Abstract
To close our discussion, we get to talk about the future of cosmological research, and this is where I get to finally give my honest opinion about several competing, albeit fantastical, modes of thought surrounding our universe and what it’s truly made of.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the word rebranded because it is, essentially, identical in form to almost every major religion since the beginning of religion, it just incorporates computers which seems to give it a shiny new validity.
- 2.
Or up, depending on how you think about it.
- 3.
Along these same lines, I recently read that Alan Guth and Sean Carrol are working together on a theory that proposes that there may not exist a universal maximum or minimum to entropy, despite it having long been assumed that there is. Basically, from the limited material available so far, it looks like they propose a giant universal shift in our cosmic direction of thermal entropy (which happens at the big bang) kind of like how our magnetic north and south poles flip every couple hundred thousand years and we don’t really understand why. Such a universe would place probability back at the bottom of our epistemological engine so to speak, displacing the more exotic possibilities like cosmic observers or 11-D strings . It would also make our timeline effectively infinite, the way that we think space is effectively infinite. The idea is very appealing, mostly because it does something that most cosmologists have been trying to do in some form or another for a long time, and that is to make our universal timeline cyclical and infinite, but without being an infinite cycle. The timeline itself is what becomes infinite, the cycle just one of some number of possible cycles. The neatest part, for me, is noting that the physical laws pop out of the book-keeping in these systems. Nothing created anything, the big bang was the act of it being rearranged, but the same elements won’t necessarily rearrange the same way the next time around. Lee Smolin also has some interesting theories about a Darwinian mechanism pruning successive universes that offers more alternatives along these lines that are worth checking out.
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Bascom, G. (2017). Putting the Future at the Beginning. In: On the Inside of a Marble. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60690-3_7
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