Science News: March 14, 2008

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Belrad Universe: Science News

March 14, 2008

Well, we're finally back. This is Belrad Universe: Science News, and I'm your host, Dr. Bryan Belrad, the rogue scholar.

You can find us online at www.BelradUniverse.com, and you can email the show at Show@BelradUniverse.com.

We've got some incredible stories for you this time. Coming up in the show, this month's Discover magazine has three theories of what came before the Big Bang - we'll take a look at those, and the Spitzer Telescope has caught sight of the most distant galaxy yet. We'll have the implications for you, and a lot more, coming up.

We've got a lot to go over, so let's get right to it!

First up, astronauts have given a hand building the International Space Station. I mean that in the literal sense, of course - they're building a robot attached to the station, and one of the more important aspects of this week's mission is to add hands to the tips of the robotic arms.

You know, robotics has come a very long way in recent years. Sure, we've had robots in space before, but this critter is probably the biggest, and definitely the most dexterous - hence, the name, Dextre. It is designed to be able to accomplish most of the tasks that would ordinarily require a space walk.

However, the giant robot is resisting attempts at assembly. The shuttle crew is already on a tight schedule; Endeavor's current trip up is already set to be the longest in shuttle history. If NASA can't fix the problem soon, they'll have to tuck the robot in under special thermal blankets, and try to wake it up another time.

Ok, on to the Big Bang stuff. Now, I'm always first in line to check out a new flight of Physics fancy, so let's see what today's theologians have to say.

Our first topic is brought to us by Julian Barbour. In 1999, he published a book that suggested we'll never figure out what came before the Big Bang because, simply put, there can't be any before. Now, we've heard that one before, but what makes Barbour's idea something of a rarity is that he says there can't be any before because there is no now. Or, more precisely, there is nothing but now - time itself does not exist.

He believes that what we perceive as the past isn't really there, we only think it happened because there are 'records' left behind; memories, fossils, and such. But these aren't what they seem - just arrangements of atoms that give us the illusion that time had been there. Really, though, they only represent links between one 'now' and another.

The notion sounds pretty far-fetched, but here's the key: consider the numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence. Does 3 come before 5, or do they exist at the same time, just in a relationship that suggests progression? Can 3 exist without 5? Or 5 without 3? Of course they do - they're independent numbers, always there. You just move from one to the next - right?

Of course, if there's a sequence of events, independent or otherwise, that only make sense when they're in order, and they have a defined 'first thing' - like when counting, with numbers, we tend to start with 1 - then we're still stuck with that whole Big Bang thing.

I'm sure lots of interesting ideas might come out of this notion, but, as far as guessing what kicked off the mythical birth of the universe, this idea kind of sidesteps the question.

Barbour isn't the first to try to answer this question by dodging it. Even the most famous physicist in the world, Stephen Hawking, can't seem to come up with a straight answer. He says it's like asking what's north of the North Pole, a meaningless question.

It seems to me, though, that calling a question 'meaningless' is not exactly the most 'scientific' approach. Say, for example, were someone to ask, "What if the Big Bang is wrong?" Would it be fair to reply - as a scientist - that the question is meaningless, just because I can't conceive of how it might be true? Would it be acceptable to assert that calculus is meaningless just because I might not understand it?

Science isn't about picking and choosing which questions have relevance when considered within our own preferred ideologies. We have another name for belief systems that don't like certain questions, that depend on faith to carry on.

In science, "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer. But dodging questions with complicated schemes and overt dismissals is more like politics, or propaganda.

But enough of that. We've got more to cover.

Our next idea comes from Sean Carroll of Caltech. To summarize, Carroll believes that we need to re-define how the universe evolves in order to speculate about what might have come before. Basically, he's trying to figure out how to avoid the 'miracle' connotation that tends to follow the Big Bang around.

Unfortunately, his idea depends on Inflation Theory, which automatically makes it as viable as a model of creation based on the Ptolemaic Solar System.

For those who don't know, Inflation is basically the notion that the Universe just decided to hyper-expand, faster than the speed of light, in order to achieve certain pre-determined properties. See, it's not like God reaching down and adjusting a bunch of controls to fine-tune the universe at all. Because.... Well, it's just not. And it's based on evidence, experimentation, and observation too. Like... um... well, it just is.

It's just like Dark Energy, the magical anti-force that has an effect, but no cause. We can prove that's real by just assuming that it exists, and then observing that our universe looks like it does. See, since the universe looks like it does, and we're assuming that Dark Energy made it that way, then it proves that Dark Energy must have played the role we assume it did - right?

Either that or a bunch of pixies waved their wands. See, if we assume that pixies made the universe the way it is, we also see the universe is as it is. Therefore, it must have been pixies, or the universe wouldn't look like pixies made it!

Anyway, Carroll suggests that Inflation is a continuous process; that, back in the void our universe was birthed from, other universes pop out all the time. And the best thing: when a universe burns out, it becomes empty void again, from which new Inflation can just start up. And, in these new universes, the arrow of time can run in either direction.

