Tzimtzum

[flexibeast]

Although, as i wrote in an earlier entry, i'm not fussed about attempts to justify spirituality via science (or, as is more usually the case, 'science'), i couldn't help but be startled by the similarity between Lurianic Kabbalah's concept of the Tzimtzum and the following excerpt from an article about a potential mathematical description of what happened before the Big Bang:

Loop Quantum Gravity has been around a while, but Bojowald appears to have simplified it, using different mathematical terminology. This allows solutions to be determined for what was, before, an intractable problem. And what his solution reveals is something that's . . . well, it’s astonishing.

It’s been thought for sometime that there may have been some previous Universe that existed "before" ours. This is a difficult idea, because in the Big Bang model, space and time were created in that initial moment. But if Bojowald’s solutions are correct, it leads the way to understanding this previous Universe. It was out there, everywhere, and it contracted. Eventually it became an ultradense, ultrahot little ball of space and time. At some point, it got so small and so dense that bizarre quantum laws took effect — things like the Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more you know about one characteristic of an object (say, its position) the less you know about another (its velocity). There are several such laws, and they make it hard — impossible, really — to know everything about the universe at that moment.

What Bojowald’s work does, as I understand it (the paper as I write this is not out yet, so I am going by my limited knowledge of LQG and other theories like it) is simplify the math enough to be able to trace some properties of the Universe backwards, right down to T=0, which he calls the Big Bounce. The previous Universe collapsed down, and "bounced" outward again, forming our Universe.

Comments

[blackwingbear.livejournal.com]

I caught this article too... Science is starting to catch up with the occult. I'm excited!

[sunflowerp]

That article was sweet.

Sunflower