"Foam zone" could be letting in harmful cosmic rays, NASA says.
BYKER THANFOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS
PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2011
The edge of the solar system may be a frothy sea of giant magnetic "bubbles," a new NASA study says.
The new findings may mean that our system's magnetic barrier—once thought to be a smooth shield—may be letting in more harmful cosmic rays and energetic particles than previously thought.
The new "foam zone" theory is based on a computer model created using data from NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft, both launched in 1977 and currently about 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) from Earth.
In 2007 Voyager 1 recorded dramatic dips and rises in the amount of electrons it encountered as the craft traveled through the heliosphere—the "force field" that surrounds the entire solar system and is created by the sun's magnetic field. Voyager 2 made similar observations of these charged particles in 2008.
A NASA computer model suggests the electron readings make sense if it's assumed the spacecraft were entering and exiting magnetic bubbles lining the edges of the heliosphere.
These magnetobubbles should act as electron traps, so the spacecraft would experience higher than normal electron bombardment.
According to the new model, the bubbles are large—about 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) wide—and shaped "like long sausages," said Merav Opher, an astronomer at Boston University, at a NASA press conference today.
The bubbles might be created by the rotation of the sun, the scientists said.
Like Earth, our sun has a magnetic field with a north pole and a south pole. As the sun spins, this magnetic field—which extends all the way to the edge of the solar system—should get twisted and wrinkled, like a ballerina's skirt.
"Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are now, the folds of the skirt get bunched up," Opher said in a statement.
These "folds" can get broken up into numerous magnetic bubbles, creating a "foam zone" along the edge of the heliosphere.
"It's very bubbly as far as we can tell," Jim Drake, a University of Maryland physicist, said at the press conference. "This entire thing is like the most bubbly part of your Jacuzzi."
Unlike a hot tub's roiling surface, however, the foam zone should be relatively calm, Opher said.
"Inside this sea of bubbles, there are oscillations. ... They are not huge but they are measurable," he said. "I would say it's a quiet turbulence."
One implication of the new finding is that the edge of the heliosphere is more like a membrane than a shield against cosmic rays.
Galactic cosmic rays can become temporarily trapped in the foam zone, but they will eventually wander into our system and then zip along the solar magnetic field lines toward the sun and Earth, the researchers say.
"We're living on Earth, so we don't have to worry about, it because we're shielded by a thick atmosphere," Opher explained.
"But if you're an astronaut heading to Mars, you really have to care about the radiation environment in the heliosphere." Cosmic radiation can, among other things, compromise the body's immune system.
The new findings could also affect astronomers' understanding about the environments around other stars.
"What we know abut the heliosphere serves as a model for other stars," Opher said. "So the fact that we're revisiting what we know about the [heliosphere] will mean we will probably have to revisit what we know about other astrosheaths as well."
This article concludes the series, "Looking Beyond the Garden." As we’ve seen in two of the previous articles, a tiny portion of something exploded into space and grew to an enormous size. It created a universe of matter and energy, from which grew nebulas, stars, and planets, among other things. And eventually it produced abundant life on the planet Earth. The universe is still expanding today, a phenomenon that can be measured scientifically. But what came before this Big Bang?
The short answer is simply: We don’t know.
Here is a sampling of some current theories or aspects of theories as I understand them. I’ve tried to state them as simply and concisely as possible.
What came before the Big Bang?
1. Nothing - According to Einstein’s work there was nothing before the Big Bang. Period.
2. Hartle-Hawking theory- There was no time before the Big Bang. It didn’t exist before the formation of “spacetime” associated with the Big Bang. James Hartle and Stephen Hawking theorize that since beginnings have to do with time, the concept of a beginning of the universe is meaningless. Before the Big Bang there was just a “singularity,” a point at which something cannot be defined because it is infinite.
3. The inflationary universe - Just before the Big Bang, space was filled with some sort of unstable energy, which exploded and created the ever-expanding universe.
4. Self-creating universe - Before the Big Bang there existed a loop of “something.” Because it was a loop, it had no beginning and no end. At some point, a “branch” popped out of the loop, and that was the beginning of our universe.
5. Universes expand and collapse (Big Bounce Theory) - Since everything in nature is cyclical, universes are continually expanding and collapsing. Therefore, before the Big Bang there was another expanding universe.
6. The Multiverse theory - Sometimes called the meta-universe, the multiverse is a set of either infinite or finite possible universes (including ours) that taken together encompass everything that has ever existed, including all of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws that describe them. The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes also called parallel universes.
