Isn't the real quandary that everywhere you look the "lumps" in nature's gravy are highly organized?
That implies that there's a very common pathway for disorder to produce order, forcing us to simply toss the cosmic implications of thermodynamics out with the wash water. So the exception to the rule is that highly uniform forces can feed the emergence of highly organized systems. A rather simple explanation for what seems to be our most common observation of the universe. http://synapse9.com/signals
As one of the authors of the mentioned paper (that was embargoed by Nature until November ... so well after the conference in Chicago) I would just note that the correct scientific procedure is always to investigate if the data are consistent with the theory or not. Discarding any anomaly as a statistical fluke is the simplest way to save your theory but this didn’t always work in the past (and, in my opinion, is not what you would expect from a serious scientist). Besides, any scientific progress is built over unexpected anomalies. Will see what future data will say in this case, where the “excellent probability” of a statistical fluke mentioned by Overbye is below the 0.01%.
No matter how elegant, simple and beautiful is your (inflationary) theory, experimental data will have the last word. If the cosmic gravy is lumpier than what you expected after following the recipe then it may also be that you got a bad recipe or that you used bad ingredients. At worst you can always justify it as a statistical fluke...but the risk is to learn nothing from your possible mistakes.
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Just run it through a sieve. I know it's cheating, but I won't tell if you won't.
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I shall attempt to bring this up at the table tonight and see if I get slapped for saying, "Your gravy reminds me of the CMB." Or if they kids say, "There he goes again talking about that mathy stuff."
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But for 'imperfections' or 'mistakes' in the Big Bang and spacetime and matter and anti- matter and supernovae and neutron stars and black holes and DNA replication there wouldn't be one biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human race species that began in Africa 300, 000 years ago still living on Earth in our solar system and galaxy.
What hath God aka Mother Nature wrought and why?
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For the life of me I can never wrap my head around the notion that our universe was at one time of sub-microscopic size, or even the size of a grapefruit — no matter how hot or dense it was said to be. I often think of this (not joking) when preparing our recycle material for pick-up. Try as I may to reduce the size of our output by flattening milk cartons, beverage cans, boxes and the like, I can only reduce it in size so much. That’s when I try to imagine our universe originating in a size so small we wouldn’t even be able to see it — and with teeny “lumps” in it besides!
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@Joe Shatus Yes, you have to wonder what "size" even means in a case like this. It's not as if it's being measured from outside: any proto-calipers or yardstick, or grapefruit for that matter, would be inside the "big grapefruit", and proportionately tiny. But they clearly mean something, it's just not intuitively obvious. It seems to have something to do with the amount of empty space between things, as if new empty space were being produced. Or something.
The most poetic of science writers comes through again. Thanks Mr. Overbye...and may your gravy be filled with lumps and your Thanksgiving be filled with good cheer.
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Such gravy gives me cosmic indigestion, because I can’t know if I’m near the kitchen at all, let alone standing the heat.
Imagine a circle, with two points on it connected. Suppose that the circle stands for a sphere, and the surface of the sphere stands for space-time itself. Quantum entanglement happens because the two points are connected in a dimension in which space-time itself is expanding.
The “flatness” of the expanding universe is that “surface” relative to a stance outside space-time itself (which string theory posits)—a stance in-principle inaccessible to anything other than mathematical conjecture.
The Standard Model would break down inasmuch as the dimensions in which space-time IS is itself non-uniform, causing conflicting data about the Hubble Constant (rather than error), as space-time itself is warped by the dimensions it’s expanding in (e.g., Dark Energy, which acccelerates expansion, isn’t effecting the expansion uniformly).
It’s like, when you shine a light through a glass rod, the light itself—to itself, so to speak—is always going straight through the rod, no matter how bent or twisted it is from a perspective outside the rod. To the light, the space is linear, but the rod itself is twisted TO a dimensionality outside the rod’s path of light.
Of COURSE, there are dimensions inaccessible to space-time: The Big Bang started in “Somewhere” outside space-time.
Earthlings calling older star systems: We need some cosmic Pepto-Bismol.
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@gary e. davis The worst thing is that when we tell our self-important kids that they are NOT the center of the universe, we're lying.