Therefore, the formation of universes happens all the time, caused by energy fluctuations in void space that trigger inflation. Better, when observed as a whole, the time flow of the multiverse averages out, giving us a temporally symmetrical reality.

Now, aside from the whole bit about Inflation, this idea makes sense. Alas, we can't test or prove any part of it without getting outside of our universe. But that's the breaks. Still, it makes a novel concept, if one just corrects for the whole 'fictional' aspects. At least it attempts to answer the question, anyway.

Finally, there's the current version of String Theory's cyclic universe. String Theory, of course, is the idea that the universe has seven extra dimensions, that exist solely to weaken gravity. Just like cosmic expansion, it only affects some parts of the universe by our arbitrary determination, String's extra dimensions only impact one force. Better yet, those extra dimensions that actually do exist - like, say, mass - don't count. We want to make gravity fit into Quantum Theory, but we're going to ignore mass.

Well, the core of the idea is that whatever caused the Big Bang happens every so often, making the universe effectively eternal. Therefore, what came before the Big Bang was another Big Bang. See how easy it is to make stuff up in Physics?

Of course, we wouldn't want the "simple and elegant" solution, as Einstein put it, and just get rid of all those troublesome Big Bangs and Inflations. That would make sense, and would fit the observations we've made of the universe around us.

We know we're right, no matter what the universe has to say about it. Einstein had another famous quote, that today's physicists seem to remember to the exclusion of everything else he contributed to science: when asked if God had made the universe in a way different from what General Relativity describes, he said, "Then I should feel sorry for the good lord - the theory is correct anyway."

See, all you science types out there - Einstein didn't mean that we get to be right, regardless of how poorly our ideas match with reality. If that were true, we'd still be on a pancake planet riding on the backs of some elephants. He meant that when we hit a note that resonates, something pure and beautiful, and right, it becomes obvious. It is almost as if we're reading directly off of God's blueprints for the universe, rather than just guessing.

But, of course, in order to even guess what came before the Big Bang, we have to assume there was a Big Bang, which, as Discover accurately puts it, is a fable to begin with.

If you want to know what the universe really is like, I've got a number of articles floating around the 'Net - many cataloged on www.BelradUniverse.com - and, once you feel scientific enough to ask questions, instead of just having faith in the accepted, unquestionable holy doctrine, then you can read my book, Testing the Big Bang.

I've given the synopsis enough times. The title says it all. Look it up on Amazon, or save a few bucks and find it on Lulu. For now, though, we have to move on.

And, our biggest story of all - the most distant galaxy yet found.

As many of us know, galaxy cluster Abell 1689 is one of the most intriguing areas of space; it happens to be a powerful gravitational lens. What that means is that we get to see other galaxies far in the background, magnified by the cluster's gravity.

Well, we've seen some pretty distant galaxies with the cluster's help, but nothing like this.

A recent discovery, A1689-zD1, is so distant that even with the cluster's magnification, it is effectively invisible. Its spectrum is so heavily redshifted, it has been knocked completely out of the visible range. Hubble found a strange blob of light kicking around in the infrared band, and Spitzer took a closer look, finding its peak wavelength increased by a factor of 8.6!

What that means, ladies and gentlemen, is that this galaxy was as we see it about 13 billion years ago. Which, incidentally, is way past the threshold of where we can see any galaxy, no matter which interpretation of the universe's supposed expansion we use, even in high redshift.

But it gets better - the team that found this critter has caught sight of several more galaxies, even more remote. We're looking back to a time right on the edge of when galaxies first began to form, and what we're seeing causes some serious problems for the standard cosmological model.

For one, galaxies should have just started to come together about then. How long do you suppose it takes a galaxy to form? About a hundred million years? About a tenth the amount of time it takes to build a planet from dust? What do you say?

But, I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of the mechanics of galaxy formation theory. Suffice it to say that, from a theoretical standpoint, it is yet another observation that should be utterly impossible if the Big Bang theory were correct. For those of you keeping score, out of all the observations that discriminate between our universe having come from a Big Bang, or not, that would be zero to all of them.

Still, no matter what else comes out of it, this galaxy is the farthest yet discovered - and more are on the way. We'll keep you posted.

Getting back to Earth, we've found medicinal drugs hiding in our drinking water. What's been happening is that people are taking their medicine, not fully digesting it, and then dropping it down into the sewer system. As it turns out, our sewage treatment facilities not only don't treat pharmaceuticals, they don't even check for them.

So, we've got bass on birth control, people getting trace amounts of interesting mixtures of drug that shouldn't be mixed, and, best of all, tiny doses of antibiotics - every time we turn the faucet. So, it's really no wonder that we've got all kinds of super-bugs that are resistant to every antibiotic we've got - they're getting constant exposure to all of them!

That's it for this time. Remember, you can send your stories, questions, and anything else to us by email at Show@BelradUniverse.com.

Until next time, stay safe, everyone.