What Banged?
If you ask someone this question you get different answers depending on who, when, where, etc., you ask. Today though, any Ontarian for sure will give the same answer: a nasty snowstorm banged over Ontario.
If you ask the physicists today "What Banged?" you get also different answers. This is not because they are not thinking at the same thing (The Big Bang) but because in the last few years the usual view about the Big Bang started to change.
Neil Turok is one of the major players in this pioneering quest to find answers to the very fundamental question of mankind: what was before the Big Bang? Until few years ago almost any physicist believed that Big Bang came out of nothing. So questioning what was before looked ridiculous.
Last week during Neil Turok's PI public lecture I learned that the nothing before the Big Bang was something as result of a previous Big Bang. There are theories and observational data to support a cyclic model of the Universe. What an achievement for Neil to be able to answer at last his teacher question of, What Banged?
What exciting times we are living now when mankind is in a similar exploratory endeavors as the continents, the world and the solar system were discovered few centuries ago. Today's explorations are at a different scale and done with different means.
We are talking about the limits of the Universe about its shape or how far back in time we can go. At Universe's scale theoretical models and testing them with experimental data are the only means the mankind have to explore it. They are also the best means to appreciate the Universe as Neil Turok stated in his Credo at the end of the PI lecture.
I'm glad that Perimeter Institute (PI) and Waterloo is part of it. It was also last week when PI gathered physicists in Waterloo to explore "Novel Theories of the Early Universe".
If you ask the physicists today "What Banged?" you get also different answers. This is not because they are not thinking at the same thing (The Big Bang) but because in the last few years the usual view about the Big Bang started to change.
Neil Turok is one of the major players in this pioneering quest to find answers to the very fundamental question of mankind: what was before the Big Bang? Until few years ago almost any physicist believed that Big Bang came out of nothing. So questioning what was before looked ridiculous.
Last week during Neil Turok's PI public lecture I learned that the nothing before the Big Bang was something as result of a previous Big Bang. There are theories and observational data to support a cyclic model of the Universe. What an achievement for Neil to be able to answer at last his teacher question of, What Banged?
What exciting times we are living now when mankind is in a similar exploratory endeavors as the continents, the world and the solar system were discovered few centuries ago. Today's explorations are at a different scale and done with different means.
We are talking about the limits of the Universe about its shape or how far back in time we can go. At Universe's scale theoretical models and testing them with experimental data are the only means the mankind have to explore it. They are also the best means to appreciate the Universe as Neil Turok stated in his Credo at the end of the PI lecture.
I'm glad that Perimeter Institute (PI) and Waterloo is part of it. It was also last week when PI gathered physicists in Waterloo to explore "Novel Theories of the Early Universe".
posted by Gheorghe Curelet-Balan at
4:58 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home