Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: cosmology – Page 196

What is driving the mulitverse theory? Are the multiverse stories only a sticky-plaster solution to the Big Bang theory problem? Leading thinkers Sabine Hossenfelder, Roger Penrose and Michio Kaku debate.

00:00 Introduction.
02:22 Michio Kaku | Multiverse theory has now dominating cosmology; it is unavoidable.
06:03 Sabine Hossenfelder | Believing in the multiverse is the logical equivalent to believing in God.
07:57 Roger Penrose | Universes are sequential and so are not independent worlds.
16:36 Theme 1 | Do scientifc theories need to be testable?
28:45 Theme 2 | Are tales of the multiverse solutions to the Big Bang theory in trouble?
42:49 Theme 3 | Will theories of the universe always be bound by untestable elements?

Multiverses are everywhere. Or at least the theory is. Everyone from physicists Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene to Marvel superheroes have shown their support for the idea. But critics argue that not only is the multiverse improbable, it is also fantasy and fundamentally unscientific as the theory can never be tested — a requirement that has defined science from its outset.

Should we reject the grand claims and leave multiverse theories to the pages of comic books? Are tales of the multiverse really sticking-plaster solutions for Big Bang theory in trouble? Or should we take multiverse theory as seriously as its proponents, and accept that modern science has moved beyond the bounds of experiment and into that of imagination?

Continue reading “Should we abandon the multiverse theory? | Sabine Hossenfelder, Roger Penrose, Michio Kaku” | >

Scientists from around the world have reconstructed the laws of gravity, to help get a more precise picture of the universe and its constitution.

The standard model of is based on General Relativity, which describes gravity as the curving or warping of space and time. While the Einstein equations have been proven to work very well in our solar system, they had not been observationally confirmed to work over the entire .

An international team of cosmologists, including scientists from the University of Portsmouth in England, has now been able to test Einstein’s theory of gravity in the outer-reaches of space.

Read more | >

Black holes have properties characteristic of quantum particles, a new study reveals, suggesting that the puzzling cosmic objects can be at the same time small and big, heavy and light, or dead and alive, just like the legendary Schrödinger’s cat.

The new study, based on computer modeling, aimed to find the elusive connection between the mind-boggling time-warping physics of supermassive objects such as black holes and the principles guiding the behavior of the tiniest subatomic particles.

Read more | >

New observations could explain why star formation declines over time.

And with the help of citizen scientists, a team of astronomers recently discovered a unique black hole in a galaxy roughly one billion light-years away that’s hurling a relativistic jet at another galaxy.

The research was conducted by a team led by Ananda Hota, a researcher with the UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences. The paper that describes their findings was published on October 12th in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

Galaxies are typically divided into three main classes based on size, shape, and composition. First, there are ellipticals, which account for about one-third of all galaxies in the Universe that range from being nearly circular to very elongated.

Continue reading “Scientists may have solved a massive galaxy mystery” | >

Use my link http://www.audible.com/isaac and get a free audio book with a 30 day trial!

In the previous episode we saw how civilizations might not simply survive after all the stars in the Universe had died, but might indeed thrive far better during the Black Hole Era of the Universe. Today, we will go beyond even the Dark Era to examine the concepts or Iron Star Civilizations, Boltzmann Brains, Reversible Computing, and even reversing Entropy itself.

Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
Join the Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1583992725237264/
Support the Channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IsaacArthur.
Visit the sub-reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/
Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/civilizations-…iron-stars.
Cover Art by Jakub Grygier: https://www.artstation.com/artist/jakub_grygier.

Graphics Team:

Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars” | >

HOW did our universe begin? This is among the most profound questions of all, and you would be forgiven for thinking it is impossible to answer. But Laura Mersini-Houghton says she has cracked it. A cosmologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was born and raised under communist dictatorship in Albania, where her father was considered ideologically opposed to the regime and exiled. She later won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, forging a career in cosmology in which she has tackled the origins of the universe – and made an extraordinary proposal.

Mersini-Houghton’s big idea is that the universe in its earliest moments can be understood as a quantum wave function – a mathematical description of a haze of possibilities – that gave rise to many diverse universes as well as our own. She has also made predictions about how other universes would leave an imprint upon our own. Those ideas have been controversial, with some physicists arguing that her predictions are invalid. But Mersini-Houghton argues that they have been confirmed by observations of the radiation left over from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background.

Read more | >