2020-08-03, 06:36 PM
A well written new article on what may be beyond the Big Bang both spacially and temporally, at https://aeon.co/essays/our-cosmic-horizo...-than-ever.
It seems, however, to share the same old limiting assumptions of naturalism (nature is absolutely all there is) as other attempts at such speculation.
...............................
So even though our Universe has had a finite age, 13.8 billion years, starting with an incomprehensible singularity, these theorists suppose that our reality is just a tiny part of a total reality encompassing unimaginably more vast expanses of space embodying an unimaginably great dynamic complexity of universe collisions, Big Bangs, evolution of these universes, etc. etc.
This speculation seems to postulate higher dimensions and new universes just to explain the Big Bang. This supposition is supported by what data? Is this supposition no more than many other multiverse hypotheses invented to explain "fine tuning", with absolutely no observational data available or even possible?
And does it really explain fine tuning? I don't think so, since the extended extra-Universal reality and cosmos just in turn needs its own sort of intricate fine tuning to achieve this particular outcome. The mystery of the ultimate origin of such a design obstinately still remains. Nothing comes from nothing.
It seems, however, to share the same old limiting assumptions of naturalism (nature is absolutely all there is) as other attempts at such speculation.
Quote:"When we look out to the edge of the observable universe, what we see is something truly astounding. The most distant light is also the oldest; it’s the light from the Big Bang itself. The early universe, right after the first moments of creation, was hot and dense, everywhere, humming with vibrating plasma; right at the edge of our vision, we’re looking into the past so far that we literally see that glowing plasma. The inferno persisted for around 380,000 years before space expanded and cooled enough that light and particles could travel freely through it. When we look at the edge of the observable universe, we see the last smouldering embers of that hot dense phase. We see a cosmos that is still on fire.
The distance to our cosmic horizon is not, as you might expect, 13.8 billion light-years. ....distances are weird in an expanding universe. Something that was 13.8 billion light-years away when its light started the journey toward us is much farther away now. If you factor all that in, that glowing plasma we see at the very edge of the observable universe is actually somewhere around 45 billion light-years away now.
Just because we can’t see things beyond our fiery horizon, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there. The evidence we have, studying the same-ness of galaxies in every part of the cosmos we’ve mapped, points to the notion that space continues far beyond our horizon, in every direction; the limits to our vision are circumstantial. If we happened to live in a galaxy that lies just outside our current horizon, everything we know of the cosmos suggests that our view from there would look pretty similar to the view we have from here. Very distant reaches of the cosmos could, in principle, be totally different, of course – we can’t know for sure without being able to see them. In fact, regions far enough beyond our horizon can even be considered to be separate, isolated universes of their own, for all practical purposes, since they can’t interact with ours.
But what if the universe isn’t just bigger than we perceive, circumstantially, but bigger than we even can perceive? What if it extends in every direction, and then some?"
...............................
Quote:"One hypothesis for the structure of our cosmos, developed in the early 2000s, suggests that we might live in a three-dimensional ‘brane’ (think: membrane) on the edge of a larger space with four spatial dimensions (plus time). Inside that higher-dimensional ‘bulk’ there could be another 3D brane, containing another universe, that might, from time to time, come crashing into our own. This theory’s originators called it the ‘ekpyrotic’ model of the cosmos, after a Greek term for conflagration – a nod to the fact that each cosmic collision would result in the fiery conditions of the Big Bang, and could explain the origin and eventual fate of our universe. In this model, the branes alternately move toward each other, collide and then move apart again, in an endless cycle, going from Big Bang, to expansion, to Big Crunch, and back to Big Bang. The patterns of structure we see in the cosmos today (distributions of galaxies and clusters) are, in this model, seeded by the interaction between the two branes in the slow collapse phase before the Bang."
So even though our Universe has had a finite age, 13.8 billion years, starting with an incomprehensible singularity, these theorists suppose that our reality is just a tiny part of a total reality encompassing unimaginably more vast expanses of space embodying an unimaginably great dynamic complexity of universe collisions, Big Bangs, evolution of these universes, etc. etc.
This speculation seems to postulate higher dimensions and new universes just to explain the Big Bang. This supposition is supported by what data? Is this supposition no more than many other multiverse hypotheses invented to explain "fine tuning", with absolutely no observational data available or even possible?
And does it really explain fine tuning? I don't think so, since the extended extra-Universal reality and cosmos just in turn needs its own sort of intricate fine tuning to achieve this particular outcome. The mystery of the ultimate origin of such a design obstinately still remains. Nothing comes from nothing.