Last Week's Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "If you've been living under a stone, you might not have heard last week's announcement that astrophysicists from the BICEP2 experiment have found the first evidence of two extraordinary things. The first is primordial gravitational waves--ripples in spacetime from the very first moments after the Big Bang. The second is that these waves are evidence of inflation, the theory that the universe expanded rapidly, by twenty orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang. But that can only be possible if the gravitational waves formed before inflation occurred. Now critics have begun to mutter that the waves might have formed later and so provide no evidence of inflation. The new thinking is that as the universe cooled down after inflation, various phase changes occurred in the Universe which generated the laws of physics we see today. These phase changes would have been violent events that generated their own ripples in space time, which would look very much like the primordial gravitational waves that the BICEP2 team claims to have found. So the BICEP2 team must rule out this possibility before they can claim evidence of inflation. But the critics say the data does not yet allow this to be done. That doesn't mean inflation didn't occur. Indeed, the critics say this is still the most likely explanation. But until the phase change possibility is ruled out, the result must be considered ambiguous. So put the champagne back in the fridge."

Comments

No confirmation

[cciechad]

Um also this is one experiment with no confirmation yet. No one else has repeated the results as of yet so how about putting the champagne away until another group of experimenters confirms?

Re:No confirmation

[JaredOfEuropa]

Look at what that champagne (& other stuff) cost you last week compared to a few years ago; that's proof of inflation right there...

Re:No confirmation

[bigpat]

We are just going to have to recreate another big bang and then see what happens and therefore settle this debate once and for all.

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

Never been a problem with the Climate "Scientists"

Re:No confirmation

[i kan reed]

Oh yeah, because controlled experiments haven't established any of the laws being applied, right?

Are you a moron who'd say "we don't know what gravity on Jupiter is like because we haven't experimented there"?

No? Then why are you a moron who says "Carbon dioxide doesn't retain heat on a planetary scale because our experiments that clearly establish that mechanism have only been on a small scale"?

Observational evidence is evidence, and controlled experiments are only necessary for the process of establishing and challenging the laws that we use to assess the real world.

Re:No confirmation

[MightyYar]

That's not really true. There are multiple, competing models and they use multiple data sets to determine historical conditions. While it is true that climate science can never be as rigorously instrumented as theoretical physics, it does not mean that they cannot follow the scientific method.

The worst science I've seen in the climate area have been people throwing out simple correlations. Everyone who bothers to build a more complicated model seems to trend toward consensus.

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. Do you have a spare proto-universe that we can inflate for the confirmation experiment?

Re:No confirmation

[interkin3tic]

It sounds like this is actually sort of the confirmation.

Last year, another telescope in Antarctica — the South Pole Telescope (SPT) — became the first observatory to detect a B-mode polarization in the CMB (see Nature http://doi.org/rwt; 2013). That signal, however, was over angular scales of less than one degree (about twice the apparent size of the Moon in the sky), and was attributed to how galaxies in the foreground curve the space through which the CMB travels (D. Hanson et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 141301; 2013). But the signal from primordial gravitational waves is expected to peak at angular scales between one and five degrees...

Furthermore, data taken with a newer, more sensitive polarization experiment, the Keck array, which the team finished installing at the South Pole in 2012 and will continue operating for two more years, showed the same characteristics. “To see this same signal emerge from two other, different telescopes was for us very convincing,” says Kovac.

Nature

So it's not just one experiment, there are multiple other readings that support it, though I guess a complete experiment duplication is not yet complete. That nature article mentions that the SPT is a competitor to BICEP2, which published the findings, and they were literally a few meters away at the south pole. So I'd assume that SPT and maybe some other competitor is most of the way to confirming the findings, enough that they were confident in publishing.

That said, I'm totally not a physicist. It just sounds like this isn't a single experiment.

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

I am amused by AGW Apparatchiks. Because that's what AGW is, a political movement, not science and not religion.

It seeks to control what people drive, where they drive, when they drive, where they live, what they use to fuel the vehicles, heat their homes, cool their homes, etc. etc. etc. Using these controls, they want to move on to wealth distribution because they can argue that wealthier people produce more C02 (But they ignore Algore and China because they are politically correct)

And it has the stink of totalitarianism to it. Some what to send "deniers" to jail

The very fact they use "denier" stinks of political condemnation by the Global Warming Nazis.

Major newspapers censors dissenting opinions

Carbon taxes seek to punish industries that have broken no laws and has put people out of work.

And the science of it is laughable. Computer models drive all the predictions of doom and gloom. Funny thing is, they can't predict the past and they certainly haven't predicted the future...at least the last 17 years. So they move the goal posts. First, it was 5 years doesn't show no warming, that takes 10 years. Then after ten years, it was 15. After 15, It's now...what? Who knows? If they were smart, they'd go for 100, just to be safe.

Global Warming is to Science what Piers Anthony is to Journalism; a side show of freaks and grant seekers.

 

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

the original experiment used 3 different types of detectors using very different techniques and got the same results.

another team of people should still replicate the results of course but to dismiss this is a just 'one experiment' isn't justified.

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know who AGW are - don't really care. I'm not a US citizen so the 'totalitarianism' and promotion of FOX as a news organisation I don't get. I will agree that jailing anyone for their opinion is wrong but so is calling anyone a Nazi who isn't.

Cars, industry and what not spew pollution into the air. That pollution is not healthy to human beings. So lets try and make the world less polluted - we are living here after all. Stop focusing on proving other people wrong in favor of providing solutions of your own.

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

They happen all the time, why don't you just wander over to the 18th dimension and have a look for yourself.

Oops, not Q.

captcha: contains

Re:No confirmation

[i kan reed]

Yes, a box in the lab is like the atmosphere in its entirety. This is called generalization, it is a fundamental process of science. When you contest a generalization, you propose a variable that has not been controlled for and launch a new controlled experiment, to establish that factor. You don't go "Ha, you can't know everything"

Or do you think quarks only exist in particle accelerators?

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

How many variables are there on the earth that affect the dynamics of the atmosphere?

Millions and millions if not billions. Only a moron would think a box in the lab is any kind of approximation of the earth's atmosphere.

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only appropriate that someone who calls another a "denier", in clear reference to someone who disbelieves the atrocities of the Nazis, should themselves in turn be called an equally extreme name. As you read, in this case it is entirely appropriate due to the totalitarian approach the Global Warming crowd wants to take and would take if not for the fact that we have laws against it.

