Jawaan!

“Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature.” ~ Leonidas Moustakas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string.

String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we see as the Big Bang was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.  In their view of the universe the complexities of an inflating universe after a Big Bang are replaced by a universe that was already large. flat, and uniform with dark energy as the effect of the other universe constantly leaking gravity into our own and driving its acceleration. According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets.  Turok and Steinhardt were inspired by a lecture given by Burt Ovrut who imagined two branes, universes like ours, separated by a tiny gap as tiny as 10-32 meters.

In 2004 astronomers found an enormous hole in the southern hemisphere of the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” This was a startling finding, since accepted models of the early universe say that the big bang created an initially uniform cosmic landscape, when viewed on large scales. While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this discovery dwarfed them all

That might sound like what happens when a poet reads a physics textbook, but it’s an actual theory put forward by Stephen Hawking-grade scientists.  Stephen Hawking, in fact, and Professor Thomas Hertog of CERN, who came up with a unique answer to how the universe began: “In every way imaginable.” That’s not the result of chemically-assisted consciousness, either, they actually derived their way to that solution to solve problems in the existing approach.  Physics is excellent at starting somewhere and working out what happens afterwards – but when the whole question is “how did things start?” you can’t do that.  You could run the physics backwards, which works for footballs and F15s, but only because they really are classical – and when you work backwards from the result you’re assuming everything obeyed classical rules all the way back, because you can’t undo an observation to find the quantum mixture of states that existed previously.

Lawrence Krauss gives a brilliant talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.”

Did dark matter destroy the universe?  You might be looking around at the way things “exist” and thinking “No”, but we’re talking about ancient history.  Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around – only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark.  Why? Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have another idea.  Dan Hooper and Alexander Belikov posit that invisible, self-destructing dark matter may have blown up every atom in the universe.  At least it’s plausible in that if we wanted to ionize an entire universe, we’d want something that sounded that awesome.

The Great Filter is the idea that there is some single, almost insurmountably improbable barrier on the path to the stars that explains why we've never seen any sign of alien life.  It combines aspects of astronomy, biology and history to arrive at one inescapable conclusion: university professors dream of book deals. Robin Hanson of George Mason University posits a “Great Filter” that prevents the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced, space-colonizing civilizations. The “filter” would be one or more improbable steps along the path that starts with the creation of a planet and ends with a race capable of colonizing the galaxy