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Sean Carroll on Universal Time |
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Written by Sean Miller
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Sunday, 01 June 2008 |
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Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist working at Caltech, provided a blurb for Riffing on Strings. Sean has a new article this month in Scientific American. It's entitled "Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?" The universe does not look right. That may seem like a strange thing to say, given that cosmologists have very little standard for comparison. How do we know what the universe is supposed to look like? Nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as “natural”—and the universe we see does not qualify.
Make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved. Some 14 billion years ago the cosmos was hotter and denser than the interior of a star, and since then it has been cooling off and thinning out as the fabric of space expands. This picture accounts for just about every observation we have made, but a number of unusual features, especially in the early universe, suggest that there is more to the story than we understand. [read more...]
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Last Updated ( Friday, 06 June 2008 )
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