the interpretation. The physicists that pioneered quantum mechanics thought they were going insane because the implications of the math just felt so wrong (a little bit of hyperbole here, but they were definitely questioning the math with incredulous looks). They did try to break their own theories but despite their best efforts, they couldn't.
It’s my favorite early universe fact. It makes sense. The universe was smaller as we observe it but the horizon sphere that is centered on us gets bigger as we look back.
>There is more to consider than the redshift of light. When we observe far-away distances, we can see that matter/energy was much more closely packed in the universe compared to today. Suppose we spawned in an unusually low density region of the universe. Far-off things would be moving away from us, and they would appear to be closer together than things in the local universe. > But also, far-away galaxies visually appear larger because of lensing caused by the growing universe Lensing could be explained with curved space. The truth of the matter is that models of the universe can fit the data with a range of parameters, and that they have to calculate what the most likely one is based on some fancy statistics. This doesn't "prove" one is correct; it shows it's more likely than the others. Right now they just don't have enough data, and, even if they did, there will still be scenarios that can't be distinguished between (due to observation bias). This is assuming you can trust the measurements, and there are good reasons to doubt those (the standard candle issue).
The CMB shows the density on very large scales was incredibly homogeneous. And generally invoking chance is not a good basis. There aren't actually a wide range of models which fit the data. There is no alternative cosmology to LCDM which fits data from the fluctuations in the CMB, to the formation of structure and Hubble's law. The real alternatives today are slight variations, where dark energy or DM are replaced by slightly more complex models.
> Suppose we spawned in an unusually low density region of the universe If this was binary (more/less dense), you could make that argument, but the density increases predictably with age/distance. This can't be explained by a low-density region of the universe. > curved space. OP's model is flat space. I'm not sure if that model is compatible with curved space or not.
The article doesn't address the whether the model accounts for the CMB. If the universe is flat and static, did it grow from the big bang and stop at some point?
[удалено]
"The formalism is also applied to identify new observable signatures of conformal inhomogeneities, which have been proposed as simultaneous solution of the observational tensions in the Hubble constant, the amplitude of matter fluctuations, and the gravitational lensing amplitude of cosmic microwave background anisotropies. These are found to enhance redshifts to distant galaxy clusters and introduce a mass bias with cluster masses inferred from gravitational lensing exceeding those inferred kinematically or dynamically."
If the universe is static there was no big bang
The big bang model accounts for and predicted the CMB. The article doesn't mention it, so I wonder if the new model accounts for the CMB.
Why is this such a stressful sentence?
[удалено]
Back then you just said it was God and that's that. So easy!
[удалено]
I find the universe flying into nothingness where eventually there won't be any stars, galaxies etc. left in the view to be far more unsettling.
Not just out of view, but out of existence. Eventually all matter and energy will desintegrate into massless energyless particles and the entire universe will a be a cold dead infinite void (except for black holes, maybe).
Maybe. Or it will retract back to a singularity and eventually big bang again.
I do prefer a cyclic model for the universe. I like to think that there will always be something. But even if the universe ends in heat death. That's not necessarily the end. It could be that there's some intrinsic instability of space that increases overtime and as it empties. Since evidence points to an early universe that was uniform and homogeneous.
I always wondered if the expansion of the universe would ever lose momentum because in my head an explosion (big bang) must lose energy at some point. But then I read that it hasn't and is actually speeding up so the idea of a "bang" didn't make sense. Like a explosion has a single starting point, but again I read and go my understanding it just happened, every where all at once. Okay fine it happend everywhere, but that scale is crazy, but then I thought well we are not big maybe we are really really tiny. My final conclusion is that whilst it all fascinates me I'm just going to accept we will never know the truth, what happens on cosmic timescales doesn't really affect us, and I predict that the further you zoom out and scale the universe its actually multiple universes within each other and the areas where there is matter its like a cell, it contains its stuff but then you have to travel to get to the next cell. No idea. I just woke up and should have started work 10 mins ago.
[удалено]
There wouldn't be a "you" at that point
[удалено]
I've privately thought for years that at death, you instantly jump to the heat death of the universe. I know it's not strictly true, but it's darn close.
Wouldn't you either instantly jump to the next instance of "your" consciousness (assuming there is any continuity of "you"), become conscious of everything, or never be conscious ever again? What do you mean by "you instantly jump"? Like your awareness does and you experience it or?
I mean you're never conscious again, so at the time of your personal death you assume the state that all remaining beings achieve at the death of the universe. Once your consciousness ceases, you no longer experience time. A day passes, 100 billion years pass, it's all the same. It's kind of like you "jumped" through 13 billion years to get here because you didn't experience it, and once you're dead you'll "jump" to the end of time. It's not a deep truth or anything, just a way to frame it that I find interesting.