7. Ball of gravity and energy - Before the Big Bang there was a ball of gravity with energy trapped inside it. No mass or particles existed. There was a lot of activity inside the ball as the energy tried to escape gravitational pull. Finally, weak points developed in the ball and energy was able to escape via a giant explosion.
8. String theory - The basic particles in the universe are not small points but rather shaped like strings. We can only see three dimensions, but space can have more than that. Events before the Big Bang could have included a collision of our own universe with a parallel universe that was made of extra dimensions. These universes exist as membranes, connected by gravity. The science behind these ideas is complex and beyond the grasp of most of us, but now occupy some of the greatest minds in physics.
Parallel Universes
Conclusion - Ultimately, no matter what the theory—and despite the fact that there are theories that say there was nothing before the Big Bang [The Greek View: Creatio Ex Nihilo - re slater] we still tend to wonder: And what came before that?
From a scientific point of view, it’s hard for us to get our heads around a concept like: It just is, period. There is no precursor. To our earthbound sensibilities it just doesn't make sense to get something from nothing. There must be an agent. If we believe in an ultimate power (God, Supreme Being, Higher Power, Buddha, Great Mystery—the list goes on) the it-just-is concept may be a bit easier to accept. In the end, religion and spirituality fill the void left by science.
* * * * * * * * *
Summary
by RE Slater
To tack on to Larry Rettig's concluding observation, the something from nothing point of view (creatio ex nihilo) requires an agent: God. A God who creates something from nothing. But as has been noted this is an impossibility. Even with a "spiritual" God who is not "physical" (e.g., classic theism; this also dissents from the pantheistic argument that God and creation are one as to confusing ontology with cosmology).
Rather, from a Process Christian standpoint, we assert that there was always something there (sic, Process-Relational Panentheism). There were always a material forces present with-or-without timeful presence (1D space posits timelessness). If spacetime is concentrated by overwhelming quantum gravities then there can only be quantum forces in stasis, not time. Time then becomes irrelevant. Basically, if we could walk around and look into this space, time would feel infinite rather than non-existent. For time to work there must be an irregularity between the relationships of quantumized material forces (cf. Wrinkles in Time, by George Smoot).
Thus, God is the First Order of Process who instigates a divine action onto, over, into, etc, the there which was there. That is, God subtends God's God-ness onto primordial forces thus creating a Secondary ordering of Processes which continue internally vis-a-vis cosmic inflation, expansion, contraction, merger separation, etc., between multiverses, or whatever science can imagine in the years to come.
This means that God's Self has inducted him/her/itself into all concurring processes - whether they be chaotic or random, ordering or disordering, but always granted a teleology of creating novel reactions to all previous novel reactions in a time-filled multi/uni/verse. As such, all secondary processes are granted the ability to (i) love (translated: create wellbeing and valuative relationships), (ii) undetermined freewill (indeterminate agency), and (iii) bring creative novelty into existence, among other divine qualities.
But with freewill can arise ungodlike qualities. On a human level these can be evidenced in racial inequality and social injustice. But on a natural scale it becomes harder to say what is, and what isn't, "good" for the universe. Death is a natural part of life. All material processes are mortal even though it's system of process is eternally immortal. So who can say if a tornado is "unnatural" though it destroys? Or a black hole is "unnatural" though it eclipses whole worlds while spawning new worlds and new life?
What can be said is that humanity must work towards unity and solidarity in healthy ways of restorative wellbeing, justice, and equality. Not only towards others but towards the Earth. Why? (i) We live in a process universe going about its task of being its process self. (ii) We have been spawned evolutionarily from universal processes. Hence, (iii) we are tasked to recognize how we fit into the process nature of life to do what we can within this life giving, life threatening, and deadly process system.
God is fundamentally, and intrinsically, good and loving. God's Self is a process-based God. God has wholly imparted his divine Self into existing, unformed creation. A creation which struggles towards life-giving qualities but also takes away those qualities within its random disorder and entropic design.
To imply moral and ethic from basic material processes would be unwise. The universe as a process yearns towards life even as it struggles against itself by its own agency. As a question of theodicy (sin and evil vs life and yearning for wellbeing, nurture, and self-giving) we can only say God is good and loving. How or what this means in a process universe becomes a more delicate, or nuanced, task of statement. Generally, the universe's teleology is towards wholeness, healing, and goodness. But broken down it's harder to see or to show evidence for in a process-filled entropic universe. And since I'm rambling this is a good place to stop. :)
Peace always,
R.E. Slater
May 18, 2021
Stephen Hawking Knew What Happened Before the Big Bang
Perhaps the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation,
originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Can science explain the origin of everything?
