Science notes: Universe Through a Glass Darkly

Measured one way, the universe appears expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.

“We think that if our understanding of cosmology is correct, then all of these different measurements should be giving us the same answer,” said Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of the new paper.

The two most famous measurements work very differently from one another. The first relies on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang. Cosmologists have built theoretical models of the entire history of the universe on a CMB foundation — models they’re very confident in, and that would require an all-new physics to break. And taken together, Mack said, they produce a reasonably precise number for the Hubble constant, or H0, which governs how fast the universe is currently expanding.

The second measurement uses supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids. By gauging how far those galaxies are from our own, and how fast they’re moving away from us, astronomers have gotten what they believe is a very precise measurement of the Hubble constant. And that method offers a different H0.

“If we’re getting different answers that means that there’s something that we don’t know,” Mack told Live Science. “So this is really about not just understanding the current expansion rate of the universe — which is something we’re interested in — but understanding how the universe has evolved, how the expansion has evolved, and what space-time has been doing all this time.”

Weikang Lin, also a cosmologist at NCSU and lead author of the paper, said that to develop a full picture of the problem, the team decided to round up all the different ways of “constraining” H0 in one place.Here’s what “constraining” means: Measurements in physics rarely turn up exact answers. (Think what this would be if lifted into the field of  forensic science, No murder may be pinned on the guilty.) Instead, they put limits on the range of possible answers. And by looking at these constraints together, you can learn a lot about something you’re studying. (In legal terms it would be a technical loophole). Looking through one telescope, for example, you might learn that a point of light in space is either red, yellow or orange. Another might tell you it’s brighter than most other lights in space but less bright than the sun. Another might tell you it’s moving across the sky as fast a planet. None of those constraints would tell you much on their own, but taken together they suggest  you are looking at Mars.

In an earlier post I had posited that Scientists are looking at universe from the wrong end of the telescope. Closer home things appear reliable and Laws of Newton or Kepler can be proved. Our predicament is that of the Flying Dutchman the more he sails the coast line further eludes him. He sees only what he believes in. Having failed to understand God as the Creator of Universe, sail he must never arriving at the one article that holds everything in order. What reason! What pother!

(Ack: How the Universe Stopped Making Sense/Life Science/Space/Rafi Letzter/Oct. 11,2019)

Benny

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Hubble (In)Constant-2

Pascal had in his Pensées observed thus ‘Nature has made all her truths independent of one another’ Nature is like the elephant of the Indian folk tale. Each of the five men of Benares, who focused on one aspect,- astrophysicists, biologists chemists and what have you, were all engaged in seeking truth but failed. Only their blindness stood in the way. God is Truth and without knowing Truth what the five collated were truths independent of one another. This is what Hubble Constant signifies.

Had Science worked from Truth down to its several parts truths of which would be set on a firm line of reasoning since Truth the frame of reference known; whatever results obtained must be compared with it; the process of eliminating the irrelevant and ever narrowing down to Truth could have settled the matter. So this method works from the whole to study the several parts without having to work in dark.

Whereas Science works just the opposite. Uncertainty principle consequently ought to warn chances of error are far greater in this case. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that there is inherent uncertainty in the act of measuring a variable of a particle. Commonly applied to the position and momentum of a particle, the principle states that the more precisely the position is known the more uncertain the momentum is and vice versa. Similarly the Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle which states that two or more identical fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously. Do we not see exclusion principle in the manner history never repeats itself? There was an attempt to recreate caliphate in 2014. It failed thoroughly because what propped it up, many factors in the medieval times have moved on and combined with many others to make history of present times. Similar a Woodstock repeat to match the 1969 event  was an impossibility. Exclusion principle applies to charged fundamental particles and its effect on human events are equally palpable.

Science for that matter shall draw different results meaning the yardstick is flawed to begin with.

Man and Woman set a family but how an infant born out their union responds to his environment is uncertain. So holding individual number of man and woman as fixed gives an uncertain outcome considering the infant in his generation shall have to interact with altogether different imponderables. If cosmos throw up uncertainty principle in case of fundamental particles is it too farfetched to think similar correspondence will not show in the manner human societies evolve?  Numbers are man made; when hitched to human condition numbers do not tell the full story. Taking the above mentioned analogy further one man and one woman together represent something else. The sum is not two but a family; and give it hundred years it spreads into so many opinions and divided loyalties. Pascal had in his Pensées observed of man’s innate difficulty to conceive the largest circle and it would still come short of infinity. Suppose I chuck a ball at you and it elicits an automatic response that is outside your will. You duck involuntarily. Man can make hypotheses and observe,- from data he collected he tries to prove them. There is an inherent flaw in his brain that he misses changes already happening in between. so the cosmos he looks at, gives only what he is looking for. Had he the mind of God, he would not need Uncertainty principle or Exclusion principle. Science at best is man’s attempt to lift his brain (still evolving) to build a model of cosmos.Whereas God as Omnipotent and omnipresent has in his mind conceived the whole and every part in development in relation to other. Whereas man in time and space adding up what is observed. Hubble (In)Constant is the problem.

