South+African+gives+radical+history+of+time,+Philp,+Sunday+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 18 June 2006
=South African gives a radical history of time=


 * Physicist says older universes gave rise to ours**


 * //‘A lot of people won’t like it, but it does address a number of serious problems with the conventional model’//**


 * ROWAN PHILP: London**

A SOUTH African has stunned the scientific world with a theory that claims the universe is at least 70 times older than what was thought.

And to do this, Professor Neil Turok — a physicist at Cambridge University and son of ANC MP Ben Turok — has used what Einstein thought was his “biggest blunder”.

In a radical paper published in the American journal Science, Turok attempted to answer the question “How did we get here?” by postulating that our universe is merely the infant child of a trillion-year-old universe that came before it.

Turok’s “Cyclic Model” uses advanced mathematics to claim that time did not begin at the Big Bang, the mysterious event 14 billion years ago that created all the material that makes up the galaxies. Instead — say Turok and co-author American physicist Paul Steinhardt — time has witnessed a potentially endless cycle of very old universes, each of which decayed into a “Big Crunch” and gave birth to its successor in a simultaneous Big Bang.

The theory implies that civilisations of super-intelligent creatures, with advanced technologies, could have lived in a previous universe, because they had so much more time to evolve than humans have had so far.

Professor Sean Carroll, a world leader in cosmology based at the University of Chicago, told the Sunday Times that Turok’s idea was “an extremely ambitious and intriguing (theory)” and had “generated a great deal of attention”.

Added Carroll: “A definite bonus of the Cyclic Model is that it does indeed attempt to fit all the facts — [but] whether or not it succeeds is another matter entirely.”

Turok, chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge University, said: “It has had a major impact. It is controversial and a lot of people won’t like it, but it does address a number of serious problems with the conventional model of how our universe came about.

“It’s appealing for all kinds of reasons. The end of each cycle is quite beautiful, because all the stuff in the universe would have to accelerate to the speed of light — so that each universe bows out in the form of pure light.”

Although, uniquely, Turok’s theory fits all the major known facts, it could be proved completely wrong next year, when a new-generation science instrument, the Planck Satellite, is launched into orbit.

The satellite will try to detect direct proof of the traditional Big Bang “Inflation” theory, in the form of “gravitational waves” which should have been produced in our early universe.

However, if it does not detect any, Turok’s theory will stand in pole position to become what children will be taught as “the truth” about how we came to be.

Turok said Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time and the most famous living scientist, had made a bet with him that the Planck Satellite would prove him wrong.

“I offered to accept the wager at even odds for any sum he cared to mention,” said Turok. “I have repeated the offer but to date he has not been willing to specify an amount.”

It was in a Muizenberg flat, on a recent vacation that Turok — who moved to England as a high school pupil when his father went into exile — made his “breakthrough” on how Big Bangs work.

Ironically, his controversial theory follows a discovery that he and Hawking made together in 1998: that “dark energy” — what Einstein called the “cosmological constant” which defeats gravity and pushes galaxies apart — was billions of times weaker than it should have been, if the Big Bang “Inflation” theory was correct.

Turok’s new theory not only explains the weakness of Einstein’s mysterious force, but states that it is this force that governs the birth, life span and death of each successive universe.

To the amazement of many scientists, it goes even further, showing for the first time exactly how Big Bangs can happen, in mind-boggling detail.

While Turok is unable to explain how the first of his Big Bangs happened, he neatly sidesteps the problem by saying: “Perhaps there was no first bang; time could well be infinite.”


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A191171**

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