It was great to see many people attend our first event of the year, a student talk on Cosmology and its implications on humans.
The start of the discussion was about the different theories for the birth of the universe. Many people are already aware of the term 'Big Bang' and the accelerating universe and what this means, but not many know the three base theories: the Open universe, the Closed universe, and the Flat universe. These are the three terms which according to theory, model the fate of the universe. The Open universe is one that says that the universe will continue expanding for an infinite period of time; the Closed universe says that the universe will re-collapse into a 'Big Crunch', and the Flat universe is one which is on the brink of collapse but never actually does. As for the implications of this for humans - one can only imagine! What would be the most desirable outcome in your opinion? Of all the ideas connected to Cosmology, perhaps the most interesting, yet most misunderstood is the idea of Imaginary Time: an idea that time is not really what we time it is. (The word 'imaginary' here does not mean that this is not real. It is to do with the unfortunate naming of two sets of numbers as real numbers and imaginary numbers: regardless of their names, they are both very real.) Imaginary time is comparable to a directionless spatial dimension which is circular. What we live in, 'real' time is somewhat of an idea we have created ourselves. We constantly travel through this time dimension as we do in the three spacial dimensions, and in our relatively small scale, we have mistaken it to be linear. This connects well to Stephen Hawking's No Boundary model of the universe, which proposes a finite universe which is directionless, that is to say a universe in which the dimensions themselves are finite but directionless: the x, y z and (imaginary) time dimensions. An analogy given by Hawking himself in the Brief History of Time is to imagine this like the Earth. It is definitely finite, but doesn't really have a direction. The theme of Circularity is apparent in these theories, but circularity is one that we find everywhere: planets, stars, orbits, atoms, protons, quarks, string theory... even we as humans seem to subconsciously understand that time itself is circular not linear- just look at the shape of our clocks! This is just some of the evidence pointing towards a closed universe, showing that even though the accelerating universe is the current most widely accepted theory which there is a lot of proof for, the question of the history of the universe is still field in which new discoveries will undoubtably be made. I hope you all enjoyed learning about the universe on a grand scale. The next event, 9th October, will be about science on the smallest scales: Professor Paul Harrison of CERN will be speaking about Particle Physics. I hope to see many of you at what will be a a very interesting talk. Shubhangi
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June 2020
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