Science has its uncertainty principle and for a Christian accepting God as the creator of heaven and the earth has faith to base his life upon. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen./ Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (He.11:1,3)”.

(My post ‘The Clean Slate principle of Feb,18, 2010 also relates to the topic)

Benny

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Science Notes: Hubble (in)Constant?

There’s a puzzling mystery going on in the universe. Measurements of the rate of cosmic expansion using different methods keep showing different readings. Darwin’s Natural Selection brought a crisis of faith to the Victorian Establishment and now a similar crisis faces the Scientific community.

The crisis centers about the Hubble constant. Named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble, this unit describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from Earth. Using data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Planck satellite, scientists estimate the rate to be 46,200 mph per million light-years (or, using cosmologists’ units, 67.4 kilometers/second per megaparsec). But calculations using pulsating stars called Cepheids suggest it is 50,400 mph per million light-years (73.4 km/s/Mpc).

If the first number is right, it means scientists have been measuring distances to faraway objects in the universe wrong for many decades. But if the second is correct, then researchers might have to accept the existence of exotic, new physics.

The trouble starts with Edwin Hubble himself. Back in 1929, he noticed that more-distant galaxies were moving away from Earth faster than their closer-in counterparts. He found a linear relationship between the distance an object was from our planet and the speed at which it was receding. Hubble realized that the universe was expanding, and it seemed to be doing so at a constant rate — hence, the Hubble constant. But in the late 1990s, when two teams of astronomers noticed that distant supernovas were dimmer, and therefore farther away, than expected. This indicated that not only was the universe expanding, but it was also accelerating in its expansion. Astronomers named the cause of this mysterious phenomenon to dark energy.

Calculating the constant on the basis of Planck satellite do not match the numbers crunched from observing Cepheids.These stars flicker at a constant rate depending on their brightness, so researchers can tell exactly how bright it is from their pulsations. From its dimness or brightness the astronomers can calculate their position. As in the case of triangulation method the astronomers used another point and using two readings came to mediating  the data obtained. For this they had settled on the light of red giant stars. (These objects reach the same peak brightness at the end of their lives) These also behave like with the Cepheids,  so astronomers can look at how dim they appear from Earth to get a good estimate of their distance and, therefore, calculate the Hubble constant. Their results have come this July and we have a number squarely between the two prior measurements: 47,300 mph per million light-years (69.8 km/s/Mpc). And the uncertainty contained enough overlap to potentially agree with Planck’s results. (Ack: LiveScience/One number shows something fundamentally wrong with our conception of our universe/Adam Mann)

Where did Science go wrong? We are considering the same cosmos right? God at one end has set these explosion of stellar material to take shape as eternal Mind has shaped. For me He is in control whereas Science sees it all as from far end of the telescope. And mathematics is a matter of numbers, but in his very world of existence the man of science seek answer for which he relies on data, value of which he has not got control since it is light years he is looking into. Vast space and time in which light operates do not tell the whole story. His own mind is fine-tuning his vision and collective memory along with many other impressions his life experience have deposited. Science expects his experiment to act according to what he has trained himself to think.

Like our memory and where our distortion occurred cannot be said.The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, for instance, has famously demonstrated that, in the process of recalling events, people can erroneously integrate imagined elements into their memories – even if these fictional memories can feel exactly like true memories.

Take the very nature of numbers. One plus one is two says mathematician.  Add one man and woman is not two but a family of divided loyalties opinions and what have you given some 100 years. Give the same family a million of two years it is not a tight-knit family but nations divided over ideological differences.

