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A new controversial analysis by an astronomer of Indian origin has suggested that the Big Bang might not have come at the beginning of the Universe, but after a long and slow period of shrinkage.

According to a report, the theory has been put forward by Amit Yadav, an astronomer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

If this theory holds any ground, it would show that the early universe did not inflate with the smoothness that many theorists expected. “The standard, canonical models will be ruled out if this holds,” said Yadav. “The simplicity is gone,” he added.

Yadav’s result suggests that models of inflation - a furious hyperexpansion in the instant after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago - have to be much more complicated than previously thought, or else that inflation never occurred at all and that the Big Bang came after a period of contraction.

“If the result sticks, it would be the first time that one of the predictions of simple inflation failed. And it could also lead to a radical reinterpretation of what the Big Bang was and whether it marked the universe’s beginning,”he said.

Standard, simple inflation – needed to achieve a flat, smooth universe - holds that, just after the Big Bang, a uniform negative gravitational field drove a brief period of accelerated expansion.

Then the field died out, creating the matter and energy known in the universe today and leaving an afterglow of microwave radiation just a few degrees above absolute zero. If simple inflation theory is right, this imprint should be almost, but not quite, perfectly gaussian - a pattern with smooth-looking noise.

The analysis of Yadav and adviser Benjamin Wandelt showed that the CMB map was not gaussian with a certainty of 99.5%.

Source: The Times Of India

‘John Wheeler, the US physicist who coined the term “black hole”, has died at the age of 96′

He died at his New Jersey home on 13 April of pneumonia, his daughter said.

Involved in the Manhattan project that developed the world’s first atomic bomb, Wheeler was one of Albert Einstein’s last collaborators.

Wheeler, who was for many years a professor at Princeton University, also worked with Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish scientist.

President George W Bush said he was saddened by the death of “one of America’s greatest physicists” who had “worked on projects that changed the course of history”.

The expression “black hole” became a household term after he used it to describe the phenomenon of a star collapsing into such a dense core that light cannot escape from it. He died at his New Jersey home on 13 April of pneumonia, his daughter said.

Involved in the Manhattan project that developed the world’s first atomic bomb, Wheeler was one of Albert Einstein’s last collaborators.

Wheeler, who was for many years a professor at Princeton University, also worked with Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish scientist.

President George W Bush said he was saddened by the death of “one of America’s greatest physicists” who had “worked on projects that changed the course of history”.

The expression “black hole” became a household term after he used it to describe the phenomenon of a star collapsing into such a dense core that light cannot escape from it.

Source: BBC News

‘Computer processor manufacturer Intel have revealed details of a patent for protecting future generations of computers from the growing threat of cosmic rays‘

The company has designed an on-chip cosmic ray detector to try to cope with the particles, which originate in space before sporadically entering the Earth’s atmosphere and going through everything they encounter.

Because the operation of computers is through charged particles, the unpredicatable hits from the rays are problematic, potentially causing the system to crash.

“What happens is if a cosmic ray causes a collision inside the silicon chip, that releases lots of charged particles,” Intel’s senior scientist Eric Hannah told BBC World Service’s Digital Planet programme.

“All our logic is based on charge, so it gets interference.”

‘Bigger disturb’

The risk from cosmic rays may not be thought of as a big problem on a single computer with a single chip, as there is the potential for error only perhaps every several years.

But Mr Hannah explained that on a supercomputer with 10,000 chips, there was the potential for 10 or 20 faults a week.

And the risk of cosmic ray interference will only increase as chips get smaller. This is because circuits will require less charge per switch to operate.

Since the amount of charge from cosmic rays will remain the same, there will be a “bigger disturb,” Mr Hannah explained.

And this is potentially a problem not just for PCs and supercomputers, but anything with computer-operated parts - for example cars.

“You could be going down the autobahn at 200 miles an hour and suddenly discover your anti-lock braking system doesn’t work because it had a cosmic ray event,” Mr Hannah said.

“It’s strange, but this is the reality we’re moving into as we get smaller and smaller circuits.”

The cosmic ray detector is therefore designed to spot when rays have caused interference and then tell the chip to repeat the command.

“Everyone else was trying to do it with circuit resistence and more robust designs, or looking at the archetecture,” said Mr Hannah.

“I looked at it and said, ‘that’s a lot of energy being deposited in a short amount of time, and if you could detect that event with a cosmic ray detector.’

