Watching Alan Alda's show yesterday, something struk me. The description of Dark Energy as a property of the space itself making more space therefore growing exponentially makes me realize that this changes everything.

It was thought that the universe has a finite amount of usable energy. Eventually, if no Big Crunch, there would be a Heat Death as all the stars ran out and all forms of energy got used up leaving maximum entropy with no potential anywhere.

But, they are implying that the universe has an unlimited supply of energy. Consider: take two masses and position them far enough apart. The attractive force of gravity falls off with distance, and the repulsive force of new space appearing between them increases with distance. So beyond a critical distance, they will repell each other, and this tension between them could be used to turn a wheel, compress a spring, or whatnot. Potential energy of things falling together will run out as they reach the common center. But there is no limit to the potential energy of such a repulsive force.

This does not lead to any immediatly practical uses. But the fact that it exists at all seems to me to be much more revolutionary than is commonly considered.

For example, it might be possible to build a "Maxwell's Demon" after all, since an "outside" source of power sidesteps the thermodynamic argument against it. Likewise, could my thought-experiment above be considered a perpetual motion machine that's not against the laws of physics?

--John

This group of researchers would probably agree with you. I haven't the expertise to know if they seem credible...any opinions from physics knowledgable people?

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An open mind is like an open window...without a good screen you'll get all sorts of weird bugs!

Just because it's there doesn't mean it can be harnessed.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

That is an extremely interesting research group! Thanks for pointing that out.

John, (nice name)

It is great to see you get so excited. However, it is the unfortunate case that their interpretation of the acceleration of the expansion is all wrong. There conclusions are based on the idea that expansion is occuring in a Universe where the cosmological principle is a reality and that expansion is outward from the original bang.

New space appearing between them....And I thought my theory was far reaching. And these branes are floating around of different dimensions wrapped around each other.....talk about science fiction...that is absolutely nuts, I guess if you put PhD and Yale beside your name you can say anything and be taken seriously. Take 9 billion spacial dimension and criss cross them with 22 zillion time dimentions make up some math and you get an atom....that is about as likely as the brane theory. As for this space thing....causation? Oh that's right Aphrodite needs a bigger room....give me a break....Let's bring Cosmology back to reality and discuss logical issues......dark energy is the gravitational attraction at the vertex of the horned universe that we are traveling down in an equiangular spiral dynamic. The closer we get the stronger the pull, the more matter that is added the greater the pull.....much more logical. But, I am the crackpot!!!! I guess as long as you can fool congress and control the NSA it doesn't matter what you say as long as you have a proper title.

nitpick: Quantum Mechanics clearly demonstrates that once you reach a certain level of knowledge "logic" goes out the window. There is no reason to assume that the fundmental workings of the existance or creation of the Universe will follow a logical principle.

In QM or much smaller scales there are too many actors on the stage to generate certainty with our current technology and models. There are logical probablilities, but you are right there is no unification theory yet, so we have problems with QM and relativity, but such cases aren't the norm. But, God does not play dice, we just do not have the technology as of yet to account for and quantify all of the probable outcomes. If you are talking about the proposed strangeness of string theory, that is still subject to debate, it is a wait and see, I still have a problem of more than 3D space, but Space/time as a 4D is helpful. As for 5,6,7,8 and up....mathematicians are reaching here and physics is based on observable reality.

Cyrek1 comment

bigspit
Agreed. Some of the proposed theories by the educated at the top sound like science fiction. They should get down from cloud 9 and review their basic physics.

triangle man
Laws are laws. I still like to observe the laws of physics since they are considered to be 'empirical evidence'.

My dark energy question.
When did this DE materialize? Was it there ridin 'piggy back' on the BB initial conditions expansion or did it just come up recently. In other words, at what time did it kick in to contribute to the expansion?

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aka Michael Cyrek

Want evidence, eh?

*cough*here*cough*

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

The idea of a completely deterministic universe went away with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Its not a question of technology, it simply doesn't exist. No amount of information will ever be able to tell you when exactly a specific plutonium atom will decay, for example.

Do you say that with certainty? Never is an awfully long time Russ.

Are you citing this as evidence of dark energy?
This is an interesting force - new to me, it seems to me to be an extension of the thermal electric effect: Does anyone know how the thermal dynamics are satisfied? Does the effect exist at 0degK?

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

The Casimir effect is evidence of the zero-point energy (vacuum fluctuations predicted by quantum mechanics - yes, I'm pretty sure that's what they call "dark energy").

