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The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...

  • Thread starter Will The Serious
  • Start date
I came across this article when looking at my local news. It brought to mind the DS9 episode "Playing God" although in that case the "tiny universe" was a "natural" phenomenon rather than an experimental construct.


studyfinds.com

Scientists Built A Tiny 'Universe' And Let Time Grow Inside It

Ultra-cold atoms, no clock needed: a physicist's tiny 'universe' experiment hints that time grows from within, not from outside.
studyfinds.com studyfinds.com
 
This experiment, to me, seems self-fulfilling.

If I were to formulate that time was a consequence of water waves passing and made predictions that time did not pass on a pond that was flat calm. I might design a clock that only ticked when a wave pasted. I would not be surprised that a calm day would be evidence that time did not advance for the pond when there were no waves to make my clock tick.

Maybe I'm simplifying this experiment too much, but it seems like the clock, internal to the "mini-universe", was specifically engineered to move only when there was change to the order of energy within that quantum space. So, of course comparing changes to that clock with the external laboratory clock would shows an emergent value for localized time.

Those are some provocative words "mini-universe", "entropic time", "big bang-like expansion, "big crunch", that are being thrown around in that paper.

-Will
 
New channel I have not watched before but interesting stories

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The original 2011 Nobel Prize winners are a bit upset since their analysis of the Universe Expansion Rate is Accelerating has been counter manded by new research from a different group that says other wise and the Rate of Expansion is Decelerating.
Now it seems to be a brouhaha within the Astro-Physics world.
 
A pillar of cosmology is the Cosmological Principle (Milne 1935) stating that the Universe approaches isotropy and homogeneity with increasing scales.
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https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/467/3/2787/2957031

I have to believe the universe is so much more vast than the farthest observable objects that our "bubble" of limited observations has to be less than a one in one-trillionth of Everything. There will always be more beyond.

What does that mean regarding the concept of a non-Copernican observer? Of course we are non-Copernacan observers. But, would the distribution of energy in a Big Bang formed universe over more than 13 billion years ago still be locally inconsistent to such an observable degree? Possibly.

However, it is also possible to misinterpret observations such as light shifts, which may not indicate changes in velocity where a momentary velocity is the only information the light shift can provide.

The Nobel Prize was awarded for research into the expansion rate of the Universe that brought two foundational concepts to the fore. One is the conclusion that our universe is accelerating in its expansion, and two, the addition of "Dark Energy" to explain that acceleration. Considering the cosmic scale and the idea of General Relativity bending space-time, the acceleration we observe in the expanding universe is probably not a result of any forces but the bending of space-time.

If we take that first Singularity as the ultimate gravitational well that bent all space and time back in to itself, all paths (geodesics) led inward. But, with the impossible explosion of that singularity, with its initial burst of energy to create the expanding universe, those inward leading geodesics unravel. The father out the universe expands, the less those inward geodesics point inward. Their affect on space-time would necessarily lead to a growing acceleration as they weaken and expand (time speeds up the farther from that central Singularity things get), making it look like the universe is under the influence of Dark Emergy, when it is really the shifting acceleration vectors of space and time itself.

Just a thought.

-Will
 
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I watched a very interesting video that said that there is an area of space where light is slowing down. Not by a little, but by a lot. And scientists don’t know why.
If I can find the link I will add it.
Found it!

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A black hole, maybe??
 
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Leave it to Gödel to point out the incomplete job when everyone thinks they're done.
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I'm not sure, I don't fully understand the math, but I don't think these Gödelian loops need to be small enough to make a single lifetime the length of the any of the loops, but maybe they are also so small that the jumps back in time could be so short and quick as to be so fast we couldn't even notice.

In a universe made of space-time, to move along a fourth axis (time), we must move into the other three where there is nothing in the way. We're can't just stand there or we get fused with our other self that is also "there" (occupying the same, x,y,z location).

-Will
 
Any occupied time machine has to be a spacecraft. Two cosmic strings that have whiplashed past each other twice allows an entry and exit such that you don't meet yourself.

The laser spring I described at the fusion thread sounds a lot like the Mallet retro-signal concept...what with the spiral and all
 
camdudetenger2018 said:
i still wonder if there are goverments within the governments that are building time machines and portals to travel in the multiverse
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So they're the cabal that changed things in 2015 for the worst /s Had to be some kind of shenanigans lol. The world was relatively good in 2014 / 2015 then it just took a very sharp turn to the crazy with Trump..

OK video with Neil Degrasse Tyson. He's a bit of a show pony

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Kamen Rider Blade said:
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Click to expand...
...defying expectations that it should be too small to hold onto an atmosphere.
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What is it about being smaller than the moon that would make it so unlikely that an atmosphere would hang around? Here, within the circle of Neptune's orbit, for example, CMEs would blow off an atmosphere from moons and large asteroids; the mother planets may even pull atmosphere off their satellites, but out beyond Neptune, the atmosphere stripping effects of a CME would be a pretty rare event, I would guess.