All models proposed so far to describe the origin of the Universe use quantum mechanical ideas to make sense of the beginning of time.
The first of these models proposed that the Universe came from an energy fluctuation out of the quantum vacuum — the quantum egg that gave rise to everything.
This is the eleventh article in a series about modern cosmology.
Can science figure out how the Universe came to be? The Big Bang model, as developed by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman, reconstructed the history of the Universe from about one ten-thousandth of a second after the “bang,” all the way to the formation of the first hydrogen atoms and the decoupling of photons when the Universe was about 400,000 years old. That last process gave rise to the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was discovered in 1965.
The breakdown of physics as we know it
In its infancy, the Universe was filled with a primordial soup of elementary particles and radiation, all furiously colliding. This picture of the early Universe has been amazingly successful, prompting physicists to push their models as far back in time as they might reach. But how far can they reach? How close to the very origin can scientific models arrive? Could they go all the way to t = 0, the beginning of everything? Or does the notion of time passing lose its meaning as we approach the origin?
This is an old problem, one philosophy sometimes calls the First Cause. If there really is an abrupt beginning of everything, a Universe that becomes itself at some point in the past, it must be due to an uncaused cause — a cause that cannot be preceded by anything else. Any model for the origin of the Universe uses established physical laws and places them within the conceptual framework of physics. Science cannot avoid using something to describe things, and this something presumes the existence of a material substrate. In other words, to see something hatch, we need to start with an egg, and the question is where this egg comes from. It is easy to fall into an endless regression, a problem famously expressed as “turtles all the way down.”
Thus, the building of a workable model for the origin of the Universe does not address the question of why this Universe operates the way it does. Science certainly provides many answers to the workings of nature, but we should not lose sight of its limitations. The question of why there is something rather than nothing should inspire us all to humility.
Mathematically, extrapolating any of the traditional cosmological models to time t = 0 leads to what we call a singularity. Matter density becomes infinite, the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite, and the distance between any two observers goes to zero. Disturbing as this may sound, the existence of a singularity is not to be taken too seriously. It signals the breakdown of general relativity, and of physics as we know it, at the extreme conditions that prevailed during the very first moments of the Universe’s existence. In essence, the singularity signals our ignorance of physics at these very high energy scales. Something else is needed here, and ideas abound. The most promising among them call for a blend of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Quantum fuzziness in the early Universe
The most dramatic effect from quantum mechanics is an intrinsic fuzziness of matter that manifests itself at atomic and subatomic distances. Close to the Big Bang singularity, the whole geometry of the Universe is to be treated by quantum mechanics, and as such, the very concepts of space and time become blurry. It may be that quantum mechanics will blunt the sharpness of the singularity by making it fuzzy.
Scientists monitored the brains of 4dying patients.Here's what they foundThere have been many attempts to marry Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics, but so far their promise far outpaces their success. Some of the best minds in theoretical physics are at this moment very busy trying to make this marriage work. As all authors working in this field should agree, any claim to understand physical conditions near the singularity must be met with substantial skepticism. Yet we push forward. We must try to obtain at least some information about the peculiar physics that dominated the beginnings of the Universe.
In 1973, Edward Tryon, then at Columbia University, proposed a pioneering idea of how to apply quantum mechanics to the beginning of the Universe. Tryon suggested that quantum fuzziness does not only occur when measuring positions and velocities, but also applies to measurements of energy and time. In the world of the very small, it is possible to violate the law of conservation of energy for very short times, Tryon proposed, even if the net energy of the Universe is zero.
This is not as crazy as it seems. Think of a billiard ball lying quietly on the ground. If it is not moving, it has no kinetic energy. If we measure gravitational potential energy from the ground up, it also has no potential energy. The ball rests at a zero-energy state. Now turn the ball into an electron. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we cannot localize an electron and tell its velocity simultaneously. The fuzziness inherent in the electron prohibits that.
“Nothing” is full of possibilities
Thus, in quantum mechanics, there is no zero-energy state. There is only the lowest possible energy state of a system, its ground state. Now, if there is an inherent uncertainty in the energy of a system, then the energy of the ground state can fluctuate. If we call this ground state a quantum vacuum, it follows that the quantum vacuum always has some structure to it. There is no such thing as a true vacuum in the sense of complete emptiness. Quantum mechanics forbids nothingness.
