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"....the beginning of the universe, as seen by modern science, begins with nothing at all. There is no space; there is no time. There is not even a void. There is nothing.
In an instant, the nothing becomes something. In an enormous flash of energy, the big bang creates space and time.... within a tiny seed of matter and energy is all the stuff of our current universe.... quarks, gluons, and leptons are the most primitive matter in the universe, and until about a millionth of a second after the big bang, the universe is a seething soup of primitive matter and radiation....
"Cosmologists are shaking their heads in disbelief, because experiment after experiment is showing that the universe is entirely different from what astronomers had assumed since the beginning of modern science. Ordinary matter is the exception, and unknown, exotic matter is the norm. Our universe is mostly dark, and most of that dark matter is unknown, ineffable stuff that has never been seen directly. Had there not been so many experiments forcing cosmologists to accept this picture, it would seem utterly ridiculous....
" The vacuum is the most complex substance in the universe. Within it are all particles and all forces, even those unknown to science...
It seems like a contradiction to say that the vacuum is the most complex phenomenon in the universe. The very definition of the vacuum is the absence of everything, a space filled with nothing at all. In the 1930s, though, quantum physicists discovered, much to their surprise, that the vacuum isn't ever truly empty. It is seething with activity, filled to the brim with particles and energy...
...on relatively large scales, lightweight particles like electrons and anti-electrons are constantly popping in and out of existence, but on smaller and smaller scales, heavier particles like muons and taus (and undiscovered, massive particles, like WIMPs and other sparticles) become more and more important...
[Physicists] think that the energy of the vacuum, the zero-point energy that is everywhere in the universe, is forcing the universe apart."
-- Charles Seife from "Alpha and Omega"
....and some further thoughts on "dark matter" HERE.
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3 comments:
And should we believe this stuff? In an instant, going from nothing to something? An event that happened billions of years ago? And the evidence for it? One word: faith.
Anonymous 10:50 AM: There is actually plenty of experimental evidence for the Big Bang (the cosmic background radiation, for instance).
Be that as it may, CT has hit on something here. Physics is key to understanding the whole Ivory-bill phenomenon. It seems pretty clear that the mercurial appearances of the IBWO from 1999 to the present must be due to the birds traveling through wormholes stabilized by exotic matter. (Hey, it happens on Lost!)
there's also plenty of experimental (as well as mathematical) evidence for the spontaneous creation of matter and energy within "vacuums" -- exactly how or why it happens is a bit harder to explain.
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