It is surprising that there aren't more atmospheres clinging to these dwarf planets. A large CME blows a little atmosphere off of some inner-circle planet and those far distance orbitals are out there like the outfielders in a baseball game ready to catch the clouds of gasses. The collision of icy elements with their surfaces would heat them up and liquify them again.

Of course, to have a gaseous atmosphere means they have to be warm enough, so the projection that 2002 XV93 has recently had its atmosphere replenished by an asteroid collision seems like a reasonable scenario.

Look at that, I think I've answered my own question.

-Will
 
Will The Serious said:
What is it about being smaller than the moon that would make it so unlikely that an atmosphere would hang around? Here, within the circle of Neptune's orbit, for example, CMEs would blow off an atmosphere from moons and large asteroids; the mother planets may even pull atmosphere off their satellites, but out beyond Neptune, the atmosphere stripping effects of a CME would be a pretty rare event, I would guess.

It is surprising that there aren't more atmospheres clinging to these dwarf planets. A large CME blows a little atmosphere off of some inner-circle planet and those far distance orbitals are out there like the outfielders in a baseball game ready to catch the clouds of gasses. The collision of icy elements with their surfaces would heat them up and liquify them again.

Of course, to have a gaseous atmosphere means they have to be warm enough, so the projection that 2002 XV93 has recently had its atmosphere replenished by an asteroid collision seems like a reasonable scenario.

Look at that, I think I've answered my own question.

-Will
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There's also the issue of mass/gravity. Mostly 'heavier' gasses would have some chance of hanging around for a while but, lighter gases would be more likely to just drift away.

Even the Earth - many times more massive than that little rock - has lost significant atmospheric gases over it's long life.
 
StarCruiser said:
lighter gases would be more likely to just drift away.
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That's my first thought, why would a gas, no matter how light, just defy gravity and drift away? Something would have to push it away. Even a free floating cloud of gas stays loosely together in space. The repulsive forces of gasses that cause them to expand have their limits. Their own mass would hold them together as well as any capillary effect they would have making them cling together.

Water vapor, once it loses just a little of its heat energy through radiation, would solidify as loosely held together ice, collecting more and more ice particles until it's mass grew to the point that it could warm the inner core of ice enough to melt the solid ice into, first a growing monolithic ice block, then with a liquid core, eventually supporting a core of heavier elements sinking in to replace the liquid ice. But, a gaseous atmosphere would necessarily require the conditions to maintain a gaseous state.

-Will
 
Gas molecules have a distribution of velocities determined by temperature. Molecules with high enough velocity can escape the gravitational pull. As the distribution re-equilibrates, eventually the gas is lost from the system.

The magnitude of the average molecular velocity goes as √(T/M) — the square root of absolute temperature divided by molar mass — so lower temperature and higher molecular mass of the gas molecules allow a gravitating body to hang onto an atmosphere for longer. Having a magnetic field to shield against the solar wind also helps. A Fermi problem for undergraduate physics students is to estimate the average time a helium atom takes to escape the Earth's exosphere where the mean free path is large enough to allow ballistic escape.

The average time it takes a helium atom to escape is a couple of million years.

Atmospheric escape - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Recently, there was talk about two kinds of liquid water…coexisting in some kind of back-and-forth relationship.
phys.org

Researchers use AI to evaluate a systematic framework to describe molecular order in liquid water

Water is the most abundant liquid on Earth's surface, and it is highly anomalous compared with other liquids because it expands upon freezing. The anomalies in water have been linked to how its microscopic structure changes with temperature and pressure. However, there is no systematic scheme...
phys.org phys.org

I wonder if that might play a role at a certain size.

I have heard it said that it is easier to get funding for advanced research as opposed to basic science.

That seemingly mundane substances can still bewilder us is cause to rethink said position.

More
phys.org

Scientists observe water's behavior in a single molecular layer

New research has revealed that water behaves differently when confined to spaces just one molecule thick. For the first time, scientists have directly measured the vibrational signatures of truly two-dimensional water. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers used ultrathin...
phys.org phys.org
 
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Indeed, there are over 20 different phases of water ice. The two coexisting liquid phases is new to me and I wonder whether groups of molecules can remain in quantum superposition of the two phases and, if so, for how long. It also makes me wonder if the claims of water having memory might now have some credibility. There might also be implications for how life might depend upon or exploit these two phases. For such a ubiquitous substance, its properties have not been studied enough, it seems.
 
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https://phys.org/news/2026-06-scientists-molecular-evidence-liquid.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03301-8

But the study revealed something beyond support for the existence of the two structures. The way Structure A and Structure B interconvert depends on where the system sits in the phase diagram. In the high-density liquid phase, the interconversion proceeds via an "upper semi-loop" pathway through a single transition state. In the low-density liquid phase, it follows a different "lower semi-loop" pathway through a different transition state.
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This will be highly fascinating to look into more.

-Will
 
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