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First Cosmological Results From MAP
riptalon writes "The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a NASA Explorer mission has announced the first results based on a year of observations from the L2 Lagrangian point. MAP carries two
back-to-back microwave telescopes to study variations in the cosmic microwave background, to
much greater accuracy than the COBE satellite. The excruciating details of the results
on the age, geometry and composition of the universe can be found in this paper. Executive summary: 13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy."
Will it heat my cosmic coffee?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Matter is Energy.
...but it will cook your cosmic Hot Pocket.
~D:
Does Dark Energy suck or blow?
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Anyone care to let us non-space nerds know what baryons, dark matter and dark energy are? TIA.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Tell that to Columbus.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Really, now. That just makes the universe sounds sinister. I can just imagine Vader argue with Yoda in Ep.III (cutting out the huffing) "Ahh you see master yoda, the universe is mostly the dark side." Can't they go for a policitally correct / socially sensitive / thoughtful of the children phrase like "cannot-see energy" or "we have no fscking clue where it is energy"?
otoh, iirc the original background radiation measurements were done using a U2 (not the band, though it would be interesting) flying at some 70k ft, something about only a U2 can fly that steady (without resorting to satelites, anyway).
My life in the land of the rising sun.
So only 0.6% of the universe is the "normal" matter and energy that we observe and of which we are composed?
I really don't have anything more creative to say than "Wow! That's not a lot."
Blaze a trail to the New World
Baryons
:)
Dark Energy
Dark Matter
Hope this helps you out a little.
~D:
13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons,
95% We don't know.
More information can be found at (including a cosmology tutorial):
w s
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm#Ne
This press release was mentioned in a post in the previous slashdot story yesterday.
Mass media coverage can be found at CNN and the BBC. A list of all the MAP papers can be found here.
Unknown age, 99.9999999% unknown components.
~D:
You only get 73% of you daily dose of dark matter. That would leave eating bowl after bowl after bowl. Try my new "Extra Dark Total Universe" and get 100% of your Dark Matter in just one bowl!
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy.
The recipe for coke ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Subject says it all.
13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy
Except for the age part, that sounds a lot like my ex-girlfriend.
Happy Valentines Day everybody!
13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy
Reminds me of my ex-girlfriend. She was about the size of a small universe too.Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
4.4% baryons + 22% dark matter + 73% dark energy = 99.4% stuff
whats the other 0.6%?
linux?
If only the WMAP could look one day into the past to find articles...
Y'know, when you add up the entirety of the UNIVERSE and it doesn't come out evenly to 100%...it's worrying.
Confused by "Dark Energy," "Vacuum Energy," "Dark Matter," and "Exotic Matter?" Here's a great collection of papers. (Mostly from the SNAP project)
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
"MAP, an Explorer mission, cost about $145 million."
If I understand correctly...
Measuring the age of universe, calculating initial proportions of baryonic matter vs. energy, and deriving shape of universe: $145M.
Shuttle flight to install ISS module: $500M.
Shuttle flight to watch ants float in zero-G: 7 deaths, $500M for launch, $2.0B for new shuttle.
Your Congressional District's seat at the trough of Shuttle/ISS pork: "Priceless."
Now that I've bashed, some constructive criticism - cut NASA in half.
One half - NAA - I'll call the National Aeronautics Administration. Its job will be pure Aeronautics. Launch vehicles. Rockets. Engines. From pricy Shuttles to half-decent Shuttle-C heavy-lift modifications, to cheap expendables, to funky crewed vehicles like X-33, VentureStar, or DC-X.
The other half - N(whoops!) let's call it the NSSA - National Space Science Administration - will do science. Build probes. Stick 'em on rockets built by the NAA, or LockMart, Boeing, or Armadillo, and do some frickin' science.
Under such a scenario, we could have avoided the Shuttle/ISS debacle completely; NAA might have had concerns about losing funding once the last Shuttle was built, and probably would have had a significant incentive to keep asking Congress for funding to build newer, better, cheaper-per-pound launch vehicles.