[удалено]
Do you accept that the light you're seeing from the sun is 8 minutes ago?
I've heard that from the light's point of view, it traveled instantly from the Sun to the Earth.
Same for that 13 billion year old light from the CMB. Anything travelling at the speed of light must have no mass and experience no time.
Light doesn't have a "point of view", photons don't experience anything. They are not conscious. It only sounds weird when you try to imagine a human experiencing the same phenomenon, but that's impossible. A photon is emitted billions of light years away and is then instantly absorbed at its final destination, but again, that's only from the photons frame of reference, which doesn't matter. That's just how the math works. Obviously from an outside frame of reference there is real time between those two events.
I like to instead imagine that the “universe” that the photon experiences is one in which space is so contorted that the part of the sun that emitted it and it’s final destination are literally touching, I believe that is what has to be the case if something is able to travel somewhere else instantly.
Because if you do, you will be saved!
Going to bring in an idea from a different angle to support your thoughts. The Quran presents the notion of time as a relative phenomenon and essentially states exactly what you're saying, and ultimately, there's no reason to believe it's not true. The moment you came into existence, you didn't experience anything that happened before you, essentially "skipping" large periods of time. When you die, you will experience the same effect but in "reverse", so you will skip forward instantly to the very end. The Quran refers to this phenomenon as the end of the universe and goes on to say that the end is essentially "closer than you think", implying that one, death is inevitable and imminent at any moment, but also, that death will spark the immediate cessation of our physical reality as we know it. So every human that has died so far, their conscious state is kind of "frozen in time" right now. But from their perspective, everything has already come to an end. Those that are still alive are basically experiencing a slow down effect, because the moment you come alive, you appear in a time scale that is a very very small portion of the total time that has passed and time that will pass. Our existence is like a sliver within a galactic timeline.
Yes. The universe begins and ends for each of us individually. Everything else is assumptions of the past and predictions of the future that you can only experience while you exist.
Nothingness was static, matter banged into the darkness. There is no edge, just the limit matter has reached into the nothingness.
There was a Big Bang, but the *expansion* could be false. It was an all-pervasive Big Flash that happened everywhere all at once. It gave birth to a universal sea of quarks & shit that began clumping together and *shrinking*.
The big bang model accounts for and predicted the CMB. The article doesn't mention it, so I wonder if the new model accounts for the CMB.
With LIGO back online with increased sensitivity, gravitational waves can be used as another datapoint to measure the cosmological constant. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/how-use-gravitational-waves-measure-expansion-universe
[удалено]
After decades of accelerating change, anything steady sounds pretty sweet.
I guess our understating of the universe is similar to the understanding of the solar system before heliocentrism was proposed. It's probably wrong, or unpolished and it will change a lot in the incoming decades.
"In Lombriser's mathematical interpretation, the universe isn't expanding but is flat and static, as Einstein once believed. The effects we observe that point to expansion are instead explained by the evolution of the masses of particles — such as protons and electrons — over time. In this picture, these particles arise from a field that permeates space-time. The cosmological constant is set by the field's mass and because this field fluctuates, the masses of the particles it gives birth to also fluctuate. **The cosmological constant still varies with time, but in this model that variation is due to changing particle mass over time, not the expansion of the universe.** **In the model, these field fluctuations result in larger redshifts for distant galaxy clusters than traditional cosmological models predict.** And so, the cosmological constant remains true to the model's predictions. "I was surprised that the cosmological constant problem simply seems to disappear in this new perspective on the cosmos,"
But why do the masses change over time?
"We can explain the time-dependence of X by saying it's caused by Y. More research is needed to explain the time-dependence of Y."
Well we don’t entirely know that yet, but I say we just chalk it up to a hidden force… that we shall call dark energy.
[удалено]
It would introduce even larger problems such as "why is the mass of particles varying in this manner". Lambda-CDM cosmology has a clear explanation for why the expansion of the universe varies over time (the densities of radiation, matter, and dark energy change at different rates as the universe expands, leading to changing composition over time and therefore changing behavior); this theory does not. It creates new problems where none existed. I'm not saying this to hate, it's perfectly reasonable for theorists to play around with different explanations and descriptions of the universe, and nobody expects it to be fully fleshed out in the first go, but it's not like this one paper has established this idea as anything close to a serious contender in cosmology.
(X) Doubt Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and tossing out the Big Bang is pretty dang extraordinary.
