Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Move Over 'Dark energry', 'Big Wave' is here!

Interesting times :) Scientists have proposed a 'new' theory to explain the expansion of universe. Its called 'Big Wave'.

Time for a bit of story telling. When some 15 billion years ago as the Big Bang occurred, the universe as we see came in to existence. All these stars and galaxies were formed. Our own solar system came in to existence some 5 billion years ago. When Newton discovered gravity, this had an ominous sign for our universe - it would ultimately collapse on itself due to gravity. To erase our fears of this inevitable crunch came Albert Einstein who proposed that Universe was 'expanding' rather than contracting. He arrived at this conclusion mathematically wherein to balance the force of gravity he introduced the 'cosmological constant' as the fudge factor. He himself admitted that it was the 'Biggest Blunder' he committed because it just did not make sense. This cosmological constant worked against the pull of gravity and thus enabled the universe to expand.

Turns out, the universe IS expanding as it was confirmed by Edwin Hubble in 1929 when he stumbled upon the red shift pattern of galaxies. As a light emitting body moves away from you, the strength of light decreases resulting in shifting towards the red end of the spectrum. But this was truly unsettling. What was causing the universe to expand? and why should it be expanding when it should be contracting instead? And what if it did not contract and kept on expanding? Will it result in the Big Rip in which everything will be torn apart?

But it was a general belief that ultimately the gravity will take over this cosmological constant so universe will become stationary if not start to contract. Fast forward to mid 1990s and scientists are boggled by the recent discovery that universe is not just expanding - its expanding very fast and its speed is rising!

The observations stated that the universe we see around us, had the visible matter of only 4%! Where the hell was the rest of 96% of our universes mass?! The Biggest Blunder of Cosmological Constant not only looked neat now but it had to be made to wear new clothes. In came the concepts of Dark Energy and Dark Matter. Dark Energy constituted 74% of the matter and Dark Matter 22%. Dark Matter has been confirmed for its presence as it has affected objects near it but it can not be detected because the light does not interfere with it.

Dark Energy which constituted 74% of our universe's mass was still elusive. In fact it too is a fudge factor introduced to balance the mathematical equations. Now scientists have come up with a new explanation for the expansion of this universe. Call it a new opinion and its called 'Big Wave'. According to it the universe is not expanding rather a wave in space-time is making it 'appear' as if its expanding very fast. This Big wave was created by the Big Bang. Blake Temple of the University of California states it in the following manner.

Temple compared the wave to what happens when you throw a rock into a pond. In this case, the rock would be the Big Bang, and the concentric ripples that result are like a series of waves throughout the universe. Later on, when the first galaxies start to form, they are forming inside space-time that has already been displaced from where it would have been without the wave. So when we observe these galaxies with telescopes, they don't appear to be where we would expect if there had never been a big wave.
uh huh :)

Man is still searching for the 'truth'. Happy hunting.
And yeah you can read that again from the top :)

4 comments:

Leena S said...

ummm yea...i AM reading it again :P

Leena S said...

now that I have read it again....its a very interesting post as it pretty much just further cements my belief in the theory of 'incompletion.' we, as humans, will never know the complete truth. wenever we will think we know everything, there will be a new discovery nullifying the previous.

PostMan said...

'nullifying' or 'augmenting' the efforts to know the secrets? :)

a fan said...

I was lost when Dark energy and Dark matter came into picture since i couldn't picture them mentally ;)

And yes, human (not only man ;)) is searching for "truth" both on outside as well as inside.