- The history of time is no longer brief.
The universe never actually began: it bubbled off some other, pre-existing
universe. And it will not come to an end: other parts of the universe are
being created now.
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- "If life in our part of the universe
were to disappear, it will appear again someplace else," the cosmological
theorist Andrei Linde told the American Association for the Advancement
of Science meeting in Anaheim, California. "So the universe as a whole
becomes immortal."
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- Professor Linde, the Russian physicist
based at Stanford University, is one of the architects of the new universe
theories. He has discarded the Big Bang version made famous (and understandable)
by the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
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- Linde does not believe that everything
began 15 billion years ago but sees the universe in which human life developed
as just one of many inflating balls of space time that in turn produce
new balls, and so on for ever.
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- "The original idea was that all
the universe appeared as an explosion of very hot matter, a huge ball of
fire. Then we understood that this was not big enough, not fast enough,
not explosive enough," he said.
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- The original hypothesis did not explain
why the universe looked much the same in all directions, or why there were
so many things in it.
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- In the inflation scenario, an extremely
small fragment of space expanded to an area far, far larger than the visible
universe in an unimaginable fraction of a second, and everything in that
space - atoms, stars and light - condensed out of the colossal energy released
by the inflation.
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- "Right now there are some other
parts of the universe where newer and newer parts are being produced: they
are inflating and expanding exponentially and then they come to a stage
similar, or maybe dissimilar, to ours," he said.
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- The universe contained 100 billion galaxies
each with 100 billion stars. "If you start with a typical Big Bang
universe with a typical size with a typical density initially and then
you count how many particles the universe would contain, the answer would
be one particle, or maybe 10 particles, but not the amount of particles
necessary to make one journalist," he said. "So the fact that
you are here is proof something was wrong with the Big Bang theory."
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- <http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/guide
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