Monday, December 31, 2007

"Lego Block" Galaxies in Early Universe

Witten:

One thing I can tell you, though, is that most string theorist’s suspect that spacetime is a emergent Phenomena in the language of condensed matter physics.


n this image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, several objects are identified as the faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. They are so far away that we see them as they looked less than one billion years after the Big Bang. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy.

The bottom row of pictures shows several of these clumps (distance expressed in redshift value). Three of the galaxies appear to be slightly disrupted. Rather than being shaped like rounded blobs, they appear stretched into tadpole-like shapes. This is a sign that they may be interacting and merging with neighboring galaxies to form larger structures.

The detection required joint observations between Hubble and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Blue light seen by Hubble shows the presence of young stars. The absence of infrared light from Spitzer observations conclusively shows that these are truly young galaxies without an earlier generation of stars.


I always like to think that while we refrain from the actual Lego Building block that a child may use, the infancy in our views of the universe, are principles and terms that a condensed matter theorist might use.


Likewise, if the very fabric of the Universe is in a quantum-critical state, then the "stuff" that underlies reality is totally irrelevant-it could be anything, says Laughlin. Even if the string theorists show that strings can give rise to the matter and natural laws we know, they won't have proved that strings are the answer-merely one of the infinite number of possible answers. It could as well be pool balls or Lego bricks or drunk sergeant majors.Robert Laughlin


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Update:


1 comment:

  1. For those looking to understand simplicity, it is more then the Mandelbrot Set of iterations.

    For an economist it might seem cut and dry to produce poster for the classroom school children, but in the real world, it is much different.

    See: Emergence

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