77 pointsby mattm4 hours ago17 comments
  • mr_mitm33 minutes ago
    Discussed before:

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714228 (249 Comments)

    [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41847656 (79 Comments)

    [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006 (40 Comments)

    [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36784319 (1 Comment)

    Needless to say, this result is not considered credible by the scientific community. It's borderline crackpot territory if you ask me.

  • chrisnight2 hours ago
    > while also matching the universe’s historical expansion rate without requiring dark energy.

    I wonder which number this matches, since we’ve repeatedly measured 2 different values and we can’t figure out why they disagree. As much as this is currently non-peer reviewed ideas that probably won’t lead anywhere (as with most news articles about new research), radical ideas like this are probably what is needed to get to the truth of the Hubble tension and other paradoxes in cosmology.

  • mcv2 hours ago
    Fascinating idea. It reminds me of an attempt from a few decades ago where scientists recalculated all fundamental constants from fundamental properties instead of the rather arbitrary quantities we're used to. A surprising finding of that project was that all fundamental constants ended up very close to 1, with two big exceptions: and the age of the universe at 10^40 and the gravitational constant at 10^-40, suggestiong an inverse relationship between the two.

    It was probably a coincidence, but now there's another model with changing constants. I'd love to see where this goes.

    • stemchar2 hours ago
      > A surprising finding of that project was that all fundamental constants ended up very close to 1

      This does not mean anything, at all.

      • whizzter7 minutes ago
        I think it implies that the recalculated value was close to the original value (ie scaled by 1) for most constants apart from the 2 mentioned.
      • Affric2 hours ago
        The part they purport means something follows that. We would expect most constants to be fairly close to 1.
      • halflife2 hours ago
        Probably that 1 is a divine number, and all other numbers are inferior.

        Or it’s just humans project meaning into a meaningless universe.

        • stemchar2 hours ago
          > Or it’s just humans project meaning into a meaningless universe.

          What else is there to do?

          • ehecatl42an hour ago
            "a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry"

              -- Ecclesiastes 8:15
          • halflife2 hours ago
            Eat and procreate
    • skew-aberration2 hours ago
      • mcvan hour ago
        That's longer ago than I thought, but it sounds like it's the same thing.
    • adrian_ban hour ago
      That was most likely some bogus research paper written by people who did not understand what they were computing.

      Even among professional physicists, a surprisingly large number of them do not have clear ideas about the meanings of the fundamental constants and of the fundamental units of measurement. The reason is that the subject of metrology, even if it is the fundament of physics, is almost never treated correctly in physics textbooks, if it is mentioned at all.

      Ignoring the extra constants that might be needed in the theory of nuclear strong and weak forces, and also the extra constants that may be needed in certain variants of Einstein's theory of gravitation (e.g. "the cosmological constant"), in the physics that is encountered by the majority of people there are only 2 fundamental constants, which determine the strength of the electromagnetic interaction and the strength of the gravitational interaction, i.e. the constant of Coulomb's law of electric attraction and the Newtonian constant of gravitation.

      None of these 2 constants can be claimed to be particularly close to 1, even when expressed in natural units, much less when arbitrary units are used. These 2 constants can be expressed in several equivalent ways, but none of the different values obtained thus has any unexpected values.

      For example, a constant that is equivalent with Coulomb's constant is the so-called "fine structure constant" a.k.a. Sommerfeld's constant, about which a huge number of aberrant research papers have been written by people who did not know what it means. The "fine structure constant" is the speed of a particle with unit charge that revolves around a fixed particle with unit charge, when having unit angular momentum (in natural units). That speed is determined by the equality between the electric attraction force and the inertial centrifugal force, so it is a measure for the strength of the electric force and it is inversely proportional with the constant from Coulomb's law.

      The poor handling of metrology in modern physics textbooks is in contrast with classic masterpieces, like Maxwell's "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism", which started with a good description of how physical quantities are measured and how systems of fundamental units of measurement are chosen, because without such a solid base all the following theory can be flawed, as it frequently happens in some modern theoretical research papers, where bogus numbers are computed.

      In the SI system of units, besides the 2 constants of Newton and Coulomb there are a few other "fundamental constants", which are fake fundamental constants, because they are some exact numbers, chosen by convention instead of being measured experimentally, which are chosen is such a way so that the legal units, like meter, second, kilogram, have values approximately equal with the values corresponding to their old historical definitions.

      • maybewhenthesunan hour ago
        Agreed 100%

        If you pick other units, you can make the constants 1. You don't really need to 'recalculate' something for that.

        And while this can sometimes be useful to reframe your thoughts and even lead to new insights it doesn't really have an inherent meaning.