“Being a physicist it didn’t look too hard to me - we could simply say, ‘you were just hit by a cosmic ray, you may want to redo that calculation’.”

He said that discussions are now under way within Intel about how to build such a detector and see how it works.

But he admitted that it will be hard to say when such a device may become a practical reality.

Such devices are “not too easily built,” he said, and required a way to build, for example, very small microphones.

“It’s hard to say when it might or might not hit a product,” he added.

Source: BBC Technology News

The urge to hug a departed loved one again or prevent atrocities are among the compelling reasons that keep the notion of time travel alive in the minds of many.

While the idea makes for great fiction, some scientists now say traveling to the past is impossible.

There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegant Universe” and a physicist at Columbia University.“And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out.”

The fourth dimension

In physics, time is described as a dimension much like length, width, and height. When you travel from your house to the grocery store, you’re traveling through a direction in space, making headway in all the spatial dimensions—length, width and height. But you’re also traveling forward in time, the fourth dimension.

“Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called space-time,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist with the City University of New York, College of Staten Island and co-author of the book “One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos.”

Space-time, Liu explains, can be thought of as a piece of spandex with four dimensions. “When something that has mass—you and I, an object, a planet, or any star—sits in that piece of four-dimensional spandex, it causes it to create a dimple,” he said. “That dimple is a manifestation of space-time bending to accommodate this mass.”

The bending of space-time causes objects to move on a curved path and that curvature of space is what we know as gravity.

Mathematically one can go backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions. But time doesn’t share this multi-directional freedom.

“In this four-dimensional space-time, you’re only able to move forward in time,” Liu told the source website.

Tunneling to the past

A handful of proposals exist for time travel. The most developed of these approaches involves a wormhole—a hypothetical tunnel connecting two regions of space-time. The regions bridged could be two completely different universes or two parts of one universe. Matter can travel through either mouth of the wormhole to reach a destination on the other side.

“Wormholes are the future, wormholes are the past,” said Michio Kaku, author of “Hyperspace” and “Parallel Worlds” and a physicist at the City University of New York. “But we have to be very careful. The gasoline necessary to energize a time machine is far beyond anything that we can assemble with today’s technology.”

To punch a hole into the fabric of space-time, Kaku explained, would require the energy of a star or negative energy, an exotic entity with an energy of less than nothing.

Greene, an expert on string theory—which views matter in a minimum of 10 dimensions and tries to bridge the gap between particle physics and nature’s fundamental forces, questioned this scenario.

“Many people who study the subject doubt that that approach has any chance of working,” Greene said in an interview . “But the basic idea if you’re very, very optimistic is that if you fiddle with the wormhole openings, you can make it not only a shortcut from a point in space to another point in space, but a shortcut from one moment in time to another moment in time.”

Cosmic strings

Another popular theory for potential time travelers involves something called cosmic strings—narrow tubes of energy stretched across the entire length of the ever-expanding universe. These skinny regions, leftover from the early cosmos, are predicted to contain huge amounts of mass and therefore could warp the space-time around them.

Cosmic strings are either infinite or they’re in loops, with no ends, said J. Richard Gott, author of “Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe” and an astrophysicist at Princeton University. “So they are either like spaghetti or SpaghettiO’s.”

The approach of two such strings parallel to each other, said Gott, will bend space-time so vigorously and in such a particular configuration that might make time travel possible, in theory.

“This is a project that a super civilization might attempt,” Gott told the source website. “It’s far beyond what we can do. We’re a civilization that’s not even controlling the energy resources of our planet.”

Impossible, for now

Mathematically, you can certainly say something is traveling to the past, Liu said. “But it is not possible for you and me to travel backward in time,” he said.

However, some scientists believe that traveling to the past is, in fact, theoretically possible, though impractical.

Maybe if there were a theory of everything, one could solve all of Einstein’s equations through a wormhole, and see whether time travel is really possible, Kaku said. “But that would require a technology far more advanced than anything we can muster,” he said. “Don’t expect any young inventor to announce tomorrow in a press release that he or she has invented a time machine in their basement.”

For now, the only definitive part of travel in the fourth dimension is that we’re stepping further into the future with each passing moment. So for those hoping to see Earth a million years from now, scientists have good news.

“If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,” said Greene, a consultant for “Déjà Vu,” a recent movie that dealt with time travel. “Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time—that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.”

Source: LiveScience