Dark Energy

I mentioned dark energy in a previous post, fortunately, Sci Am dedicated its April cover to the topic. As it pertains to singularities and all that, I thought it might be pertinent to hint at what the most up to date theorists are theorizing:

As the discovery of an accelerating universe became invaluable to the makeup of the cosmos, it became clear that there was a mass of missing information. A fat 70% of the universes substance was sheathed in mystery, with the exception that it was undoubtedly pushing along the expansion of the universe-instead of holding it back...this is dark energy.
It is theorized that the big bang gave everything an outward push, but gravity should be slowing down that push... so, its only logical to consider some kind of force/energy working against gravity... Dark Energy? Its possible that this is the energy associated with empty space that Einstein had suggested in 1917 when he introduced his cosmological constant (which he in fact considered his 'greatest blunder') and if that turns out to be the case, well then this is yet another act of remarkable foresight on his part.

So whats the news? As long as there has been the idea of dark energy, there has been a strict grip on the Copernican Principle-that Earth is not in a central or otherwise special position in the universe, and this extending into the cosmological principle-at any moment in time all points and directions in space look the same. But! A small collection of physicists are considering dark energy sans the principles. Meaning there might be no such thing as dark energy at all. Meaning, we might exist in a very unique spot in the universe-the center of a giant cosmic void.
So, what are the alternative explanations?
1. Rather than expanding evenly, like a balloon might, the universe is expanding unevenly, like a big amoebic blob. How? I will tell you-in the previous view of our location in the universe, the decelerating expansion rate was explained by the effects of dense matter tugging at the fabric of spacetime and slowing down the rate of expansion (this coming from the outward push of the big bang) BUT if one were to put us at the center of the aforementioned cosmic void, where matters density is conceivably much less than anywhere else in the universe, we would find less slow down (less matter), faster expansion (especially at the center of the void, slowing down as it moves outward towards the edge and creeps up on the surrounding high density space). At any given time different parts of space will expand at different rates.

As you might imagine, this change in design is an upset of massive proportions, for in general astronomy, the larger a structure is, the rarer it should be and the probability of a void big enough to mimc dark energy is less than one part in 10 to the 100th power (or a googol tahaha). Now to bring us round to singularities-for a void to mimic dark energy, the expansion rate would have a significant decrease away from us and in all directions, meaning the density of matter and energy must increase sharply away from us and in all directions... this would make the shape of an upside down witches hat, the tip of which, points out us, our place in the void. Ugh, but this goes against the assumed smoothness of structures in the universe. AND, my favorite part, Vanderveld and Flanagan of Cornell showed that the tip, us, would have to be a singularity-wild.

epi 11 and the Cassandra Complex

Cassandra's story finds its origin in Greek mythology... She was the impeccably beautiful daughter of the the King of Troy. Merely upon seeing her, Apollo was struck with a desire to have her, wholly... he offered her gifts, bestowing upon her the unique quality of prophecy. However, when his love went unrequited he cursed her causing her prophecies, or warnings, to go unbelieved. Ah, in 1949 the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who influenced Derrida to Foucault, coined the term to refer to a belief that things could be known in advance.

He attempted to formulate a scientific philosophy that takes both rationalism and empiricism into account, incorporating this into the study of literature. In La Poétique de l'espace he offered a phenomenology of poetic image as inner and outer space. He considered the image in terms of the “reverberations” it inspired within him. And in La Poétique de la rêverie he theorized that since reality is fashioned by imagination, the state of day dreaming, or reverie, is the highest state of mind. In The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Bachelard introduced his theory that the four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—embody the creative temperament as well as the basic forms of life. He went on to explore the meanings of these symbols throughout time in world literature.

'It is not a question of observation which propels mankind forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.'

Uh oh, those quantum kids are goin to mess it all up for me and Einstein..or not?

