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NASA Reaffirms Big Bang Theory
Peretz writes "NASA has found evidence reinforcing a theory of what took place post-Big Bang and time expansion. They claim: 'Over the course of millions of years, gravity exploited the density differences to create the structure of the universe---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.'"
NASA has a confirmed a theory of what took place post-Big Bang and time expansion.
Please don't use sensationalist and misleading headlines. Confirmation of a theory is tantamount to saying that it is proven. Given that this is scientific theory we're referring to, I don't think that's what you want to say. What you probably want to say is, "New evidence supports a Big Bang Theory".
What NASA actually says in their article is:
To put that into laymans terms, they have new data that agrees with old data and theories. That can be a good thing for the status of a theory. But let's be somewhat scientific here and not throw around statements that imply proven theories. This is, after all, supposed to be "News for Nerds".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Well, looks like that's it for their funding.
How can the past be truly confirmed? -C
This doesn't confirm anything. They have found evidence that may or may not be consistent with a particular hypothesis. Could someone please do a better job of editing the titles?
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
How is it possible to "confirm" a big bang theory ? You'd have to go back and see it. Maybe "indirect evidence was found" is a better description.
They'll probably change their stance a few years anyway about the whole thing.
---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.
Fantastic!
I was looking for a pickup line for tonight!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
First I clicked on the link and there was this: Nothing for you to see here.
Then I clicked and there was a story.
It happened in less than a second, so we can call that a Big Bang.
Q.E.D.
You can't handle the truth.
Lets not forget that in science you cant prove anything, only disprove. All you can do is postulate a theory and provide evidance to back it up.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
And we all know the answer will be 42, so why bother?
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Era of reionization? Time expansion? Doesn't Nasa know this is friday afternoon, time to go drinking and chase skirts? I can't think about this now!
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Actually, I think he means Quiddich Cup. Bad enough that the religious zealots chime in, but now we have a new threat to science from the Harry Potter geeks.
There is no use resisting, five points to Gryffyndor!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Oh great, now the Kansas Board of Education will have to have another meeting.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Now what exactly happened billions of years ago? And what happened before that? And before that?
*Head asplodes*
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Do you really think scientists decided that the universe is probably expanding from a single point, and then decided to manufacture evidence to prove that belief to themselves? The whole idea that the universe is expanding was a shocking idea that was only accepted by astrophysicists when they concluded that experimental data could have no other explanation.
You should make it clearer that when you say "based on what I do know" you mean "based on nothing".
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
what strange definition of "universe" do you have that the term "always" would make sense outside of it? "The universe always existed" can't be anything but tautology. The universe is existence*.
*whether the universe exists or not notwithstanding, of course.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?
The dame walked into my office with a sneer on her pretty pasty-white face. "You sure you know what you're talking about?" I sneered back.
"Yeah," she said. She had the kind of teeth made for clenching, white and pearly and pressed firmly together. "Yeah, the way I see it, the Universe got a bum rap. They say it all exploded, but I don't believe it. Not my Universe, the big handsome lug." She went on like that for a while. It coulda been the whiskey, but I think she was just dumb in love with her own voice. She went on about how the Universe had to've always been, and nobody had no evidence to the contrary.
She wound down after sixty minutes or so.
"Look, Lady," I snapped. "I get paid by the hour. You owe me big. But I'll forget to send the bill if you just answer me one question."
She squinted at me like her eyeballs got a taste of something sour. "What?" She spat the word out in a short blast of noise, like a bird honking for attention.
"You ever break the second law of thermodynamics?"
The question must've smacked her right between the eyes. "What're you implying?" She was suddenly, strangely coy.
I pressed my advantage. "Your lovely little thing with the Universe. You ever break the second law of thermodynamics? Did you ever see the Universe break the second law of thermodynamics?"
She shook her head like she had a boiled egg stuck in her ear. She admitted, "I have never done any such thing. It's impossible for a lady of my fine upbringing. I don't even understand what you are driving at, Mister Entropy."
"Yeah, I know." I pointed toward the door. She took the hint, and left my office like a hot, wet squal in the middle of the Pacific. "That's the problem, " told the blank and empty space where she had been. "If you don't get it now, you'll probably never understand."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Suppose I'm sitting by a pond one day, busy coding on my laptop, when I hear a lound splash. I look up and see a couple of kids picking up rocks and a circular wave having a diameter that indicates it was formed about 5s ago. Well, I wasn't a witness to the event, but I could hypothesize that one of the kids threw a rock into the water. To confirm, I could roll up my pant legs and feel around in the soft muddy floor of the pond for a rock. Now I've got a supported theory. The rock turns out to be the same imported blue granite used to grit the path around the pond but not found natively in the area? Even more confirmation...
