Back to the Beginning of Time

While some of us who had been engaged in a little prehistory examination of earliest QGP states as glast determination of high energy photons, the question, "to Be or not to be," how could we not ask what Professor Susskind offered up for examination under the title, "the elephant and the event horizon?"

What happens when you throw an elephant into a black hole? It sounds like a bad joke, but it's a question that has been weighing heavily on Leonard Susskind's mind. Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University in California, has been trying to save that elephant for decades. He has finally found a way to do it, but the consequences shake the foundations of what we thought we knew about space and time. If his calculations are correct, the elephant must be in more than one place at the same time.

I think there is still this far reaching philosophical question about what really started time? If "nothing" existed then how could we assume anything could arise from it?

While empirically Aristotle has lead the thinking, you know how I think don’t you:) Do you see me stand apart from Aristotle?

So I resolve this question in my own mind, even if I do refer to Gabriele Veneziano and his introduction of what began as string theory.

How could I resolve "anything" that has been taken down to the very first microseconds, while recognizing the value of anything "underneath the guise of building blocks of matter," and have said, "that this is the theory of everything?"

It only helped us to the point of the singularity, but it is much different then a complete death. The whole time reductionistic thinking has dominated the move back in history, there were other things going on, that us simple lay people were not aware of. Maybe for some scientists too?:)


Colliding galaxies, NGC 4676, known as "The Mice" (credit: Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA )

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. JWST will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. JWST will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. JWST's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.

JWST will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won't fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open only once JWST is in outer space. JWST will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth.

JWST Science

The JWST science goals are divided into four themes. The key objective of The End of the Dark Ages: First Light and Reionization theme is to identify the first luminous sources to form and to determine the ionization history of the early universe. The key objective of The Assembly of Galaxies theme is to determine how galaxies and the dark matter, gas, stars, metals, morphological structures, and active nuclei within them evolved from the epoch of reionization to the present day. The key objective of The Birth of Stars and Protoplanetary Systems theme is to unravel the birth and early evolution of stars, from infall on to dust-enshrouded protostars to the genesis of planetary systems. The key objective of The Planetary Systems and the Origins of Life theme is to determine the physical and chemical properties of planetary systems including our own, and investigate the potential for the origins of life in those systems.

So again, we are being lead by science here to look ahead to what plans for the future may have influenced, or caused the decsisons they did, on another trip to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope?

The Dark Ages of the UniverseBy Abraham Loeb

What makes modern cosmology an empirical science is that we are literally able to peer into the past. When you look at your image reflected off a mirror one meter away, you see the way you looked six nanoseconds ago--the light's travel time to the mirror and back. Similarly, cosmologists do not need to guess how the universe evolved; we can watch its history through telescopes. Because the universe appears to be statistically identical in every direction, what we see billions of light-years away is probably a fair representation of what our own patch of space looked like billions of years ago.

So then I am at a loss to explain that what happened billions of years ago near the beginning of this universe, could have ever been created in this universe now? Some body may say to you, "that the beginning of time and the distance of the beginning of the universe to now, has no correlation?"

If the circumstance are to be created in our colliders, then what said that mass determinations will ever arise from our research into the HiGG's, is not relevant, to what can be created in this space and time now?

Remember, everywhere you look in the cosmos this possibility exists. The WMAP is indictive of what I am saying.

So you say, the beginning of the universe and "the time created" to produce the particles of new physics, has no correlation into how this universe came into being?

Perhaps you may like to read Stephen Hawkings perspective on the beginning of time?

The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity, at which the laws of physics would have broken down. Nevertheless, the way the universe began would have been determined by the laws of physics, if the universe satisfied the no boundary condition. This says that in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge. The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again. However, the contracting phase, will not have the opposite arrow of time, to the expanding phase. So we will keep on getting older, and we won't return to our youth. Because time is not going to go backwards, I think I better stop now.