If there are energy fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, very interesting things can happen. For example, the E = mc2 relation tells us that energy and matter are interconvertible. A vacuum energy fluctuation can be converted into particles of matter. Sounds weird? Maybe, but it happens all the time. These particles are called virtual particles, living a fleeting existence before plunging back into the ever-busy quantum vacuum.
Tryon extrapolated the idea of quantum fluctuations to the Universe as a whole. He reasoned that if all that existed was a quantum vacuum, a bubble-like energy fluctuation out of this vacuum could have given rise to the Universe. Tryon proposed that the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation, originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.
Tryon’s proposal falls into the category of universes with a beginning, but created out of nothing. However, nothingness here, as well as in all the other examples of quantum-created universes that followed Tryon’s inspiring idea, must be understood in terms of quantum mechanical nothingness, and not from an absolute nothingness that translates to complete emptiness. In physics you simply cannot get something out of nothing. Creation ex nihilo is not the way of nature.
More Accurate Clocks Unleash More Disorder in The Universe, Physicists Say
BEN TURNER, LIVE SCIENCE
18 MAY 2021
What's the price of an accurate clock? Entropy, a new study has revealed.
Entropy – or disorder – is created every time a clock ticks. Now scientists working with a tiny clock have proven a simple relationship: The more accurate a clock runs, the more entropy it generates.
"If you want your clock to be more accurate, you've got to pay for it," study co-author Natalia Ares, a physicist at the University of Oxford, told Live Science. "Every time we measure time, we are increasing the Universe's entropy."
As we go forward in time, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system must increase. Known as the "arrow of time", entropy is one of the few quantities in physics that sets time to go in a particular direction – from the past, where entropy was low, to the future, where it will be high.
This tendency for disorder to grow in the Universe explains many things, such as why it's easier to mix ingredients together than separate them out, or why headphone wires get so intricately tangled together in pants pockets. It's also through this growing disorder that entropy is wedded so intimately to our sense of time.
A famous scene in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five demonstrates how differently entropy makes one direction of time look to the other by playing World War II in reverse: Bullets are sucked from wounded men; fires are shrunk, gathered into bombs, stacked in neat rows, and separated into composite minerals; and the reversed arrow of time undoes the disorder and devastation of war.
This intimate connection between time and entropy has fascinated scientists for decades. Machines, such as clocks, also produce entropy in the form of heat dissipated to their surroundings.
Physicists have been able to prove that a tiny quantum clock – a type of atomic clock that uses laser-cooled atoms that jump at highly regular intervals – creates more disorder the more accurately it measures time.
But until now, it has been very difficult to prove that larger, more mechanically complex clocks create more entropy the more accurate they get, even if the idea sounds good in theory.
"Clocks are in some way like little steam engines – you need to put work into them to measure time," Ares said, where the "work is the energy transfer needed to make mechanical devices like clocks run.
"In order to get that regular tick, tick, tick, you have to get the machine going. That means you need to invest in entropy production."
To test this idea, the researchers built a simplified clock made up of a 50-nanometer-thick, 1.5-millimeter-long membrane stretched between two tiny posts that they vibrated with pulses of electricity.
By counting every flex up and down as a tick, the team showed that more powerful electrical signals made the clock tick more regularly and accurately, but at the cost of adding more heat – and therefore more entropy – to the system.
Seeing this relationship between entropy and accuracy play out in a device much larger than a quantum clock has given the researchers confidence that their findings could be universal.
Perhaps if clocks didn't produce any entropy, they'd be just as likely to run backwards as they do forwards, and the more entropy they generate the more they're protected from stutters and backwards fluctuations.
"We don't know for certain yet, but what we've found – for both our clock and for quantum clocks – is that there's a proportional relationship between accuracy and entropy," Ares said. "It might not always be a linear relationship for other clocks, but it does look like the accuracy is bounded by the laws of thermodynamics."
Aside from being useful for designing clocks and other devices in the future, the researchers view their findings as laying the groundwork for further exploration of how the large scale laws of thermodynamics apply to tiny nanosized devices.
"We now have so much control over these tiny devices, and are able to measure them with so much precision, that we're rediscovering thermodynamics at a completely new scale." Ares said. "It's like the Industrial Revolution at the nanoscale."
The researchers published their findings May 6 in the journal Physical Review X.