@Pat Roberts Yeah.
And all the kids must take to heart that no gods will arrive to save the Earth, because the evolution of Mother Gaia requires axiological geocentrism in the Anthropocene of Our Anthropic Locale.
Our universe is a subset of dimensions in which it expands. So, The Universe might be Singular with its bubbles of the throw of trans-cosmic dice that allows physicality which unwittingly allows intelligence imagining gods: some helpless personification of Our cosmic romance of The Origin of Our Anthropic Bubble.
And there’s no way to know how many universes there are (like the fish seeing themselves in the side of the aquarium)—or whether or not the especially-blue area in the COBE image is our universe’s inflation bumping the brane (the "Presencing") of another universe.
Maybe the COBE image is what quantum foam "Is" to itself.
@gary e. davis There's a problem w/ the image of space/time as the surface of a sphere, and entanglement represented as a line connecting two points, through the inner space of the sphere? Because in that dimension, there would still be considerable differences in the distances between the various pairs of dots, and entanglement, as I understand it, is immediate for any pair, anywhere in space/time (or at least in space). It's not a shortening of a given distance, it's something that doesn't have anything to do with distance at all, long or short. Like, my brother is just as much my brother, no more or less, whether on the other side of the world, or right here at the kitchen table. Doesn't have anything to do with the distance.
Happy Thanksgiving, Dennis! From Berkeley - I give thanks for your books, and your thought-provoking articles, which I have followed since early days. Mark
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Once when my Mother was on holiday from myself and my siblings, one of my sisters made dinner complete with gravy.
We were quite merciless and she was a terrible cook, so we looked forward to another fine ribbing at her expense.
The gravy arrived in the best gravy boat and while she went to fetch the bird we crowded round to see the reason for Dad's pained expression.
There floating in a sea of chicken fat was the 'gravy' a brown bobbing blob, worse we were to be denied our fun as Dad took pity on her, and admonished us-"not one word!!"
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reminds me of my sister's gravy.
I always think it is mashed potatoes! That thick and gloppy. No flavor at all. We just smile and push it around on the plates.
I designed and built some of the millimeter wave components in the WMAP spacecraft. Whenever I have visitors and show them the map of the cosmic background radiation produced by WMAP, I try to explain the "lumpiness" of the distribution of matter in the universe. Their eyes glaze over as I try to explain vibrational density modes such as those that happen when you pluck at the stem of a water balloon. I still can't explain how the results show that the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
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@Pat Roberts That's the trouble: from the non-calculus-knowing side, I see people trying to explain things that they understand, but at some point the images from ordinary experience don't quite work... or, maybe we are "understanding" it all as much as they are, but just not able to do the math...
So I guess I am to be the first commenter to point out the Frank Zappa connection in all this?
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Certainly Zappa knew all about the Unified Theory (after all, One Size Fits All).
@LRoy Goldberg
Good point, Elroy.
P.S. Well spotted, Sir!
@Garry R: And Hugh Romney might have been introducing a whole new theoretical model!
Making gravy without lumps is super easy.
Just make a roux(heat oil and slowly add flour while stirring) before doing anything else.
Not hard at all.
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@James Jones: Sure, easy. But it's the "slowly", and the "while stirring", and maybe even the "heat oil"... I imagine most of them add the flour too fast, and then get impatient and pour in the milk too soon, without stirring enough... but there are probably other things that can be done wrong....
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I'd like a picture of those stardust waffles.
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How many universes are there? We could adopt the notion that universe stands for all of space, the currently observable and that which we are yet to or never will be able to perceive. Will we ever be able to observe infinity? Stay closer to home. There is more comfort in that thought. My preference is a universe that makes room for portions that have, within the reach of a particular observer, closed characteristics that can be incorporated into the universe of another observer, with a greater breath of observational powers, as generally flat with some number of "lumpy" perturbations. I always have enjoyed the notion of being the fly in the tomato soup.
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Great recap. There are still so many questions to be answered, it's easy to forget how much humanity has discovered. It is truly quite amazing. Think of the thousands of generations of humanity who never had an opportunity for such knowledge. It is something to be grateful for.
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