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Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found
astroengine writes "For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence of the expansion of the universe, a previously theoretical event that took place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang explosion nearly 14 billion years ago. The clue is encoded in the primordial cosmic microwave background radiation that continues to spread through space to this day. Scientists found and measured a key polarization, or orientation, of the microwaves caused by gravitational waves, which are miniature ripples in the fabric of space. Gravitational waves, proposed by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago but never before proven, are believed to have originated in the Big Bang explosion and then been amplified by the universe's inflation. 'Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,' lead researcher John Kovac, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement."
Pretty damn cool.
My hat's off too all the hard-working, dedicated cosmetologists that made this possible.
A direct detection of a gravitational wave moving the mirrors of a large scale interferometer is up next. In the next few years, Advanced LIGO (US), Advanced Virgo (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan) will come online with the hope of directly detecting gravitational waves from sources such as supernovae and coalescing binary star systems. With this kind of network, it will then be possible to coordinate both electromagnetic and gravitational searches of our sky. This is useful for many reasons, one of which is that it lets us listen to the sound of black holes colliding where no light escapes.
Exciting times!
If they thought finding gravitational waves was hard, just wait until they try to locate a drooling autotroph.
Einstein's theories continue to astound.
We already have plenty of direct evidence for the expansion of the universe. See redshifting of galaxies etc.
This announcement is about inflation - a particular period of rapid expansion immediately after the big bang.
Ok, fine. But is it webscale ?
There are three problems in cosmology that inflation solves: flatness: the universe is very close to its critical density, the horizon problem: the universe looks like it is in thermal equilibrium for no good reason, and absence of magnetic monopoles.
Note that this the second indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves, the first one was the orbital decay of a binary system that included a pulsar, discovered by Hulse and Taylor (Nobel Prize 1993). Today's result, if confirmed, seems pretty spectacular, and might be rewarded with a second Nobel Prize. For a first direct detection of gravitational waves, we have to wait for first detections by LIGO, Virgo and eLISA.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Some interesting perspective from Matt Strassler, who's a particle physicist at Harvard.
He points out that this is still an *indirect* observation of gravitational waves (and not the first one) and that the results look sensibly in line with some predictions from inflation. And that while this is a tremendous experiment, it's not any kind of "smoking gun", and we really need to wait for replication to get properly excited.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
No, we all know that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
I think you have it wrong. You see, these creationists...they have a book which describes exactly how the world was created. It is called the Bible and it states pretty clearly how it happened. The problem here is that this so called "evidence" contradicts the very strong evidence they have...namely, their book.
Since it contradicts their book by claiming to take billions of years, it must (by very definition) be wrong. So what you really have is the Big bang is a bad interpretation of the natural world.
Now excuse my while I go wash my hands for typing that.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
At least lets see what the NRA has to say about this.
Have gnu, will travel.
If gravity waves exist, wouldn't that imply that gravitrons exist as well? Otherwise it would be like having water waves without water...
I feel them after every Thanksgiving meal.
That's silly. Everyone knows the universe was danced into existence by Shiva, the Lord of the Dance. You cannot deny the power of dance. Lose yourself to dance.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Just like in biology, where "multiplication" and "division" mean the same thing.
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I live in perpetual fear of The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.
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Incorrect. Or, rather, been shown to be false by the evidence. And it was such a damn elegant model, too. Bravo to the team of researchers who've been working a decade on this satellite and these observations. I believe Neil and another scientist had a small bet about this, so he's also out of pocket a few dollars. Now we just have to hypothesise new ideas that will eliminate the many kludgy math bits out of Big Bang model. This news, and 120 more BlackBerry jobs lost today, means a sad day here in Waterloo (at the Perimeter Institute).
DaveyJJ
Crowbar? BICEP? What's next, the theoretical physicist responsible for the discovery just happens to be named Gordon Freeman?
Perhaps if the Bible said '7 units of time' then there wouldn't be such a big emotional fuss over such a meaningless argument.
its time to get rid of the silly but widespread idea of inflation coming from a singularity point source. The universe was hot, dense and still probably infinite, it just started to inflate locally. We probably will never know exactly what was before, but thinking it all came from a point source seems a little silly.
http://scienceblogs.com/starts...