    • mock-possum2 hours ago
      > all fundamental constants ended up very close to 1

      What could that possibly mean?

      • jiggawatts2 hours ago
        Probably a misunderstanding of the concept of normalizing units to '1' so that, for example, the speed of light is is simply unity instead of arbitrary Terran units like 299 792 458 m/s or 186 282 miles/s.

        There's a few ways of doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units

        Alternatively, and more likely, it's based on the "relative" strengths of the different forces, where ratios of about 10^40 do tend to turn up.

        For example, the ratio of electric force versus gravitational attractive forces for a proton and an electron is 2.3 x 10^39 which is close.

        PS: A fun thing to numerological coincidence to consider is that 2^128 is about 3.4 * 10^38, which is weirdly close. It's almost like gravity is "rounding error" on a universe simulator made with 128-bit CPUs. Similarly, 2^256 is close to the Eddington number of ~10^80, which is the estimated number of particles in the Universe...

        • pmontra28 minutes ago
          We only have to figure how to rowhammer that cpu and finally make Star Trek teleport real. Or escape to other VMs.
    • mort96an hour ago
      > and the age of the universe at 10^40 and the gravitational constant at 10^-40

      I mean that literally doesn't mean anything? It literally depends on the units you choose to use?

  • jbotz16 minutes ago
    One possible falsification of this hypothesis (from earlier this year): https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/547/3/stag430/8507252...
  • justauseridan hour ago
    Does someone else get overwhelmed and just give up whenever you start thinking of how everything was created? It's an endless streak. I think by design – as in obviously if you start thinking what made a -> what made that made a -> … and very soon you have a recursive loop without an exit condition. So basically universe creation is possible case of OOM if ever it ran on any fathomable system, unless we posit that the resources will keep increasing for that system. I mean it's the same if we insert a deity like entity in this, because then there's who created that deity. As in – you know there's no end to it, unless you accept that one "<that> just happened" or "whatever".
  • dr_dshivan hour ago
    100 billion stars 100 billion galaxies 100 billion years.

    Give or take some orders of magnitude. It is enough to sit in awe

  • bmh1002 hours ago
    Have there been any peer reviewed papers published into reputable journals?
  • po1ntan hour ago
    I've never liked big bang as a concept. It sounds cartoonish for me like geocentric model. It's way too convenient that entire space evolved from a single point long time ago. It sounds like a child story in comparison to everything else we can prove so far.
    • mellosouls16 minutes ago
      Cartoonish/childish: That's why it's called "the Big Bang", it was a mocking reference coined by Fred Hoyle, a leading opponent of the idea.
    • Starlevel004an hour ago
      > It sounds cartoonish for me like heliocentric model.

      Do you mean geocentric?

      > It's way too convenient that entire space evolved from a single point long time ago.

      It didn't evolve from a single point.

      • po1ntan hour ago
        Geocentric. My bad, it's morning where I'm currently at. I know it's not a single point but to have an expansion, you must expand from some point.

        Also why do we accept doppler shifts as proof if we can't prove the time is uniform in space.

        • mmustapic35 minutes ago
          It didn’t expand from a point, it expanded at the same time from everywhere. Other things could have happened before that expansion, but currently there’s no way to know.
  • hypfer2 hours ago
    If true, then that's a heavy hit for the big bang theory intro song. I don't think they can just replace the fourteen with a twenty-seven, without the whole flow breaking completely.
    • silentsea902 hours ago
      Good thing nobody watches it any more? Bazinga.
      • moomoo112 hours ago
        my parents watch it and laugh at all the jokes.

        i used to think it was cringe and maybe it is, but many normies love that show and watching it with them when they find it funny is actually endearing.

        • 4ggr02 hours ago
          i could do with the jokes and watching it passively as a timesink, but my genz brain just can't get used to the canned laughs and claps. doesn't even matter which show, it feels soooo weird to see actors freeze for 1-2 seconds after every joke, like non-stop, repeating 4th-wall breaks.
          • moomoo1117 minutes ago
            i think i get you. i feel like you guys grew up with netflix type shows. im millennial and also never got into sitcoms, i find it hard to turn off my brain lol.

            i prefer the higher quality of modern shows that have richer narratives and are more immersive?

            but sitcoms for me have a sentimental value. my dad would come home tired after work and my parents would watch everybody loves raymond, and before sleep me and my dad would watch fresh prince of bel air and cosby show.

            big bang is the one of the last shows before my parents moved on to forming a youtube vlogs addiction.

  • kavalg2 hours ago
    Oh poor universe. As if she wasn't old enough already :)
  • kleene_op2 hours ago
    Every year or so we hear about new studies that double or halve the age of the universe.

    Until we get radically new data, I'll consider the universe ageless. This is the most elegant solution anyway.

