New Scientist has an article by Stephen Battersby on their top ten weirdest cosmology theories. My first thought, beore reading the article was that they were going to have a lot of fun with this, but they seem to be rather conservative about their definition of “weird”. This means that they’ve focused on “weirdest” in the context (mostly) of existing scientific observational input, and published science academic circles, which you might think puts a damper on things… but read more below.
So here are the titles, under which the author writes a short paragraph describing the idea:
1. Clashing branes
2. Evolving universes
3. Superfluid space-time
4. Goldilocks universe
5. Gravity reaches out
6. Cosmic ghost
7. It’s a small universe
8. Fast light
9. Sterile neutrinos
10. In the Matrix
This means that the kind of whacky cosmology that you and I could think of in a flash for fun on a Friday (or other) afternoon are not allowed. Nor are the ones I constantly get in the mail from well-meaning citizens. All of which can be way, way weirder.
Oh well. I’m opening up this particular thread (note: no, not all discussion threads on this blog!!) to any fun/whacky/weird cosmology ideas you might like to share of your own. Serious or non-serious. I’m not going to rank them. Just feel free to share.
Here is a fun constraint (which has a serious point): Try as much as you can to make your theory fit at least loosely with whatever observational data you are aware of (expert or non-expert level, as appropriate). You’ll find then that it becomes hard to beat some of the ideas (and tested and establised phyiscs) that is actually out there in the scientific literature!
The serious point: Science already has observed and described so many strange, beautiful, and wonderful phenomena in Nature…. why make it up? Even if you try, you probably can’t do any better (I give you General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics…. imagine what those would have seemed like if proposed say 100 years earlier…even fewer years earlier!). Anyway, don’t let the serious point stop you! Have fun making stuff up, and share some with us if you like….
Oh. Do have a read of the New Scientist article, in all seriousness. It is a nice summary of some of the thinking that’s out there. We can talk about them in this thread too if you like. Try, if you can, to be clear about what is your fun stuff vs any serious scientific points you might like to make. (Wait, what am I thinking with that last sentence? This is an open blog… all serious scientific discussions have random fun/weird stuff in them, intentional or not.)
-cvj
Oh. I see!
Cheers,
-cvj
Sorry Clifford, that was a feeble attempt at humor. I know that Inflation is ok and Sean knows it too. I was just referring to the “Boltzmann’s Brain” discussion: if you think that the Arrow of Time was due to a mere fluctuation away from equilibrium, then indeed the most probable situation is that your brain, complete with false memories etc, just fluctuated into existence Last Thursday….the point being not that Inflation is wrong but that Boltzmann was.
The episode was “Terminus”, starring Peter Davison (1983).
Pastafarianism looks suspicously like string cosmology.
Well, I’d say “steady on, there”. Inflation is a specific framework waiting to be embedded into a larger theory, and so is perhaps incomplete. But as it stands, it is remarkably predictive, with spectacular observational verification, which makes it quite a bit better than Last Thursdayism. I mean this too: see for example, er, the writings of Sean Carroll in various nice review talks, or those of several other people working in the field.
Cheers,
-cvj
Actually, the idea that the Universe was created last Thursday is much more plausible than Inflation. I mean this literally: see the writings of Sean Carroll on the Arrow of Time. 🙂
Ambitiwistor: Gosh.. It’s hilarious! Thanks for the link!
JustAnotherInfidel: I don’t know. Maybe others are more up to date?
Haelfix: I found his choices (given the banner “weird”) to be odd in places too.
Warren: One person’s weird idea is another’s pedestrian idea, I suppose… It’s also a function of time, as I know you know. Was that old or new Dr. Who, by the way?
Aaron F.: That’s just brilliant! I especially like the vacuum energy idea. I shall have to question Brian closely when I next see him….
-cvj
The Wikipedia article says that Last Thursdayism is sometimes referred to as Last Tuesdayism or Last Wednesdayism… but wouldn’t it explain so much more if the universe had been created on a Monday?