So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why?
It was depressed and binge-eating?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?
Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
There's lots more. All it takes is a little reading and thinking to find lots more problems with a universe that's always been here.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
If the Universe started out in one place, and expanded at less than the speed of light, how can we only now be receiving light from its early days?
.6c, and object B is moving the opposite direction at .6c, does each object appear to be moving at >1c from the other object?
Because the Big bang was not an explosion. The universe didn't start in one place - it was one place, and that place - space itself - expanded.
If object A is moving one direction at
No. Because by special relativity, velocities do not add in the Newtonian fashion. The wikipedia article on it is pretty good.
To the mods: why was the parent marked Flamebait? Just because he admitted he is a fundamentalist? Posts that pointed out the same thing without authors expressing religious conviction got marked as "insightful" or "interesting". Learn a little bit of tolerance, it won't hurt.
:) I chose to refer to creative days as creative stages, or creative time periods.
Now, to move on
Although it is a rather common view, and in no way to critique you at all, may I suggest, respectfully, to investigate further and deeper the meaning of "day" throughout the Bible?
Keeping all religious doctrines aside, day can mean various time periods of no specific length. At times a day is taken for a thousand years... At times it is taken simply to mean an undefined time period.
A very basic description is the use of "judgment day". There is no indication it means anything other than a certain, undefined time period. That's it. There is more reasoning to it than just this, but I can't recall it. At one point I spent quite a bit of time reading various articles on this subject.
And to all who will be jumping at this, claiming that now fundamentalists, creationists, or whatever other term you choose to use now are shifting their conviction... there was never any guarantee that the view (whoever devised it) of 6000-year-old earth was correct. So at the very least, hail the break-through!
When Big Bang theory was new, many didn't like it due to the harmony it had with theistic assumptions and arguments over the years. The universe had a beginning and that was bad news.
But people got over it.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Upon closer inspection of the results, scientists found evidence of giant supergalactic noodles and meatballs.
You're correct. No where does the Bible directly say the earth is 6000 years old.
This theory is based on (in my opinion an incorrect) belief that God created the earth, and then directly followed up by creating everything else, in literally 7 days earth time. Though no where is this stated or implied. Furthermore, time is defined as infinite to God in Genesis, where it's stated that 7 days can be equal to 7 years or 7 minutes.
The 6000 year figure comes from listings of the ages of parents starting with Adam and Eve, which are given when heirs are born and upon death. This is documented in the Bible all the way up to the Kings (Known as chapters Kings I and Kings II). Historical documentation, and some on going religious calendars provide a pretty accurate way to translating dates. Most of this is based on the Bible as a historical document, if you believe the time lines are correct.
Time frames from the Kings on rely on secular historical data, such as the resignation of King Solomon after the destruction of Solomon's temple by the Babylonians. By the time Jesus is born the history of *man* is calculated as being just under 4,000 years old.
Taking everything at face value you *at best* could define when humans started to record history, and place it at 6,000 years. To define a time line for the universe... I think that's better left to scientists than cave men chiseling in stone...
In the simplest terms I can put it...
.. er.. hyper? sphere) so the cars can move in 3 dimensions (left, right, up, down, forward, backwards) and yet still never get outside of the hypersphere. (if it helps, picture it as a normal sphere but if a beam of light would penetrate the surface, instead re-enters the sphere at a spot on the opposite side but really I think that there is no "surface" to penetrate.)
If racecar a is on a straight racetrack with racecar b they will stop and smash at the end of the track. One can be ahead or behind the other one.They are limited to remaining on the line of the track so they are moving in 1 dimensions.
If racecar a is on a racetrack with racecar b, then each racecar is both ahead of and behind each other. They are limited to remaining on the line of the track but can turn so they are moving in 2 dimensions.
Now-- instead of a racetrack, make them the inside of a sphere so they are whizzing around inside it. Instead of moving in a line (1d), they can move in 3 dimensions on the inside of the sphere but would percieve it as if they were moving in 2 dimensions (since they couldn't go down into the ground or up into the air). They can drive as far as they want with complete freedom forward, backwards, left and right, and still never get out of the sphere. Sort of like us on earth.
Now-- cover the earth mentally with cars very close together and start them driving around at a maximum speed of 20 mph. Now... expand the earth to 10 times its size like a balloon (by blowing a lot of air or rock into it). The cars are suddenly 10 times as far apart-- some of them are now so far apart that at a maximum speed of 20 mph, they won't ever see all the earth or other cars if the earth keeps expanding.
Finally- Add one more dimension (like going from a circle to a sphere only go to a
That's the universe and that's light- it can go in all directions and never get out.