Re:No confirmation

[geekoid]

A box in the lab is good enough to understand that CO2 absorbs IR energy.
THAT is what we are talking about.

You really, really, have no clue about climatology or Global warming, or science. I find the sad that you don't know anything about any of those and yet you state an opinion like it has meaning or relevance.
If you did have a clue you would have a chance to learn how to change your narrative when actually facts prove it wrong.

Re:No confirmation

[geekoid]

Troll? Wow, idiots have control of the point today.

Re:No confirmation

[MightyYar]

The Limbaugh is strong in this one, LOL. Yeah, troll is pretty weird.

Re:No confirmation

[hawkfish]

We are just going to have to recreate another big bang and then see what happens and therefore settle this debate once and for all.

Sadly, if they were climatologists, this is exactly what would be demanded of them in some quarters...

Re:No confirmation

[Anonymous Coward]

no. drink the champagne (if you like that icky bubbly dry wine....) now, for the experiment yielded good and interesting data. get another bottle for the time when the explanation is on the table.

Re: No confirmation

[astar]

Idiot. Evidence is evidence. We have been using evidence since before we were human. Some kinds of evidence we chose to evaluate differently than others and the way we do this changes over time. Now a better way is to look at authority/experience interplay and way people balance that. Science socially comes up with some authority because of our experience with the expertness we get from controlled experiments as in physics.

Kiddie, when I was young I was hand coding in assembler matrices of partial differential equations and the hot item was that we had some math to tell us when the rounding error made the results garbage. We still do not have that one really solved at LHC.

Tell me again about evidence being evidence.

Re: No confirmation

[i kan reed]

In this particular case, I don't think it's a problem with me in that I can't really understand what it is you take issue with.

And we do have that particular problem solved, it's called a big decimal, and it's available as part of every even slightly modern language. You sacrifice FLOP speed and get indefinite precision tracking.

I don't know exactly how that relates to anything I was saying, so rebutting your post as a whole is like some non-euclidean nightmare, but suffice to say, you seem a bit... off.

Re: No confirmation

[astar]

Maybe but you do so like to conflate difference experience. Somehow a computer model result is presented as the same as a bench experiment result. And if you are relying on flops because you have too many data points for your processor limits then big decimals are not very relevant. Indeed the thought becomes adding more bits to the processor word as in the case at CERN i referenced. In my world the models always support the funder's policy position. Hmm. Maybe it is different for you. Maybe you do live on Jupiter? Talk about off...planet.

Re:No confirmation

[gzuckier]

Never been a problem with the Climate "Scientists"

Play the AGW drinking game! Every time somebody posts to a completely unrelated scientific topic about how AGW is bogus, you take a drink. If he says it's a hoax or otherwise asserts evil doing, you chug.

Re:No confirmation

[gzuckier]

Yes, a box in the lab is like the atmosphere in its entirety. This is called generalization, it is a fundamental process of science. When you contest a generalization, you propose a variable that has not been controlled for and launch a new controlled experiment, to establish that factor. You don't go "Ha, you can't know everything"

Or do you think quarks only exist in particle accelerators?

"Might not" is not an acceptable scientific argument. Of you are advancing the hypothesis that CO2 doesn't absorb IR in the atmosphere, you need to postulate a mechanism.The null hypothesis is that CO2 behaves in the atmosphere just as it behaves in the lab, particularly when there is overwhelming evidence of it doing so that cannot be explained another way.

Re:No confirmation

[uninformedLuddite]

Do you have a life?

Re: No confirmation

[uninformedLuddite]

Kiddie, when I was young I was hand coding in assembler matrices of partial differential equations and the hot item was that we had some math to tell us when the rounding error made the results garbage.

WTF does that have to do with anything? Are you trying to make yourself seem super? I would have thought with a name like astar that you would realise that we all know just how fscking super you really are.

Re:No confirmation

[Vincie]

There is no valid reason for confirmation to show a hypothesis or postulation to be true. We can only fail to falsify a hypothesis, thus only proving that we cannot (yet) yield results that falsify our hypothesis. Ergo, you should have written: "Um, this is one experiment with no falsification yet. No one has falsified the results as of yet so how about drinking champagne until another group of experimenters falsifies?" Or something along those lines.

Re: No confirmation

[astar]

The big things in science last century was first that logic says math is not true and then we came up with computer modeling as a new kind of science. We have decided to ignore the first as best we can and on the second pretend we know how to do it correctly. What does this have NOT to do with with anything scientism? Still you are fundamentally correct. I have been puzzling over the relationship between addressable memory models and security vulnerabilities and the proposal to go to the 128 bit words because the numerical calculations are too flaky to be fully trusted depresses me. I really thought 64 bits should be enough for everyone. Sorry. I should know better. Have a great day.

Re: No confirmation

[uninformedLuddite]

The deeper you dig the more 'words' you will need. Eventually paragraphs won't cut it and the deeper you dig the more mysteries you will find. Working at the LHC I envy you.

Re:No confirmation

[Vincie]

So what you're saying is that....we predict the past the way we predict the future? That is seriously profound!

Re:No confirmation

[gzuckier]

Hmmph. You silly warmist alarmists, you don't even know that it's not "IR", the correct phrase is "I am".

Re: No confirmation

[astar]

Oh my. I do not work at lhc and never have. I am not a scholar though i play one on Hulu. Everything i know i learned at slash U. No wonder you were pissy. I thought that since you were making an emotional argument i should try to make nice in spite of having a bad hair day trying to research something around a local instance of demographic pressure on a few hundred elk. Your nice noise cheers me. Thank you.

Re:No confirmation

[MightyYar]

Well, yes, kind of. You back-test the model because you obviously can't forward test it. You have to watch out for perils like overfitting, but there are techniques to attempt to avoid this.

Phase changes

[P-niiice]

I think phase changes on a universal scale is an amazing thing to ponder.

Re:Phase changes

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Absolutely. Regardless of whether the results confirm or are consistent with the theory of Inflation, the every existence of coherant structure the scale of the universe itself is an amazing result. By default, there is no reason to expect any structure whatsoever at the highest cosmic sale. (I would argue that up to now this, there was essentially no struture to the CMB)

Yet here we have "waves" of polarisation over a gigantic region of the night sky. The Universe has uniform strutures at the most enormous scales. It's a deep and awesome result that must be addressed, by inflation or whatever other theory we can propose for it.

