Backward, turn backward, O Time in your Flight

On Jun 12, 12:40?pm, Reid Goldsborough
wrote:


So, Anka, where did the gold in the coins in your collection
ultimately come from?

Ultimately? They came from nothingness, a void, a vacuum.

Can't go much further back than that.

;-)

~Anka

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:24:14 -0700, Anka wrote:

Ultimately? They came from nothingness, a void, a vacuum.

Can't go much further back than that.

You're speaking of the singularity, which is different from
nothingness, a void, a vacuum. The latter we know about. We know
nothing of the singularity from which sprang the Universe. Many
cosmologists believe that it was what remained after the Universe that
preceded ours collapsed into successive black holes and finally into a
single black hole in what has been called the Big Crunch, our
Universe's ultimate fate as well, the cycle to be repeated endlessly.
This aligns very closely, incidentally, with ancient Hindu cosmology.

Other cosmologists believe the Universe will expand forever, with
galaxies first breaking apart, then stars and planets and other large
bodies, then atoms, then subatomic particles, leaving a near void that
will last for eternity. Much depends on how much matter, energy, "dark
matter," and "dark energy" is in the Universe, whether or not there's
enough for gravity to eventually stop the accelerated expansion of the
Universe happening today.

I favor the ancient Hindu view. Don't you?

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On Jun 12, 10:10?pm, Reid Goldsborough
wrote:

You're speaking of the singularity, which is different from
nothingness, a void, a vacuum. The latter we know about. We know
nothing of the singularity from which sprang the Universe. Many
cosmologists believe that it was what remained after the Universe that
preceded ours collapsed into successive black holes and finally into a
single black hole in what has been called the Big Crunch, our
Universe's ultimate fate as well, the cycle to be repeated endlessly.
This aligns very closely, incidentally, with ancient Hindu cosmology.

Other cosmologists believe the Universe will expand forever, with
galaxies first breaking apart, then stars and planets and other large
bodies, then atoms, then subatomic particles, leaving a near void that
will last for eternity. Much depends on how much matter, energy, "dark
matter," and "dark energy" is in the Universe, whether or not there's
enough for gravity to eventually stop the accelerated expansion of the
Universe happening today.

I favor the ancient Hindu view. Don't you?


No.

"Reid Goldsborough" wrote in message
...


...Have
the last word here if you like here, and continue your harassment here
and elsewhere if you like. You won't hear from me again.


Naturally.

I have posed a question whch you *cannot* answer.
I fully expected you to wimp out.

I'm just surprised that you haven't taken the ultimate coward's step, and
plonked me.

Again.

--
Jeff R.
(the more it changes, the more it stays the same)

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:57:57 -0700, Anka wrote:

No.

Really? I find the Hindu concept of an oscillating cosmos, with our
current Universe having evolved from a previous universe and destined
to evolve into the next one, considerably more reasonable and
compelling than the magical, miraculous cosmologies put forth by
Western religions.

At any rate, I found that Croswell book today, The Alchemy of the
Heavens. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard, and in this book he
states that the r-process (occurring during the collapse and explosion
of massive stars at the end of their life, or supernovae) account for
the creation of most of the elements heavier than iron, but not all.
He says that all gold and most silver in the Universe today were
created by supernovae, the remaining silver by the s-process of
smaller stars at the end of their life.

I also today read through another book, Origins: Fourteen Billion
Years of Cosmic Evolution by Tyson and Goldsmith, published in 2004.
It has a couple of chapters about element formation but doesn't
mention gold or silver let alone copper or tin. It does say, as the
two other recent books I've read through thus far have said as well,
that the conclusions of the groundbreaking 1957 100+page paper by
Burbridge, Burbridge, Fowler, and Hoyle (B2FH) still stand with only
minor corrections relating to lighter elements. So I need to track
down this paper to see if the authors talk specifically about
individual elements such as gold and silver. It doesn't appear to be
online, at least not through the free Web. I'll try to find it next
time I'm at Penn.

I looked briefly through about twenty other books dealing with
cosmology and astrophysics, but none seem to cover the subject of
element creation in any detail. The reading public, is seems, is more
interested in more dramatic or more exotic phenomena, real or
hypothesized, such as the Big Bang, black holes, quasars, superstring
theory, wormholes, parallel universes, and so on.

I still don't know the origin of that figure of 95 percent of the gold
in the Universe coming from supernova explosions. Haven't heard back.
Do you know?

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