"God really does play dice"

--- Stephen Hawking

The power of this man's intellect is as amazing as his ability to explain the nearly inexplicable.

see: lecture on The Origin of the Universe

I'm enchanted with the universe being a simulation. The universe beginning from nothing makes sense as a simulation, a simulation created from a universe that always was, and has no end. What's sad is that the human race always believed THEY would discover these answers to these mysteries, but it will be man's children, the computers, that achieve it.

The link page has the text of Professor Hawking's March 13, 2007 lecture given at UC Berkeley. Since then 2011 Nobel prize winning research suggested the universe is expanding ever more rapidly and all matter will eventually disintegrate into nothingness. I was puzzled that this news did not generate some general public discussion about our universe coming to an end, even if that end is billions of years away. Breath easy folks: research released last year by Oxford University says that ending does not yet have enough evidence to be considered a certainty.

Quote: BleedingChipsSlowly

The link page has the text of Professor Hawking's March 13, 2007 lecture given at UC Berkeley. Since then 2011 Nobel prize winning research suggested the universe is expanding ever more rapidly and all matter will eventually disintegrate into nothingness. I was puzzled that this news did not generate some general public discussion about our universe coming to an end, even if that end is billions of years away. Breath easy folks: research released last year by Oxford University says that ending does not yet have enough evidence to be considered a certainty.

Given humanity's short-sightedness...

IMO it is highly likely that the universe is TRILLIONS of years old (not billions),
and that the universe is in a 10-20 billion year cycle of respiration (which scientists assume is the only cycle since the "big bang").

There is no mainstream science evidence for this belief, just an esoteric non-scientific text.

But it sounds reasonable to me.
The universe is smoother than one might expect from a "big bang" because scientists are underestimating the age of the universe by 2-4 orders of magnitude.

As far as I'm concerned, the universe ends with my last breath. Not planning on having my brain downloaded, hope not anyways, thinking it's greedy. That's going to be a thing before we know it, if we haven't already done it. That's a thing too.

Quote: mamat

Given humanity's short-sightedness...

IMO it is highly likely that the universe is TRILLIONS of years old (not billions),
and that the universe is in a 10-20 billion year cycle of respiration (which scientists assume is the only cycle since the "big bang").

There is no mainstream science evidence for this belief, just an esoteric non-scientific text.

But it sounds reasonable to me.
The universe is smoother than one might expect from a "big bang" because scientists are underestimating the age of the universe by 2-4 orders of magnitude.

Could be, but it's hard to say the least, to know what happened before the big bang. It could have been pea sized for an eternity before it popped, or one second. By respiration, are you meaning the universe expanding, then contracting to a singularity, then a big bang again? I dont think it'll be easy to prove it happened already. Matter would all be destroyed from the last incarnation, but if there's any evidence, something will find it someday.

Quote: BleedingChipsSlowly

The link page has the text of Professor Hawking's March 13, 2007 lecture given at UC Berkeley. Since then 2011 Nobel prize winning research suggested the universe is expanding ever more rapidly

this is the Dark Energy discovery

Quote:

and all matter will eventually disintegrate into nothingness. I was puzzled that this news did not generate some general public discussion about our universe coming to an end, even if that end is billions of years away. Breath easy folks: research released last year by Oxford University says that ending does not yet have enough evidence to be considered a certainty.

the bit about disintegration into nothingness is the playing out of the idea that this Dark Energy is getting ever more stronger, thus the accelerating expansion. Essentially, DE is overcoming gravity now and will theoretically, as it continues to get stronger, overcome interatomic forces and the sub-atomic strong force too, tearing apart everything. I believe it is the idea that DE will continue to get so strong without limits that is now under dispute.

It is important to realize DE is quite the puzzle as to what it actually is. Paraphrasing one physicist I was watching on a program, "Dark Energy is the term we have for a phenomenon about which we are completely ignorant"

They have about as much trouble understanding Dark Matter.

Quote: The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate – or is it?

Link

... However, there now exists a much bigger database of supernovae on which to perform rigorous and detailed statistical analyses. ... [We] found that the evidence for accelerated expansion is, at most, what physicists call "3 sigma". This is far short of the 5 sigma standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance.

Origional research including hairy math available at Nielsen, J. T. et al. Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae. Sci. Rep. 6, 35596; doi: 10.1038/srep35596 (2016)

Quote:

[We] found that the evidence for accelerated expansion is, at most, what physicists call "3 sigma". This is far short of the 5 sigma standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance.

hadn't seen that, thanks.

btw I get the gist of it, but don't get '3 sigma = meh , 5 sigma = required standard' ... seems to me it should go in the opposite direction.

Good stuff - and shows how a guy can be out of date on this stuff, the original post in this thread in fact was so in sort of an amusing way. BTW that link also mentions the European Extremely Large Telescope, which might be operating in another 7 years and we'll get some answers maybe.

Image from wikipedia page