It's not possible to prove the effect exists at 0 K. I'm not sure if anyone has tried it after dowsing the plates with liquid helium... I'll have to do some more searches...

(By the way, Googling for "zero-point energy" can turn up some pretty cranky sites. :P )

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

My only point is that some things in nature, such as wave-particle duality, are not "logical" per se and when discovered defied logic. Thus many things in the universe may not follow a logical principle so unusual hypotheses such as String Theory cannot be dismissed simply because they are not logical.

I think I'm confusing myself now #-o :wink:

Ackkk...I've read the CIPA research site and am attempting to understand the concept of ZPE. Unfortunately, my husband (Engineer) is in Japan right now so my source for "translating technical stuff" isn't available!

What does everyone think about this? Here's a snip from CIPA,

"What is the zero-point field or zero-point fluctuations (ZPF)? What is its relationship to the quantum vacuum?
In the view of modern physics, the vacuum is far from empty. Take away all particles and all electromagnetic radiation and you will have an apparently empty region of space at a temperature of absolute zero. But in fact this "vacuum" will still be full of energies and particle pairs (such as positrons and electrons): the electromagnetic zero-point field, the zero-point fields of the weak and strong interactions, and the Dirac sea of negative energy particle pairs. All of these energies and particles are collectively referred to as the quantum vacuum (making the vacuum in reality a plenum). Our work so far has involved only one component of the quantum vacuum: the electromagnetic zero-point field or zero-point fluctuations. (Henceforth, unless stated otherwise, ZPF refers only to the electromagnetic ZPF.) The ZPF was a hypothesis put forward by Max Planck in 1911, and was developed by him and Walther Nernst between 1911 and 1916. In 1947 the effect of the ZPF was directly demonstrated by Willis Lamb, in a famous experiment, which Lamb himself has described as "a proof that the vacuum does not exist" (i.e. that the "vacuum" is a "plenum"). The Casimir effect, predicted in the following year and subsequently verified, is another direct demonstration of the ZPF's reality."

Are these guys onto something? If so, then at some point in the future space, itself, could (theoretically) yield a huge energy source.

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An open mind is like an open window...without a good screen you'll get all sorts of weird bugs!

That happens to be exactly right.

You see, particles can pop up out of nothingness... but they can only stay in existance for a certain amount of time. That time depends on their mass: the more mass/energy the particle has, the shorter the time it can stay around. Since electromagnetic effects are caused by transmission of virtual photons between charged particles, this explains the inverse-square law: the photons have a finite (though very large) speed, and last for a finite (though very small) amount of time; since more energetic ones stay around for a shorter time, the energy of virtual photons decreases with distance from their source.

Also, virtual particles are involved in the evaporation of black holes. A pair of virtual particles (say an electron-positron pair) pop into existance at the event horizon. One falls into the black hole; the other gains some of the black hole's mass/energy and escapes. A black hole will very slowly lose mass by this process (known as Hawking radiation, after its discoverer, the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking), and eventually, given enough time, "evaporate". The rate of evaporation depends on the black hole's mass; therefore, as the loss of mass continues, it accelerates, becoming explosive at a certain point. Thus, the miniature black holes that could have been created in the early universe, if they were actually created, would no longer be around...

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Gullible,

Doesn't black hole evaporation require there is no mass feeding the system (ie. the black hole is isolated)?

The smaller the black hole, the faster the evaporation. So as long as the mass being introduced into the black is less than the rate of evaporation, the black hole will shrink.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

As N C More pointed out, This group has worked the Casimir effect and the theory about it
[quote="N C More"]This group of researchers
Has plowed this turf quite a bit. It does seem to be, on the quantum level, very similar to thermal conductivity and all the other hole-type stuff that run our computers for a reasonable amount of pocket change, but it may in providing a defining link to inertial coupling...in any case, the quark discription of matter that kind of isolates gravity may need to spread it's arms a bit and either eliminate the graviton or integrate in a more charming manor.

But first things first, starting with eliminating dark energy and dark matter...

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Dark matter needn't be made of mysterious stuff, you know. Could be ordinary matter that we can't see - MACHOs and stuff like that. You're not the only one who sees the evidence for WIMPs as rather scant.

Dark energy, on the other hand, doesn't seem to me to violate any laws of physics or anything. And I haven't seen it being turned into a cosmological cure-all to explain everything.

