Einstein averred that "the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible". He was right to be astonished. Our minds evolved to cope with life on the African savannah, but can comprehend a great deal about the counterintuitive microworld of atoms, and about the vastness of the cosmos. Indeed, Einstein would have been specially gratified at how our cosmic horizons have expanded. Our Sun is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is itself one of many billion of galaxies in range of our telescopes. And there is firm evidence that these all emerged from a hot dense "beginning" nearly 14 billion years ago.
Every year, the Dutch physics community gathers in a town called Veldhoven to get their geek on. Physics@FOM is a conference in the old style, with cosmologists rubbing shoulders with materials scientists. The star of the show was Hitoshi Murayama, who spent his talk telling us how we all live inside a quantum fluid. Because the Physics@FOM audience comes from a range of backgrounds, Murayama's talk was light on details and strong on providing a flavour of the problem and inspiring the audience. And inspired I was, as he took us on a whirlwind tour of the known Universe, including dark matter and inflation. He wrapped up by going completely off the map with some of the ideas that he has had floating around for some time now. Read more
Title: The Accelerating Universe and the Second Law Authors: M. Paul Gough (Version v3)
The main sources of information energy in the universe are shown to be stellar heated gas and dust and black holes. Information energy has properties similar to dark energy with a significant energy density that has remained nearly constant for at least the last half of cosmic time, corresponding to an equation of state parameter, wi~-1, the value unique to dark energy. Changes in universe information content during star formation require an accelerating universe expansion in order to ensure dI>0. The size of this required acceleration is in good agreement with the observed extra doubling in universe size due to dark energy. Any information energy contribution to dark energy is determined by the extent of star formation, possibly answering the 'cosmic coincidence' question - 'Why now?'
The Known Universe Scientifically Rendered For All to See
After hovering over Mount Everest and the gorges that plunge to the Ganges, you are pulled through the Earth's atmosphere to glimpse the inky black of space over Tibet's high desert. So begins The Known Universe, a new film produced by the American Museum of Natural History that is part of a new exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Read more
After studying the colour of light emitted by 200,000 galaxies scientists have combined them to produce the colour, they have dubbed 'cosmic latte'. Other names suggested for it were 'univeige' and 'skyvory'. But apparently this colour has changed over the last six billion years as the predominant colour has shifted from blue to more of a red. Read more