Re:Phase changes

[VortexCortex]

Now imagine phase changes on a multiversal scale. All those infinite chaotic dimensions then BLAM a few align such that their properties harmonize and propagate in a brilliant momentary flash before returning to chaos time and again like fireworks and then the energy density becomes low enough that the explosions stop among some dimensions and yet occur among others, and one of those final big bangs was this universe wherein at the smallest levels of reality we see the infinitely differentiable quantum uncertain foam from which chaotic energy crystallizes into matter momentarily and is destroyed in tiny little flashes, like fireworks, before returning to the chaos.

Now imagine phase changes on a gigaversal scale... For this experiment beings aware of less than 12 dimensions will need a visual aid. You'll need to wrap your cognitive locus in tin-foil and have access to an old microwave oven. A turn table is optional -- it's the lamp and timer's "Ding" that's most important.

Re:Phase changes

[Warbothong]

I think phase changes on a universal scale is an amazing thing to ponder.

When we're talking about the moments after the Big Bang, a "universal scale" is actually quite tiny ;)

Re:Phase changes

[u38cg]

Who let Vortex have sugar, people?

Re:Phase changes

[marcosdumay]

Nope, those phase changes must be after Inflation, when the Universe was already quite big.

Re:Phase changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, almost a metre across!

Re:Phase changes

[gzuckier]

I think phase changes on a universal scale is an amazing thing to ponder.

I think "phase changes on a universal scale" is the best album title to come out of the sixties, if only it were.

An illusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps our universe is still expanding at the same rate along with relative time? In other words, perhaps when you look back far enough, what is being seen is something of a mirage. Basically, the universe is infinite.

Re:An illusion

[JonnyCalcutta]

I've often wondered something similar myself (but I was too lazy to become a physicist). What if the universe is infinite and inflation is simply the result of a 'local' (e.g. at least a 15 billion light year radius) eddy in the flow of infinite space/time.

If you want to know bring some marijuana.

Re:An illusion

[mmell]

Thank you.

Equally valid - when we see "evidence" of accelerating expansion at the "edge" of the Universe - when did that expansion actually take place?. For bonus points - how far apart were those distant points in space back when they emitted the light we're observing now?

Re:An illusion

[reve_etrange]

The dominant model of cosmology holds that the universe is infinite. The observable universe is finite, because the universe apparently has a finite age (and the speed of light, of course, is also finite).

Re:An illusion

[reve_etrange]

I think most cosmologists believe in an infinite universe, wherein inflation has led to many "bubble" observable universes due to the finite speed of light and finite age of the universe. See chaotic/eternal inflation.

The observable universe is actually much larger than ~15 billion ly. The farthest objects we can see are at extremely high redshifts implying distances of about 40 billion ly. You may note that this is greater than the age of the universe times the speed of light.

Re:An illusion

[reve_etrange]

The proposed acceleration is not at the "edge" of the observable universe. It is (apparently) everywhere that matter is not bound by gravity. Inflation, which is most likely quite distinct from our current expansion, was likewise everywhere in space during its brief moment after the big bang.

In any event, the universe is very close to 13.8 billion years old, yet the farthest objects we can see are some 40 billion light years away.

Re:An illusion

[hawkinspeter]

Eddies, in the space-time continuum.

Ah, is he? Is he?

Re:An illusion

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah not really

op: "Or perhaps our universe is still expanding at the same rate along with relative time?"

Read that back again. Meaningless drivel. What is "expanding... along with relative time" meant to *mean*?

op: "In other words, perhaps when you look back far enough, what is being seen is something of a mirage."

That isn't "in other words", that's a total non sequiter, whose only connection to the previous statement is in being equally meaningless. What does "something of a mirage" even *mean*?

op: "Basically, the universe is infinite."

Not only is this another non sequiter, it's not even something that most cosmologists would deny. There are people who think the universe is closed, which would imply finite, but the mainstream view is that it's flat -- infinite. There are some who think that while the universe is spatially flat the topology is toroidal (or otherwise non-simple) and therefore the volume is still finite, but they're in a minority and the mainstream view is that it's infinite.

Then again, why would I expect the OP to learn anything they're talking about? This is Slashdot, after all.

As for this post here:

"Equally valid"

Assumes both that the OP's post was valid (it isn't) and that this one is valid.

" - when we see "evidence" of accelerating expansion at the "edge" of the Universe"

No-one has ever claimed this. We see signatures of an accelerating expansion. That is incontrovertible. Those signatures may be a sign of something else, and no-one would deny that, and no-one would deny that the simplest explanation is an accelerating expansion. No-one mentions the "edge" except people who haven't tried to learn the slightest thing that they're talking about.

" - when did that expansion actually take place?."

This is something of a curve ball. What are you babbling about? It's still going on. That's kind of what "accelerating" implies.

"For bonus points - how far apart were those distant points in space back when they emitted the light we're observing now?"

Which light? Which points? The signatures come from waves. The wavelength of those waves is known, both theoretically and from observations of the CMB (which in this model was emitted when the universe was roughly 300,000 years old) and of baryon acoustic oscillations (in this model, observed from when the universe was roughly 10-12bn years old). I can't remember the wavelength of the top of my head but just for illustration it's going to be very roughly 100Mpc in a comoving system, so perhaps 66Mpc when the BAOs were observed and perhaps 0.1Mpc when the CMB was around. Those numbers should be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt but they're good enough for illustrative purposes.

If it helps, a Mpc is a megaparsec, or a million parsecs. A parsec is 3.3 light years (or, more accurately, 206265 astronomical units) and is a characteristic distance between stars in a galaxy. A kiloparsec is a characteristic scale of galaxies themselves and a megaparsec a characteristic scale of galaxy clusters.

Re:An illusion

[geekoid]

There are parts of the universe expanding faster then light can travel through the universe whose light we will never see.

Re:An illusion

[gzuckier]

It all depends on the nature of spatial dimensions. We like to think they are infinite in extent, as with time, but in fact they are just as likely to be phenomena localized to the vicinity of matter/energy. As you may guess, it's been a while since my Introduction to Advanced Physics classes.

Re:An illusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Marijuana won't help you. You need mescaline or psilocybin or acid for work of this degree of complexity.

Creationisticism

[dingleberrie]

This aspect of the story is great as an example of science.
It seems stubborn to hold onto a single interpretation of evidence during pursuit a theory, including the origin of the universe.
Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be.
When you won't relegate the evidence, then you are practicing faith (in the evidence) instead of science.

