``On the contrary: the future is the most easily knowable thing of all. All you need do is just wait around.'' Shane (292)
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Message 294 followed by message 292, in my email program's reckoning, but I thought it would be interesting to reverse the temporal order. Playing Lewis Carrol.
I am not sure whether to call the above absurd or beautiful. There is something in the logic between the lines that penetrates to the heart of the matter. It has to do with the possible absurdity of the concept of linear causality, what Eddington called Time's Arrow. The problem is related to Hume's critique of causality, that characterizes cause as the habit of mind that jumps the endless jutaposition of events A and B, to link them, to the point of saying A causes B, when in reality, they are merely often found to be juxtaposed. In other words there maybe no arrow of certainty that connects them.
It comes down to something along the lines of quantum selection, the discrete partitioning of the smooth continuum of probabilities, where the selection of a cause, that is its certainty only pertains to a potential future, one of many futures, but a distinct one, none the less, that selects its unique casual past retro-actively. We say later, so that was the cause. This idea is related to the many worlds interpretation and the Born Rule.
[from wiki. The Born rule... is a law of quantum mechanics which gives the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result. It is named after its originator, the physicist Max Born.]
For pure speculation purposes it's fun to look at the philosophical problems with the Big Bang cosmologies using some of these ideas. We have no cause, only its subsequent effect, B, with a single evolutionary path toward our era, and we are trying to postulate something like the inverse of the Born Rule.
I don't like the Big Bang. Never have. Don't like expansion either. All that has too much of a gosh and gollie neoliberal ring to it. If Hawking can postulate God beyond the event horizon, then I feel free enough to postulate the whole theory is a crock. And I will bet the Big Bang goes down sooner than Hawking's God shows up. Truth is, the standard model has been nothing but trouble from the beginning. It solves three great empirical problems: 1) explains red-shift via expansion, 2) explains microwave background as residue of the bang, 3) provides a primordial environment for quarks and GUTs to exist.
Yet BB has also generated a huge variety of other empirical problems which all revolve around a central problem of time.
I think the most important of these empirical problems is the ever increasingly short period between the era of re-ionization and the evolution of matter into stars and galaxies. Here is an interesting sample, from Nature:
``A supernova origin for dust in a high-redshift quasar
Interstellar dust plays a crucial role in the evolution of the Universe by assisting the formation of molecules, by triggering the formation of the first low-mass stars, and by absorbing stellar ultraviolet-optical light and subsequently re-emitting it at infrared/millimetre wavelengths. Dust is thought to be produced predominantly in the envelopes of evolved (age >1 Gyr), low-mass stars. This picture has, however, recently been brought into question by the discovery of large masses of dust in the host galaxies of quasars at redshift z > 6, when the age of the Universe was less than 1 Gyr. Theoretical studies, corroborated by observations of nearby supernova remnants, have suggested that supernovae provide a fast and efficient dust formation environment in the early Universe. Here we report infrared observations of a quasar at redshift 6.2, which are used to obtain directly its dust extinction curve. We then show that such a curve is in excellent agreement with supernova dust models. This result demonstrates a supernova origin for dust in this high-redshift quasar, from which we infer that most of the dust at high redshifts probably has the same origin.''
(Nature 431, 533-535 (30 September 2004) | doi:10.1038/nature02930; Received 22 April 2004; Accepted 6 August 2004)
Think about what the above implies. Notice `Gyr'. This stands for Gallactic Year, the revolution of our solar system around the galactic center through a single revolution (225-250Myrs). But I've seen it also used as short hand for 1 billion years. So its an indefinite scale. In any event, it is a nice way to elade the problems of a universal evolutionary time scale.
What above says is that galaxies and stars evolved to a sufficient state to generate enough supernova to create a rich dust environment associated with quasars. Now the above also make mention of low-mass stars. Here is the problem stated in more direct terms:
``What happens after a low-mass star ceases to produce energy through fusion is not directly known: the universe is thought to be around 13.7 billion years old, which is less time (by several orders of magnitude, in some cases) than it takes for the fusion to cease in such stars...'' (from wiki, stellar evolution)
There is another way to look at all this. We could say that as far back as we can see, galactic evolution seems to be more or less the same. In other words there is no evolutionary scale except the expansion itself.
The conclusion seems to be that galaxies and stars hatched out of the re-ionization fully evolved into or very near their present state.
I think we are on the road to a direct confrontation between empirical observations and their theoretical foundation... and there is no doubt which will win.
CG