Where did the Big Bang happen?

I have been known to ponder the mysteries of the Big Bang on more than one occasion. A recent news story about new telescopes giving us the ability to look deep into the universe’s past raised the spectre of those questions in my heart again.

“If the universe is 13 billion years old, then how is it that we are able to see light from stars 13,000,000,000 light-years away?” I asked once upon a time.

Fraser Cain, co-host of Astronomy Cast, dropped by on the previous occasion to point me toward that site’s archive of very interesting podcasts about astronomy and physics.

The show took on the subject of Inflation (the theoretical rapid expansion of the universe in the first phase of its existence) in October 2007.

Fraser’s co-host, Dr. Pamela Gay, described the process thus:

It’s all a matter of what is doing the moving. The idea is relative to the grid of space, I cannot move faster than the speed of light. I personally can’t get anywhere near the speed of light, but even the fastest, smallest particles — the things that can get the closest to going the speed of light, can’t ever go faster than it, relative to space.

Now, if instead space itself grows, that’s something different. One way to think about it is: imagine you have a little kid who is walking away from school on his way home. The little kid’s capable of moving at, say, four sidewalk blocks every couple of seconds. He can’t go any faster than that. His family might see him moving toward the house at four sidewalk blocks a second — no big deal. He’s going his typical speed.

Imagine there’s some crazy sidewalk builder building a hill of sidewalk blocks between him and the school. As the school watches, they see not just his motion but also all these new sidewalk blocks getting built.

Imagine that crazy sidewalk block-building machine is building sidewalk blocks at a rate of 10 sidewalk blocks every couple of seconds. As those new blocks appear between the school and the child, you now have the expansion of the sidewalk and the rate the kid is moving, added together.

So the school might see the kid moving at 14 sidewalk blocks every couple of seconds. That kid is moving faster than he’s allowed to go — but he’s not. It’s the sidewalk that’s growing not the kid that’s moving relative to the sidewalk. So you get these weird additive velocities coming in that cause things to be perceived as moving faster than they’re allowed to move. They’re not — it’s space moving instead.

So I get the metaphor, I think. As the sidewalk inflates, new blocks appear on both sides of the kid. At the beginning of his journey he could have started out with only 10 blocks to cross, but by the end of his journey he had to cross maybe 500 blocks.

This all starts to sound very much like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, where no matter how much distance you cover, there remains yet more distance to go before you can cross some threshold. And yet, our experience with movement tells us that we can cover an entire distance despite the paradoxes (I’m really paraphrasing badly to save time).

The thing about Zeno’s paradoxes is that eventually something has to stop or run out. In the case of Inflation, it was Inflation that stopped. The universe is still expanding but Inflation is not really affecting us any more (I think).

We apparently detect the after-effects of Inflation in the red-shifted starlight that reaches Earth from every possible direction in the universe. And that is what leads me to scratch my head yet again.

If the universe was at its very earliest point of existence nothing more than a point of existence, then when everything expand outward from that point, did it all expand uniformly in all directions (or even approximately uniformly) or did it expand in some non-spheroidal way?

By our observations, Earth must be at the center of the universe because we cannot see more of the universe in any one direction than in other directions. Of course, our observations can be misleading. After all, suppose we can only see a spherical portion of the universe within some larger shape?

Maybe the universe looks something like a spiraling cone and what we detect of it is just one small part of a spiral.

This must be the kind of stuff that keeps physicists awake at night. I am sure there is an insane asylum somewhere that houses former academics who blubber madly and scrawl obscene equations on chalkboards, occasionally yelling out things like, “Reverse Ontology Destabilizes The Molecular Continuum — Cogito, Ergo non Sum!“

It makes no sense to me, either.

What would it do to our understanding of the Laws of Physics (within this universe) if we could in fact pinpoint the region where the expansion began? Scientists are constantly revising their ideas of what the universe consists of — perhaps there is a place where new matter is still streaming into existence, pushing the portion of the universe we see farther out into whatever it is (or isn’t) that the universe expands into.

Things were simpler back when I was only thinking about how to steal the planet Venus and make it your own and colonizing mars.

