> "Scott H" wrote in message
>
> news:zMqdnclC2PBAD77VnZ2dnUVZ_oDinZ2d@supernews.com...
>

>> Eternal recurrence is the idea that the universe is reborn infinitely many

>
> Almost everything in the universe is the result of cyclic processes.
> Especially higher forms of order such as life and intelligence.
> So it would be logical to assume our universe is the result
> of a cyclic process. Where the death of one universe leads
> to the creation of another.

>
> In fact, the cyclic model is becoming the state of the art.
> It's a rather new idea by perhaps the two leading
> cosmologists of the day, Steinhardt and Turoc.
>
> Steinhardt
> Princeton Physics Dept
> See, "A quintessential intro into Dark Energy"http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/
>
> The Endless Universehttp://endlessuniverse.net/
>

>> times and that all of history, including our own lives, repeats itself.

>
> The butterful effect shows that each iteration or cycle is destined
> to pick up some noise or error with each pass. So an exact
> repetition is absurd with even a casual examination.
> Similar in form and function perhaps, but like snowflakes
> no two things will ever exactly repeat.
>
>
>

>> Although I only learned of the term a year ago, I wondered if eternal
>> recurrence, if real, were in some way responsible for the "now" feeling.

>

>> I have some difficulty understanding the linearity of it. Why must the next
>> universe begin at the death of this one?

>
> You have to understand that things are changing very fast in this
> field these days. What we don't know far exceeds what we know.
> The universe is now thought to evolve, but not just in the generic
> sense of becoming more ordered over time. But in the ...Darwinian
> sense. The universal constants evolve and adapt over time. Dark
> energy and dark matter emerge at different times, guiding the cyclic
> evolution of the universe.
>
> To quote Steinhardt, one of the founders of the inflationary theory
> and now the cyclic model.
>
> "Most of the energy in the universe is not matter." For its first 300
> years,  physics has focused on the properties of matter and
> radiation, including dark matter. Now we know that they
> represent less than 30%% of the composition of the universe.
> The rest  consists of something we know virtually nothing about.
>
> Most of the energy in the universe is not gravitationally attractive.
> We are  probably the last generation to have been taught that
> "gravity always attracts," a notion which has been presented
> as a basic fact of nature for hundreds of years. We are now
> aware that gravity can repel, as well.  We must rewrite the
> textbooks to explain that the gravitationally self-attracting matter
> with which we are familiar is the minority in the universe today and
> for the indefinite future.
>
> We live at a special moment in cosmic history, the transition between
> a decelerating, matter-dominated universe and an accelerating, dark
> energy dominated universe.
>
> The recent proposal of a "cyclic" universe presents a whole new outlook on
> cosmic history in which dark energy plays a central role (Steinhardt & Turok,
> 2002a, 2002b). in  this model, the conventional cosmic history is turned
> topsy-turvy. The big bang is not the beginning of time. Rather, it is a bridge
> to a pre-existing contracting era. The Universe undergoes a sequence of cycles
> in which it contracts in a big crunch and re-emerges in an expanding
> big bang, with trillions of years of evolution in between.
>
> The big bang" is  moderated. The temperature and density of the universe
> do not become infinite at any point in the cycle; indeed, they never exceed
> a finite bound (about a trillion trillion degrees).
>
> Dark energy recurs as the dominant form of energy every cycle roughly
> 15 billion years after each bang. and it replaces two of the  key roles of
> inflation. Although it causes the universe to accelerate at an pace
> 100 orders of magnitude slower than inflation, by maintaining the
> acceleration for a trillion years or so,  the dark energy homogenizes and
> flattens the universe. In particular, it is the dark energy of a
> cycle ago that made the universe homogeneous and at prior
> to our own big bang,
>
> A second critical feature of the dark energy is that it is not stable.
> It naturally decreases with time as the universe expands. As a result, the
> acceleration ultimately stops and the universe begins to decelerate.
> It eventually triggers a period of contraction, during which
> there is the quantum generation of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of
> perturbations that accounts for the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic
> microwave background and large scale structure.
>
> Finally, the dark energy is responsible for insuring that the cyclic evolution
> is an attractor solution to the evolution equations. If random fluctuations
> kick the universe away from the ideal cyclic evolution, the period of
> dark energy domination red shifts" away the transient behavior and
> drives the universe back towards the regular cyclic solution.
>
> http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/steinhardt.pdf
>
>
>

>> It seems more natural to me to think of infinitely many copies of this
>> universe existing in a more ideal realm. I say this because all quantities
>> in the universe are relative. You could scale all physical constants,
>> including the speed of light, by some factor and get basically the same
>> universe with the same phenomena, and we'd never tell the difference. The
>> properties we notice are more abstract. We could imagine infinitely many
>> such copies of this universe existing, not necessarily in linear order.

>

>> What if what is usually called eternal recurrence is better accounted for by
>> abstraction itself?

>
> The big mistake being made today is to try to understand the universe
> through its simplest components, forces or 'abstractions'. Such as
> some elegant or grand equation.
>
> The properties of the universe are best seen by the most ....complex...
> the universe has to offer.....LIFE. Not the simplest.....particles and such.
>
> We wouldn't exist if we didn't have the ability to reproduce ourselves.
> So why would it be any different for the universe?
> The only kind of universe that ...can  exist.. is one that
> can create other universes. Or so I believe.
>
> Jonathan
>
> s
>
>
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