Why? Because they'd be under competitive pressure from every other contractor under the sun building launch vehicles to launch NSSA's space probes. Perhaps NSSA would have come to the same mistake NASA did - and decided that we Really Needed a Space Station - but even if that were the case, the design requirements of ISS would have immediately mandated a heavy lift vehicle, wholly unlike the Shuttle.
In such a scenario, NSSA would have had the choice between building ISS with three FooCorp Big Dumb Booster flights, or 30-40 NAA Shuttle flights.
Unlike the current NASA monolith, in which both halves exist to feed each other, a separate NSSA would have been loathe to spend its hard-begged budgetbucks to use another government department's (i.e. "NAA's") Shuttle, particularly in the face of cheaper alternatives. (And likewise, NAA, seeing that it had no Shuttle customers, would have been forced to spend its hard-begged budgetbucks building the Shuttle's successor, or find itself on the Congressional chopping block.)
Sacrebleugh! (spelling)
To think that the entire universe could be understood by standing atop a hill and looking at it! The earth is a mere speck in a speck of a galaxy in a far corner of the universe.
To assume that we could understand the whole shebang from this vantage point is like the flea declaring the universe is made up of large hair-like columns which extend upwards forever and soft skin-like ground which stretches forever in all directions.
Get over yourselves. This kind of "science" isn't science, it's palm reading.
I have been pwned because my
From the article: Expansion rate (Hubble constant) value: Ho= 71 km/sec/Mpc
What does the Mpc stand for?
"MAP ... to study variations in the cosmic microwave background, to much greater accuracy than the COBE satellite"
And their web page is better too. My satellite can beat up your satellite!
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Ivory Snow.
It is just rounding. They are quoting to two significant figures. It is actually 73.x and 22.y which adds up to 100% in total.
I would interpret this to mean the following:
(no profit recycling please)
1. 4.4 of the energy is stored in atomic nucleuses and some exotic particles.
2. 22% is stored in matter we can't directly observe, but can observe its effects on surrounding objects.
3. 0.6% is electrons and other small mass particles, measurable energy, etc.
Guess: Up to 73% of the original mechanical energy of the big bang is still in the form of mechanical energy (kenetic energy + potential energy).
Guess#2: Or 73% of the original ME of the big bang has been lost to entropy.
Aside Question: Given 2 objects of the same mass and potential energy at rest. Raise one of the objects to a higher potential. Does that not raise its mass relative to the first since the mass is its total energy/c^2? I remember NASA was puzzled by the Voyager probes not making it as far out as they expected them to be by now. Perhaps because they gained mass relative to us? Also, if 2 objects accelarate relative to each other and thier KE increases (relitively), does that not increase the mass, and their for the attraction between the two objects?
Bah, time to RTFA.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
22% dark matter and 73% dark energy
So...basically they're saying "95% of the Galaxy is we can't sense or prove exists...so just trust us here, because obviously we're scientists."
um...okay. Not disputing it, just kinda going along with it.
This "finding" is bogus. The only authority on the universe is the Word of God as spoken in, and only in, the Holy Bible. The only thing NASA should be sending into space should be Bibles. A true Christian would never believe the filth that comes from NASA. NASA is actually the North American Satanists Association and is one of the biggest spewers of Luciferic filth on the Lord's planet.
The Lord struck the shuttle down and burned it's occupants and they are still burning... in HELL. If you're not a true Christian then you too will be burned... both here on the Lord's planet and in Hell where you will burn for eternity.
It looks like the calculation was accurate to 2 significant figures. That other .4% is either baryons, dark energy or matter. Since they probably cannot accurately say how much so they don't even try.
"...13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy."
This just sings to me, I think this could be the new "all your base are belong to us." or something of that nature. Quite nice.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I thought that the Universe was hyper sphere so if we looked through a telescope that was strong enough we would see our butt.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The best thing the money could be spent on is eith er the war on drugs or on gun law enforcement and punishment. In any case, the government needs to at least double the taxes to pay for social programs and get tougher drug and gun laws on the books and enforced and to increase security in the country before blowing money foolishly on space and science.
Would not a sphere of unimaginable size have a surface that would essentially flat?
For millenia, most of the world thought the earth was flat and people could fall off the edge. Could this just be an extension?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Damn, think I got a bit carried away, said it twelve times and had to shout BATMAN at the top of my lungs. I think I'm going to be getting some paid leave soon.