Technically, you're there, since the "first inch of expansion" contains the entire universe... literally.
This was the old news...
Basically sifting through information gathered from older CMB detectors, they discovered a statistical B-mode in the data that could have come from gravitational wave that occurred during inflation, but the data was really too noisy to be sure.
The new news is they used a new detectors which are capable of making cleaner measurements to convince themselves that the detected B-mode was unlikely to come from gravitational lensing after the big-bang. The current evidence apparently is consistent with the B-mode coming from a gravitational waves that are predicted to occur during the inflationary period of the universe.
Except your quote says exactly nothing of any use about what happened.
And here I was going to respond "1964 called, they want their news back".
Seriously, this is cool, but astroengine's teaser above "For the first time" is nowhere near correct.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Did you hear that? That was the sound of millions of religious zealots pressing their palms harder against their ears and screaming LA LA LA even louder.
Remarkably, the oldest baryons in the* universe are in your head.
* From your reference frame. And only by a nanosecond or so.
Better yet, it's a misinterpretation by, wait for it.....
A Roman Catholic Priest, and thus, a creationist!
Nah, he couldn't possibly know what the Bible means......
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"God is very far ahead of you"
In my own defense, God did have a head start.
I'll bet I'll type "waka wama wana" before He does. So there.
The word typically translated "day" or "days" in Genesis is originally "Yowm" (root meaning "hot"). Strong's translates this variously as "period"—it's a very general term that I usually read as "era".
My limited understanding is that most of Jesus' contemporaries believed in an ancient universe. It was Ussher's bestseller that, ahem, fixed that problem.
Concordance here.
Ingenious inventions here.
Why wouldyou believe that priest has a better idea of what the Bible says than a random 3 year old from down the street?
The silliest part of it is where the book comes from. The bible is a creation of a committee of the early catholic church that sat down with more than 1500 spiritual texts and decided on 300 that were important enough to include in a book given to all priests. Now ask a young earth creationist what they think of the catholic church and the typical response is the whore of Babylon, yet the book they so revere as the accurate word of god was creating by a committee of early members of the catholic church. It's terribly ironic.
The gun is the universe. These people only found the smoke. Not the smoking gun.
Well, it does say about commanding their hosts. Physics has nothing to say about whether or not the universe had their hosts commanded during inflation, so this could be a valuable addition to our knowledge.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Perhaps if the bible didn't try to anthropomorphize the universe there wouldnt be such a big emotional fuss over it.
Good-bye
I have video proof that a runaway queen can freeze her whole country and create a giant ice castle in less time than a pop song.
My kids strongly believe it's really cool, therefore global warming science is wrong.
Yes, if the measurments can be confirmed for different (and hopefully bigger parts of the sky), the cyclic model of Turok and Steinhardt seems to be very unlikely now, as it has predicted a very small polarisation of the cosmic microwave background.
What puzzles me, is that neither the WMAP probe nor the Planck probe have found a polarisation and now the polarisation was found with a ground based telescope? The resolution of the WMAP probe was probably too low, but the planck probe has had a much higher resolution.
Sven
P.S.: An explanation and comparison of both, the big bang inflationary model and the cyclic model featuring Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
First of all, how is it that all stars moving apart from each other rapidly is not "first direct evidence" of the universe's expansion? And secondly, how could the expansion of the universe amplify gravitational waves? Space stretching would thin out the waves because they would be expressed over a wider area. Also, you don't create more gravity without adding mass or energy. Neither is occurring due to universe expansion, and of course the fact that mass and energy can't be "created" under any circumstances anyway.
Where is the center of the surface of the earth?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Why should we take what Creationists say seriously?
The real mystery to me is why any nerd would be willing to embrace fiction built around the idea that we need the beautiful people extend their olive branch to help the poor, retarded geniuses.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I met a guy from Sri Lanka once who had the best comment yet on "Prayer in schools":
"I am perfectly ok with prayer in schools, and I would encourage it but it seems a bit impractical if they don't already have an altar to catch the blood."
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I don't know why you need to go arguing about all these fancy foreign words; if English was good enough for Jesus then it should be good enough for us to understand his teachings. You think if he wanted us using Hebrew words, he would have written the bible in it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
There is no center. The expansion happens everywhere at once. A mediocre but helpful analogy is to the surface of an expanding balloon. Imagine drawing a bunch of dots on the surface. As the balloon expands, every dot moves farther from every other dot. There is no center -- or rather, *every* point looks like a center.
