And it ends up looking like the French flag? Socialist fake news!
I would like to remind you that I represent the people of Pittsburg, not Paris.
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Apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB Sky
" Outlook
It seems to us that anomalous points provide an important new input to cosmology, irrespective of the validity of CCC. It is hard to see, however, that they find a natural explanation in the currently conventional inflationary picture."
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I have now learned enough about conformal cyclic cosmology to state that I would probably need years of schooling in theoretical astrophysics to understand it beyond an ELI5 level. I think Iām going to leave it there.
I do know enough to say that the Daily Mailās headline is unmitigated clickbait, butā¦ waitā¦ I am receiving breaking news from our weather desk that water is wet and the sky is blue. More on all of these shocking developments on the hour.
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. . . therefore God exists./s
Count me skeptical. Intuitively speaking, Iāve never felt that a cyclic universe makes sense, just from an entropy point of view. And what with the expansion of the universe seeming to be accelerating, it makes even less sense to me that it could ever stop and then contract again.
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From the little I understand, itās not that anything contracts, itās just that the proposed heat-death of the universe is indistinguishable from the low-entropy state that existed before the big-bang, just on a different scale. So, the universe doesnāt contract and re-big-bang; it keeps expanding until it bigger-bangs, and then starts over with everything re-scaled (which is the āconformalā part, āconformalā geometry being a form of geometry that preserves directions and angles but not distances).
Iām pretty sure that all of that is wrong just due to me not really understanding most of it, but I hope Iāve at least properly conveyed the part of it being distinct from the āBig Crunch,ā despite both being cyclic models.
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Thanks for the explanation & definition of CCC.
Iāve recently thought that once the expanding universe gets so diffuse, any one spot eventually mimics the state of Nothing ā no matter, energy, space or time ā i.e., non-existence, that existed ābeforeā the big bang. Logically it seems to me non-existence canāt exist, so something has to start existing (whatever āstartā means in this context). Without prior existence, the scale is indeterminate, so the enormous (relative to ourselves) universe we see can just appear from that Nothing.
Oh, well, idle speculation.
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Itās as they say: nature abhors a vacuum.
For that matter, so do I: theyāre noisy, smelly things that kick dust up everywhere.
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I thought itās a basic assumption of āscienceā that the rules are supposed to be the same everywhere. Weāre supposed to assume that the triple point of water and the planck length and the speed of light are the same on your street as on my street and in the past, present, and future.
So it kinda seems to me that any story that includes a bit like āAnd at this moment the laws of nature changedā is not a scientific hypothesis. When cosmologists talk about āinflationā theyāre admitting they donāt have a story that works for when the (observable) universe was less than a millimeter across.
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The Big Rip, though, is where the tidal forces of the accelerating universe affect everything everywhere, forcing a universal event horizon. It doesnāt seem very nonexistent to me, just a violent dissassembly of space and time. A geometry that works with that might look like a big bang.
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Cats. Cats abhor a vacuum. They know something we donāt know.
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When I was a kid we had a cat who loved being vacuumed with the round brush. Youād turn the machine on and heād come running. It was amazing to see.
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That I would like to see!
Today I discovered that one of my cats is no longer terrified of the swiffer. Because my daughter uses it to knock bugs down from high places so that the cat can chase them. Now when she (the cat, not my daughter) sees the swiffer, she thinks itās playtime and runs around looking for bugs to hunt.
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As I recall, Claude liked his back vacuumed. Heād kind of spread out on his tummy, like a ball of Silly Putty left on the table overnight.
That was a while back. Claude was a pretty cool Siamese, with an amazing vocabulary.
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Do you have to eat it? Or just spread it on your body?
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