    • Octoth0rpe2 hours ago
      > Every year or so we hear about new studies that double or halve the age of the universe.

      Not any reputable ones. The consensus on the estimated age of the universe has shifted only slightly in the last several decades.

      • colordropsan hour ago
        There's no way that it hasn't existed for infinity, for the value where universe = literally everything. It can't come from nothing, so it has always existed. I am obviously not aware of the formal definition of universe, considering there are theories of our universe being one of many bubbling in the cosmic foam.
        • marcus_holmesan hour ago
          Whereas I really like the idea that infinities cannot exist, so for any definition of the universe, it must have had a start somewhere/when.
          • colordrops18 minutes ago
            Why can't they exist? That's an arbitrary and unnecessary constraint.

            How could it start from absolutely nothing?

    • Larrikin2 hours ago
      This never actually happens.

      Since Hubble launched there's been a near complete consensus on the bounds that were radically reduced down from before. Perhaps you were born in the seventies or earlier? Well before CMB studies and the Hubble telescope launched.

      There's just been a ton of science trying to reconcile the difference in the upper and lower bounds that are far closer than they were before. But it's a few billion years, not doubling or halving.

    • psychoslavean hour ago
      It also depends what one name universe. That universe is ageless is not fundamentally incompatible with a BigBang like event occurring at some point in it.
    • donkey_brains2 hours ago
      We also hear that time is an illusion, which renders the whole debate moot anyway.
      • grishka2 hours ago
        We know nothing about the true nature of consciousness, and we can't describe time except through our own subjective experience of it. Spacetime might not even be the fundamental layer of the universe, it's just what we all collectively experience through consciousness. So until we figure out what we are, these questions will remain unanswered.
        • psychoslave42 minutes ago
          "What we are" and "how consciousness emerges and what it implies about itself and its relation to everything else" are two distinct considerations which only partially overlap.

          For the second part, it's completely fine to dismiss the first question as irrelevant as "what is 'it' in 'it rains '". That is, language artifact are not evidence of ontological correspondance in actual things happening. So, "we", "being", and "me" can be regarded as illusions. The illusion itself actually happen, but it's more straight forward interpretion is generally misguiding.

          The first approach on the other hand can lead to dismiss consciousness as relevant tool to reach some absolute substance which is postulated as ultimate reality. That is, there is some "being", and "I" and "we", just as there are actual ideal spheres in existence in a platonic sense.

          Both don't give much credits to the most trivial intuitive interpretation of phenomena, but they kind of point to very different directions.

      • treebeard9012 hours ago
        In a sense, time is just different fractions of counting the number of times a planet of monkeys goes around the sun. The monkeys then apply this limited concept of time to the entire universe. But then in the grand scheme of things, everything that is now was nothing at one point and presumably will also be nothing again, then the only evidence of time are the monkeys who tried to keep count of how many times they orbited a star. When everything returns to nothingness, time will have been an illusion.
        • psychoslave36 minutes ago
          We don't know if anything ever was and will return to nothingness and even if nothingness is a valid concept. We don't know if cosmos as a whole don't experiment a form of consciousness, which don't need to be anthropomorphized to be clear.

          And illusion implies that something exits, where the illusion can be casted and experimented.

      • joarv0249nw2 hours ago
        Isn't time related to the distance between objects eg. space. So if the distance is 0, time does not exist
      • somatan hour ago
        Lunchtime doubly so"

        --Douglas Adams

      • adzm2 hours ago
        Time is an illusion but not causality
      • konart2 hours ago
        Perception rather than illusion.
    • exe342 hours ago
      Every year or so we hear that super intelligence is around the corner and is also impossible, so I'll ignore LLMs entirely until there's new information.
  • zkmon2 hours ago
    The past is created by your observation and understanding.
    • mort96an hour ago
      So yesterday (which is the past) I went out to the pub with a couple of friends. This past is created by my current observation of it and understanding of it. If I stop observing or understanding that past it will cease to have happened. Is that it?
  • eddiewithzato2 hours ago
    Another hit to having answer for the fermi paradox, a universe this quiet is something to marvel at
  • NSUserDefaults2 hours ago
    But those hair implants...
  • moomoo112 hours ago
    Big Bong
  • b1122 hours ago
    Seeing as the universe existed before time existed, it would seem that the universe is infinitely old.
    • fasterik2 hours ago
      What does "old" mean before time exists?
      • b1122 hours ago
        Hence the stub in of infinity
    • marcus_holmesan hour ago
      Or zero old
      • b11227 minutes ago
        A time of 100 plus 0 is 100. A time of 100 plus infinity is infinity. Only one value changes the outcome, so that it represents something as existing.