The standard model is, of course, anything but all-encompassing. That is common knowledge. You wonder why there's so much stuff going on with superstring theory, p-brane theory, etc.? It's because the standard model is not satisfactory. Physicists are still working on it. (My gut feeling is that string/brain theories will turn out to be correct, but as history has shown, gut feelings are not very reliable...)

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

That's the problem: The only test for dark energy is that BB version of the Einstein Desitter cosmology has painted itself into a corner with no other escape, and the only evidence is a handful of supernova that could just as easily be hypernovae...

Which gets back to my broken record: Why are braneworlds, dark stuff, and stringy stuff acceptable, but intrinsic redshifts, of which there is mounting compelling evidence a total taboo? Is this scientists talking, or a frazzled stubborn community with their heals dug in?

I gave up on gut feelings the first time I proposed and was turned down...

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

String theory seems to explain properly the stuff that the standard model explains properly. (Yes, I know that the standard model doesn't explain some things, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't explain anything right.)

As for the redshift things, I would like to know:
1. Is it possible that there might be more mundane explanations, e.g. overlapping of galaxies' images from our viewpoint?
2. Have any mainstream astronomers repeatedly reproduced Arp's results?
3. Why didn't anyone raise hell about this stuff earlier, when the BB was still not so widely accepted? Wouldn't anyone have noticed this stuff when the universe was thought to be static, and used it as evidence against the expanding model of the universe?
4. Have you any explanations for the increasing redshifts we currently see that do not bend the known laws of physics?
5. What are your explanations for the massive redshifts displayed by quasars and protogalaxies?

Oh, and a rather belated response to Bigsplit: it has been proven again and again that, as much as one might wish it otherwise, this universe is not deterministic. I suggest that you simply stop fussing and deal with it.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Thanks for the response Gullible, I do not necessarily believe that the Universe is deterministic.....it is a possibility, though perhaps not likely. I do think we can know that if you drop a sheet of paper from a couple miles up it will hit the ground, but predicting everything that will happen in between may not be possible. What is possible with optimal observation skills is knowing what happened after it hit and why it hit there in that particular form. But, we knew when we dropped it, the paper or some chemically changed form of it would eventually hit the ground.

Astronomers use a wide variety of techniques to assure observations are of unique items, but none of them are foolproof. Almost all of the techniques used today involve binning, which usually separates according to redshift, proximity, and the expected spectral distribution. If there is intrinsic redshifting, Arp argues this technique separates items that are really much closer together. For example, there is a tail of red stars that appears to be connected to M-83, but electronic binning separates these stars from the rest of the galaxy because they appear to have too high of proper motion towards us, relative to the galaxy. A better explanation is that the blue heart of M-83 has a small intrinsic redshift, and the further one moves away from this center, the less intrinsic shift there appears to be.
Yes, the papers are quite numerous. In the past these papers produced claims of cherry picking and bogus statistics, but the current trend is to ignore them and hope they go away, which is a lot like ignoring the moons of Jupiter.
This is a very good question and the answers are many. One example: In 1960 it was thought that the number of ‘red’ galaxies fell off rapidly with distance, and the number of ‘blue’ galaxies increased, and also had much lower metal content. It was logical to assume the ‘blue’ galaxies evolved into “red” ones. It is now known the ‘red’ galaxy population continues well past the epic where the ‘blue’ population appears, and UV and X-ray data show these distant ‘blue’ galaxies cannot be the progenitors of the current “red” galaxies, because the metal content in the ‘blue’ galaxies is much too high. We are using known physical properties. Intrinsic redshifts can be explained in terms of Compton and similar effects and are even seen in the disk of the Sun: The Wilson-Bappu effect.

The tensors of polarization, CREIL: This is the refractive index of space. We know that the tensors of polarization are elastic, because the path of light through a transparent medium “bends back” when the light passes completely through the object. This bending means energy is stored and coherently transferred to and from the bending molecules at all wavelengths and amplitudes. What is not obvious, but must occur, is a small amount of the energy of each pulse must be lost to the transferring medium as thermal energy, resulting in a slight spectral redshift – notice that the speed of the light cannot change because of the rules of general relativity. Chandrasahker’s rules of electromagnetic transfer also predict that low frequency radio waves should be blue shifted by the same process: This is what we have observed in the Pioneer space probes. This same process, relaxed over cosmic distances, creates both the CMB and the CIRB – Cosmic Infrared Background, or Continuum, something not predicted by the BB.

