Are we intelligent enough to understand the universe?
The observable universe can sometimes be served up on a plate, as musician Pablo Carlos Budassi recently did when he combined Princeton University and NASA logarithmic maps into one color disk. This is a geocentric model - the Earth is in the center of the plate, and the Big Bang plasma is at the edges.
Visualization is as good as any other, and even better than others, because it is close to the human point of view. There are many theories about the structure, dynamics and fate of the universe, and the cosmological paradigm that has been accepted for decades seems to be breaking down a little lately. For example, voices are increasingly heard denying the Big Bang theory.
The universe is a garden of oddities, painted over the years in the "mainstream" of physics and cosmology, filled with bizarre phenomena such as giant quasars flies away from us at breakneck speed, dark matterwhich no one has discovered and which does not show signs of accelerators, but is "necessary" to explain the too fast rotation of the galaxy, and, finally, Big Bangwhich dooms all of physics to a struggle with the inexplicable, at least for the moment, feature.
there were no fireworks
The originality of the Big Bang follows directly and inevitably from the mathematics of the general theory of relativity. However, some scientists see this as a problematic phenomenon, because mathematics can only explain what happened immediately after ... - but it does not know what happened at that very peculiar moment, before the great fireworks (2).
Many scientists shy away from this feature. If only because, as he recently put it Ali Ahmed Farah from the University of Ben in Egypt, "the laws of physics stop working there." Farag with a colleague Saurya Dasem from the University of Lethbridge in Canada, presented in an article published in 2015 in Physics Letters B, a model in which the universe has no beginning and no end, and therefore no singularity.
Both physicists were inspired by their work. David Bohm since the 50s. He considered the possibility of replacing the geodesic lines known from the general theory of relativity (the shortest lines connecting two points) with quantum trajectories. In their paper, Farag and Das applied these Bohm trajectories to an equation developed in 1950 by the physicist Amala Kumara Raychaudhurye from Calcutta University. Raychaudhuri was also Das's teacher when he was 90. Using Raychaudhuri's equation, Ali and Das obtained the quantum correction Friedman equationwhich, in turn, describes the evolution of the Universe (including the Big Bang) in the context of general relativity. Although this model is not a true theory of quantum gravity, it includes elements of both quantum theory and general relativity. Farag and Das also expect their results to hold true even when a complete theory of quantum gravity is finally formulated.
The Farag-Das theory predicts neither the Big Bang nor great crash return to singularity. The quantum trajectories used by Farag and Das never connect and therefore never form a singular point. From a cosmological point of view, the scientists explain, quantum corrections can be viewed as a cosmological constant, and there is no need to introduce dark energy. The cosmological constant leads to the fact that the solution of Einstein's equations can be a world of finite size and infinite age.
This is not the only theory in recent times that undermines the concept of the Big Bang. For example, there are hypotheses that when time and space appeared, it originated and second universein which time flows backwards. This vision is presented by an international group of physicists, consisting of: Tim Kozlowski from the University of New Brunswick, Flavio Markets Perimeter of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Julian Barbour. The two universes formed during the Big Bang, in this theory, should be mirror images of themselves (3), so they have different laws of physics and a different sense of the flow of time. Perhaps they penetrate each other. Whether time flows forward or backward determines the contrast between high and low entropy.
In turn, the author of another new proposal on the model of everything, Wun-Ji Shu from National Taiwan University, describes time and space not as separate things, but as closely related things that can turn into one another. Neither the speed of light nor the gravitational constant is invariant in this model, but are factors in the transformation of time and mass into size and space as the universe expands. The Shu theory, like many other concepts in the academic world, can of course be viewed as a fantasy, but the model of an expanding universe with 68% dark energy that causes the expansion is also problematic. Some note that with the help of this theory, scientists "replaced under the carpet" the physical law of conservation of energy. Taiwan's theory does not violate the principles of conservation of energy, but in turn has a problem with microwave background radiation, which is considered a remnant of the Big Bang. Something for something.
You can't see the dark and all
Honorary nominees dark matter Lot. Weakly interacting massive particles, strongly interacting massive particles, sterile neutrinos, neutrinos, axions - these are just some of the solutions to the mystery of "invisible" matter in the Universe that have been proposed by theorists so far.
For decades, the most popular candidates have been hypothetical, heavy (ten times heavier than a proton), weakly interacting particles called WIMPs. It was assumed that they were active in the initial phase of the existence of the Universe, but as it cooled and the particles scattered, their interaction faded. Calculations showed that the total mass of WIMPs should have been five times greater than that of ordinary matter, which is exactly as much as dark matter has been estimated.