Can anyone tell me what's so special about the Sun-Earth L2 point that made it attractive to put the probe there? I couldn't find any reference on that site about why that spot was chosen.
At first I thought that it might need permanent shade from the sun, but I checked and found that the Earth's umbra doesn't extend that far out.
Unlike L4 or L5, the L2 position is a meta-stable point, requiring frequent correction to remain in place. There had to be a very good reason to choose it. The site has quite a bit of info about what exactly that spot is (nothing I didn't know already) and how the probe got there, but not a word why.
When I took physics not so very long ago, they never mentioned 'Dark Energy' as one of the forces of nature. They were real good at calling people who talked about alternative energy like 'radiant energy' whack-jobs. But reality is stranger than fiction; it turns out that the wackjobs were right about at least one thing: the universe is full (73%) of unseen energy forces which are beyond the ken of modern physics.
Not quite.
:)
From the PDF in the article:
Baryon density 0.044 +- 0.004
Matter density 0.27 +- 0.04
Dark energy density 0.73 +- 0.04
Total density 1.02 +- 0.02
The figures in the abstract have assumed that "Total density" is 1.00 (as this fits in nicely with other theories, and is within the uncertainty margin).
Note also that the baryons are part of the "matter density", and the figure "dark matter" in the abstract was obtained by subtracting these two.
Assuming that total density = 1.00, the figures are actually:
Baryons (incl. leptons) between 4.0% and 4.8%
Dark energy between 69% and 77%
Dark matter between 19% and 27% (approx.)
PS. To calculate (0.27+-0.04) - (0.044+-0.004) I have rounded the latter; someone who remembers how to do it the proper way could correct me
Does Dark Energy suck or blow?
e nergy.html
Blow... sort of. It acts the opposite of gravity, pushing everything apart.
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/dark-
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Since time has been proven to continue into infinity, why do we state that the universe 'started' 13.7 billion years ago? What was happening 13.8 billion years ago in the space we currently occupy? Surely the Big Bang was a result of some other cosmic event, since time could stretch infinitely into the past as well as the future. The universe couldn't have been born without being first conceived...
This isn't science! Wait, oh shit, it is.
Let the naysayers be damned. I don't think there's a 'real' scientist out there who believes that this is the ultimate truth as to what the universe is composed of.
However, it's a good start at figuring out just what exactly is going on.
Where would we be now if some nutcase back in the day didn't say, "Hmm, well, what if the world was actually round?" and start working on craziness that would ensure.
Where would we be if some looney wouldn't have said, "You know, math would be a lot easier if zero exisisted."?
Giving random figures about things you aren't certain about isn't science. It's an important *part* of science. It's a launch vehicle for experimentation and theorizing.
Inaccuracy is biggest sin a scientist can make, except when it makes the maths easier.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
When I first saw the COBE map awhile back, a little part of me said, "Well, that's nice, but such subtle data from a single platform isn't much to go on." But now, the new image certainly does seem to correlate well with it. The similarities are graphically obvious, and the fact that those data were obtained independently from COBE's is what makes this announcement most significant.
Actually The first measurements were done by the telephone companies, with a ground based microwave antenna, trying to figure out why there was interferance with their microwave towers. Next the more accurate version was done with a large weather balloon at the south pole where the sun kept constant temp on the balloon allowing it to stay in the same place for 30 hours. This gave the first accurate tests before the U2 was even in the air.
Time has not been proven to continue into infinity. Go read 'A Brief History of Time' for a good laymens introduction to cosmology.
Space and time are concepts deeply intertwined with energy and matter; they is not distinct from them. Thus, there is no 'before' the universe began, there is no time there, there is no there there either.
does anyone else find it odd that this "dark matter" was only discovered a matter of days ago, and suddenly we have a gauge on it? how accurate can this measure be?
All your base are 13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy
...It is my understanding that space is a co-relative property of energy, not an independent plenum in which things reside. That is to say, without taking into account the relationship between two or more energy peaks there is nothing which can be called "space." Space in this context simply means: spatial relationship, but that relationship is intercontained in the co-relative awareness which we call "energy."
