There Was No Big Bang at the Start of the Universe

Posted by phunkychic666 on August 7, 2010

Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com:

A new theory explains the accelerating universe without invoking mysterious, unseen dark energy to account for the expansion. But it also gets rid of singularities, an unchanging speed of light … and the most famous astrophysical phenomenon of all, the Big Bang.

The observation of certain supernovas in the late 1990s led astronomers to the very unexpected discovery that the universe is expanding, and that the expansion is speeding up. There was nothing in the existing laws of physics to account for this, and so the only solution was dark energy — a mysterious force so named because we’ve never detected it, and yet it has to make up 75% of all the energy and mass in the universe for it to account for this cosmic acceleration. Also, the existence of dark energy weakens the supposedly inviolate law of conservation of energy, if not negates it completely. Cosmologically speaking, that’s a problem.

And yet, clumsy and unlikely as that all sounds, it’s the best explanation we’ve got for our observations of the universe … until now. Wun-Yi Shu, a physicist at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University, has come up with a bold new cosmological framework that solves the dark energy problem. At its most basic, the theory states that the universe has three basic dimensions — mass, time, and length — and these three properties can be converted between each other. He then proposes two new constants, κ and τ, as the conversion factors between time and length and mass and length respectively…

[continues at io9.com]