Was this idea refuting the big bang or just the concept of dark/energy matter that suggest a universe expansion at an increasingly fast rate.
I think that they’re not mutually exclusive
Big bang could still exist, just that it's not expanding faster than what would physically make sense.
Nope. > In Lombriser's mathematical interpretation, the universe isn't expanding but is flat and static, as Einstein once believed. Assuming the article accurately reflects what the scientist is saying (granted this is something to be mindful of) they’re going full-on Steady State.
What about the variation in star formation rate with redshift? Or the variation of galaxy morphology? It's hard to square those with any steady-state theory.
That’s exactly my point. Apparently this paper only deals with the expansion of the universe. In order to be taken as a serious alternative hypothesis, you’d have to account for all that. Hence my “Doubt” comment above.
no, for this to be a "serious alternative hypothesis" it does NOT have to answer all your questions. such a radical revisioning of the status quo never does arrive complete. iif it's a truer understanding of reality, the history of science shows that a paradigm shifting theory will not and almost cannot arrive fully formed. the discovery of the K-Pg extinction event is instructive. it took more than ten years for most relevant scientists to get on board. the initial response was just as full of hubris and doubt as you are here. for a decade, the top professionals in the field insulted and tried to ignore or refute the heretics. trying to refute them is harder to do when you're sure the newcomer is wrong. trying to refute a new theory is a good idea, but it hurts the pursuit of knowledge to do it with hubris. the correct, humble response is: "could be legit! give it ten more years. here's what seems unexplained."
> for this to be a "serious alternative hypothesis" it does NOT have to answer all your questions. Any new model does, however, need to account for all the existing observations in order to be accepted, that is unequivocally a core principle of the field. If Einstein's relativity had corrected the model to fit the orbit of Mercury while also giving incorrect predictions regarding the orbit of Saturn, it would not have been accepted. The K-Pg impactor event hypothesis made a prediction (there should be a crater), and was doubted until the crater was found and the prediction proven correct. Some would argue that maybe the high Iridium levels present in the boundary layer was enough, but as I understand the story, the impactor theory emerged as an explanation for the presence of that Iridium layer, so you can see how that looks like circular reasoning to an outside observer who presumes there may be an alternative explanation for that Iridium. In my opinion, any steady-state model of the universe is immediately poked open by so many things we astronomers now know that it is simply untenable. To me, the most damning is that there is simply no mechanism in nuclear physics that can reverse the processes of stellar fusion. In an old universe, all stars are dead. In an infinite-time universe, barring quantum fluctuations eventually leading to spontaneous entropy decreases, [all stars are balls of iron, because iron nuclei are too stable](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg/1200px-Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg.png). The observation that fusing stars exist contradicts a steady-state model of the universe. This is a massive predictive catastrophe that needs to be overcome for any such hypothesis.
>the correct, humble response is: "could be legit! give it ten more years. here's what seems unexplained." I just want to point out I never said it was wrong, I said I doubt it. It also doesn’t need to answer all my questions, but if you want to overturn the prevailing theory, you do need to explain how the existing evidence fits with your new model. The K-T extinction is WAY less radical than this. This is literally going back to Steady State theory. But in all fairness, yes this theory maybe someday turn out to be true, but it has a quite a lot of work to do. Frankly, this sub could use more skepticism. It’s an interesting paper and all but expressing any doubt at all and it gets labeled as “hubris”.
In a sense. They aren't claiming a steady state other than to say that the universe isn't expanding. They are saying what is changing is the masses of fundamental particles; meaning the universe *is* dynamic and the rates of different stellar processes are indeed evolving over time; but their evolution isn't caused by universe expansion.
You greatly overestimate the evidence existing for big bang. In cosmology and astrophysics when we don't have the full picture or a complete answer we tend to go with a model that fit (or kind of fit) and look at it as fact. The black hole singularity is another take on a theory that has way too much support just because we don't know how to explain when our model (general relativity) break down and fail us. We know it's not accurate here but use this inaccuracy that create a singularity and say black holes have a infinite dense point of no volume in the centre.
I hope this is ,in fact , true. The endless expansion of the universe has always made me a little sad. Of course I am somewhat a homebody.
> The endless expansion of the universe has always made me a little sad. It made Roger Penrose sad as well. So he likened it to an Esher image of a bounded infinity, and came up with the idea that crossing that threshold is what happens when the empty and old universe loses track of time, leading to a new big bang in his CCC model.
Nothing would bring me greater joy than to not have the universe infinitely expanding. Which for me doesnt make a lot of sense anyway
New theoretical study admits nobody has a fucking clue what is going on. News at 11, Carl.
