Hal writes:
>I don't have a clear picture of what the attraction was
>of a closed universe despite the lack of physical evidence
>for it. I found some excerpts from a sci.physics posting at
>http://www.seanet.com/~ksbrown/closed1.htm which discussed some
>issues, but they didn't seem very convincing.
The theoretical attraction is for a very nearly critical mass
universe. The key observation is that the mass density relative
to critical density diverges with time. If this parameter is near
one, then it must have been very very near one when the universe
was orders of magnitude younger than it is now. And if it is now
almost exactly one now, then it will be far from one when the
universe is a few orders of magnitude older than now, and thus
we are living at the unusual time when this parameter goes from
being near one to being far from one. Theorists don't have any
ideas I know of for this coincidence, so they'd rather it wasn't
there.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Tue Jan 13 00:47:47 1998
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