(Note that in this analogy, the universe is the *surface* of the balloon only. The 3D expansion of the balloon has a center, but the 2D stretching of the surface does not. It's a bit confusing, which is why it's a mediocre analogy.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
Visit the
Well, Catholic schools (at least the one I went to) regularly teach evolution in their biology classes, amongst other things. They are hardly the same groups that push this anti-science BS (anymore), shit they even appologized to Galileo (after 400 years.... so they are....slow...)
While I have plenty I am happy to lambast the Catholics over; I have to hand it to them....they don't really push the creationism as we have come to know and despise. In fact, while you may find lay Catholics with all manner of beliefs, including young earth creationists and the like.... they Clergy tend to be a bit more level headed on these things and will often even say, flat out, the Bible is a book of allegorical stories and not a history book.
For example, as much as I dislike the man, Pope John Paul II did say:
"Today, almost half a century after publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. "
That said, I did go to a Catholic High school, and there was a teacher told he was going to hell for teaching evolution.... he was told that by a student; not a priest, a brother, or anyone else in the clergy... a teenage student.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The AC may be referring to results from the Planck observatory (see, e.g., planck.caltech.edu/publications2013Results.html), which put some constraints on the inflationary era. What is interesting is the results that were released today may not completely agree with the Planck data. It is too early to say if the disagreement is real or not.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Radio waves still have polarisation, just the same as optical and gamma radiation does. You need some pretty refined equipment to study it in detail but you can build it. Check out bolometers and radiometers.
"And it was such a damn elegant model, too."
You evidently have a different definition of "elegant" to me. My definition of "elegant" does not include "theories containing hand-crafted and unjustified potentials of a strikingly bizarre form inserted purely phenomenologically into a theory that is a phenomenological attempt to see what might happen if some facets of M theory are put onto large scales". That's not to defend inflation too much but the potentials of inflatons are typically quadratic or quartic, which is a lot neater than the potential in ekpyrosis, and the setup with two infinite, flat branes is at least as contrived as the inflaton.
All of that said, let's wait until the dust settles before we rule models out based on gravitational radiation alone. Their position is certainly looking somewhat precarious, but there may be ways out yet.
Who do you think predicted the gravitational radiation in the first place? There's a reason we've been wanting to find them since the 1990s and it's not that observational cosmologists were arguing with theoreticians that they were definitely there.
Tit.
There are steps between parallax and red shift in the cosmic distance ladder.
"A viable alternate theory is that light gives up some energy while traveling extremely long distances, which shows up as red-shift. Where does the energy go? It could be the source of energy for the CMBR. It could go somewhere else. In any case, as a theory, it explains the red-shift just as well as expansion."
Excellent! Now repeat the rest of the predictions of the Lambda CDM model. Ah, no, you'll have trouble with that one.
"Another viable alternate theory is that the absorption/emission spectra of atoms differs with space/time. Perhaps atoms farther away or longer ago created and absorbed light at lower frequencies, this making older light appear red-shifted by current frequency comparisons. This theory is even harder to test, but just as good at explaining the observations. "
Even better! Now repeat the rest of the predictions of the Lambda CDM model. I think you'll have problems with that one, too.
Actually, I'll give you a bye -- all I want to see is the position of the first peak on the CMB *and* the wavelength of the oscillations in the large-scale structure, with one predicted consistently from the other. Once you've done that, if you can further get out supernovae 1a redshift/distance plots I'll give you extra credit, but since the progentiors aren't fully understood I'll give you a bye on that one, too.