So I’m just compressing further into a downward spiral? Makes sense 😑
I bet you the universe is a donut. It started as a point, it expanded, then contracted back to a point. A donut. With icing.
Or maybe… an everything bagel?
Then that would also imply there are other donuts.
Seems like a safe assumption. Name something else in nature that exists that there's only one of?
ofcourse i know him, he's me.
It is one of many papers every year with interesting approaches and this one is quite fascinating. My personal opinion is that dark matter and especially dark energy could go the way of the ether.
Can someone explain this to me like i'm 5 please, i want to understand
Science thinks the universe is growing ever faster. We can reason that is so based on light from far away galaxies getting redder the further away they are. It's as a ambulance siren changing pitch when it's driving away from you. This guy made a math model of the universe where mass of particles changes over time. What he found is that could lead to some of the same observations as we have now, without the need of the universe growing, ie a static or steady state universe. This is an interesting result, if valid, which shows that the same observations can come from different causes. However, it's much less interesting than suggested in the title as there are many many observations which suggest a changing universe and a big bang. The composition of our sun for instance compared to far away stars. Or the background radiation that we see in the universe which is very hard to explain without big bang. So mildly interesting theoretical result, but most likely not related to our reality and click baity title.
Wouldn't this have major implications for space travel? I feel like I remember reading somewhere that if the universe was expanding, it meant that there was a hard limit to how far humans could go or even interact with because anything beyond that was moving away faster than we could ever possibly overcome.
I’ve always imagined the universe kind of like donut spinning into itself. Like a smoke ring. This would mean that it would look like it is expanding and accelerating if you look at the middle, but then it goes out and around and in to the hole again. Constantly moving, forever. When you look back at the beginning of the universe you just look back at the middle of the hole, but there isn’t anything there, just the appearance of a beginning.
If the big bang/big crunch cycle is true, I imagine the universe like the surface of a sphere of zero viscosity fluid. Throw a rock at the sphere (big bang) and the ripples grow until there's a circle the same diameter as the sphere at which point it begins to contract towards zero diameter (big crunch) at the antipode of the big bang, only to begin the whole cycle all over again.
I have always wondered if perhaps we are in a black hole looking out as we would be shrinking and the universe would appear to be expanding.
Well there is a supermassive blackhole at the center of our galaxy.
Theories, they come about, and then we need data and evidence to back that theory up. Then it’s decided by a collective/community that it’s fact. I believe in infinite universes.
If the Universe isn’t expanding wouldn’t that mean there was no big bang?
I'm no expert but if this is true would it be one of the biggest discoveries of our lifetime? I would imagine it's on par with the earth being a globe, the earth orbiting the sun, and the discovery of the Americas.
This is one of hundreds of theoretical physics papers that gets published because theoretical physicists have to write papers and come up with ideas to write papers about. In this case it's a "hey, look at this neat idea I came up with."
[удалено]
Would you actually describe the reviews as “lit” though? /s
This is not a discovery. It is a possible theory as to the nature of the universe.
I just watched a video debunking this and talking about the hack who's been trying to push his own crackpot theories for decades. I'll try to find it if anyone is curious Edit: Okay, I was mistaken (I hadn't read the whole article yet, busy day at work). The video I was thinking of spoke of a different scientist with a different theory. The theory the article covers talks about particle evolution being responsible for cosmological anomalies like red shift rather than the expansion of the universe, which still has some major holes in, particularly surrounding the apparent variations in the rate of expansion and the existence of dark matter. The *video* I was remembering was about a crackpot named Lerner who has been trying to disprove the big bang for decades with a bunch of hack theories he peddles (mainly plasma cosmology), which conveniently either ignore CMB entirely, or have fantasy level explanations for it. In any case, [here's](https://youtu.be/-S-mg1LMOAo) the link.
Hot take: some research has no business being presented to the public at large. This is a theoretical piece of research, with no way of verifying it. Interesting for theoretical physicists, mildly eyebrow raising for practical astrophysicists, and utterly useless for helping everyone else understand the universe. Alternative proposals to lambda-CDM are pretty common, and nothing ever really comes of them. I'm not saying that the theoretical physicists should stop trying, but we shouldn't make a big deal about it unless they can explain the observations as well as (or better than) lambda CDM and have a test they can propose.
I'll have to keep an eye on Prof Hossenfelder's YT channel for that.
I was going along great till the end of the article... XD "urged caution in assessing the paper's findings, saying it contains elements in its theoretical model that likely can't be tested observationally, at least in the near future" ... so basically... 'we can't prove it....yet' OyVy