Of course, Einstein’s explanation of what is light, both a particle and a wave, (described as wave-particle duality) get discussed on a number of occasions. And exactly what does Einstein tell us about light?
But our understanding of the constancy of light is being shaken by questions scientists pose to better understand how the Universe looks today and what it may have been like the moment of its birth, the Big Bang.
Cosmologists look at the Universe today and question inflation after the Big Bang because they don’t understand the uniformity they see in the background temperature of space. From one end of the observable Universe to the other, there is no variance. This calls into question the moment of the Big Bang itself with light traveling out from the centre to the outer edge traveling at a constant speed. Why aren’t there pockets of the Universe warmer than other areas? The only way uniformity can exist is if light energy exchanges occurred throughout space from the beginning. But light traveling in one direction from the Big Bang could never exchange energy with light traveling in the opposite direction. So space’s background temperature should not be uniform because there would no opportunity for energy exchanges to create it.
The cosmological puzzle of uniformity of background temperatures has brought into question Einstein’s theory that light travels at a constant speed and has done so forever. New hypotheses suggest inflationary theories of the Universe after the Big Bang may be wrong and that light, at the moment of the Big Bang, the beginning of space-time, traveled at near infinite speed.
Niayesh Afshordi, Associate Professor, University of Waterloo, is one of a number of physicists who suggest that in going back to a point when the Universe was hot just after the Big Bang, temperatures would have been ten thousand trillion degrees Celsius. Under such conditions light may have behaved far differently.
Afshordi isn’t questioning the observable speed of light as we know it today. He and others argue that the only explanation for what we are observing through the data our telescopes and satellites are collecting today, suggests a very different model. Light may very well have traveled at very different speeds in the past.
Other physicists also look at the voids in the Universe, areas that appear empty, and speculate that they aren’t as they appear, that they are packed with particles in altering states caused by quantum fluctuations. They propose that quantum fluctuations slow the speed of light.
And in fact, physicists from the University of Glasgow and Heriot-Watt in laboratory experiments have demonstrated that a single photon of light can be slowed down in a vacuum by having it travel on an oval track. Doing this the researchers demonstrated light speed diminished over a distance and time by a fraction of a millimeter. That’s something that would have had Einstein doing some real head scratching.
Further experimentation on the theoretical limits of the speed of light will be put to the test when the James Webb telescope is launched next year and we will for the first time see back 13.5 billion years to the beginning of space-time. That should make for some interesting new takes on cosmology and our understanding of the Big Bang and the properties of light as an inconstant or constant.
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So when a mathematics and physics team at Vanderbilt University questions what the future of the Universe will be, lots of folks of a scientific bent sit up and take notice. Apparently the team has calculated a very different future for our Universe which current thinking has expanding forever with eventually a cold dark fate called the “Big Freeze.” They call it the “Big Rip.” Their paper, “New approach to cosmological bulk viscosity,” appears in the journal Physical Review D.
When we think of viscosity we picture liquids and by their density, pipe diameter, angle of descent – a rate of flow. But cosmological viscosity is “bulk viscosity” which measures the resistance of fluids to expansion and contraction. In our daily life we seldom encounter “bulk viscosity.” But in the Universe which is subject to all kinds physics seldom encountered here on Earth.
The discovery of the expansion of the Universe at ever accelerating rates was only made in the 1990s. The explanation cosmologists came up with was an unknown force called “Dark Energy.” But we have no proof that “Dark Energy” exists. The Vanderbilt team in their research are convinced that “bulk viscosity” explains the acceleration not “Dark Energy.”
The “Big Freeze” theory of the end of the Universe was projected out 100 trillion years. The theory the Vanderbilt team proposes, the “Big Rip” is expected much sooner – a mere 22 billion years into the future. In the “Big Rip” expansion of the Universe causes matter to disassemble to a point that even atoms fall apart leaving just elementary particles and radiation.
