Today as I was doing some weekly Sunday Shopping in my local town, I randomly passed by the local camera shop and my son very excitedly pointed at this telescope. His Birthday was a few months ago and Christmas is long way away. But I thought I should capture the moment and purchase his as a the next Christmas present today. I ordered it and it should arrive next week. May be it is not a good idea is in UK the number of clear night sky's is rather low.

At 800 magnifications, Cameron can probably get a good view of the Moon. However, further away we look will remain so very distant. However, even with this kind of telescope, we come to realize that if we look up at the night sky we would probably predict that no matter how powerful the next hobble telescope may be, it will still show that our perception of our universe remains feeble indeed.

Today I noticed an article in New Scientist "Existence: Why is there a universe?" This article really does show how frail our understanding of universe really is. Take this statement in the article:

"The universe is big. Really big." And yet if our theory of the big bang is right, the universe was once a lot smaller. Indeed, at one point it was non-existent. Around 13.7 billion years ago time and space spontaneously sprang from the void. How did that happen?"

In this article the author "Amanda Gefter" has some interesting questions about the idea that the universe simply appeared out of nothing and how trying to conceive of nothingness is perhaps even harder. However, like most other writers, they make similar assumptions about the state of universe in the past, today and in the future. Assumptions like the physical constants like speed of light or even more basic unites of measurements like distance, time, energy and more were the same today as they were at the moment of big bang.

After all without these basic assumptions it really gets difficult to have any reasonable perception of what happened that long ago. So like many others - it attempts to answer the questions with today's basic laws of physics that we know of and are reproducible with our present state of universe. Here are some they list:

Basic physics suggests that you and the rest of the universe are overwhelmingly unlikely to exist. The second law of thermodynamics, that most existentially resonant of physical laws, says that disorder, or entropy, always tends to increase. With this logic, nothingness is the highest entropy state around - you can shuffle it around all you want and it still looks like nothing. Therefore, using this law it is very difficult that nothing could ever be turned into something, let alone something as big as a universe. But entropy is only part of the story. The other consideration is symmetry - a quality that appears to exert profound influence on the physical universe wherever it crops up. Nothingness is very symmetrical indeed. "There's no telling one part from another, so it has total symmetry," says physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wilczek's own speciality is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes how quarks behave deep within atomic nuclei. It tells us that nothingness is a precarious state of affairs. "You can form a state that has no quarks and antiquarks in it, and it's totally unstable," says Wilczek. "It spontaneously starts producing quark-antiquark pairs." The perfect symmetry of nothingness is broken. That leads to an unexpected conclusion, says Victor Stenger, a physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder: despite entropy, "something is the more natural state than nothing".
According to quantum theory, there is no state of 'emptiness'," agrees Frank Close of the University of Oxford. Emptiness would have precisely zero energy, far too exacting a requirement for the uncertain quantum world. Instead, a vacuum is actually filled with a roiling broth of particles that pop in and out of existence. In that sense this magazine, you, me, the moon and everything else in our universe are just excitations of the quantum vacuum.
Quantum uncertainty allows a trade-off between time and energy, so something that lasts a long time must have little energy. To explain how our universe has lasted for the billions of years that it has taken galaxies to form, solar systems to coalesce and life to evolve into bipeds who ask how something came from nothing, its total energy must be extraordinarily low.
Physicists used to worry that creating something from nothing would violate all sorts of physical laws such as the conservation of energy. But if there is zero overall energy to conserve, the problem evaporates - and a universe that simply popped out of nothing becomes not just plausible, but probable. "Maybe a better way of saying it is that something is nothing," says Guth.

The article makes one very valid statement: "None of this really gets us off the hook, however. Our understanding of creation relies on the validity of the laws of physics, particularly quantum uncertainty. But that implies that the laws of physics were somehow encoded into the fabric of our universe before it existed. How can physical laws exist outside of space and time and without a cause of their own? Or, to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing?"

Bottom line is that no telescope of any size is going to answer all the questions that little Cameron will be asking me in the next few years. Mainly because the question of nothingness will for ever elude us. According to basic physics, the moment you check to see if there is nothing there - you will introduce something. In Quantum Mechanics, the moment you look at a particle you change its natural state into something else.

I personally am inclined to believe that in the earlier state of universe, we did not have the same conditions as today and laws of physics was somewhat different but not chaotic. For example, passage of time may have been different and therefore our clock would have behaved differently to today. That alone would have substantially changed most of present predictions of the early state of universe.

Comments

By Salar Golestanian Blogs @ Thursday, August 04, 2011 4:15 AM

Comments from the following blog entry: 'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background - lie within , located at: http://salargolestanian.com/BLOG/Science/tabid/569/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/323/Multiverse-theory-suggested-by-microwave-background--lie-within-bubbles-of-space-and-time.aspx

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