[HN Gopher] The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than Expected
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The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than Expected
Author : tinmandespot
Score : 74 points
Date : 2020-12-21 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| akka47 wrote:
| I always get a feeling of existential dread when I read these
| kind of news.
| yokem55 wrote:
| Don't worry too much about it. In the end, everything will be
| nearly 0k.
| xwdv wrote:
| The worry is that not only will we be utterly destroyed, but
| that the destruction will be so thorough it will blow
| backward through time erasing all events that ever happened
| and making it so that we never even lived. That means
| everything we experience right now didn't happen, we are just
| seeing a probability of what could happen but didn't because
| it's all destroyed. These lives mean nothing.
| rytill wrote:
| I don't see how it's possible to un-make-something-happen.
| It already happened. It's gone. You can't kill what's
| already dead.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| If there is no afterlife, then oblivion is our inevitable
| destiny.
| xwdv wrote:
| No afterlife, no prelife, no life.
| twic wrote:
| Reminds me of a Stephen Baxter story:
| http://www.sixwordstories.net/2009/08/big-bang-no-god-
| fadeou...
|
| (the story is - for once, literally - in the URL)
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| That's a very specific worry.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| "Everything we experience right now, didn't happen, we are
| just seeing" - Who exactly is seeing?
| maedla wrote:
| It seems like in that case there isn't much to worry about
| then :)
| p1mrx wrote:
| 0K should be uppercase.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That is brilliant.
| eloff wrote:
| I appreciate your optimism. I tend to be optimistic about the
| future myself. But there is no law of the universe that
| everything will work out ok. Only if we make the right
| decisions as a species and we don't get unlucky.
|
| I'm quite apprehensive that the great filter lies ahead -
| that technology accelerates too rapidly compared to our
| wisdom and we end up nearly destroying ourselves. We're
| getting the ability to program life itself and to likely to
| democratize the ability to harness the forces inside the
| atom. Neither of which we're ready for as a species.
| kiba wrote:
| What does it mean to not pass the great filter? Humanity or
| their successor stop existing?
| bartwe wrote:
| We won't be there ourselves anyways...
| woko wrote:
| I think it was a joke about zero Kelvin.
| grey-area wrote:
| I believe the OP said 0K, not OK.
|
| There may not be a universal law which says everything will
| be OK, but there is one which says everything will be 0K in
| the end.
| unionpivo wrote:
| had to read that twice to get it :)
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| "The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident
| religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and
| forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
| civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in
| love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and
| explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,
| every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and
| sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of
| dust suspended in a sunbeam" - Carl Sagan
|
| And that pale blue dot means nothing in a cosmic scale. Stop
| worrying and enjoy the incredible fortune of being alive.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Time runs slower when you're young; but then as you age there's
| less time in each day. Perhaps it's the same for everything else
| that experiences time, from us to galaxies and universes.
| edgefield0 wrote:
| A few years ago, a published article suggested an alternative to
| the universe expanding is mass decay. Older objects lose mass and
| therefore are red shifted. Why isn't this alternative plausible
| theory recieving such little attention?
| ricardo81 wrote:
| One thing I've always admired as a Layman about astronomy, is all
| the eloquent deductions they've been able to make that adds
| another framework of ways to discover new information,
| particularly the discovery of Cepheids.
|
| Obviously the engineering side is also as impressive, being able
| to look at objects light years away and using the paltry several
| hundred million miles our Earth orbit takes us around the sun as
| a means of information discovery.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| When this article talked about the ladder of standard candles, I
| started to wonder: when using the brightness of supernovae
| between near and far galaxies, what about intergalactic dust
| absorbing some of the light? Wouldn't that mess up the ability to
| just straighforwardly determine the distance from the brightness
| in a 1/r^2 way?
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Here's a narrated video about this current cosmological crisis:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sfvQ_fsil4
|
| This is one of the key graphics:
| https://i0.wp.com/particlebites.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
| jart wrote:
| tl;dr the universe is expanding at 73kmph rather than 68kmph.
| c-smile wrote:
| If your "tl;dr" would be true then there will be no difference
| between day and night ...
|
| 3600 times faster than that ...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| kilometers per second per megaparsec, not kmph.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Actual title:
|
| _Astronomers Get Their Wish, and a Cosmic Crisis Gets Worse_
|
| There seems to have been a reframing of the "crisis" at some
| point, with "discrepancy in measurements" becoming "expanding
| faster than expected" which latter seems to imply the Reiss camp
| has the expansion rate correct compared to the earlier mystery as
| to which might be true and why they might be different but both
| sides on an equal footing otherwise.
|
| Reader (me) misunderstanding, actual change in scientific
| perception or PR work by somebody?
| User23 wrote:
| One thing that really frustrates me about cosmology, or at least
| popular science reporting and books, is a particular kind of lack
| of intellectual rigor. Specifically, even as a layman, it's clear
| that observation and model are being conflated.
|
| Cosmology is a science in the broadest sense of being a field of
| human knowledge, but it isn't a science the way that, for
| example, physics is. It would better be described as a
| phenomenology[1]. I'm sure many will disagree with this factually
| more accurate description, because of the emotional role their
| ideation of science plays in their lives, but I believe it has
| greater intellectual utility and that a phenomenology can even be
| of greater value than an experimental science. This framing helps
| us understand that we should spend less time on trying to come up
| with dubious "natural experiments"[2] and more on the collection
| and publication of data in useful formats. And most of all, to be
| absolutely clear what the assumptions of the model are, even the
| most trusted ones, because they may well prove incorrect. But
| maybe this is just an issue in the popular press?
|
| [1] "A description or history of phenomena." (not the definition
| from what we now call philosophy)
|
| [2] Which aren't experiments at all because selection isn't
| control.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I agree with you here. A phrase that always echoes in my mind
| when discussing cosmology is
|
| "All models are wrong - some models are useful"
|
| The farther you venture from the verified useful section of a
| model (by which I mean - the farther you are from model
| predications that have been validated with observational
| evidence), the less you should trust it - ALL MODELS ARE WRONG!
|
| And for most sciences - this isn't a huge deal - we can do lots
| of observational work easily right now. For cosmology... well -
| our observational data on the history of the universe it just
| astoundingly, mind-bogglingly, miniscule in comparison to the
| events we're interested in.
| twic wrote:
| > it's clear that observation and model are being conflated
|
| How so?
|
| > [cosmology] isn't a science the way that, for example,
| physics is.
|
| Why not?
|
| > I'm sure many will disagree with this factually more accurate
| description, because of the emotional role their ideation of
| science plays in their lives
|
| Perhaps i will once i understand what you're going on about.
| lisper wrote:
| No, you are absolutely wrong here. But before I explain why I
| need to ask a question: are you by chance a young-earth
| creationist? Because your rhetoric here is very similar to that
| employed by YECs. (The reason I ask is that my explanation is
| going to be different if you are not a YEC than if you are.)
| User23 wrote:
| I'm engaging in dialectic, not rhetoric. I don't believe
| rhetoric has a place on this site, at least not from me.
|
| Since this is a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity, why
| don't you please present me with both?
| cubano wrote:
| Wasn't there a time, not so long ago in fact (pre-1920's),
| where almost all your beloved physics models, beside Netwonian
| gravities, were wrong as well?
|
| So Astronomy, as a "hard science", is around 100 years
| behind...what's the big deal with that?
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