Adventures in Cosmology: Starting out Simply…
Why was entropy so low at the Big Bang? (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Back in 2010, SUNY-Buffalo physics professor Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues made a simple– a radically simple– suggestion: that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first — was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today).
The core idea is that the dimensionality of space depends on the size of the space observed, with smaller spaces associated with fewer dimensions. That means that a fourth dimension will open up — if it hasn’t already — as the universe continues to expand. (Interesting corollary: space has fewer dimensions at very high energies of the kind associated with the early, post-big bang universe.)
Stojkovic’s notion is challenging; but at the same time, it would help address a number of fundamental problems with the standard model of particle physics, from the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity to the mystery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
But is it “true”? There’s no way to know as yet. But Stojkovic and his colleagues have devised a test using the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, that could shed some definitive light on the question in just a few years.
Read the whole story in Science Daily, and read Stojkovic’s proposal for experimental proof in Physical Review Letters.
As we glance around for evidence of that fourth dimension, we might bid an indeterminate farewell to Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Laureate whose work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility led to the identification of self-organizing systems, and is seen by many as a bridge between the natural and social sciences. He died at the Hospital Erasme in Brussels on this date in 2003.
Prigogine’s 1997 book, The End of Certainty, summarized his departure from the determinist thinking of Newton, Einstein, and Schrödinger in arguing for “the arrow of time”– and “complexity,” the ineluctable reality of irreversibility and instability. “Unstable systems” like weather and biological life, he suggested, cannot be explained with standard deterministic models. Rather, given their to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, probabilistically.
source: University of Texas