The Sound of Yet Another Cosmological Bubble Popping
Posted by: Robert Sandberg in Astronomy, tags: Big Bang, Ptolemy, tempus fugitThe October edition of Astronomy magazine reports that many cosmologists now think that the Big Bang, our Big Bang, is but one in a very long sequence of Bangs. If true, this renders our universe but one in a continuously lengthening series. The age of these universes in aggregrate then totals to trillions, not billions, of years.
First the earth was demoted from center of the universe to mere satellite by the force of Nicolas Copernicus’ mathematical proofs and arguments in his De revolutionibus which eventually led his successors to abandon Ptolemy’s geocentric model for a heliocentric vision. But this loss of status of place once enjoyed by our planet was minor in comparison to our recently coming to understand that the Milky Way galaxy is not the only galaxy, but, instead, but one galaxy among billions and billions of others swirling and racing in about and, sometimes, through one another. Edwin Hubble’s long hours of watching and measuring the redshifts of receding galaxies led to this incontrovertible conclusion.
And now, after just getting used to not being the center of space, we seem on the verge of realizing that the universe itself is not The Universe nor is it the sole source or measure of time’s beginning and subseqent flow.
The article concludes that it is coming more and more to look like time and space are infinite, without beginning or end.
Thoughts to fall asleep by?
Entries (RSS)