See, the word "viable" has certain caveats. It has to satisfy the observations it's been built to explain *at least* as well as the theory it's replacing. Second, it has to -- self-consistently -- predict further observations that fit *at least* as well as the theory it's replacing. I'm no fan of Lambda CDM but its successes should convince anyone who's actually looked seriously at them that there's something close to reality there, even if ultimately it's a phenomenology close to reality (which it is; I can prove it's phenomenology -- rigorously -- but I can't demonstrate how wrong it actually is, and neither can anyone else at present, but I can at least assert that up until very recent times it's so close as to be indistinguishable and no that I fit all observations, and even very recently it's exceedingly good).
nice...was going to post this but I wouldn't have explained it as well...
honest quesiton: do you think what you described is commonly understood among physicists? It seems to me, and I of course could be wrong, that alot of stuff I see on /. is conflating what happens *on the event horizon* with the actual black hole itself
I even got into a discussion with the editors of the Black Hole wiki...the first sentence is the maxim "BH is a region of space from with nothing, even light, can escape"
Thank you Dave Raggett
"....namely, an incorrect interpretation of their book.."
FIFY, FTW
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Time to play:
Name that logical fallacy!
Would that be: argument form authority?
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
Why do you think just becasue they are a priest they know what the Bible means?
I went to catholic school, and I constantly pointed out error in priest beliefs. Hell, most of them don't even know their own theology, much less it's history.
A previous pope talked about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am going to assume you missed the recent evolution debate with Bill Nye where his opponent actually attempted, on several occasions, to claim the Bible explained several things that Nye claimed we still can't explain.
If people want to use the Bible as a bunch of allegorical stories on how to live, more power to them. However, when they actually try to claim that it explains things science cannot or that other explanations must be wrong simply because they contradict the bible (which, some do);
You can espouse whatever interpretation you want that lets you reconcile the bible with cosmology however you like. However, it is not really honest to pretend that this simple little interpretation is actually the case made by the creationists that have been such a problem.
The reality is that the people making these claims are pushing to have their version of reality taught in schools; and their version is one making rather specific claims beyond some wishy-washy little interpretation that makes it all play nice.
Unless you are claiming that any scientific claim that the earth is older than a couple of thousand years is wrong, and that humans were created seperately from apes and they are not our long distant cousins (along with all other life on this planet that has been found so far)....then you are not one of the creationists most of us are talking about when we talk about creationists.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Man does belief things he doesn't understand, spout meaningless statement to show everyone how ignorant he is: news at 11.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ah,but as the prime mover all else in the universe is a manifestation of His will, yourself included. So in fact it was He that typed "waka wama wana", using you as His instrument. :-)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Could you let me know which bits are meaningless and betray ignorance? Genuine question.
Ah, you just hit upon one of my pet peeves.
If we're playing name that logical fallacy, then argument from authority is in and of itself an argument from authority fallacy.
Why?
Because logical fallacies are an authority that limits rational thought.
Having said that- you're completely right, though I think most atheists would classify theistic evolution as just another form of Intelligent Design.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Reread my title, BorisTheSpider. I'm clearly talking to people like you. Your message showed exactly the unarguable hubris I'm talking about.
As for your challenges, if I'm allowed to make stuff up whenever I want to make my theory fit the model, I can do at least as well as the Lambda CDM. But then it'd be no better either. I don't want to make up dark energy when it calculations don't add up. I don't want to make up dark matter when my motions don't add up. I don't want to invent a cosmological constant that causes accelerating expansion because the timeline doesn't add up without it.
I do not assume that the universe must be expanding in the "expanding space" sense. I do not assume large scale electric charge imbalances are impossible. I do not assume dark matter exists. I do not assume that the universe must have had an identifiable beginning. I do not assume that it must fit with any religion's idea of "the moment of creation." I honestly believe that most scientists believe in the Big Bang as a religious litmus test akin to "do you believe in science?"
I do make a lot of assumptions, but when I take out the assumption of a Big Bang, I find that a lot of things don't necessarily follow supported by their own weight. And anyone who justifies one piece of the puzzle by saying it fits into the Lambda CDM, is I believe falling victim to circular logic. I remain unconvinced that Lambda CDM (or any previous Big Bang formulation) is anything more than an attempt to put a random formula together that ties together a number of different unfounded assumptions so they look like they reinforce each other.
You assume it's more than that, and I appreciate that you are working to validate aspects of the theory. Here's what I'd like you to ask yourself, even if you still think I'm an idiot: When you find something that disagrees with the theory, you try to figure out what variable needs to be tweaked to improve the agreement, but is there a point where you would ever consider reexamining the questions of the assumptions? Why haven't we reached that point yet?