Clifford: Last Thursdayism.
THE LEAKY COSMOS HYPOTHESIS
It is already well-known that some incarnations of string theory allow gravitons to leak into compactified extra dimensions, greatly reducing the strength of gravity relative to the other forces. If the vast majority of gravitons are tucked away in higher-dimensional space, is it possible that other missing things could be hidden there as well?
Vacuum Energy
Rough quantum mechanical calculations predict a cosmological constant at least 120 orders of magnitude larger than the one we actually observe. Where has all the vacuum energy gone? The Leaky Cosmos Hypothesis provides an answer, but its supporters have long been troubled by the fact that it can only account for 98% of the missing energy. This discrepancy was finally resolved in 2004, when a report by the International Parallel Plate Association suggested that the remaining 2% is being used to heat Brian Greene’s house.
Stop it, Brian. We know you’re doing that.
Antimatter
According to the Standard Model of particle physics, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts and promptly annihilated each other, leaving the universe devoid of anything but radiation. The Leaky Cosmos Hypothesis posits that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, most of the antimatter in the universe slipped away into higher-dimensional space, cleverly avoiding annihilation. Normal matter, due to vague reasons that involve a lot of hand-waving and CP symmetry violation, is unable to enter the extra dimensions, but antimatter sometimes leaks back out into our three familiar dimensions, producing ultra-high-energy cosmic rays that appear to flout the GZK limit.
Proton Decay
Proton decay has been firmly predicted, but never observed. Why? According to the Leaky Cosmos Hypothesis, extra dimensions are where protons go to die. These particles’ unusual burial customs demand that they decay in a secret, hidden place, as stated in verse 173 of the sacred Opôp Dian:
Solar Neutrinos
[This section has been removed]
The CMB Quadrupole Moment
In 1998, theoretical astrophysicist Bruce Coville used the Leaky Cosmos Hypothesis to come up with a novel explanation of why the CMB quadrupole moment is so low. In Coville’s model, the CMB power spectrum agreed with the predictions of inflation until just a few million years ago, when part of the quadrupole was spirited away to the 10th dimension by malicious aliens.
Socks
The occasional disappearance of socks is a phenomenon that has been observed for centuries, and one that appears to violate the conservation of mass. Special relativity does not provide a way out, because if the vanishing socks were converted to energy, the resulting bursts of radiation would be easily detected. A more promising hypothesis is that quantum fluctuations can briefly boost the size of the extra dimensions, making them just large enough to swallow an average sock.
Mark Hamill
Seriously, where did this guy go? He played the lead role in Star Wars, for crying out loud… Hollywood should have been chasing him like a dog after a squirrel. The Leaky Cosmos Hypothesis is the only reasonable explanation.
What is Last Thursdayism?
-cvj
Last Thursdayism was also left out. Sigh. Perhaps God didn’t create NewScientists.com to further her Glory after all.
I thought “weird cosmology” was redundant.
According to an episode of Dr. Who, the Big Bang was the result of an enormous spaceship firing its engines. Depending on the engine design, that might account for the microwave anisotropy.
Whats so bizarre about sterile neutrinos??? They are naturally implemented in modern GuTs and play serious roles in many alledged leptogenesis models and various dark matter models.
In fact if you poll most neutrino experts, most believe in their existence as its become sort of a fashionable point of view in the last few years.
I’d say they were fairly run of the mill and probably one of the primary believable beyond the standard model *things* that might eventually be verified in the not so distant future.
I was just wondering—what is the status of the “soccer ball” universe that was supposed to explain those few stray data points from WMAP 1? Is it ruled out by WMAP 2?
The great flying spaghetti monster doesn’t like me to speculate about the origins of the universe… (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
One of the questions that I’ve been playing with in the occasional spare thirty seconds but have never had the time to really actually look at is, if you take a spacetime with a single black hole in it, and perform an inversion through the event horizon, what does the space look like to a mass sitting inside said inverted spacetime?