alsoin case anyone wanted MORE walls of text from me tonight (i think i'm now on a dozen ignore lists), this is where penrose's recent news stories have come from. penrose has a theory, which hasn't been satisfactorily published but which actually is quite elegant in principle, where you map the heat death of the universe onto the start of another. the details are a bit... detailed, but it boils down to looping future infinity onto past infinity, and being able to do so because the only things left in the universe are photons which for some reason i've never understood because he's not written a proper paper about this that i've ever seen means that there's no firm definitions of distance. so the massive distances at the end of the universe apparently can be mapped onto tiny distances in the very early universe. the heat death leads to a new big bang, new universes, and yet more physicists to evolve and ask WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THE ENTROPY?
oh, and also for respected physicists to work it out and then put out ill-advised papers based on statistics they readily admit they don't understand, which promptly get rubbished by the rest of the community.
(oh, and also for respected physicists to work it out and then put out ill-advised papers based on statistics they readily admit they don't understand, which promptly get rubbished by the rest of the community.
boris the spider,
Fri 23 Sep 2011, 23:47,
archived)
actually i think i'm being as clear as mudi could probably explain all this a bit more comprehensibly
( boris the spider,
Fri 23 Sep 2011, 23:49,
archived)
is that where suggested the concentric rings on the wmap image were left over gravitational waves?
Rebel biscuit stercore sumus et nos esse novimus,
Fri 23 Sep 2011, 23:50,
archived)
YepThey never actually explained where the concentric rings were meant to have come from, and they used some really weird statistics where they compared everything with white noise rather than with simulated maps. That's like looking for discrepancies in a recording of a Beatles track by comparing it with white noise rather than a reasonably precise cover version. Or like looking for yellow blocks in a field of blue instead of a field of random colour. The papers were not well received - which isn't entirely Penrose's fault; he's never pretended to be an observational cosmologist nor a statistician.
( boris the spider,
Fri 23 Sep 2011, 23:54,
archived)