'The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe'



Reuters
1/6/2011

VATICAN CITY — God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said Thursday.

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

"Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God," he said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica on the feast day.

While the pope has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Researchers at CERN, the nuclear research center in Geneva, have been smashing protons together at near the speed of light to simulate conditions that they believe brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth — and perhaps elsewhere — eventually emerged.

Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were "mind limiting" because "they only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality."

He said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.

"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth," he said.

Benedict and his predecessor John Paul have been trying to shed the Church's image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.

Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism — the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible — and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.

But it objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.






















church

Asteroid: Global Warming, Meteors, Asteroids ... end of the world

Astronomers spot 'potentially hazardous' asteroid just ONE month before it is due to pass close to Earth




By Daily Mail Reporter
28th September 2010



Astronomers have spotted a 'potentially hazardous' asteroid less than one month before it is due to pass close to Earth.

The object, given the name '2010 ST3', is 150 metres in diameter and will pass within four million miles of Earth in mid-October.

It was discovered using the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope in images taken on September 16th, when it was about 20 million miles away.

It is the first 'potentially hazardous object' (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey, using a new telescope designed to scan the skies for dangerous asteroids.

'Although this particular object won't hit Earth in the immediate future, its discovery shows that Pan-STARRS is now the most sensitive system dedicated to discovering potentially dangerous asteroids,' said Robert Jedicke, a University of Hawaii member of the PS1 Scientific Consortium, who is working on the asteroid data from the telescope.


'This object was discovered when it was too far away to be detected by other asteroid surveys,' Jedicke noted.

Most of the largest PHOs have already been catalogued, but scientists suspect that there are many more under a mile across that have not yet been discovered.

These could cause devastation on a regional scale if they ever hit our planet. Such impacts are estimated to occur once every few thousand years.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center (MPC), said, 'I congratulate the Pan-STARRS project on this discovery.


'It is proof that the PS1 telescope, with its Gigapixel Camera and its sophisticated computerized system for detecting moving objects, is capable of finding potentially dangerous objects that no one else has found.'

Pan-STARRS expects to discover tens of thousands of new asteroids every year with sufficient precision to accurately calculate their orbits around the sun.

Any sizable object that looks like it may come close to Earth within the next 50 years or so will be labeled 'potentially hazardous' and carefully monitored.

NASA experts believe that, given several years warning, it should be possible to organize a space mission to deflect any asteroid that is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.

PS1 and its bigger brother, PS4, which will be operational later in this decade, are expected to discover a million or more asteroids in total.

They will also spot more distant targets such as variable stars, supernovas, and mysterious bursts from galaxies across more than half the universe. PS1 became fully operational in June 201.





















space

The End of Times (really, or 50% chance)

The end really is nigh... but don't panic, there's only a 50% chance of it coming in the next 3.7BILLION years




By Niall Firth
30th September 2010
Daily Mail






There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new study.

Some physicists believe that our universe - and everything in it - will continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate, splitting into newer universes as it goes.

This is known as theory of 'eternal inflation' and has spawned the idea of the 'multiverse' in popular science-fiction.

But a group of scientists have argued that the laws of physics do not work in a universe that is never-ending and continues to expand – it must end at some point.

A star explodes in a Hubble space image. Some scientists believe that our universe is not never-ending and will finish suddenly one day in the future

And Raphael Bousso, at the University of California, Berkeley, has worked out when this is most likely to happen.

His team’s argument is that in an infinite universe any event that can happen, will happen. Furthermore it will happen an infinite number of times.

The problem with this is that if there are an infinite number of instances of everything happening it is then impossible to determine the probability of them happening at all.

This means that the laws of physics, as we know them, no longer work.

We're stuck between a rock and a hard place,' says Bousso. 'If you don't like the cut-off, then you have no way of making predictions and deciding what's probable in eternal inflation.'

The only way to make our current universe work is to include a catastrophe at some point in the future which ends time - and takes us with it.

Using complicated theoretical physics and advanced mathematics the team calculated when this is most likely to occur.

Bousso says: in the study: ‘Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years.’

This means that time and the universe would end before our own Sun has died.

Other physicists give us slightly longer, calculating the end of time to occur within the next five billion years.

But there is some good news. The research team say that, due to physics, we will not know when the end of time is approaching before it actually takes place.













 
 
 
universe

Matter and Anti-Matter: The Origin of the Universe

May 17, 2010

A New Clue to Explain Existence

By DENNIS OVERBYE
The New York Times



Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review.

It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.

The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.

Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.

Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”

Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”

Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the results are confirmed by other experiments.

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”
















Close

The Number of Universes

Physicists Calculate Number of Parallel Universes


October 16th, 2009
by Lisa Zyga


(PhysOrg.com) -- Over the past few decades, the idea that our universe could be one of many alternate universes within a giant multiverse has grown from a sci-fi fantasy into a legitimate theoretical possibility. Several theories of physics and astronomy have hypothesized the existence of a multiverse made of many parallel universes. One obvious question that arises, then, is exactly how many of these parallel universes might there be.

In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16. If that number sounds large, the scientists explain that it would have been even more humongous, except that we observers are limited in our ability to distinguish more universes; otherwise, there could be as many as 10^10^10^7 universes.


[To read the rest of the article, click on the title link]







physics