What is the nature of the universe??

SatanIsMyCoPilot wrote:

Lone Wolf wrote:

Why are we here??? (Meaning of life also - VFM thread..)

I finally made it to the end of Hegel's Phenomenology a month or so ago, so I have now seized the Notion, I have arrived at Absolute Knowing, and I am now at one with the mind of the universe. I just rock so much

So do you know next weeks lottery numbers now then????

Heh!! Oh dear I would like to call you Hegel Boy but Revol already has ownership of that title...

Do I ask too much if I suggest you summarise your findings in a short post for us mere mortals??

Love

LW X

Stardust may be basis of life on Earth

Alok Jha
Friday December 15, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Comets could have brought the basic ingredients of life to Earth, scientists revealed yesterday.

The first analysis of samples that Nasa's Stardust mission brought back to Earth from a comet earlier this year has revealed that comets contain a richer range of ingredients than previously thought, including the complex molecules needed to kick-start biology.

The findings will force a re-evaluation of the traditional thinking on comet formation. "We think we know what these things are made of and then suddenly we find that, no, we don't," said Monica Grady, an astronomer at the Open University who worked on the Stardust samples.

Nasa launched Stardust to test the standard concept that comets are just dirty balls of snow left over from the early solar system. It was sent to examine the comet Wild 2 in February 1999.

The probe flew through the tail of dust and debris the comet had emitted and, after travelling 2.88bn miles, returned to Earth earlier this year with a payload of thousands of tiny particles from the comet.

The results of the first investigations of the trapped dust were presented yesterday at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco and simultaneously published in the journal Science.

To their surprise, scientists found a huge range of minerals in Wild 2. In particular, the samples showed evidence of aluminium- and calcium-rich minerals that could only have formed at very high temperatures, presumably close to the sun.

Donald Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington and the principal investigator for Stardust, said the traditional ideas that comets were made in isolated parts of the outer solar system would need revision. "As the solar system formed 4.6bn years ago, material [must have] moved from the innermost part to the outermost part. I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out," he said.

Wild 2 also seems to have some of the complex organic molecules that could be precursors to life.

"It's a fairly widely held belief that comets may have played a key role in delivering organics to the early Earth and played a role in getting life started," said Scott Sandford of Nasa's Ames research centre, who led one of the research teams.

When the Earth first formed, it would have been a molten body so hot that any organic materials already present on it would have perished. Any complex organic materials made in space would have had to arrive on the young Earth well after the planet had cooled down. "A lot of our findings support this interesting idea, which is that comets played this key role," said Dr Sandford.

"We don't know how life got started on the Earth. But one would presume that the more complex the things you drop on the Earth, the easier it might be for life to get started. We know that comets and asteroids deliver this sort of material."

Of most interest are the types of organic molecules seen in laboratory simulations of the early solar system, in which scientists irradiate ices containing dirt and dust. These produce a lot of organic compounds including amino acids; Wild 2 seems to contain similar molecules.

Dr Sandford said: "The possible presence of this material in the comet is exciting because it suggests that many [more] of these kinds of compounds that are biologically interesting may well be there."

Yup - if i tried to summarise it (and I have done - I've made a few attempts at mapping out what's going on in the book, none of which were particularly pretty) I'd reveal just how little I understood it. Hegel is hard; top quote from Arthur Schopenhauer (not a big fan of Hegel), who complains about young minds "strained and ruined in the freshness of youth by the nonsense of Hegelianism.”
He writes:

“…the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity.”

No Big Bang? Endless Universe Made Possible by New Model

A new cosmological model demonstrates the universe can endlessly expand and contract, providing a rival to Big Bang theories and solving a thorny modern physics problem, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physicists.

The cyclic model proposed by Dr. Paul Frampton, Louis J. Rubin Jr. distinguished professor of physics in UNC's College of Arts & Sciences, and co-author Lauris Baum, a UNC graduate student in physics, has four key parts: expansion, turnaround, contraction and bounce.

During expansion, dark energy -- the unknown force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate -- pushes and pushes until all matter fragments into patches so far apart that nothing can bridge the gaps. Everything from black holes to atoms disintegrates. This point, just a fraction of a second before the end of time, is the turnaround.

At the turnaround, each fragmented patch collapses and contracts individually instead of pulling back together in a reversal of the Big Bang. The patches become an infinite number of independent universes that contract and then bounce outward again, reinflating in a manner similar to the Big Bang. One patch becomes our universe.

"This cycle happens an infinite number of times, thus eliminating any start or end of time," Frampton said. "There is no Big Bang."

An article describing the model is available on the arXiv.org e-print archive and will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.

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

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

Frampton and Baum circumvent the Big Bang by postulating that, at the turnaround, any remaining entropy is in patches too remote for interaction. Having each "causal patch" become a separate universe allows each universe to contract essentially empty of matter and entropy. "The presence of any matter creates insuperable difficulties with contraction," Frampton said. "The idea of coming back empty is the most important ingredient of this new cyclic model."

This concept jolted Frampton when it popped into his head last October.

"I suddenly saw there was a new way of solving this seemingly impossible problem," he said. "I was sitting with my feet on my desk, half-asleep and puzzled, and I almost fell out of my chair when I realized there was a much, much simpler possibility."

Also key to Frampton and Baum's model is an assumption about dark energy's equation of state -- the mathematical description of its pressure and density. Frampton and Baum assume dark energy's equation of state is always less than -1. This distinguishes their work from a similar cyclic model proposed in 2002 by physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, who assumed the equation of state is never less than -1.

A negative equation of state gives Frampton and Baum a way to stop the universe from blowing itself apart irreversibly, an end physicists call the "Big Rip." The pair found that in their model, the density of dark energy becomes equal to the density of the universe and expansion stops just before the Big Rip.

New satellites currently under construction, such as the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, could gather enough information to determine dark energy's equation of state, Frampton said.

A copy of the paper may be downloaded at http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610213

Hi peeps

Do any of you agree with Unified Field Theory..as some physicists are starting to...that all matter is connected etc etc...and/or that a univeral intelligence pervades everything, you know, a bit like the force in Star Wars...

Love
LW X