That makes me one of those cosmologists who takes consciousness as the primary medium from which all else is composed. Although from a materialist standpoint this is difficult to conceive, it is a perfectly valid assumption from which to build. But it proceeds from a subjective experiential validity rather than an "objective" sensual validity. Since I know from experience that I am transcendently conscious I have no trouble trusting my own authority on the matter.
And frankly it leads to more elegant explanations of phenomena than proceeding from a materialist standpoint, and after all aren't aesthetics the real arbiter of truth?
-- thinkyhead software and media
In order of usefulness:
The difference between ignorance and apathy? I sure don't know, and I don't care either.
Am I to believe they mean flat as in, the universe is flat like the surface of my desk? Or is it the whole curvature, non curvature thing?
I'm having problems finding the answers to this question and I know one of you can help me. Reply for great justice!
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
As my physics used to say "Science never sucks, it only pushes and pulls."
The density of the universe also determines its geometry. If the density of the universe exceeds the critical density, then the geometry of space is closed and positively curved like the surface of a sphere. This implies that photon paths diverge slowly and eventually return back to a point. If the density of the universe is less than the critical density, then the geometry of space is open, negatively curved like the surface of a saddle. If the density of the universe exactly equals the critical density, then the geometry of the universe is flat like a sheet of paper. Thus, there is a direct link between the geometry of the universe and its fate.
The simplest version of the inflationary theory, an extension of the Big Bang theory, predicts that the density of the universe is very close to the critical density, and that the geometry of the universe is flat, like a sheet of paper.
From http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101shape.html
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Saw this image first thing in the morning, barely conscious, and thought, "uhnnnn...wha? some new map of the earth?"
Then I realized what I was looking at. Funny, how the eye can see familiar patterns in everything...throw the Americas in the center, Europe on the right, Africa lower right, Asia off to the left with Australia at the far left bottom corner...
Hell, even "South America" and "Africa" look like they could fit together.
--Dan
I agree. The government could give ME a tax cut. In fact, if we could cut spending down to just the functions of government that the Constitution allows, they could give me a BIG ASS tax cut.
Go crawl under a rock, you damned liberal!
One thing that I have never understood about the observations that approach the time of the big bang is how are we able to still see that light.
.1c then we should only be able to see light that left the location of the big bang 1.37 billion years ago.
The assumption is that the universe was created out of a singularity called the Big Bang. Immediately after the big bang, matter and energy began expanding at various speed up to the speed of light. As the universe expanded, it would have gradually slowed its rate of expansion to the current speed. From the red shift of the universe as a whole, our galaxy appears to be moving at around 300km per second.
So the problem is that if light was moving away from the point of the big bang at the speed of light and the matter that we are now made up was moving along some complex vector at an average speed that was much slower. All of the light from the universal point of origin should have long passed us by. If you assume that our speed averaged over the estimated 13.7 billion years was even
The fact that they are able to see radiation and galaxies in all direction that are 13.7 billion light years away seems to imply that the universe is actually much older.
If you were to assume that we were in the middle of a piece of space from which light had been detected in all directions from a distance of 13.7 billion light years. That would imply a sphere of known space that has a radius of 13.7 billion light years. Now all information points to us not being at the center of the universe so we are actually seeing a sphere of space that is itself moving outward from a much larger sphere that is the actual universe. Do we even have information that shows that our 13.7 billion year sphere of knowledge contains the edge of the sphere expanding from the big bang? How much farther away now are the stars that were there 13.7 light years away, 13.7 billion years ago?
If the universe did indeed originate in a Big bang, then it must have been much much longer ago than 13.7 billion years.
Anyone out there understand the theory behind this?
Cheers
75% Dark Archons a la Starcraft
25% George Bush
They just don't want you to know that yet
The probe was just measuring the heat transmitted by the walls of the holodeck.
Do you have any idea about how NASA really operates?
NASA's budget and operations are firmly divided into unmanned and manned areas. Almost none of the unmanned science missions are launched by the Shuttle fleet... most are launched on corporate expendable launch vehicles.
Science in NASA is almost totally disengaged from launch vehicle & station planning & operations. This is a problem, not a cure.