--Jaborandy
The new observations have a lot to do with testing the theory of inflation, but they are not really focused on the Big Bang. The Big Bang has the observed expansion of the universe, the age of the oldest globular clusters, the existence of the cosmic microwave background and the theory of primordial nucleosynthesis to support it. If you run the expansion backwards, you shrink to a point in finite (backwards) time. That the oldest globular clusters of stars are just a little younger than that, that the cosmic microwave background shows the universe was hot and uniform in the past, all gas and no stars, and that the ratio of primordial elements shows that it was even hotter further back in the past but that element formation was quenched by the cooling of the expansion, these things support the Big Bang theory You don't really need a smoking gun when the artillery has already laid down a barrage. These new observations take advantage of the pristine nature of the cosmic microwave background to test some ideas about what happened before the elements formed. But inflation theory is an elaboration of Big Bang theory, not really a proof.
"if I'm allowed to make stuff up whenever I want to make my theory fit the model, I can do at least as well as the Lambda CDM"
Go ahead - you're more than welcome to. Empty assertions don't show much but new cosmological models are welcomed. *I* welcome them, anyway; I've never liked Lambda CDM much and it's obviously a phenomenological model. But they have to be predictive, and founded on firm principles.
I didn't actually want to suggest you're an idiot because I think it's apparent you're not, but this type of post at the same time implies that *cosmologists* are idiots and brainwashed into a model that doesn't really make much sense. And in some cases that's actually true -- there are more and more cosmologists trained into cosmology rather than general relativity and it's a bit dangerous -- but on the whole I don't think many people *like* LCDM. There are too many unanswered questions in it, and everyone is looking to answer those. Just some people work more tightly within its framework than others.
"is there a point where you would ever consider reexamining the questions of the assumptions? Why haven't we reached that point yet?"
Oh, don't misunderstand me -- I *constantly* question and re-examine the assumptions. At some point, if you're genuinely interested, flip back through my posts on Slashdot; I've made my position I think fairly clearly. Boiling it down and putting it in bullet form it goes something like this:
* The "big bang theory", and Lambda CDM in particular, is an astonishingly successful theory, particularly when attached to an inflationary period in the early universe or something that mimics its observational results closely
* The successes of Lambda CDM -- such as the predicted abundances from Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the *prediction* of the angular power spectra of the CMB (temperature auto-correlation, temperature/E mode cross correlation, E mode polarisation auto-correlation and now the B mode polarisation auto-correlation) from a simple early primordial power spectrum, the direct mapping between the wavelength of the sound horizon at last scattering as seen on the CMB and that same wavelength imprinted on large-scale structure and *observed* as the baryon acoustic oscillations, and their ilk -- are far too numerous and significant to be ignored.
* Any alternative absolutely has to preserve these, and they're all extremely sensitive
* Lambda CDM is wrong. It is dead wrong. It is wrong in principle. It is questionable from a particle physics perspective, particularly where it comes to dark energy, but far more importantly, it cannot be justified with general relativity.
Lambda CDM rests on a few main assumptions:
* The universe is on average isotropic around the Earth. OK, fine, we can't argue that; the CMB is proof enough.
* Since the Earth is nowhere special, the universe is on average isotropic around every point: homogeneous. Well, this is debatable since the Earth *is* in a particular position, but on the whole this is probably at least approximately true.
* Gravity is best described on large scales (ie > mm) by a metric theory. This is currently practically unquestionable; metric-based theories of gravity are vastly more succesful than any alternative.