Apologies to real scientists out there. B) Best i can do.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's much easier to start by thinking about a universe that isn't expanding. The imporant concept is that the universe is "circular": move far enough in any direction and you'd be back where you started. Light just keeps moving until it hits something - there's no direction where light can go that it leaves the universe. The things we can see that are clearly very old and very far away are distributed more or less evenly across the sky.
However, you can't see all the way back to the Big Bang - for the first 100 K years or so the universe was opaque, though every bit of it was glowing brightly (the same amount of matter in a much smaller universe meant the entire univers was effectively an opaque liquid for quite some time). The cosmic microwave background radiation that is being studied here is a snapshot of the moment (called Recombination) when that changed, and the universe became transparant.
The rapid inflation of the universe (so the theory goes) happened long before Recombination, so the universe was already pretty large at that time. Nevertheless, light could have circled a universe that size many times in the age of the current universe. It doesn't work out that way, however, as the universe has been steadily expanding.
Imagine the universe as a balloon, with stars as marks on the balloon and light as an ant crawling away from one of the marks. If the baloon is inflated rapidly it could take quite a long time indeed for the ant to make a circle, as the distance remaining in the circle is growing nearly as fast as the ant could walk. We don't think that any of the light we see has actually been around even one full "circle", but this model does explain why we see very old things in every direction.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
search for "Olbers' Paradox" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olber's_paradox).
This is a helpful hint to curious people about to use Google and is not intended as a spelling flame.
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
The second law of thermodynamics is no longer considered a law per se, since we discovered that thermodynamic systems such as gasses are composed of atoms which collide with one another according to time-symmetric laws, not some continuous 'gas' stuff which obeys the 2nd law the way particles obey the law of gravity, say. The fact that entropy always seems to go up is merely a statistical law, namely, that the chances of it going back down are EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY unlikely, because of all possible arrangements of (for example) the atoms in a cloud of gas, most of them are in thermal equilibrium, and a vanishingly small number of possible states of that cloud of gas have all of them on one side, or some similarly low-entropy state.
But such states are still possible. And given infinite time, anything possible will occur. So while a massive amount of energy suddenly conspiring to come together to form the super hot and dense 'initial state' of the Big Bang is vanishingly unlikely, in an eternity, it will eventually occur. An infinite number of times, in fact. So the 'universe' as we conceive it (or at least the part of it which we call 'the universe', that part which we have any hope of ever observing) is currently winding down from an extremely unlikely lapse of entropy, and an inconceivably long amount of time in the future, something just like that will happen again.
And if you take infinite space for granted too, then something just like the Big Bang is happening right now, most likely somewhere so far away that everything we consider 'the universe' will be radiation and black holes (or possibly even just radiation, once the black holes all evaporate) by the time any effects of it can reach us. In fact, if space is infinite, then it's happening an infinite number of times *right now*.
The apparent problems of physical infinities only arise if you fail to completely grasp the sheer, literally unimaginably large scale of 'infinity', and all of the implications that it brings with it. Infinity solves its own problems.
Besides, the law of thermodynamics only states that entropy never goes UP. It could remain static over the entire universe, and just shift where the particular concentrations of energy are at a given time (changing local entropy). If you assume the law of conservation of information (which is the reciprocal or inverse of entropy) is true, then that seems like it's got to be the case, anyway, since an increase in universal entropy would mean a loss of information.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
...to explain it all to you:
Big Bizang
Words: MC Hawking & Fred Ciesla
Music: Dark Matter
In the beginning there was nothing, not even time.
No planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme.
Then there was a bang like the sound of my gatt,
the universe was born and the shit was phat
The universe began as a singularity,
nobody knows what went on then G.
For ten million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second
the state of the universe cannot be reckoned.
The fundamental forces were unified,
we've no theory to describe that 'though I've tried,
then the forces split and the universe was born,
it was hotter than a priest watching kiddy-porn.
Protons, neutrons and electrons came to pass,
as photons collided changing energy to mass.
Three minutes go by, temps a cool one billion,
down from one hundred million, trillion, trillion.
This reduced heat allowed a new event,
the formation of heavier elements.
Still it was millions of years, 'fore the first start glowed,
if you're down with the bang sing along here we go!
It was a big-pow, piz-ow,
bang-a-dang, bigitty-digitty,
boom, bigitty-boom,
ka-boom, the big bizang.
Hold on now what about inflation?
Well that's a little tricky,
and could use some explanation.
Inflation, one could fairly state,
was a time when the universe expanded at a rate,
that was faster than the speed of light,
but that over simplifies and it ain't quite right.
Still for purposes here it will have to do,
'cause I ain't got the time to explain it to you.
The beginning of time and the birth of all matter,
say it took seven days you're as mad as a hatter,
it was millions of year 'fore the first star glowed,
if you're down with the bang sing along here we go!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!