Re:Creationisticism

[magsol]

No, science is the willingness to relegate interpretations of evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be. The evidence itself is pretty clear; what the scientists potentially got wrong is the interpretation. Suiting evidence to specific theories (as opposed to the other way around) is when you start practicing faith instead of science.

Re:Creationisticism

[Anonymous Coward]

"The evidence itself is pretty clear..."

Is it? It sounds like this is based off only one line of evidence analyzed by a single group. I may be wrong about that, but if not I think it is premature to call the evidence "clear".

Re:Creationisticism

[nine-times]

I'm not sure you're criticism is valid. He said, "Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be."

I don't think he was saying that valid evidence would be dismissed because it didn't fit the theory, but that it would be admitted to be less significant if it's found to insufficient to support the theory.

Re:Creationisticism

[Sockatume]

Ridiculous. The creationists, anti-vaccination advocates, anti-global warming people, bigfoot hunters and investigators of Atlantis all tell me that scientists totes agree with each other on everything and never succeed by competing and challenging each other's ideas. That many quacks can't possibly be wrong about everything.

Re:Creationisticism

[Anonymous Coward]

"the science is settled"

Most people do not practice 'science' they practice faith. It is just a matter of who they place their faith in. Even you. You have even dismissed their ideas as 'quacks' just because it does not fit your faith.

As a computer scientist I play games with my fellow programmers. We challenge each other to write bad code. Something like write a binary sort using gotos only and DOS batch script. Why on earth would you do such a stupid thing? To recognize things that are wrong you need to know how to do them. If I out of hand dismiss the challenge, I learn nothing and put my faith in myself that I am better than that. Sometimes you even find better ways to do things.

Dont be so narrow minded you squish out your brain.

Re:Creationisticism

[JonnyCalcutta]

Yip. If you want to know the truth you have to do the research yourself (so I've been told). http://www.davidicke.com/ is apparently the place to start.

Re:Creationisticism

[mmell]

Faith - the evidence of things unseen.

Science - evidence and knowledge of the unseen supported by understanding what is seen.

I notice that faith talks about things unseen, but doesn't mention how they know about these unseen things (heaven, hell, G*d, etc.). Science also talks about things unseen all the time - but only in the context of what we know. Faith quite handily skips that inconvenient reliance on facts.

Re:Creationisticism

[BourneTolouse]

Yip. If you want to know the truth you have to do the research yourself (so I've been told). http://www.davidicke.com/ is apparently the place to start.

OK, you start there. I will start where the light of divine revelation is better.

Re:Creationisticism

[geekoid]

", but that it would be admitted to be less significant if it's found to insufficient to support the theory."
and it might be depending on prior plausibility.
When that happens, more data is need and more tests are run.

Re:Creationisticism

[geekoid]

No thinks, I don't look good in Turquoise. aha, I kid. I look good in anything, and fabulous in nothing.

Joking aside, that guy is crazy.

Physics vs Medical/Social Science

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting how different the fields are just due to the presence of theories making exact predictions. In this case they seem to be ruling out what is predicted by each theory as people think them up. In the other fields it is not yet possible to make exact predictions like that, so the researchers disprove hypotheses that no one really believes "two groups are the same". Mathematically the statistics are the same, but the latter provides evidence that is so weak in comparison due to the presence of obvious alternative explanations for a difference between two groups. Essentially if anything goes wrong with the experiment it is going to yield results consistent with a theory predicting group differences, while in the physics case if anything goes wrong the theory is not supported.

I think last week's announcement was correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there was massive inflation immediately after the big bang. The universe printed way too much money.

Re:I think last week's announcement was correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there was massive inflation immediately after the big bang. The universe printed way too much money.

How else was it going to pay for Obamaphones and "free" health care.

Re:What a crock of shit.

[smooth wombat]

You, on the other hand, will burn in the Pit.

At least I'll be warm compared to the frozen wasteland your God has created on Earth.

Jumping the gun

[wjcofkc]

Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down. Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed? Regardless, if the alternate interpretation proves true, I find it no less significant.

Re:Jumping the gun

[MightyMartian]

The media hyped this up. The BICEP2 team did nothing wrong.

Re:Jumping the gun

[wjcofkc]

Your'e right.

Re:Jumping the gun

[Anonymous Coward]

These experiments are very expensive. The results have to be presented with lots of hype.
What was observed was a peculiar pattern in the polarization of the electromagnetic waves of the cosmic background radiation. From the media summary it sounds that gravitational waves were observed, but that is not correct. The best but certainly not unique explanation is that the pattern is a consequence of the gravitational waves from the inflation period. It is circumstantial evidence, not proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Doubt, reassessment of evidence, new interpretations is the way science works. Hype is detrimental to science as a whole, but benificial to the group promoting themselves. In my opinion opinion, hyped presentation of results is dishonest.

Re:Jumping the gun

[Baloroth]

Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down. Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed? Regardless, if the alternate interpretation proves true, I find it no less significant.

It's customary in science to present your findings exactly as they are, with the statistical certainty associated with the findings. They never said their results were confirmed or "concrete", they said their findings confirmed several other theories and that they were highly certain of the results given the known sources of error and the model they were using. You can always come up with other theories that would also fit the observational data: heck, half the point of publishing your data is so the scientific community can look at it and see if you did something wrong, or if there are other interpretations that fit the data better.

Re:Jumping the gun

[Ol Olsoc]

Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down.

I don't recall anyone saying those results were "concrete". I think that a lot of the science skeptics are simply not capable of thinking as a scientist. If you take the political and faith based systems as an example, the person makes up their mind, such as "All liberals are evil" or "The Bible says the entire world was covered with water, so it was, and I'll accept no evidence to the contrary." It is people like that who have difficulty understanding the way the scientist thinks.

The scientist is ready to move onto a new paradigm if the old one quits working. Scientists are human, and therefore subject to the same foibles as everyone else, But in general, the scientist is prepared to change their mind. In other words, scientists have no problem getting excited about something, then saying "Oops - We made a mistake!"

Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed?

When possible. But that doesn't mean that things we cannot reproduce cannot be studied. We really don't want to return to inflationary times in order to reproduce them. That's why we have theories (let us not confuse them with hypotheses)

So in the realm of cosmology, we have theories. We have hypotheses. Does what we predict pan out? Does the formula make a useful prediction.What is the math? Do I have an interesting idea?.

Note that I ran that series backwards, just as we have to do in matters of cosmology.

