One of the great joys in living in 2020 is relishing the complete disarray of modern astrophysics. Jonah being swallowed by a whale; the tower of Babel, manna from Heaven, all have more credibility than 2020 astrophysics.
2020 astrophysics has become myth making, on an amateur level.
Time is a seminal problem for physicists, and astrophysicists. By all the applied laws of physics, Mankind should be able to go both back in time, and forward in time; physics tells us that should be possible. But against the laws of physics, Time is an arrow, going only one way- forward. If one built a time machine in 2020, one could go to the year 2050; but the Time Traveler would not be able to return to 2020. Time goes against physics; astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in his tome A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, asked his Readers to imagine a time without Time, before the Big Bang. If anyone can imagine a time before Time, without Time, one can believe in a whale swallowing Jonah, and Jonah coming out alive.
Not satisfied with creating a myth that there was a time before time without Time, astrophysicists have doubled down. Now they have created a fantasy that there is a parallel universe in which Time goes backwards. Sort of a MERLIN Universe, in which everything ages backwards.
“Why does time seem to move forward? It’s a riddle that’s puzzled physicists for well over a century, and they’ve come up with numerous theories to explain time’s arrow. The latest, though, suggests that while time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the “other side” of the Big Bang.
Two leading theories propose to explain the direction of time by way of the relatively uniform conditions of the Big Bang. At the very start, what is now the universe was homogeneously hot, so much so that matter didn’t really exist. It was all just a superheated soup. But as the universe expanded and cooled, stars, galaxies, planets, and other celestial bodies formed, birthing the universe’s irregular structure and raising its entropy.
One theory, proposed in 2004 by Sean Carroll, now a professor at Caltech, and Jennifer Chen, then his graduate student, says that time moves forward because of the contrast in entropy between then and now, with an emphasis on the fact that the future universe will so much more disordered than the past. That movement toward high entropy gives time its direction.
The new theory says a low entropy early universe is inevitable because of gravity, and ultimately that’s what gives time its arrow. To test the idea, the theory’s proponents assembled a simple model with nothing more than 1,000 particles and the physics of Newtonian gravity. Here’s Lee Billings, reporting for Scientific American:
The system’s complexity is at its lowest when all the particles come together in a densely packed cloud, a state of minimum size and maximum uniformity roughly analogous to the big bang. The team’s analysis showed that essentially every configuration of particles, regardless of their number and scale, would evolve into this low-complexity state. Thus, the sheer force of gravity sets the stage for the system’s expansion and the origin of time’s arrow, all without any delicate fine-tuning to first establish a low-entropy initial condition.
But here’s the twist: The expansion after the simulated Big Bang didn’t just happen in one direction, but two. The simple Big Bang they modeled produced two universes, one a mirror of the other. In one universe, time appears to run forwards. In the other, time runs backwards, at least from our perspective…..
Here’s Billings again, interviewing lead author Julian Barbour from the University of Oxford:
“If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past…..PBS.”
Readers, this layman of a Blogger has a prima facie problem with that Time in Reverse Universe Theory; it fails to explain why any universe should exist, let alone a Time in reverse Universe. By the applied laws of physics, no Universe should exist, including the current one we are experiencing, with Time as a Straight Arrow.
“One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why antimatter did not destroy the Universe at the beginning of time.
….All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration.
“An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”….The standard model predicts the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter – but that’s a combustive mixture that would have annihilated itself, leaving nothing behind to make galaxies or planets or people….cosmosmagazine.”
But this Universe does exist; perhaps Jonah in the belly of the whale knows why.
Mankind is living through an explosion of astrophysics which is proving there are physical things which exist which should not exist, including the Universe itself.
On March 30, 2018, this Blogger published: Astrophysics and God-A Galaxy Exists without DARK MATTER, Which Should NOT Happen in a Godless Universe.
The following is excerpted from that Blog:
“….. Astrophysics is the easiest path to believing in the existence of God.
Lately, the only thing which astrophysics has been doing is proving the existence of a Creator, a God.
....Astrophysics is close to proving that Divine Mankind is the most intelligent life in the Universe, because intelligent life on Earth is the oldest intelligent life in the Universe because of GRBs. (The inexplicable THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD, in which mankind learned language and became Divine in practice is 50,000 years ago).
....The latest developments in quantum theory are leading astrophysics to the conclusion God exists…..Supposedly the speed of light is the fastest thing in the universe, according to Einstein.
However, within the quantum theory there is the worm of ENTANGLEMENT, forever interlocking the fates of subatomic particles, regardless of their separation. So if a photon on one side of the galaxy spins up, an instant later on the other side of the galaxy its twin photon will spin down …..Suggesting that INFORMATION TRAVELS FASTER THAN LIGHT.
This was very upsetting to Einstein, because the suggestion that information travels faster than light is a no-no in his special theory of relativity.
He dismissed it as unworthy “spooky things”, and invented the concept of hidden variables. Hidden variables are mystical science, much like miracles; consider them miracles for physicists. Their sole purpose is to find an explanation within the universal speed limit of light to explain the speed of information traveling above the universal speed limit.
European physicists did a test which banned Einstein’s hidden variables from the lexicon of physics. They proved mystical things are indeed happening in the speed of information, unexplainable by any scientific mumbo jumbo like hidden variables.
Einstein’s spooky things are God’s mysteries; ENTANGLEMENT may well be predestination pre- ordered by a Creator....THE MAXEY CHRONICLES."
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear research, it operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world at the Swiss/French border.
It was CERN that discovered the Higgs Boson-the God Particle.
Alas, the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the God Particle, has created a myriad of problems for astrophysicists.