* Gravity is described by general relativity. OK, now we're entering questionable territory but GR remains our best example of a metric-based theory and is yet to be seriously challenged (though there are many, myself among them, who point out that the appearance of dark matter on galactic scales, and the addition of dark energy on cosmological scales, may very well imply that actually we cannot apply gravity on such scales or else that it simply doesn't act this way on large scales)
* GR can be applied directly on large scales. This is extraordinarily shaky. Actually, it's unjustifiable. We've got two main objections here: firstly, there is no reason to assume that gravity actually obeys GR on large s
It's a question of how many different facts and observations each thing you assume can explain. If you, with a small number of assumptions, can explain a huge amount of data with good precision, that is a good and impressive. If that same number of assumptions, the same theory also can make predictions that survive comparison with new data, the theory is even better. By both these standards, Lambda CDM is a very good theory. As always it builds on some assumptions, but the amount of things it explains and the fact that new data (like the things announced today) fits well with it without any new additions or tweaks makes it a very good theory. You are welcome to try and do better, but I suspect you will have a lot of trouble making it work, and if you have to add special clauses to explain every bit of data, well, that just isn't impressive and your theory will be clearly worse than Lambda CDM. Also, making up stuff without messing up other parts of the theory isn't so very easy. If you add dark matter to fix some observations, you still have to make sure that it doesn't screw up some other prediction. When dealing with a mathematical theory, its actually quite rigid, as long as you don't do extremely unnatural things. Which the current model of inflation really doesn't do. Dark matter is just some stable electrically neutral particle, there isn't anything too mystical about that (we already know of some such particles actually, neutrinos). And dark energy was natural enough for Einstein to invent it back in 1915. I feel like the name "dark" bears a bit of negative/mystical connotations, leading people to question it way more than if it instead was called "neutral matter" or something less "scary".
Thank you for sharing your perspective like a gentleman. I respect that.
I think the core of our disagreement is with your expectation that all the things explained by LCDM must be explained by other theories. I believe it's perfectly fine for the answer to be that some things aren't connected. If we no longer assume we know the age of the universe, then predictions of element ratios no longer need to agree with observations of CMB, which may be totally disconnected from galaxy supercluster clumpiness. If red shift is seen to have some cause other than just expansion, then no unified theory has to predict how the universe got from a near-singularity to the observed state. Once you take a fixed finite timeline out of the picture, there can be different causes for different phenomena.
-Jaborandy
(Last post from me on this thread.)
Technically, you're there, since the "first inch of expansion" contains the entire universe... literally.
Answer's a B!T@H ain't it.
Greetings and peach be with you.
I will respond also and do so as young earth creationist. Now, before I say what I have to say I am not going to sit here and debate or argue with anyone. I have a job and a life and don’t have time to sit and argue on the Internet.
I clicked on the article and read the whole thing in its entirety and nothing has changed. Honestly I think this article attacks people who believe in the Steady State Theory more then anyone.
The Singularity in a gist, Extremely dense, hot ball of matter expands rapidly. The theory of inflation happens in there to deal with the horizon problem. Billions of years later here we are today.
So you found some evidence of a rapidly expanding early universe. Cool, I believe I believe in a rapidly expanding universe too. The Bible says that God stretched out the heaves. Now, see, I get the image of everything in the universe being in one spot and getting “stretched.” Kind of like your theory. The biggest difference is you believe that this happened on its own and I believe that it happens by the hand of a Divine being. You think it took billions of years to get to where we are and I think it took a lot quicker. So we found some evidence that says this happened. Again, you say naturally, I say Divine, but there is the evidence for it. Awesome.
However, those Steady State folks are not doing so hot.
Have a great night.
This is the first direct evidence for gravity waves, but another very clever indirect one earned a Nobel Price in 1993.
That's clever, but it's safer to restrict yourself to electrons, which we have better reason to believe all appeared at once as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, rather than baryons generally. There are competing still-viable theories for cosmological baryogenesis and in some in small patches of space there could have been substantial differences in the ages of baryons that survived whatever process or processes led to the particle/antiparticle asymmetry in the baryon sector. The metric expansion of space is not guaranteed to dilute all those age differences away, and indeed can lead to the oldest baryons in the* universe being at a small remove from your head, from your clever reference frame.
Of course, it could turn out that you are right and that at least in our patch of space there is no significant difference in age among the baryons that formed cosmologically.
Alternatively, one could get really silly and accept Wheeler's electron argument at face value rather than saying something deeper about the indistinguishability of fundamental particles (and their anti-particles after a change of sign in their proper four-vectors, which we still draw in Feynman diagrams) and extend that to the particle content of the other fundamental quantum fields, in which case you're not actually correct. :-)
That puts a stopper on the young earth creationists, but not the rest of the creationists. Most creationists already subscribe to the idea that the days of Genesis were actually eras that were million or billions of years long. They believe in the big bang. They believe that the universe is 13.6 billion years old and that the earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old, but they also believe that the first man was Adam and that he lived just over 6000 years ago. That's where the fight lies: convincing creationists of evolution.
"Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago."
So, I assume the universe started out as a singularity (another blackhole from another universe, popping like a big pimple to create our universe?) But, really, my question is what is the measurement of a singularity? It has to be 100 trillion trillion times something. I assume that since a planck volume (V=4/3 pi planck length^3) is the smallest volume you can have, then it would be 100 trillion trillion times that?
and why does this editor strip out special characters like pi, etc?
Planck is due to report it's first tranche of data in August, IIRC.
Being first still matters. As the guys who got the Nobel in 1993 for showing that the loss of energy from a pair of co-orbiting neutron stars is consistent with the expected radiation of gravity waves will be fastidious about not pointing out. While wearing big cheesy grins. And gold medals.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
GR says photons lose energy going uphill.
We see red shift in all directions.
So all directions are uphill.
Uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow, coming and going to school.
Now get that neutrino detector off my lawn.
--
To wake with a start and shudder from a lecture you are delivering
From another post I made in this thread:
"* Lambda CDM is wrong. It is dead wrong. It is wrong in principle. It is questionable from a particle physics perspective, particularly where it comes to dark energy, but far more importantly, it cannot be justified with general relativity."
That does not mean that it is inaccurate -- there are now at least two questions from here. How do we get a theory of cosmology that can be properly derived from physical underpinnings, and to what extent is Lambda CDM (or any other Robertson-Walker based model) inaccurate? No-one can really answer either of those questions, although there's certainly a lot of interest in both.
"Is there anyone who thinks that \LCDM isn't built on phenomenology?"
Sure. Everyone who without question says "the universe is homogenous and isotropic on average", derives the (Friedman-Lemaitre)-Robertson-Walker metric on those assumptions, perturbs it, and then slaps it straight into the Einstein equations without any caveats. You'd perhaps be surprised at how many people in current cosmology haven't really realised that this is invalid. And then those that *have* realised it's invalid, due not least to people like myself (and to people more well-known and influential in the field than I -- I'm hardly trying to attribute any undue credit on myself here; journeyman all the way) giving seminars and trying to drum up awareness of this, don't really seem to put much further thought into it. Which is quite frustrating. Everyone is interested, and no-one wants to do anything with it, or thinks "it has to be insignificant". Which can certainly be argued, even perhaps persuasively, but *cannot be demonstrated* and always relies ultimately on Newtonian reasoning.
I'm not saying people all think that Lambda CDM is reality. Everyone in the field is looking at alternatives, and the vast bulk accept that dark energy may well not be a cosmological constant, although you'd also be surprised at how few will actually question that dark matter may not (or may not entirely) be particulate and may instead be due to modifications of gravity or even due to a ham-fisted application of gravity. There are assumptions that are deep-rooted, and there are even quite a few cosmologists who seem to find them unremarkable and the attempt to chisel at them somehow unconstructive. Which does irritate me a bit, but I don't mean to put things too strongly as a result -- I'd say the majority of researchers could ultimately be persuaded of total alternatives and theorists are *almost* all aware that ultimately we deal in theories and marrying yourself to a theory is silly.
My experience is the more senior the researcher, the less likely they are to throw their ego into a construction, which probably makes sense.
Anyway, I'm rambling, sorry.
Alimentary my dear Rob, it is wherever you sit down
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
To be fair, the statement "Dark matter is just some stable electrically neutral particle" is pretty strong. "Dark matter could just be some stable electrically neutral particle" would be better, particularly if you went on to some well-motivated examples such as the neutralino or axino, but there are always alternatives, particularly in this kind of case with plenty of alternatives and plenty of doubt that we even understand how gravity works on galactic scales, in clusters, superclusters, cosmologically, etc. A particulate contribution to dark matter certainly seems plausible and perhaps even likely, but it is far from certain and even less far from certain that it is even the dominant, let alone sole, contribution.
As I see it, it expands like a bubble of air, as it grows, like its in a pot of hot water, the space inside containing fragments of, the stuff outside as it grows, black holes.
Plus, this article points out that most peer-reviewed journals consider theistic evolution and intelligent design to be just forms of creationism.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The theological orthodoxy cuts both ways, I'm afraid.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
On #2: Not my opinion
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And the atheists are also stuck on literal interpretations.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.