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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".
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How can the past be truly confirmed? -C
---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!
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If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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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The former media guy would have insisted on saying "NASA Confirms: Big Bang was Done by Jesus"
Trolling is a art,
There's an ironic post. George Bush upset because these scientists are using science rather than religion?
How do we gaze back to the infant universe? The cosmic microwave background is a fossilized record of what occurred way back when. Embedded in this light are subtle patterns that point to very specific conditions about the early universe.
So...subtle patterns from something that happened long ago that may or may not have been affected by external forces on the way towards us. Patterns for which we are extrapolating initial conditions on the basis of what is equivalent to a very, very small number of observations in the grand timeline, and for which we only have a single location (this solar system) to sample from.
All this to describe an event whose happening we don't really understand and which we have no way to either predict or test. What can we really do now that we couldn't before?
We can see into space with a higher degree of accuracy, and finally, perhaps, test a few of the theories that we couldn't before (which are based on other theories that we still can't yet test). Don't get it wrong, though:
Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.
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Have you ever heard the word "inference"? You know, the same kind of process as you would use if you find a man lying on the ground with a pool of blood around his head and a bloodied hammer lying beside him.
Big Bang cosmology is based upon three key lines of evidence:
1. The red shift of distant galaxies demonstrates that the observable universe is expanding.
2. Nucleosynthesis demonstrates that the large majority of the very lightest elements; hydrogen, helium and lithium are not the products of stars, but rather from some period when the universe was much hotter and denser than it was today.
3. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, seen in *every* direction you care to look, is the clearest earmark that the Universe was much hotter and denser.
So even if Big Bang cosmology is replaced, the replacement theory is going to have to explain these observations and the inference gained from them that the universe was much denser and hotter early in its history.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Plenty of observations could falsify the Big Bang. If the CMBR were localized in one direction, then it would knock down a key pillar of the theory. If we could demonstrate some other means by which the vast amounts of hydrogen needed for the earliest stars to form other than by primitive nucleosynthesis, that would certainly cause severe problems.
The Big Bang is falsifiable, though by this point, and with the vast number of observations done in the last three decades, it's hard to imagine any evidence now coming to light that would overthrow it. If it is replaced at all, then the new theory is still going to have explain the evidence, and that means that the new theory is still going to have to deal with a universe that was once incredibly hotter and denser than it is now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...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!
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