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It's time to look on the other side of the hill


We've always wanted to know what was on the other side of the hill. Or rather, some of us do. Many are happy to live with the status quo even if they recognise it's limitations and imperfections. A few are prepared to leave the flock in the hope of a better place. Others are just driven by curiosity.

Today we have a universe which is little understood. At best less than 5% is clearly explained by science. The rest remains in the dark, Dark Energy and Dark Matter.

The problem is actually much bigger as this 5% refers to the observable universe.

We know that part of the universe is already beyond our reach. We don't know how much. We have no idea how much of the universe is out there beyond our vision.

Back to the analogy about the desire to know what is on the other side of the hill.

The standard response will usually explain that as we cannot see beyond the observable universe, there is no point in asking the question. Ask what was the universe like before the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking will be quoted with his "there's nothing south of the south pole" argument.

This is best summed up by a well known scicommer on YouTube.

"as far as we can tell, the universe is totally self-contained. All of its dynamics are governed purely by its interior contents".

If everything in our little green valley was fine then there would be little motivation to scale the heights around us, but it is not.

We have enormous gaps in our knowledge of the universe. All we have are a few pieces of the jigsaw scattered around on a very big table.

Catherine Heymans told the Royal Astronomical Society in 2017 that there were two kinds of cosmologists - smug and embarrassed. Well, we need a third. We need some who are prepared to find out what is on the other side of the hill. We need a cosmological Magellan prepared to take the risk and find out what if anything is out there. To mix the metaphor, to boldly go where no man has gone before!

We need to find out what happened before the Big Bang. Penrose and his conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), Avi Loeb and his Big Bounce are at least two distinguished names who challenge the idea that all this came from nothing.

We need to explore beyond our observable bubble. If indeed there is something out there. If there was a cosmos before our Big Bang; then it can be detected by the new astronomy of gravitational wave detection. Of course it will not be easy. The success of LIGO today took 50 years to achieve. The kind of gravitational waves will be way outside the range of LIGO. The prize at the end of the day will be a new understanding of our universe. Who would not want to be the first to make a detection from outside of our universe.

Once the idea that the universe could be much bigger than we thought is accepted then the great minds of science will find other ways to test it.

If the cosmos is much older and much bigger than the universe we know then we may have some very simple explanations for how our universe began; where it is going and how it's expanding to get there.

Lindsay Forbes

lforbes174@gmail.com


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