Slashdot Mirror
Theory-Affirming Evidence About the Universe
Bill Kendrick writes "Astronomers using a radio telescope at the South Pole have recorded a flicker of light from nearly 14 billion years ago that verifies most modern theory about the cosmos. Way back then, light and matter were only just beginning to separate from each other."
It's not the matter in the Universe which is "expanding", but the Universe itself. The Big Bang didn't happen at just one point in space; it happened at one point which became all of space. So the Big Bang happened everywhere - Kidderminster, Baghdad, Mercury, Andromeda, everywhere. So there are parts of the Universe which are very very far away from us. Light from these parts has travelled for billions of years to reach us, hence it was intially emitted a very long time ago, at a time just after the Big Bang.
Many people think the Big Bang theory means that the universe expands like a conventional explosion from a sigular point. This is not correct.
Imagine an infinite rubber sheet covered in dots. At the beginning of the universe (or as early as we can postulate) this sheet started stretching in all directions , so the dots on it became further apart. This is similar to what happened to the universe, except in the universe it was 3 dimentional. So there is no special place where the big bang happened, it was everywhere
Since the universe was always infinite and the big bang happened everywhere on the 'sheet', as we look further away we see further back in time. This means light is always coming from every age of the universe since the big bang for us to see. The light in this case came from when the 'sheet' stretched just enough for the density of the universe to allow light to pass freely without being continually absorbed and re-emitted. This is the base microwave background radiation.
This article is saying polarisation has been detected which means some evidence of the lights last scattering event is present, so this tells us something about the universe at the point when it became opaque to light.
How ironic that a creationist would use a scientific principle to try and prove the existence of God. If you want to use the 2nd law of thermodynamics in an argument, then go and get a physics degree. In the mean time, check out this page and call me in the morning.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Of course, the question about why there is a universe at all has to be answered. But according to Bill Ockham's Remington, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. God + universe = two entities, universe = 1 entity, therefore, as Laplace put it, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If anyone actually read the real article they would be appaled at the sensationalism applied to this story by the slashdot editors and the submitting person. The ONLY thing it solidifies is the polarization aspects and NOTHING ELSE.
It is getting quite disgusting as how Slashdot's editors are allowing this site to become the new "weekly world news". what's next stories about a two headed alien worm baby and a phycic moose found in northern canada?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I work at UChicago (Carlstrom, the professor here, is my advisor). For more information about CMB polarisation, I reccomend Wayne Hu's (a theorists) webpages at http://background.uchicago.edu.
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.
Remember kids, every time a gap in fossil record is filled, two more gaps are created!
Just because you don't know about the countless intermediary fossils that we've discovered for many species, including our own, doesn't mean they exist. We've got quite a nice progression from our common ancestor with ape to modern man, thankyouverymuch.
The Talk.Origins FAQ Archive
Not to piss specifically on your religion, but:
& q= biblical+contradictions
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_bibl.htm
This hasn't exactly been hiding since the bible was written.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?