Jerome's favorite science pages, page 1

Last login: 12 hours agoJerome: Jérôme is a 25 year old guy from Brussels, Belgium.; Likes 2,313 pages, 222 videos, 60 photos • 134 fans • Received 33 reviews; Member since Feb 12, 2005

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the physics arXiv blog & Blog Archive & Why our time dimension is about to be…: Oct 9, 2007 5:17pm 12 reviews science
http://arxivblog.com/?p=71; Why our time dimension is about to become space-like From the page: "It don't get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it. The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us is a 4-dimensional cosmos called a braneworld embedded in a multidimensional universe. The "signature" of our universe is the number of space and time-like dimensions it has: in our case we got 3 space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension. It's what astrobods call a Lorentzian universe. So far so good: lots of astronutters think the same thing. But our universe may not always have been like this. Some theorists think it may once have had a Euclidean signature meaning that all the dimensions were space-like. Now Marc "Bars" Mars and a few pals in Spain say that the Universe's signature might be about to flip from Lorentzian to Euclidean. In other words, our dimension of time is about turn space-like. Gulp! This ain't entirely bonkers and here's why. Bars Mars has calculated what it's like to be an observer in a universe that is about to flip and get this: it would look as if it were expanding and accelerating away from us. Sound familiar? Yep, it's exactly what astrobods have been observin over the last few years, a phenomenon they attribute to dark energy. If Bars Mars is right, dark energy ain't got nothing to do with it and we're all starin' down the barrel of a cosmic catastrophe. Still, maybe four space-like dimensions will be better than three. Who needs time anyway?"