Any way you look at it from our historical perspective, Canada turning 148 on July 1st and the United States now 239 today, 22 billion to 100 trillion years gives us a bit of time to figure out which it is, “Big Freeze” or “Big Rip.”
In an article entitled, The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time, appearing in this month’s issue of Scientific American, they provide a mathematical argument for our Universe’s birth. They hypothesize that the Big Bang may have not been the singularity scientists have described, that moment when time and 3-dimensional space came into existence giving birth to what we see in the night sky some 13.7 billion years later. Instead the authors of the article envision that our physical three-dimensional Universe came about in the collapse of a star from a four-dimensional universe. That collapse
A four-dimensional universe? What the heck is that? Our view of physical space is only three-dimensional. We see height, width and depth. We can measure the distance light travels from a star. But we also know that light travels through time. The uniting of time and space to create spacetime produces a parameter not visible to us three-dimensional worlders. We don’t see time as a dimension. But mathematics does. And the Perimeter Institute scientists propose a scenario where a four-dimensional universe could have been the birth mother for three-dimensional space.
That’s because a four-dimensional dying star that collapses becomes a three-dimensional black hole. And on the exit side of that black hole is our three-dimensional space, the Universe we reside in.
But black holes in our observable Universe some argue are two-dimensional at the boundary that marks the point of no return, what we refer to as the event horizon. So here’s another speculation – does that mean the spawn of our black holes may be two-dimensional Universes, the flat land scenario where only length and width exist? It’s interesting mathematical speculation to think we are composed of the stuff of stars that came about because of the burping of a Universe with a higher number of dimensions.
Buddhism is the child of the Hindu faith. It cannot be described as monotheistic. Its concept of god or gods is far different. Buddha who predates Jesus of Nazareth by more than 5 centuries grew up in a world where multiple manifestations of the godhead were practiced. Today some sources estimate close to a half billion people follow Buddha although many more, maybe twice that number, practice many Buddhist precepts. The spiritual leader of Buddhism is the Dalai Lama.
Buddhists believe in a cycle of life and death like their Hindu neighbors. They seek Nirvana, a state of oneness with the godhead and through a series of births and rebirths go through 31 planes of existence to attain perfection. It is a faith of personal salvation through following an eightfold path. Some would even say it is a faith focused on humanity and not a god, atheism with a plan.
The combination of these two East Asian faiths represent in followers numbers almost equal to the umma, the followers of Islam. But the two differ from Islam in their acceptance of modern science and technology even though the populations of these faiths have experienced similar subjugation by colonial Western European nations in the past. So why is that?
Because Hinduism and Buddhism approach creation in a similar way to the scientific explanation, the Big Bang. Even reincarnation is analogous to the recycling of matter in the Universe with the birth and death of stars and planets. Both religions look at medical technology and its focus on the whole person as consistent with religious teachings. There is a strong cultural acceptance within Buddhist and Hindu societies of all forms of medical intervention in treating human disease. Genetic engineering raises issues in both faiths as it does in Christianity and Islam. For Hindus and Buddhists who see animals, plants, air, water and all of matter as an expression of the godhead, manipulation at a genetic level of food crops conflicts with respecting existing life even though in India where Hinduism predominates the need to grow enough food to feed the more than one billion citizens is of paramount importance.
How do these two faiths accommodate to the issue of global warming, climate change and ecology? India today faces some of the greatest environmental challenges on the planet. The population will soon surpass that of China even though the country is half its size. The cycle of the monsoon, the annual life enriching source of water for the subcontinent is being threatened by changes in weather patterns as the atmosphere warms. The glaciers of the Himalayas, the primary source of freshwater for the major rivers of Northern India, are at risk of melting as temperatures rise in higher elevations. When you consider that the religion sees all matter as a manifestation of the godhead then current Hindu practices are out of synch with a sustainable future. Hindu texts describe the Universe as the body of God. Rivers are sacred and given godlike manifestations. Forests as well. So if any religions are ready to embrace modern science and technology in combating climate change it would seem that Hinduism and its Buddhist incarnation are most willing.
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