If time is a measurement, than what physically exists is perfectly conserved, as it passes from one macro-state to the next. It is only these macro states that are created and consumed.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Doesn’t the Uncertainty Principle essentially show that some information is destroyed in the very process of measuring other information?

Since I view time as a consequence of motion, rather than the dimensional basis for it, I think monumental amounts of information are destroyed and replaced every moment. I would posit the current credit meltdown, as well as the rest of history, as proof.

Lawrence B. Crowell

According to Inflation theory, it is many, many times the size of the visible universe. To the point that, from our perspective, it is just about spatially infinite. Curvature seems mostly a function of the time dimension, in that the analysis of redshift and CMBR says it is only13.73 billion years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation

“Cosmic inflation has the important effect of smoothing out inhomogeneities, anisotropies and the curvature of space.”

Basically it explains how the factors which suggest an infinite universe can exist in a finite model.

Well, the free parameter in question is a pretty important one, in my view: the energy scale of inflation. Pinning down the energy scale of inflation is a pretty big step in making any significant statements about what inflation actually is.

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In cosmology the time dependency of the metric coefficients means there is no Killing vector which as an isometry defines an energy conservation. As strange as it might sound, conservation of energy in cosmology is not definable. The only conservation law we really have is the continuity equation

plus conservation based what ever spatial killing vectors might exist.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Measurements to smaller scales. Once past 10 arcminutes or so, you’re in the damping tail and will learn nothing more of the early universe. Getting l of 700 won’t really help much with l of 3000 except you might know the input cosmological parameters a bit better.

As for the other benefits you mention. Yes, of course there will be a lot of data. I just don’t see it as really changing things, pushing the field, in new directions. And I say that as a guy with Kolb and Tuner on his desk and a couple of early universe ideas out in the literature and in my head. I wish there was a measurement from Planck that I’d be truly excited about, but right now it’s a grab bag of things that other places will cover as well.

Well, the free parameter in question is a pretty important one, in my view: the energy scale of inflation. Pinning down the energy scale of inflation is a pretty big step in making any significant statements about what inflation actually is. There are also measurements of the CMB out to smaller scales, which will provide further, much more significant constraints on various other inflationary parameters. It’s also a big help to make use of the same instrument for both the large angular scales and the small angular scales, as there are always uncertainties that crop up when combining different experiments. Then there’s the fact that additional sky coverage improves measurements at all angular scales, and so Planck will be able to do better out to somewhere around 10-20 arcminutes or so than any ground-based instrument can possibly do.

Lawrence B. Crowell

I am trying to figure out what you are meaning here. The result seems to point to some analogy with the T less than T_c magnetization of a metal in domains. Though some care must be given in that our observations are not across the whole of space, but are along projective rays on a past light cone. This birefringence result is an anisotropy and not an inhomogeneity result. But it does suggest that a CP violating phase in the PMNS (CKM) matrix might assume local values, which is suggestive of physics similar to more down to Earth physics of symmetry breaking and Landau-Ginsburg type of potentials. The WZW action in supersymmetry is similar to this, and this might be a manifestation or “fossil” signature of such physics in the early universe.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Adam on Mar 5th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
@ Mr. Crowell:

Have you considered that the stochastic nature of the parametrically-driven electron birefrigence would circumvent the dynamic Curie threshold and instead oscillate unstably until (pi/d^2) - 1 converges on infinity, thus causing the universe to implode?

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I am trying to figure out what you are meaning here. The result seems to point to some analogy with the T

I would say from conversations with many people that Planck has been so long in development that by the time it does get up and running many of its results will be anticipated by other experiments (for example, the ground based ones.) Other than primordial gravitational waves (PGWs), I don’t find much to get excited about relative to other things coming online — which will mostly be telling us about the later universe.

I don’t find PGWs particularly exciting — they are supposedly “pinning down” a free parameter for inflation, but let’s be honest here: there are many varieties of inflation, too many, and did the WMAP result “ruling out” single-field phi^4 really change anything in the field? Not really. It was cool and fun, and worthy of celebration, but it had not enough impact on the proliferation of inflation models, and did little to provoke theorists and observers in new directions.

Other than that, perhaps the search for non-Gaussianity will be the biggest result from Planck. But it’s hard to square with the massive amount of resources that have been expended. Could we have built a “non-Gaussian probe” better faster cheaper?

Definitely, Planck’s results will not have the massive, stunning impact that WMAP’s no-BS settling of the concordance model (taking “concordance” here to just mean a negative pressure fluid and not a pure cosmological constant) did. (By “settle” here, I don’t mean “prove” — I mean “provide the baseline against which new models must improve upon.”)

Anyway, as I’ve been typing this I’ve mellowed a little on Planck. Perhaps there will be something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error_(statistics)

The more data points you have, the broader the distribution looks to your eye, but the better-determined the mean of the distribution actually is.