Skip to main content

One for kavips--and my bid for my own science Kavipsian

The news today in science is the discovery of a dark flow of energy in the universe unrelated to the general inflationary expansion:

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."


The key to this is not the description of the flow or how it was found, but this:

The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there's a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started travelling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can't know how big the whole universe is), but we can't see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe.


This is literally earth-shattering, for one particular reason.

The inflationary theory suggests that our observable universe is only one infinitesimal part of the larger whole: we exist essentially in a bubble universe within the larger multiverse.

Foundational to this theory is an assumption I have never liked: that we can never exchange information or actually directly observe anything about those areas beyond the observable universe. Sure, we can hypothesize, but we can never even really theorize in a scientific sense, because real theories have to be falsifiable. That means that a real theory has to include a mechanism for proving it's not true. If you don't have any way to test it, it's a conjecture or a hypothesis, but not a theory.

This possibility that we can see the indirect impact of a force external to the observable universe plays hell with that idea.

If we can deduce that a flow of dark matter is being caused by forces external to the known universe, we will eventually begin to be able to deduce the parameters of that force--and then we will have what we have long been told we could never have: direct, testable information about a part of the universe apparently separated from us by the light-speed barrier.

And--this is the critical piece--if we can get one piece of information from there, there is no effective barrier to getting other descriptive information from that region, even if only by finding other more subtle impacts of that external region.

In other words, if this proves out, it is a breakthrough of momentous proportions, because it holds out the hope that the light-speed barrier is not--at least for the purposes of passing information--an ultimate barrier.

Warp Seven in that direction, Mr. Data. Let's find out what's out there.

Comments

Anonymous said…
So far I think, this puts you in first place for the scientific kavipsian....

An amazing breakthrough, and to think, I saw it on this site first.

Nice analysis towards the end, but you don't seem to be a proponent of string theory I gather?

Good job with explaining Guth's inflationary theory by the way...

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?