No, unless your coffee has been artificially cooled below the temperature of the universe.
No naturally occuring cups of coffee in the universe will need any cooling from the CMB
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Isn't it outside the scope of science to try to say what the origin of the universe is? The interpretation of this data relies on far too much flimsy theory to be credible IMHO. Dark matter, for example, still can't even be detected. We only 'know' it exists because it MUST exist for the current model of cosmogeny to be valid. I for one would rather see a 'we report, you decide' approach to this stuff. Tell me what you found, sans comment.
4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy. it MUST be the formula for the evil syrum my algebra teacher drinks.....
The writeup on scienceforums.net (click below if too lazy to c/p /type) provides a good technical summary of the results and explains what all the fancy terms like decoupling and reionization mean.
Does this research: New Light on Dark Matter, count as a prediction of these observations?
Of cource, at one time, a lot of the "real" scientists thought that there was something they named 'ether' where all EM waves travel in. People swore up and down that was how it had to be, since sound waves must travel in a medium.
Then Michelson and Moorley (sp?) proved those prople wrong.
Doesn't the fact that 95% of the universe is "dark" suggest we have a very poor understanding of what is actually going on?
I mean, when we only know what 5% of the universe is, doesn't that suggest our current understanding of things, physically speaking, is pretty bad?
I don't mean to sound like a troll or anything, but really: if this were any other field of science, it would sound like current theory were woefully inadequate. I mean, to not be able to explain 95% of your subject matter...
What am I missing?
The map (really big version too) is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Along with another good description of the findings with the typical excellent APOD links.
Go Apod!
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Those 4% of normality are on the other side of the Universe, to the left and a bit bellow the oldest quasars. We are deep into the utter nonsense zone. But if you are smart you would have guessed that by now.
And that's not just a summary. That's a SUMMARY .
excuse me for being, well, not exactly the brightest one here, but here goes:
If the speed of light is constant, then why does it vary as it goes through different things? For example: when light goes through glass, it slows through the glass then speeds back up again.
And with black holes, the gravity is so intense that not even light can escape.
It would seem that these two things (the first being the most obvious of all) prove that the speed of light does vary. Or maybe everybody I learned from was full of it.
Either way, any clarification would help.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
I'd just like to mention that I really appriceate it when the author of an article on science sums it if for us. I often have only 5 min to brouse the headlines and information like this is most welcome.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Dark Energy Sucks because it exerts a negative pressure on the universe. (There's a neat article about positive and negative pressure in the most recent Scientific American - including stuff about dark energy and the cosmos.)
Anything with a negative pressure sucks.
Anything with a positive pressure blows.
blowing money foolishly on space and science, thats nice and close minded.. science has made the world a better place (hot food, running water, agriculture, COMPUTERS like the one youre typing on, just to name a few out of almost everything else.. ) :)
maybe you like rubbing sticks together to make heat. i sure like turning on the heater
i do agree on the point that taxes should be raised, but never cut out science..
a klingon would pop up with the infamous "I can see my house from here" quote.
http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/fra meless/startstandard.html
Straight to baryons:http://particleadventure.org/particleadven ture/frameless/hadrons.html
Ok, this is a subject that really melts the grey matter, but I just gotta ask...
:)
If the universe is continually expanding, and at the rate of gazillions of light years every day... What the hell is it filling up?? That thing must be F**King HUGE!!!
Why does the baby pic of the universe represent the (borders of the) universe in the shape our own planet?
Why this sudden geocentrism again?
There is an animation on the NASA website that starts with the global shape and ends up with sth totally different (namely the borders being that what we can see of it).
It takes a lot of courage to say no when everyone else rush into mass crazyness and hate. Remember early opponents to nazism in germany when all the politicians were with hitler. Were they coward ? Of course not.
History will tell but USA has not to be proud of promoting hate and disinformations.
Actually, you're about the first person to clue in!
*psst* (Doesn't that picture look like a picture of the city lights of earth on the nightside, all spread out? It couldn't be, could it? Nah...)
It means that you and I and everything else in the universe is travelling at escape velocity.
Is that perfectly clear?