Re:Jumping the gun

[photonic]

Scientist are still analyzing the data of ESA's Planck satellite, with first results expected in October this year. This instrument is supposedly sensitive enough to confirm or reject BICEP's results. I guess Planck's team must feel pretty depressed that the potential big discovery of their 700 MEuro instrument is scooped by the relatively small-scale BICEP experiment.

Re:Jumping the gun

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy was on Science Friday and while he did state that it will need to be confirmed, they were all talking fairly confidently about these results.. e.g. ""Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today. A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point," said John Kovac (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), leader of the BICEP2 collaboration."

"This is the first direct image of gravitational waves across the primordial sky," said co-leader Chao-Lin Kuo (Stanford/SLAC)."

"This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar," said co-leader Clem Pryke (University of Minnesota)."

Please tell us again how it is not the leaders of the BICEP2 team that caused media excitement.

Re:Jumping the gun

[reve_etrange]

No one is questioning the detection of gravitational waves, which is itself highly important regardless of implications for cosmic inflation.

Re:Jumping the gun

[steelfood]

They forgot to flex when they were talking to the media.

Re:Jumping the gun

[uninformedLuddite]

The gravity waves are hiding within the dark matter. It's so simple.

Back in the fridge?

[MiniMike]

the result must be considered ambiguous. So put the champagne back in the fridge.

Already drank the champagne... Um, my fridge is, er, full, can we use yours?

I think more people would be interested...

[Viol8]

... in what caused or happened before the big bang. Even so someone interested in cosmology like myself, I can only take so much more "and at 1 second after the big bang this happened and 1 min after this". Yeah ok , thats all good fun for particle physics types, but its not actually that interesting compared to the Big Question of why is there something rather than nothing? Which frankly I get the impression not many cosmologists appear to be too interested in finding out, being more content to leaving it to hand waving theorists.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[MightyMartian]

At the moment, that question is not answerable, and in fact may never be answerable.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[oneandoneis2]

Imagine you set up a ridiculously-powerful computer to simulate a universe - literally a particle-by-particle perfect simulation. (You might need this to be a fairly small universe, of course)

The simulation begins with everything in one tiny place and then it explodes outwards, cools down, matter starts to coagulate, etc. etc.

Within the simulation, there was no time before that universe's Big Bang. You could pause and even rewind the simulation and this could never be noticed from inside. The simulation only has 'knowledge' of what happens within the simulation.

Imagine your tiny universe evolves life, and it becomes intelligent. Can you imagine any way, any way at all, that that intelligent life could look at the simulated universe, and from it work out that it's a simulation? Can you think of a way they could find out what kind of computer it's running in? Can you imagine a way they could work out what the universe the computer exists in is like? Can you imagine any way, at all, in which the inhabitants of that universe could ever come to be aware of you yourself, unless you intervened and told them about yourself directly?

The difficulty that that simulated universe would have in working out how the computer works and what the rules of OUR universe are, are AT LEAST as great as the difficulties that we face in working out what, if anything, gave rise to our own universe. Questions like "What was before the Big Bang?" and "What's outside the Universe?" are at best almost impossibly difficult to answer, and at worst as meaningless as "Where's the end of a circle?"

That's why nobody's busy trying to find out. Now because nobody's interested, but because we don't even understand our own universe yet, so how the hell do we stand any chance of working out what's beyond it?

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

More people are interested in getting their name recognized with junk science than are interested in real science. Junk science can get you grant money. Real science doesn't pay well. So junk science it is for the vast majority and when it comes down to getting paid, and when not finding anything.... make up results.

Wasn't there a Slashdot article not too long ago that said 40% of papers are faked??? Now just imagine how much scientific theory is based on that 40% of faked papers. You get the scientific atmosphere we have today. As soon as you question any of it, nobody in the scientific community will ever talk to you again.

Try it for yourself. Question why Iron is magnetic and a conductor and why copper is a conductor an not magnetic. See how far you get.

I've even questioned many articles posted here and have been modded down every time, even after several months a new article comes out and proves my line of questioning correct.

I used to come here for the most intelligent people discussing the articles. They got overrun with the onslaught of the average college student thinking they knew everything by reading something in a book and modded all the intellectual members to -1. So discuss only what is believed to be common knowledge and don't rock the boat.

That happens in the scientific community as well. Discuss something outside of common knowledge of the masters and lose your job. Who would want to do that? So more junk science it is. Keep those grant dollars pouring in.

So for real science to happen, someone would have to prove that the big bang happened in the first place. Nobody can, and nobody wants to put their job on the line to really figure out which theory is most plausible, because maybe they would find something that went against the accepted theory and be excommunicated.

I've heard a bunch of bizarre theories about the first seconds of the universe, some even as plausible as the big bang, over the last 10 to 15 years. How many do you hear about today?

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Warbothong]

... in what caused or happened before the big bang.

I still can't believe we haven't sent an expedition to see what's North of the North Pole!

(This is the analogy Stephen Hawking uses when asked about "before the Big Bang")

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't there a Slashdot article not too long ago that said 40% of papers are faked???

Reading comprehension is kind of a prerequisite to commenting on the state of science... considering such news isn't that papers have been faked but that their results, especially within specific fields, are irreproducible which is a much broader, vaguer category of issues.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course we know what was going on before the Big Bang: Our whole universe was in a hot dense state, and nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started. Dr. Sheldon Lee Cooper himself told me about it!

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody can, and nobody wants to put their job on the line to really figure out which theory is most plausible, because maybe they would find something that went against the accepted theory and be excommunicated.

Just like the scientists in the news here that are being banished for challenging data that matched mainstream theories.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Gavrielkay]

There's a good YouTube video of Lawrence Krauss talking about getting "something from nothing" in which he explains that the current thinking is that nothing is very unstable (which is observed on the subatomic scale) and thus, in the time before time existed particles and energy popped in and out of existence so fast that they didn't violate any laws of physics. Until, the so rare as to possibly be unique event happened that what popped into existence exploded (big bang fashion) before it had a chance to disappear again. His talk gives background on why this sort of thing could be possible and current science that supports it. I'm a scientist by education but not in physics so I'm not qualified to point out any holes in his discussion.

His talk attempts to explain in semi-layman's terms where certain people are looking for answers and evidence to support their theory on that universe-starting event. So, there are people looking into this area, you just have to look.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[marcosdumay]

Well, take a deep look at Inflation teories. You'll be surprized.

