Cosmic Microwave "ripples" may mean time did not exist before the universe. - Polidicks

[I]via:[/I] NatureNews [release][B]Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.[/B] Edwin Cartlidge Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe. The provocative idea was posited by Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and celebrated theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK. In a recent paper[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html#B1"]1[/URL], posted on the arXiv preprint server, Gurzadyan and Penrose argue that collisions between supermassive black holes from before the Big Bang would generate spherically propagating gravitational waves that would, in turn, leave characteristic circles within the cosmic microwave background. To verify this claim, Gurzadyan examined seven years' worth of data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, calculating the change in temperature variance within progressively larger rings around more than 10,000 points in the microwave sky. And indeed, he identified a number of rings within the WMAP data that had a temperature variance that was markedly lower than that of the surrounding sky. [B] Cosmic cycle[/B] Most cosmologists believe that the Universe, and with it space and time, exploded into being some 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang, and that it has been expanding ever since. A crucial component of the standard cosmological model — needed to explain why the Universe is so uniform — is the idea that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe underwent a brief period of extremely rapid expansion known as inflation. Penrose, however, thinks that the Universe's great uniformity instead originates from before the Big Bang, from the tail end of a previous aeon that saw the Universe expand to become infinitely large and very smooth. That aeon in turn was born in a Big Bang that emerged from the end of a still earlier aeon, and so on, creating a potentially infinite cycle with no beginning and no end. Now Gurzadyan and Penrose's idea is being challenged by three independent studies, all posted on the arXiv server within the past few days, by Ingunn Wehus and Hans Kristian Eriksen of the University of Oslo[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html#B2"]2[/URL]; Adam Moss, Douglas Scott and James Zibin of the University of British Columbia[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html#B3"]3[/URL] in Vancouver, Canada; and Amir Hajian of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Ontario[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html#B4"]4[/URL]. All three groups reproduced Gurzadyan's analysis of the WMAP data and all agree that the data do contain low-variance circles. Where they part company with the earlier work is in the significance that they attribute to these circles. [B] Circles of significance[/B] To gauge this significance, Gurzadyan compared the observed circles with a simulation of the cosmic microwave background in which temperature fluctuations were completely scale invariant, meaning that their abundance was independent of their size. In doing so, he found that there ought not to be any patterns. But the groups who are critical of his work say that this is not what the cosmic microwave background is like. They point out that the WMAP data clearly show that there are far more hot and cold spots at smaller angular scales, and that it is therefore wrong to assume that the microwave sky is isotropic. All three groups searched for circular variance patterns in simulations of the cosmic microwave background that assume the basic properties of the inflationary Universe, and all found circles that are very similar to the ones in the WMAP data. Moss and his colleagues even carried out a slight variation of the exercise and found that both the observational data and the inflationary simulations also contain concentric regions of low variance in the shape of equilateral triangles. "The result obtained by Gurzadyan and Penrose does not in any way provide evidence for Penrose's cyclical model of the Universe over standard inflation," says Zibin. Gurzadyan dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing that there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model and the WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he makes in a response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv[URL="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html#B5"]5[/URL]. However, he is not prepared to state that the circles constitute evidence of Penrose's model. "We have found some signatures that carry properties predicted by the model," he says. [/release] [URL="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html"]Source[/URL]

Science, woo! Wait, triangles?

Cool, but what was 'everything' before the universe?

Time is not infinite!? :byodood:

One day nothing existed, then one day time happened. And that's why come the universe. Those Astrophysicists or whatever are making it all sound so complicated.

[QUOTE=TheBrokenHobo;26609672]One day nothing existed, then one day time happened. And that's why come the universe. Those Astrophysicists or whatever are making it all sound so complicated.[/QUOTE] But a day is a measurement of time :byodood:

ITT Bats try to imagine a world without sound.

[QUOTE=Fata;26609747]But a day is a measurement of time :byodood:[/QUOTE] Or is it? :science:

I... cannot comprehend any of this. :psyboom:

[QUOTE=claythepro;26609626]Cool, but what was 'everything' before the universe?[/QUOTE] Asking for a "before" when time even did not have existed is an invalid question.

But, if time is an invented concept, then it wouldn't exist until we invented it, right? ...right? Hey, I have a theoretical degree in physics.