Hello:
:-). Yet we cannot decide what the matter used to get correct velocity profiles is at this time. So we don't know what it is made of, and its sole purpose is to cover a math error, an approach which has work in the past, see the history of the neutrino for example.
We don't know how gravity works on a large scale (and physicists don't like to point this out explicitly). Back in the 1960's, Alar Toomre was able to take the profile of light from a spiral galaxy and calculate how fast things were going (it is a tough calculation involving elliptical integrals). He showed two things. First, the velocities of the outer stars should decrease over distance, yet the speed remains constant. Second, a small disturbance along the axis will cause the galaxy to collapse, yet galaxies are stable over billions of years.
Dark matter was invented to get the velocity profile right and make the systems stable. We have a very precise knowledge of what kinds of particles can make up anything (it is called the standard model, built from the groups U(1), SU(2), and SU(3). whatever a group is
If we had a stable constant-velocity solution that involves gravity, then there would be no need for dark matter for spiral galaxies. There are other structures that Newton's gravity law fails to explain, but this was the first one noticed.
The big bang has a very similar math problem. Everything is traveling at the same speed, yet there was not enough time to agree to said speed (known as the horizon problem). The solution using the known forces is also mathematically unstable (the flatness problem). It is far worse than balancing a pencil on its tip, requiring some 55 orders of magnitude precision to end up with a Universe 13.7 billion years old. Guth and Linde proposed a way to solve these problems calling it inflation. A period of exponential growth gives everyone the same speed and drives the result to a stable place.
If we had a stable constant-velocity solution that involves gravity, then there would be no need for inflation.
For big systems like spiral galaxies or the big bang, gravity does not work. We do have hyptheses for both problems. Yet both involve types of matter we are still trying to guess. We may be missing something basic, a stable constant-velocity solution that involves gravity. Let's look at gravity again...
F_g = d m V/dtau = m dV/dtau + V dm/dtau
This is the chain rule applied to a relativistic force law. The m dV/dtau is the m A acceleration term that gets all the press. The other term is for constant-velocity. Assume the m A term is zero, solve for the second one, and one has a chance at getting a constant-velocity solution involving gravity. At least that's what I do in my free time.
doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Hmm if they swept the Starship Enterprise for Baryons then there would be nothing left but electrons....
Eat at Joe's.
1) Big Bang
2) ???
3) 13.7 billion years old, flat, 4.4% baryons, 22% dark matter and 73% dark energy!!!
Exit, pursued by a bear.
Mass is essentially energy. E=MC^2 is just a way of coverting between the units that were decided on to express mass energy, and the units used to express other types of energy.
95% of everything is dark stuff.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Not only does time not continue backwards infinitely (this would require the "steady-state" concept to be true), but if string-theory is anywhere near the mark, time itself is GRANULAR. So it is NOT continuous... it just sort of smoothes out at larger scales.
Which is what I have thought for a while: our human experience of the universe is grossly distorted by the fact that we experience time, space, and matter at a great distance of scale, so that everything looks smooth and regular, when it is actually frothy and discontinuous at the "bottom".
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
But, I feel that the whole flatness thing is getting out of hand. Inflationists need the universe to be really, really flat, or else they would have gone through all the trouble of inflation theory for nothing... :-)
So, what happens, is that every time a new study comes out that doesn't make a flat universe, very improbable, they claim a new victory for inflation. But, to date, there isn't really a study that can be claimed to support the idea that the universe is flat, not even this one. It is just that a flat universe is still pretty consistent with data. But, a flat universe is a line in the diagram, and to claim that this line is correct, you need more proof than that. I think it is time to go looking for reasons that the universe isn't as flat as expected...
As for the shape of the earth, that's an exaggerated myth. The circumference of the earth was measured by Eratostenes long BC, and was generally accepted by scientists throughout the middle ages, the renessance included. It was only in a short period about 300 AD that leading priests contended that the earth was flat. Damn, I should translate my Norwegian language article on this... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It's amazing...do you realize that I posted that response EXACTLY 12 hours after you did?
n le
Ninnleninnleninnleninnle
Ninnleninnleninnlenin
Ninnleninnleninnleninnle
BATMAN!
Hey! This is neat!
Matter doesn't size.