Science shall of course go back to their readings and suggest another hypothesis to finetune their understanding on cosmos

Benny

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Science Notes: Cosmic table manners

Here is a news item: The Hubble and Chandra space telescopes have detected a new belch emerging from a black hole located about 800 million light-years away. But they saw a remnant of another belch that occurred 100,000 years earlier. “Black holes are voracious eaters, but it turns out they don’t have very good table manners,” Julie Comerford, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, told the 231st American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC. “There are a lot of examples of black holes with single burps emanating out, but we discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole that has not one but two burps.” The burp itself consists of a stream of high-energy particles that is kicked back from the black hole.(BBC online news/science)

When man talks about God, happiness or anything else his language is peppered with what is familiar to his world. Blackholes have voracious appetites we say. I can understand it since I have had voracious appetite some times and so long ago when I have had a cast-iron constitution. It has no meaning whatsoever outside the specific context of humans conveying their observations and based on their own experience. Nature of God, Trinity are all concepts which we employ in human language; logic, rhetorics by the same token are artifices to makes one’s arguments sound superior and it does not however means truth has been established. When we read in the Bible and in several passages, God’s blessings are given in conjunction with all living creatures who makes case for his right to cut out all competition?  When the Spirit writes of God’s anger over the old world he writes,”It grieved him at his heart” and he would destroy them as well. From so many examples it is very clear that God’s Providence would see man in a context than singly. Why? Man is a steward (Ge.1:28) and is responsible for their welfare. In salvation also he is a witness and bring others to peace of God which He assures as the portion for the righteous. Noah among the creatures in the ark is but a snapshot of the Millennial Reign on the earth. This being the case  when we see so many species are either extinct or on the endangered list where did man go wrong? His rational mind only makes his world in terms of dollars and cents but he is steadily making his own future in jeopardy. He accepts only ‘here and now’ and not the way God wants him to. His Time sees past future and present as here and now. God knew that there would be a great famine in Israel so he had set Joseph as his instrument and bestowed bumper crop to Egypt so much so they could be helped. Sufferings of Joseph were foreseen and God’s Providence to sustain a nation it was necessary. God also had instilled in him necessary qualities to ride out all injury and humiliation. Besides God sets him as an antitype for Jesus Christ whose death would bring great many to eternal salvation. God sees all events and persons and their roles in 360°. In short God’s ways are mysterious where man’s ways are only based on short term benefits for himself.

Cosmic lunch where stars partake their table manners however clumsy it would seem leave great blessings. ISM for instance. Do not however ask me who says Grace for the occasion.

Benny

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Living In A Hologram

Classical physics implies that anything falling through the horizon of a black hole can never escape. But Hawking showed that black holes continually emit radiation once quantum effects are taken into account. Unfortunately, for typical astrophysical black holes, the temperature of this radiation is far lower than that of the cosmic microwave background and we have no way of proving it. If a black hole continually emits radiation, it will continually lose mass – eventually evaporating. Hawking realized that this implied a paradox: if a black hole can evaporate, the information about it will be lost forever. This means that even if we could measure the radiation from a black hole we could never figure out it was originally formed. This violates an important rule of quantum mechanics that states information cannot be lost or created.

Determinism implies that the state of the universe at any given time is uniquely determined from its state at any other time. This is how we can trace its evolution both astronomically and mathematically though quantum mechanics.

If a black hole can evaporate and information lost how will determinism work? Black hole physics provides a test for any potential quantum gravity theory. Whatever your theory is, it must explain what happens to the information recording a black hole’s history.

It took two decades for scientists and they have come up with an answer. They suggested that the information stored in a black hole is proportional to its surface area (in two dimensions) rather than its volume (in three dimensions). This could be explained by quantum gravity, where the three dimensions of space could be reconstructed from a two-dimensional world without gravity – much like a hologram. See a problem like quantum gravity can disappear if we make the universe is a hologram: the real action would play out where gravity is zero. In regimes where there are no analytic tests a holographic universe replaces actual proof.

In this context we have Maldacena conjecture and it  reconciles Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics.

Shortly afterwards, string theory, the most studied theory of quantum gravity was also shown to be holographic.

Using holography we can describe the evaporation of the black hole in the two-dimensional world without gravity, for which the usual rules of quantum mechanics apply. This process is deterministic, with small imperfections in the radiation encoding the history of the black hole. So holography tells us that information is not lost in black holes, but tracking down the flaw in Hawking’s original arguments has been surprisingly hard.

Which came first? chicken or egg? Maldacena conjecture in this case makes chicken the hologram projection of egg where gravity is zero. Conversely shall we say chicken is the hologram projection of an egg in another time zone?

In a 4-D world of chickens , the eggs are entangled only in a flattened 3-D scaled down version of reality. Both are present.( cf.universe as a hologram)

(Ack: The Conversation June 24, 2015 -Don’t fear falling into a black hole – you may live on as a hologram- Prof.Marika Taylor/ in theoretical physics at Uni. of Southampton)

benny

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