If there is no time, nothing can move.

[QUOTE=Fata;26609747]But a day is a measurement of time :byodood:[/QUOTE] It is a human measurement of the passage of events, time in physics is a bit different, it's a basic fundamental component of everything and is in fact a dimension interwoven into our universe. Our perception of time is just us imposing order on a system where there is little or none in the first place.

Nothing could say if there was time before the universe. There would be nothing with which to relate the passage of time...

[QUOTE=papaya;26609921]But, if time is an invented concept, then it wouldn't exist until we invented it, right? ...right? Hey, I have a theoretical degree in physics.[/QUOTE] Time isn't an invented concept. Time is the sequence of events, in which the sequence of events after relative present are fixed, and future events have no set sequence. However, time is not a constant.

[QUOTE=papaya;26609921]But, if time is an invented concept, then it wouldn't exist until we invented it, right? ...right? Hey, I have a theoretical degree in physics.[/QUOTE] Congratulations on being wrong.

:psyduck:

[quote]Cosmic Microwave "ripples" may mean time did not exist before the universe. ...in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe...[/quote] Too bad this doesn't explain how our known universe was created, except if you are a fan of the theory that supermassive black holes colliding into each other would release enough energy for this process. A "previous cosmic aeon" would probably be a universe that existed before ours. Leaving the question open where the energy came from after all, which was used to create matter from a timeless "something". [editline]Edited:[/editline] I prefer Hawking's version of explaining the Big Bang anyway: [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZZ0SqSv7BY[/media]

I thought we already knew this

Still talkin' about the ship's mission? :v: But yeah, time and space were quite jumbled before the big bang, I think. I need to take the better Physics and Math classes at the next institution I go to.

It's really hard to imagine what could possibly cause the big bang when nothing existed before it, not even time itself. I hope I live long enough to read a definite answer to that.

What I fail to understand is how the universe suddenly could have been created if there was no time. Without time there would be no future events, so the universe couldn't have just "popped up", as that would require time.

How about this? Crazy but stick with it. Everything happened at once, cause time wasn't time, it's more like a big blob of wibbley wobbley timey wimey. [img]http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01208/david-tennant460_1208355c.jpg[/img]

I read about this on new-scientist. I think it pushes the idea that we are in a cyclical universe, and that those black hole collisions happened as it was collapsing again, just before the big crunch, and then traces of them would then be seen after expansion on the CMB. Very cool stuff, but then the prevailing theory for how this universe will end is heat death. So a cyclical beginning with a heat death end? How peculiar.. I prefer looking at the inception of the universe in reverse. The beginning would then be tiny minute fluctuations in the fabric of space-time (quantum field fluctuations) which would then gain matter and mass through reversing the process of black hole evaporation, and then seed all the galaxies and stars and matter until ultimately the fields and gravity pulls it all in to the crunch at the end (which then may very well go on to be cyclical). Since QM is time reversal symmetric, this is a perfectly valid way of viewing it. It would show the universe going instead from a state of high entropy to a state of low entropy.

Thinking about the universe and it's creation and purpose just makes my brain hurt, I choose to ignore it these days

It's so weird to imagine a "somewhere" without time. How does it work? Is everything "happening" at the same "time" ? How does an event look without time?

[QUOTE=DrLuke;26619774]It's so weird to imagine a "somewhere" without time. How does it work? Is everything "happening" at the same "time" ? How does an event look without time?[/QUOTE] I doubt everything can happen at the same time, because I support the theory of Planck lengths. If the smallest timestep is roughly 5*10^-44 seconds which a quantum mechanical process needs to take place, it is impossible that everything can happen at the same time. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time[/url] Though there is no machine to measure the exact limit, because measuring something takes time as well and you need to use a reference I think: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_clock[/url]

[img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4237780/moreisless.png[/img]

[QUOTE=johan_sm;26609953]If there is no time, nothing can move.[/QUOTE] Agree, time is the evolution of particles. (evolution meaning change/movement, not biologically) Otherwise there is no way to perceive time.

[QUOTE=cyanidem;26620670]Agree, time is the evolution of particles. (evolution meaning change/movement, not biologically) Otherwise there is no way to perceive time.[/QUOTE] So is it not more acurate to say [i]if there is no movement then there is no time? [/i] rather then vice versa.