The kind of questions cosmologists are asking nowadays is simply amazing.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[AkkarAnadyr]

We have trouble answering such questions because of the poor ways we pose them.

The semanticists have a rule I find useful here:

The verb 'to be' carries no information. It functions as an empty vessel into which we pour our assumptions.

When we reword the questions to make our assumptions explicit, they also become specific and (usually) falsifiable, lending themselves to rational inquiry to a much greater degree.

Also, the question 'why' admits an infinite recursion into the line of questioning.

The question "Why is there X ..." has both of these big problems. I call it unanswerable based on its structure, without needing to resort to its content.

Here, as in software projects, we produce the best results when we get the specs right at the beginning.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[MightyMartian]

No, we have a hard time answering these questions because they point to events that are incredibly difficult to probe. Even if and when we demonstrate that inflation happened (it is the most favored theory at the moment, but by no means a near-absolute certainty yet), that gives virtually no information on the condition of the universe prior to inflation. There are some theories that may give some answers, but currently they are pretty much untestable and thus remain little more than educated conjecture.

I'm afraid there's no semantics game you can play to get past the problem that going to earlier epochs than inflation are hidden from us, and that the veil, if it can be lifted at all, will be a long time in the coming.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[reve_etrange]

See zero-energy universe.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[ClickOnThis]

The point is, since time started at the Big Bang, it's meaningless to talk about "before."

Yes, I know that sounds like a dodge. It's unsatisfying to me as well. The best I can do is consider that we need some other word than "before" to describe it.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Will.Woodhull]

And thus we see more clearly the strong link between post classical physics and linguistics studies.

We cannot hypothesize about that which we cannot yet express in language, where language includes all that we can do in natural speech, mathematics, or computer simulations. That is an inherent limitation of science.

Since we have no way of framing the questions, we cannot talk about what was there before the big bang, what is on the other side of a black hole's event horizon, or what is going on in that part of the Universe that is on the far side of our part of the big bang. Those things might be interesting, but they are currently outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Even though our language skills continue to improve, some of those things might always be outside the realm of science. (The universe is that Big.)

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not interested in cosmology then, are you? You're interested in arrant speculation. Which is fine, but feel free to fuck off anyway. Or do you think it's better to invent wild bullshit about "what caused or happened before the big bang" before we even have an understanding of what happened after? Do you think perhaps that it's better to have meaningless vistas of unprovable phenomenology rather than attempting at least to pin down which phenomenologies operate in the vicinity of a singularity? In case you missed the point (hint: you did, by a fucking mile) that's *what they're trying to do here and what every probe of the CMB is trying to do*. Inflation is a phenomenological theory that we assume must emerge from a more complete high-energy theory and may indeed emerge from a quantum gravitational theory. Pinning down the allowed types of inflation not only leads us towards tighter predictions for the further evolution of the universe (you know, *cosmology*, the study of why the universe looks as it does) but also points us in better directions when we're looking at quantum field theories in extreme regimes and, who knows, quite possibly in quantum gravitational regimes. That means we might have a better idea what physics actually looks like in the vicinity of a singularity, which might save us from making a whole host of meaningless dribbling speculations to satisfy people self-identified as "interested in cosmology" like Viol8.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[uninformedLuddite]

... in what caused or happened before the big bang.

./universe/simulation.pl

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[gzuckier]

That's where the spaghetti is extruded.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[gzuckier]

Indeed. Or, send an expedition to the West Pole.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[gzuckier]

It's just that our current understanding of time is not that it's an invariant metric, but something that is dependent on local parameters. Something which is measured by some mechanism (not necessarily something purposed like a clock; intervals between successive waves will do). In the absence of anything, clearly nothing which is measured by material objects or wavefronts or such is meaningful.

Re:I think more people would be interested...

[gzuckier]

Indeed. The answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is that the two are essentially equivalent.

But it's still inflation?

[Christianson]

Having read the original paper to the best of my ability (which is not perhaps very good), as far as I can see, the "critics" are arguing that the gravitational ripples might not have been caused by inflation directly, but by another process which happens to be a by-product of inflation. So unless I'm missing something, even if the critics are right, BICEP2 has still provided proof of inflation.

Re:But it's still inflation?

[grub]

I think the skeptics are saying that the gravity waves have been confirmed, the question is were they created by the Big Bang or sometime later as things cooled down.

Re:But it's still inflation?

[mmell]

...the gravitational ripples might not have been caused by inflation directly, but by another process which happens to be a by-product of inflation...

I got the impression that it was a by product of expansion (which occurred after inflation) not inflation itself (which, while cosmoligists appear to have reached a concensus is still itself a theory, not a fact).

Re:But it's still inflation?

[MightyMartian]

I urge anyone interested in these questions to go to Professor Matt Strassler's blog: http://profmattstrassler.com/ . In particular he goes to some length to describe what BICEP2's data might mean.

Re:What a crock of shit.

[VortexCortex]

This is un-provable and wild and rampant speculation. Keep twisting the evidence to support your beliefs, meanwhile I will worship God and be granted life Everlasting. You, on the other hand, will burn in the Pit.

Have you heard the bitchin' news?! I reject your god because I don't need some elitist hipster cloud club. I've had my fill of standing in lines and getting judged at the door in this life, screw doing it again in the next. So, I bought my front-row ticket to the hottest show in Earth because all the good bands and fun people will be there.

You may be interested in my pamphlet, "So, you've decided to go to Hell."

Re: What a crock of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Successful troll is successful.

What really happened.

[wcrowe]

What really happened was that Wolowitz and Koothrappali rigged the electric can opener to create false postitive results for Sheldon's test equipment. He shouldn't have announced his findings so soon.

Re:What really happened.

[geekoid]

And they should have been fired.

Re:What a crock of shit.

[celticryan]

Have you heard the bitchin' news?! I reject your god because I don't need some elitist hipster cloud club. I've had my fill of standing in lines and getting judged at the door in this life, screw doing it again in the next. So, I bought my front-row ticket to the hottest show in Earth because all the good bands and fun people will be there.

You may be interested in my pamphlet, "So, you've decided to go to Hell."

This made me so very happy! Well done!

Won't be settled

[Anonymous Coward]

Until a poll of all physicists are taken and/or when the published papers supporting the idea are in the majority by a substantial margin. Also, the name Primordial Gravitational Waves will be changed to Premier Gravitational Waves.

Well, yeah...

