Arcadian Functor

occasional meanderings in physics' brave new world

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Marni D. Sheppeard

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Bigger and Bigger?

For centuries our view of the cosmos has grown in size, from a focus on the exploration of Earth's oceans, to a few stars in the firmament, to the recognition of spiral galaxies beyond our own in an almost endless array. The rational extension of this progress has brought us now to a notion of multiverse, which is often viewed rather pragmatically as a simple classical extension to even more stuff out there somewhere. In the news, one can see the Big Hole touted as evidence for a parallel universe.

But in quantum gravity, an effectively endless range of classical spaces is a very dull construct. If this was all there was, how could spacetime observables take on different values depending on experiment in this sector of the multiverse? How could we derive the particle masses and other parameters of the Standard Model? How could we really understand the cosmological horizon? Fortunately, an extension in size is not the only way to extend the realm of possibility.

4 Comments:

Blogger nige said...

The efforts of multiverse believers to interpret any anomaly as definite evidence for their faith system is terrible biased.

I wonder what the "cosmic landscape" expert Dr Leonard Susskind (Louise's former tutor) thinks about this? In his position, it must be tempting to seize on anything like this just to help publicise the multiverse theory some more?

November 29, 2007 12:22 PM  
Blogger L. Riofrio said...

nige is wise yet again, what the Hole really shows is that the Concorde cosmology doesn't work. Lenny's Landscape was treated as an interesting idea for a while, but seems to be losing popularity.

I've tried sending email to Kea but it was returned. Do you have a new address? If so, you can email my regular address. Would you like to work at a science hostel?

November 29, 2007 3:11 PM  
Blogger Kea said...

Louise, I'd love to work at a science hostel! For a short time longer, you can find my email at my UC page.

November 29, 2007 3:57 PM  
Blogger Matti Pitkänen said...

Assigning a hole to multiverse (whatever it is taken to mean) looks very strange to me. I simply cannot imagine any other rational justification for it than an attempt to guarantee continuing funding of landscapeology.

In TGD framework quantal cosmic expansion taking place in jerks. M^4 sizes of space-time sheets keep constant and increase only in the phase transitions increasing the gravitational Planck constant assignable with them. Big Hole indeed has same size as the big voids containing galaxies at boundaries: about 10^8 ly.

Also planets should have experienced cosmic expansion in jerks. Size increase in single transition is most naturally a power of 2. This provides a solution to the mystery related to Wegener's theory. It is known that continents fit together also at other sides but only if one assumes that radius of Earth is by a factor 1/2 smaller. This led to the Expanding Earth theory but various mechanisms (heat expansions, variation of G) have failed.


Geologists decided to just neglect this fact! Brings in mind the habit of rabbits to put their head in bush in too dangerous situation! Wegener failed to teach them (or us!) anything useful!


Quantum phase transition lasting 185 million years (from the time taken the magma to make its convective flow along ocean bottom) started around Cambrian revolution in biology about 530 million years ago. This led to the breakdown of the granite continent covering the entire Earth surface to tectonic plates.

Cambrian revolution is the big mystery of biology. It meant the emergence of highly evolved multicellular species out of nothing. No raw drafts but outcomes of long evolution. In all other catastrophes species were lost and became more complex.

The explanation is in terms of intra-terrestrial hypothesis. Multicellular life evolved below Earth surface in underground seas shielded from UV and meteors. The starting of expansion with formation of plates meant literally the moment of birth for multicellular life living at ocean bottoms.

There is evidence that also Mars contains underground seas. Also evidence for methane usually regarded as a signature of life. Amusingly the radius of Mars is one half of Earth's radius so that after expansion radius it will be same as that of Earth and gives same scale of Schumann resonances! Might relate to the fact that 10 Hz near it defines one of the most fundamental secondary p-adic scales (that associated with Mersenne prime M_127=2^127-1 assignable to electron and gravitonic space-time sheets, the largest not completely super-astrophysical Mersenne).


The decrease of surface gravity by factor of 1/4 during expansion period meant that multicellular began to grow in size. Recently a scorpion with size of 2.5 meters was discovered! Trees had also emerged around 300 million years ago. Dinosaurs emerged also but were eventual losers because it is better to have big brain and small body rather than big body and small brain.

Also the duration of day increased from 6 to 24 hours which might be a testable prediction.

For a more extensive representation and links see my
blog posting.

November 29, 2007 7:30 PM  

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