“GENEVA-Deep under the countryside north of Geneva, straddling the Franco-Swiss border, one of the most advanced scientific machines ever built has been banging subatomic particles together for more than a decade. This device, the Large Hadron Collider (lhc), accelerates beams of protons (members of a class of particle called hadrons) in opposite directions around a 27km ring until they reach almost the speed of light. Powerful magnets then force these protons into head-on collisions, causing the energy they carry to be converted—as described by Einstein’s best-known equation, E=mc2—into matter. And what matter! For sorting through the ejecta from the collisions gives physicists fleeting glimpses of the fundamental building blocks of the universe and the forces that bind or repel them.
The lhc belongs to the world’s leading particle-physics laboratory, cern….finding out how the universe truly works. The result of this effort has been one of the most successful, most tested scientific ideas of all time: the Standard Model of particle physics (see chart).
The Standard Model is not, however, a theory of everything. It leaves many things unexplained. ….The Standard Model is a quantum-mechanical description of all known elementary particles: from the quarks inside protons and neutrons, via the electrons that orbit atomic nuclei, to the photons that carry electromagnetic force and also light up the universe. Unlike Einstein’s General Relativity, its rival for the laurels of “most important theory in physics”, it is not the product of the musings of a lone genius. Though the name goes back only to 1975, the substance of the model was developed bit by bit by tens of thousands of scientists working for more than 80 years on hundreds of experiments around the world. The final piece of the jigsaw, the Higgs boson, which gives mass to certain other particles and thus ties the model together, was predicted by theoreticians in 1964 and found by the lhc in 2012.
The discovery of the Higgs…. the Standard Model now needs to be extended into something bigger. It does not, for example, include gravity. That is the province of General Relativity. Dark matter is also absent. This is a substance, invisible but detectable by its gravitational effects, that makes up 27% of the universe—over five times as much as the so-called normal matter of stars, planets, people and so on. And it does not include dark energy, a thing of unknown nature which constitutes the remaining 68% of reality and somehow acts to push everything else in the cosmos apart.
The Standard Model does include antimatter. But it predicts that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have emerged at the beginning of time and, by now, these should have annihilated one another. Since this evidently has not happened—matter being common these days, and antimatter vanishingly rare—that prediction is in need of serious re-evaluation.
Each of these inadequacies points to physical laws, particles and forces yet to be discovered—mysteries which physicists had expected that the lhc would have started cracking open by now. But it has not. That suggests their hypotheses about what lies beyond the Standard Model, which were the basis of those expectations, must be wrong.
The weightiest expectation was placed on the shoulders of an elegant idea called supersymmetry. This theory, developed over the past 50 years, is a way of removing from the Standard Model a lot of things known in the trade as fudge factors. A fudge factor is an arbitrary value that makes a model work, but which itself defies deeper explanation. In the Standard Model, many such fudges can be erased by introducing, for each and every Standard Model particle, a heavier “supersymmetric” partner that has not yet been seen. The putative superpartners of the electron and quark, for example, are known as the selectron and squark.
Supersymmetry might also eradicate one more of the Standard Model’s inadequacies. The supersymmetric partners of another type of Standard Model particle, the neutrino, would be things called neutralinos. And neutralinos are plausible candidates to be the components of which dark matter is composed.
Unfortunately, after almost a decade of increasingly energetic collisions at the lhc, nothing new has emerged beyond the Higgs itself. No hidden dimensions. No unexplained phenomena. No supersymmetric particles. ….
This is all a headache for the practitioners of particle physics—….It is also confusing, because physicists had come to expect that they could more or less predict…. it began with the discovery of positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons.
Positrons were predicted in the 1920s by a formula that lies at the bedrock of the Standard Model. This formula, called the Dirac equation after its creator, Paul Dirac, suggested the existence of electrons with positive charges as well as the familiar negatively charged sort. Thus predicted, they were sought and found. Confidence in the prophetic power of maths was then confirmed over and over again, up to the triumphant discovery of the long-predicted Higgs. But the failure of supersymmetry has dented that confidence badly.
Regardless of the details, though, the consensus is that the route to finding physics beyond the Standard Model runs through the Higgs boson itself. This means examining and characterising that object in exquisite detail. Physicists do not know, for example, if it is truly an elementary particle with no internal structure (like an electron or a quark) or is a composite of smaller objects (in the way that protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each). It is even possible that what has been identified as the Higgs is not actually the particle predicted by the Standard Model—but, rather, a different particle from an as-yet-unknown theory that happens to have the Higgs’s predicted mass.
….Higgs bosons are unstable. They decay into pairs of other particles almost as soon as they are created. The Standard Model predicts that around 60% of the time this will create a bottom quark and its antimatter equivalent. A further 21% of the time a pair of W bosons will emerge, and 9% of Higgs-boson decays should end up with a pair of gluons (the other 10% will result in yet further combinations).
….As Jon Butterworth, a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, puts it, “My whole career there’s been a very clear road map of what we need to do next and now there isn’t one. We’ve outgrown our road map. Experiment is ahead of the theory. It’s an interesting and difficult time.” …THE ECONOMIST, Jan 2020."
The Big Rip, the Big Crunch, the Big Bang, spooky things, cosmic entanglement, information traveling faster than light,(which implies predestination, which implies John Calvin was the greatest astrophysicist ever), Black holes devouring neutron stars, …astrophysics is in A TOTAL STATE OF CONFUSION; cosmology is in a total state of confusion.
The seminal question is this- can Science explain how Nature created an existing universe where a universe,by all the laws of physics, should not exist?
In 2020, astrophysicists must grapple with the following: Can Science explain Cosmological Confusion?
Confusion humbles Mankind, and who, save the Creator, would have a vested interest in confusing and humbling Mankind? See the Tower of Babel tale in the Old Testament.
As a religious experience, following astrophysics in 2020 is really fascinating.
THE ECONOMIST
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