If the medium is of highly uniform density and temperature, the light retains coherence. Space meets all of these criteria. The redshift is proportional to distance. I think the laws of physics, as we understand them, predict that space should coherently transfer and redshift light, just as in the optics we use to study these observations. Can anyone tell me why not? None of this works unless there is intrinsic redshifting in very bright objects. As I mentioned above, an intrinsic redshift is predicted by Compton scattering and a smattering of related theories, including CREIL. The conventional theory relies upon wormy clouds in interstellar space to create the spectral lines we observe in quasars. These clouds would screw up the refractive index, but it is hard to imagine why they would exist at all: Jean’s laws tell us that when gases are non-homogeneous, the either condense into gravimetric objects or disperse.

CREIL predicts the exact line sequences observed in quasars. (Incidently, when I first read about CRIEL, Jacques was unaware of the periodicity in the quasar spectra. He immediately realized these lines were exactly what he had unknowingly predicted.) Since quasars are used to calculated the density of the interstellar medium, and the intrinsic redshift in quasars places them much closer to us, the density of the interstellar medium is much greater than calculated. This, in turn is necessary to increase the refractive index of space to a high enough number to explain cosmic redshifting.

Does this answer all the questions? No. Does it answer enough that funded research should be directed towards solutions that do not require a BB?

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Actually, it did answer my questions.

Now another question: what sort of model do you have in mind to replace the BB? If it's not that crazy EU model, I'd be very intersted to know.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Aye, there's the rub. For evidence against BB to be taken seriously, there has to be a serious alternative cosmology. Yet, any attempt to describe an alternative cosmology is an even faster way to get labeled a kook.

Moreover, intrinsic redshifting is much messier than expansion, producing a much more convoluted cosmology. Instead of a nice, predictable redshift == distance, we get redshift for all sorts of phenomina, forcing a more detailed examination of each object to get data that we take for granted in the expansion model. We're also back to square one on the history of the universe; steady state models do not appeal to our need for a definitive "beginning" to the universe.

And that says nothing about academic inertia and resistance to an idea that literally renders many mainstream astronomy papers not worth the paper they are printed on (at the very least, an intrinsic redshift component would force a lot of re-evaluations, even if there is also an expansion component). Say what you will about scientists loving new discoveries (and I have agreed with that many times in similar rants), but nobody likes having their life's work undercut like that, much less their grant money. It can no doubt generate some genuine hostility.

Anyway, I think this thread was the beginning of the alternative theory discussion, tucked away in the OP:
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=14433
A more formal description is probably in order, but is probably a life's work for somebody.

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Do try not to take me too seriously.

Hi Gullible Jones,

If you would like to check out another theory check our my work at www.uniformexpansion.com

It has characteristics of a steady state and big bang model. For example, based upon relative measures of time, the universe is nearly infinitely aged and based upon “absolute” measures of time the universe has a moment of creation.

The red shift is the result of motion in an unobserved dimension. This unobserved dimension conforms to specific dimensional relationships to our observed dimensions of space and time.


Snowflake

Interesting idea, Snowflake.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

It could very well be ordinary matter, but that would violate BBT nucleosynthesis.

I've responded to this here

I've responded to this here .

Several points - first, the discovery of quasar redshifts was coincident with the discovery of the microwave background. There never was a period of time when the redshift anomalies were noted before the BBT became dominant. Second, the original steady state model also admitted an expanding universe. Third, Arp made a lot of noise, but few were convinced because the initial evidence was primarily statistical. By the time significant numbers of stronger evidence appeared (connections and so on) the mainstream had made its decision. Some have noted on this board that Arp has been largely ignored for 20 years so its hardly surprising his supporters are few.

Narlikar&Arp attempt to explain the observations with a variable mass hypothesis which preserves all local physics but allows for variable particle masses as particles age. Of course if Jerry is right about time dilation, then this model is wrong.

However, I fail to see how new physics is problematic if it improves upon older physics.

In Arp's interpretation, they are related to age such that younger objects have larger intrinsic redshifts than older objects. But this is jumping ahead of the situation. The first priority is to establish that there is solid empirical evidence for intrinsic redshifts. Once that is established and agreed upon astronomers can then move forward with attempts to theoretically explain. This is what happened with dark matter. Evidence for its existence is widely accepted even though we still don't know what it is.