Before we begin, I will define a key idea as I will not be returning to its definition or orgin in this particular discourse; Nonlocality is the possibility of physically affecting something without touching it or touching any series of entities reaching from here to there...this poses a threat to special relativity as according to Einstein, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Needless to say, Einstein was not down. In fact, he and two friends published a paper regarding the existence of entangled particles (evidence of nonlocality) and deemed this aspect of quantum mechanics 'strange and dubious' and assumed that this type of nature was apparent only, a mathematical anomaly surely.

Niels Bohr on the other hand, responded immediately with an incredibly prescient refutation highlighting Einstein et cie's use of the word reality and impressed the significance of subject and object, the conditions under which it makes sense to ask questions, and the nature of human language.

Okay, now, in the most recent issue of Scientific American, there is an article on entanglement and briefly the authors highlight what this would mean in terms of time travel. When considering special relativity and nonlocality, one must recall that sp. relativity is based on the impossibility of transmitting messages faster than the speed of light. After all, if sp. relativity is true, one can argue that no material carrier of a message can be accelerated from rest to speeds greater than that of light. And one can argue that a message transmitted faster than light would, according to some clocks, be a message that arrived before it was sent. The kind of nonlocality encountered in quantum mechanics calls for an absolute simultaneity...posing a very real threat to special relativity as subjectivity is IT in terms of relativity.

However, as Stephen (Eloise) Hawking (and a lot of other physicists) has emphatically proposed, a possible key to the ultimate theory of everything/the universe is the melding of quantum mechanics and relativity. Ugh, how to do this...

Singularities

Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose worked with Stephen (Eloise) Hawking to show that the collapse of a massive star would inevitably lead to a singularity* and that it must be surrounded by an event horizon (the zone surrounding a black hole from which nothing can escape**).

*Singularities can also be divided according to whether they are covered by an event horizon or not (naked singularities). According to general relativity, the initial state of the universe at the beginning of the Big Bang, was a singularity-a tiny point of infinite density where the laws of physics break down.

The equations of general relativity tells us that at the moment of the big bang, everything in the universe would have been infinitely squeezed together and the universe would have been compressed into a single point (the singularity).

Other types of singularities predicted by general relativity are found inside a black hole: any star collapsing beyond a certain point would form a black hole, inside which a singularity (covered by an event horizon) would be formed.

The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems are a set of results in general relativity which attempt to answer the question of when gravitation produces singularities. A singularity in solutions of general relativity is one of two things:
a situation where matter is forced to be compressed to a point (a space-like singularity)
a situation where certain light rays come from a region with infinite curvature (time-like singularity)

Now, I ask, why do we remember the past instead of the future?

You see, the second law of thermodynamics says that if we currently have a low entropy system (a measure of the disorder of a system/chaos and specifically in thermodynamics, a measure of the disorder of molecules in a system), we can expect to have a high entropy system in the future. The law tells us that as you go back in time, things get less and less random (i.e. a glass falling off a table would break into millions of pieces (more random/disorder) but rewind and all the pieces would come together to form the one glass (less disorder/chaos)... Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that seems to imply a particular direction for time.

Does the origin of the thermodynamic arrow of time lie in the nature of the big bang? Does consciousness have its weird hand in our perception of time beginning in the past, passing through the present, and then moving forward into the future? As we go "forward" in time, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase or remain the same; it will not decrease. Thus one could, theoretically, consider entropy measurement as a kind of clock.

Is there a connection between the thermodynamic arrow of time and the psychological arrow? For it seems to be that memory and our capability of such is intimately connected to the arrow of time. Considering braincells as computer bits and its correlation to the outside world as that of memory, the law explains the growth of such correlations with time a forward movement, propelling toward the future, rather than the past (entropy growing as time passes).

However, this is not the only option.

There are peoples, like the Aymara, who associate that which is ahead as past and that which rests behind, the future...dope.


The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
- Omar Khayyám

Ohhh oh h candida

fokkkkkus

Behind the scenes