Peter Jackson talks about “The Hobbit”

This excerpt was published by The Examiner on August 10, about 8 days before MarketSaw published the rumor that Peter Jackson wants to direct a 3rd “Hobbit” film. I just think the interview is interesting enough that I should say something here (even though it’s not longer hot news).

Here is an excerpt from the interview that concerns “The Hobbit”. I have excised some portions of Peter’s comments because you really should visit the site and read the full interview:

…I know you’re probably going to have a lot of questions about “The Hobbit.” …

…We’re about three or four weeks away of delivering our first draft of the first movie to Warner Bros., because the film’s not greenlit yet. You know, we have to submit a script, the studio has to read the script and like it. …

… I just want to be able to say … we haven’t gotten to the stage where we can offer anybody a role yet …. So we’re still three or four weeks away from delivering that draft. Then we can start the process of the budget. Probably in about two months is when we’re going we’ll be able to start to offer people roles. So despite everything you might have read and all the gossip and everything else, literally, honestly, [we] have not offered anyone a role in this film at this stage.

We are doing two ["Hobbit"] movies, just to clarify … because one of the things that is interesting, as you know, is that [J.R.R.] Tolkein wrote “The Hobbit” first in 1936, and then about 20 years later, he published “The Lord of the Rings.” And he expanded and developed the world of Middle Earth way bigger and larger and more detailed than he knew about when he wrote “The Hobbit,” ….

But one of the things we were really excited about when we got to thinking about [doing "The Hobbit" movie] is we can take that expanded information that he developed later on and we can apply it to “The Hobbit” and make it fuller and more epic and put “The Hobbit” in the context of the greater activity that is happening in Middle Earth at that time. To do all that, we figured that we needed two epic films to be able to really tell that story … I just wanted to clear a couple of things up.

Read the full article here.

Now, let me point out that Peter Jackson and his writing team almost completely rewrote the history of Middle-earth for the LoTR movies. In their very slimmed down version of Middle-earth history, there was no long line of kings in Gondor — it was ruled by Stewards all along. And Arnor and its subsequent division into three smaller kingdoms also was transformed into a realm that vanished completely upon Isildur’s death.

How much the very abbreviated history Peter and his co-writers went with could affect their “Hobbit” extensions I don’t know. To be honest, they are probably free to invent any new history they want (because the license from the Tolkien Estate really doesn’t allow them to use all the canonical history but neglects to forbid creating new history).

Is this important? Don’t mistake what I’m writing here for Tolkien Purist doom-and-gloom. Rather, I think we should all look for some surprises in whatever material Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro decide should be included in the backstory for “The Hobbit” (and any third “bridge” movie that may appear).

It’s probably safe to assume that faithfulness to the books died many deaths long ago. There were some elements of Peter’s movies that I felt were more faithful to the books than many other fans (including the spirit of Arwen’s character, but that’s a whole different topic). Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro will extend Peter’s Middle-earth in ways Tolkien did not foresee. And I think that as long as people enjoy the movies that should be okay.

Would I love to see a completely faithful adaptation of the Tolkien stories? Absolutely. And I think all the arguments about how the books are too long have long since been proven to be nonsense. Clearly, people don’t want their favorite film franchises to vanish into the woodwork. You could easily bring six “Lord of the Rings” movies to the big screen.

The continuity issues could probably be resolved in various ways. I don’t believe it’s necessary to follow every character all the way through every movie. But a little rearrangement could probably handle that objection, too.

Still that’s just wishful thinking. We have the movies we have and I am looking forward to seeing what Guillermo del Toro brings to the silver screen. He has some large boots to fill, but I’m confident he is up to the task.

Rumor: Peter Jackson to direct 3rd Hobbit movie

First of all, sorry for not posting much lately. I’ve just been very busy at work and a little under the weather at home.

Anyway, tonight I stumbled across this rumor which suggests that Peter Jackson and trying to persuade Guillermo del Toro to go along with Peter directing a third Hobbit film, one that supposedly bridges the stories between the books (covering material contained in the LoTR appendices).

I don’t know whether to believe the rumor or not. It’s just as likely to be debunked within a day or two as to be confirmed in a month or six.

Keep an eye on Xenite’s Hobbit Movies News site for more information — it may show up in the headlines there before I can share it here.