However, no traces of WIMPs were found. So now it's more popular to talk about searching sterile neutrinos, hypothetical dark matter particles with zero electric charge and very little mass. Sometimes sterile neutrinos are considered as the fourth generation of neutrinos (along with electron, muon and tau neutrinos). Its characteristic feature is that it interacts with matter only under the action of gravity. Denoted by the symbol νs.
Neutrino oscillations could theoretically make muon neutrinos sterile, which would reduce their number in the detector. This is especially likely after the neutrino beam has passed through a region of high density matter such as the Earth's core. Therefore, the IceCube detector at the South Pole was used to observe neutrinos coming from the Northern Hemisphere in the energy range from 320 GeV to 20 TeV, where a strong signal was expected in the presence of sterile neutrinos. Unfortunately, the analysis of the data of observed events made it possible to exclude the existence of sterile neutrinos in the accessible region of the parameter space, the so-called. 99% confidence level.
In July 2016, after twenty months of experimenting with the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector, the scientists had nothing to say except that… they found nothing. Similarly, scientists from the International Space Station laboratory and physicists from CERN, who counted on the production of dark matter in the second part of the Large Hadron Collider, say nothing about dark matter.
So we need to look further. Scientists say that maybe dark matter is something completely different from WIMPs and neutrinos or whatever, and they are building LUX-ZEPLIN, a new detector that should be seventy times more sensitive than the current one.
Science doubts whether there is such a thing as dark matter, and yet astronomers recently observed a galaxy that, despite having a mass similar to the Milky Way, is 99,99% dark matter. Information about the discovery was provided by the observatory V.M. Keka. This is about galaxy Dragonfly 44 (Dragonfly 44). Its existence was only confirmed last year when the Dragonfly Telephoto Array observed a patch of sky in the constellation Berenices Spit. It turned out that the galaxy contains much more than it seems at first glance. Since there are few stars in it, it would quickly disintegrate if some mysterious thing did not help hold together the objects that make it up. Dark matter?
Modeling?
Hypothesis Universe as a hologramdespite the fact that people with serious scientific degrees are engaged in it, it is still treated as a foggy area on the border of science. Perhaps because scientists are people too, and it is difficult for them to come to terms with the mental consequences of research in this regard. Juan Maldasenastarting with string theory, he laid out a vision of the universe in which strings vibrating in nine-dimensional space create our reality, which is just a hologram - a projection of a flat world without gravity..
The results of a study by Austrian scientists, published in 2015, indicate that the universe needs fewer dimensions than expected. The XNUMXD universe may just be a XNUMXD information structure on the cosmological horizon. Scientists compare it to the holograms found on credit cards - they are actually two-dimensional, although we see them as three-dimensional. According to Daniela Grumillera from the Vienna University of Technology, our universe is quite flat and has a positive curvature. Grumiller explained in Physical Review Letters that if quantum gravity in flat space can be described holographically by standard quantum theory, then there must also be physical quantities that can be computed in both theories, and the results must match. In particular, one key feature of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, should show up in the theory of gravity.
Some go further, speaking not of holographic projection, but even of computer modelling. Two years ago, a famous astrophysicist, Nobel Prize winner, George Smoot, presented arguments that humanity lives inside such a computer simulation. He argues that this is possible, for example, thanks to the development of computer games, which theoretically form the core of virtual reality. Will humans ever create realistic simulations? The answer is yes,” he said in an interview. “Obviously, significant progress has been made on this issue. Just look at the first "Pong" and the games made today. Around 2045, we will be able to transfer our thoughts into computers very soon.”
The Universe as a Holographic Projection
Considering that we can already map certain neurons in the brain through the use of magnetic resonance imaging, using this technology for other purposes should not be a problem. Then virtual reality can work, which allows contact with thousands of people and provides a form of brain stimulation. This may have happened in the past, Smoot says, and our world is an advanced network of virtual simulations. Moreover, this could happen an infinite number of times! So we can live in a simulation that is in another simulation, contained in another simulation that is... and so on ad infinitum.
The world, and even more so the Universe, unfortunately, is not given to us on a plate. Rather, we ourselves are part, very small, of dishes that, as some hypotheses show, might not have been prepared for us.
Will that tiny part of the universe that we - at least in a materialistic sense - ever know the whole structure? Are we intelligent enough to understand and comprehend the mystery of the universe? Probably no. However, if we ever decided that we would eventually fail, it would be hard not to notice that this would also be, in a certain sense, a kind of final insight into the nature of all things...
