Manvantaras e Pralayas

Part I

Manvantara - Um dia de Brahmâ - período de manifestação do Cosmos equivalente a 4.320.000.000 anos solares

(um dia)

Pralaya - Uma noite de Brahmâ - período de repouso do Cosmos equivalente a 4.320.000.000 anos solares

(uma noite)

um Ano de Brahmâ - 3.110.400.000.000 anos solares

(um ano)

Mahamanvantara - 100 anos de Brahmâ ou período completo da Idade de Brahmâ - período de actividade do Cosmos equivalente a 311.040.000.000.000 anos solares

(uma vida)

Mahapralaya - período de inatividade do Cosmos equivalente a 311.040.000.000.000 anos solares

(inactividade, morte, período entre vidas)

Os termos acima são encontrados na tradição Hindu, anterior ao Cristianismo e mais recentemente, (Séc. XIX) na Teosofia.


Part II

Discover Magazine - April 2008, pag. 54 - "The Day Before Genesis"

"For Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, the Big Bang ended on a summer day in 1999 in Cambridge, England. Sitting together at a conference they had organized, called “A School on Connecting Fundamental Physics and Cosmology,” the two physicists suddenly hit on the same idea. Maybe science was finally ready to tackle the mystery of what made the Big Bang go bang. And if so, then maybe science could also address one of the deepest questions of all: What came before the Big Bang?

(...) In the standard interpretation of the Big Bang, which took shape in the 1960s, the formative event was not an explosion that occurred at some point in space and time—it was an explosion of space and time. In this view, time did not exist beforehand. Even for many researchers in the field, this was a bitter pill to swallow. It is hard to imagine time just starting: How does a universe decide when it is time to pop into existence?

(...) The prospects for making sense of the Big Bang began to improve in the 1990s as physicists refined their ideas in string theory, a promising approach for reconciling the relativity and quantum views. Nobody knows yet whether string theory matches up with the real world—the Large Hadron Collider, a particle smasher coming on line later this year, may provide some clues (...)

The key concept turned out to be a “brane,” a three-dimensional world embedded in a higher-dimensional space (the term, in the language of string theory, is just short for membrane). “People had just started talking about branes when we set up the conference,” Steinhardt recalls. “Together Neil and I went to a talk where the speaker was describing them as static objects. Afterward we both asked the same question: What happens if the branes can move? What happens if they collide?”

A remarkable picture began to take shape in the two physicists’ minds. A sheet of paper blowing in the wind is a kind of two-dimensional membrane tumbling through our three-dimensional world. For Steinhardt and Turok, our entire universe is just one sheet, or 3-D brane, moving through a four-dimensional background called “the bulk.” Our brane is not the only one; there are others moving through the bulk as well. Just as two sheets of paper could be blown together in a storm, different 3-D branes could collide within the bulk.

(...) Three years later came a second epiphany: Steinhardt and Turok found their story did not end after the collision. “We weren’t looking for cycles,” Steinhardt says, “but the model naturally produces them.” After a collision, energy gives rise to matter in the brane worlds. The matter then evolves into the kind of universe we know: galaxies, stars, planets, the works. Space within the branes expands, and at first the distance between the branes (in the bulk) grows too. When the brane worlds expand so much that their space is nearly empty, however, attractive forces between the branes draw the world-sheets together again. A new collision occurs, and a new cycle of creation begins. In this model, each round of existence—each cycle from one collision to the next—stretches about a trillion years. By that reckoning, our universe is still in its infancy, being only 0.1 percent of the way through the current cycle.

The cyclic universe directly solves the problem of before. With an infinity of Big Bangs, time stretches into forever in both directions. “The Big Bang was not the beginning of space and time,” Steinhardt says. “There was a before, and before matters because it leaves an imprint on what happens in the next cycle.”

The standard model of the early universe predicts that space is full of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time left over from the first instants after the Big Bang. These waves look very different in the cyclic model, and those differences could be measured—as soon as physicists develop an effective gravity-wave detector. “It may take 20 years before we have the technology,” Turok says, “but in principle it can be done. Given the importance of the question, I’d say it’s worth the wait.”

Meu Deus! e tanto alvoroço para separar o conhecimento mistico ou religioso do conhecimento ciêntifico! Ainda não percebereram que ambos convergem na mesma direcção? - "Seek and you sall find" - diz-vos alguma coisa?

Claro que (e necessariamente) os métodos são distintos. Mas não vos parece que os métodos ciêntificos são desmesuradamente mais lentos, artificiais e caros para o ser humano (em todos os sentidos que a palavra caro pode aqui assumir)?