[fustakrakich]

Some guy puts up a NOAA weather map and tells us this is how the universe began?? And what with this "briefly faster than light" BS? The law is the law.

Re:Well, yeah...

[reve_etrange]

Only matter and radiation must move at or below the speed of light. Relativity poses no limit on the relative velocities of objects, provided these velocities are acquired via the expansion of space. During the inflationary epoch after the big bang, space itself (probably) expanded at a rate faster than the speed of light. We think this process magnified small fluctuations, which nucleated the aggregation of matter into galaxies, that it separated different regions of the universe after they were in thermal equilibrium, and that it diluted away rare particles such as magnetic monopoles.

The whole idea of an "observable universe" is predicated on relative velocities greater than the speed of light. The event horizon at the edge of the universe exists because beyond that distance space (and the objects in it) are moving away from us at a speed greater than that of light, resulting in the causal separation of regions of the larger universe.

Actually, we know some rapid expansion must have occurred, because we can see objects which are apparently ~40 billion light-years away, even though the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

Re:Well, yeah...

[geekoid]

Shut you ignorant pi hole and listen.

The universe is expanding faster then the speed of light, as predicted. Light within the universe only travels at the speed of light.
Look it up and try to use your neurons to learn something.

Re:Well, yeah...

[fustakrakich]

Well, it certainly good to know that faster than light travel is possible then.

Keep your pi hole wide open. I'm comin' in!

Re:Well, yeah...

[uninformedLuddite]

Isn't the speed of light relative?

Well, then. Just run the experiment again, eh?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

It's the only way to be sure. Don't forget those safety glasses!

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[Langalf]

My question is, do these ACs PURPOSEFULLY misquote this song? By now, everyone should know that the last word in the first stanza is "confidant"; enough people have pointed it out. Or, is this just a 'bot with a fixed text file that is never updated?

Is it NPR or PRI, I don't unnerstand

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

What now, Ira Flatow? I trusted you and Science Friday. I TRUSTED YOU!!!

Re:Is it NPR or PRI, I don't unnerstand

[Anonymous Coward]

Science can still deep-freeze you! Kryostase, though. Perhaps you can then find out, later on! ;}

Don't you just hate ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... regurgitated champagne?

Re:Don't you just hate ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... regurgitated champagne?

Hate it? I love it. I pay people to drink it and throw up so I can lap it up. Yum.

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[rossdee]

This is Slashdot - if the last word of the song was confidant then it wouldnt be on topic.

Its like "Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard"

or
California Dreaming, I've got your Womans Day

Nothing refuted here, just more precision.

[Anonymous Coward]

If a phase change happened very soon after inflation caused the signal, then this is still proof of inflation. The article may have a quibble with which type of inflation was detected, but if there model still only admits situations where a massive violent expansion of space happened early this is proof of an inflationary model which sounds a bit different than the lede. If so, the earlier announcement is _not_ wrong, but rather there is more awesome and exciting analysis to come from this dataset.

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's typed in manually each time. There are other golden girls posts with misspellings. Oh and please don't feed the trolls.

Inflation

[rossdee]

If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn't reach a consensus.

Re:Inflation

[marcosdumay]

You do realise that this is an article about physics, right?

Also, I don't think researchers in any area would reach a consensus if you get they all toguether.

Re:Inflation

[reve_etrange]

Key words: "if they all get together." Probably most fields (of science) have consensus if you get like 75-90% of researchers together.

Re:Inflation

[marcosdumay]

In the exact sciencies, you get consensus to nearly all questions that you craft well enough to exclude any kind oppinion, but you'll get plenty of "nobody knows". You won't get any kind of consesus on the likehood of a non-mainstream theory being right, and very little on how right (or wrong) are the mainstream theories, except if you use some completely objective measurement.

In human sciences you won't have any "nobody knows" answer to those first questions. You'll have consensus on the known ones, and plenty of hand waving on the not known. You'll also get hand waving in the exact sciences, the difference is that they come after the "we don't know" part, while in the human sciences that part is missing (or maybe implicit, I don't know).

Re:Inflation

[reve_etrange]

I agree with you, but I do consider "nobody knows" to be consensus if we all believe that.

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[Langalf]

Oh, those are great. Thank you for making a bright spot in my Monday morning. :)

Please do not feed the trolls.

[mmell]

It makes them reliant upon human feeding to survive.

"Computer - end program."

[mmell]

Still here. *Whew*

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[gmagill]

There's a bathroom on the right.

Possible exception to the "law"...

[mmell]

If the Higgs boson is the particle which gives matter "mass" . . . and if the Higgs boson formed (like all other particles) some time after the Big Bang . . . then the universe was filled with what were then massless particles. I don't think old uncle Al would object to me accelerating a massless particle past c, would he?

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[fustakrakich]

if the Higgs boson formed (like all other particles) some time after the Big Bang . . . then the universe was filled with what were then massless particles.

You do see the flaw there, don't you? Which came first? The Higgs boson, or the particles? And "massless particles"? Sounds like that requires no small degree of faith..

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[mmell]

If it were faith, I wouldn't have used the word "if".

(oi vey)

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[reve_etrange]

First, massless particles, like the photon or graviton, don't go past c. They go exactly c. Anything going faster would be a tachyon, which isn't like any of the massless particles we know. BTW, these BICEP2 results seem to confirm the existence of gravitational waves, and thus of gravitons. Otherwise, I would have said "supposed gravitons" or something like that.

There is also the concept of tachyonic fields, which are fields whose particles have imaginary mass. The Higgs before symmetry breaking occurred is an example, but despite their name, excitations of tachyonic fields propagate at or below the speed of light.

In short, you can't accelerate even massless particles past c. Nevertheless, objects can have faster-than-light relative velocities as long as these are acquired via the expansion of space.

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[reve_etrange]

The parent may have confused you with the choice of terminology. All particles, including the Higgs boson, are excitations of fields which permeate all spacetime. These fields have existed at least since the big bang. There is no need for any of them to have "come first."

It is true that today there are many sorts of massless particles, and it is very likely true that cooling after the big bang led to some rearrangements of the quantum fields (called the 'Higgs mechanism') which led to many particles acquiring mass or becoming more massive.

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[mmell]

That requires the assumption that the current physical laws and constants were true then. By definition, they weren't - the four fundamental forces did not assert themselves until a finite period of time after the Big Bang, and did so singly, not all at once (or so goes the theory).

If nothing had mass at the instant of the Big Bang, how does Einstein's theory of Relativity apply? Objects become infinitely massless as their speed approaches c?

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone once told me, that all Einstein's theory states is that the "law" must not apply in all places. And, the object's mass goes towards infinite? Please excuse my "Science-English" .. folks these days. ;}

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[geekoid]

Boson, gluon and photon are massless particles.
Being massless is why they can move at the speed of light.
You're pretty ignorant of this matter and you are looking really foolish.

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[reve_etrange]

the assumption that the current physical laws and constants were true then. By definition, they weren't - the four fundamental forces did not assert themselves until a finite period of time

If they didn't "assert themselves," does that imply that they did exist? I think that this way of speaking is a little confusing, because we believe that current "laws" represent special cases of more general laws, rather than different laws entirely.

If nothing had mass at the instant of the Big Bang, how does Einstein's theory of Relativity apply? Objects become infinitely massless as their speed approaches c?

Massless particles inherently move at c. They can't be accelerated or decelerated because they have no inertia, although they do have momentum.

As far as we know, this was just as true right after the big bang. Particles, or field excitations or whatever, had no mass, and moved at c. They did have energy, and an energy density, and therefore were gravitationally attracted. This attraction would be described by quantum gravity, instead of General Relativity.

Once the particles acquired mass via the Higgs mechanism (probably at or about the same time that the modern-day forces became completely separated), the universe was still an ultra-hot quark plasma, so the newly massive particles still moved very rapidly. Just not at c.

Re:Possible exception to the "law"...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If the Higgs boson is the particle which gives matter "mass""

It isn't. The Higgs *field* gives *fundamental* particles their mass. The Higgs *boson* is an excitation in the Higgs field. The vast bulk of the mass of, say, a proton is made up of binding energies and the contribution from the Higgs is pretty minor.

"then the universe was filled with what were then massless particles"

Well, rightish. After a period of inflation (and I've seen papers in the last week claiming that Bicep2 disproved Higgs inflation -- in which the Higgs field itself drives inflation -- once and for all and other papers claiming that Bicep2 shows that Higgs inflation is still viable) and a subsequent period of reheating, the universe is dominated by massless particles. But as soon as reheating occurs, generating photons, gluons, bosons etc., there are massive particles, because there is also a Higgs field.

"I don't think old uncle Al would object to me accelerating a massless particle past c, would he?"

Yes, he would, very firmly. Massless particles propagate on null geodesics, which are associated with a local velocity of c. To go past c you'd have to be on spacelike geodesics and good luck getting anything with or without mass to go on a spacelike geodesic without fundamentally changing the theory.

Great assumed premise, guys, really.

[tlambert]

Great assumed premise, guys, really.

We've jumped way past the point of claiming that polarized background cosmic radiation = gravitational waves detected (right now, the polarization is just consistent with a theory that, IF there are gravitational waves, AND a particular inflation theory requiring gravitational waves to be possible is correct, THEN the observed polarization is consistent with fossil pre-inflation gravitational waves.

We are now to the point of "alternate explanations for the gravitational waves 'observed' by BICEP2".

It's like seeing a headline that says "Aliens meet with Jimmy Carter!" in a supermarket tabloid, and then arguing about whether or not they met with Jimmy Carter, instead of arguing about whether or not aliens landed on Earth... or arguing about whether or not they landed on Earth, rather than whether aliens exist in the first place.

Re: Great assumed premise, guys, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much theoretical physics defined.

Actually you could in a way

[Viol8]

Try measuring smaller and smaller lengths until you hit the limit of the computers precision. Then you either can't subdivide any further or things start to get all fuzzy as rounding errors creep in.

Hold on, where have I heard of something like that in physics already....

Re:Actually you could in a way

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd probably also see evidence of propagation delays, something like a "universal speed limit"...

the "laws" of physics

[iMadeGhostzilla]

...as someone said once are human-centered idea, that there are laws obeyed by nature that we can grasp with our minds and that those laws must be unchanging. This is the unspoken assumption, that the models that would explain the physical processes never changed in the course of the evolution of the Universe. I'm beginning to think that such assumption is no different from Newton's "mind of God" that he wanted to know -- we just call it slightly differently.

And how is this claim relevant? If those "laws" have not been unchanging, we may be wasting enormous time and money trying to find out how it all began in a way we imagine has to have happened, ie. producing theories that have no consequence other than to satisfy philosophical questions that we insist must be posed only in a certain way -- and they can't even do that. I hope at least some consequential discoveries and tools will be made along the road.

Re:the "laws" of physics

[reve_etrange]

Are you proposing that the laws change randomly or something?

If the laws of physics change with time, then what we thought were the laws aren't actually the laws, but rather the actual laws with parameterized time. It might make some experiments more difficult, but there is no philosophical conundrum. Actually, this idea is already implicit in lambda-CDM ("standard model" of cosmology), where there is a time-dependent "scale factor" in the Friedman equations.

Re:the "laws" of physics

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Even parametrized time changing of laws would still be laws. I'm not proposing the laws change randomly -- and I don't take the credit for the idea, heard it elsewhere -- but that it is essentially a leap of faith to think they are constant (just because we humans have laws) and that they are completely accessible to our way of thinking. They may change in ways that may never appear to make sense to our rational minds, e.g. a constant here and there drifts unexpectedly, some patterns that occurred before no longer happen or happen differently, and so on.

If true, then research on matters of immediate consequence (e.g. quantum) would be useful, and research on what happened billions of years ago less so. Which I think is already the case (regardless of constancy of laws) -- much as I find theories in astrophysics fascinating, I wonder if we are essentially making up those stories by stacking one set of assumptions after another.

Re:the "laws" of physics

[Anonymous Coward]

but that it is essentially a leap of faith to think they are constant

In general, theories and laws discovered are considered to apply everywhere (if including whatever known caveats are appropriate), as this is in a sense an application of Occam's razor. To presume they are different in places/areas not observed requires imposing an new factor that the theory depends upon that has not been observed. Of course, one shouldn't think it is impossible that such new, unaccounted for factors exist, but we likewise don't have any indication that they should exist either.

More practically speaking though, in the case of treating the laws of physics as constant over cosmological distances is a couple steps above a leap of faith since there are tests and observations that check some of these things (spectroscopy is rather powerful tool). At some point, with some theories at least, either the changes have to be really subtle below the error bars of current observations, or have to be really different but conspire to look exactly the same. But there is always the miniscule possibility that the laws of physics are different every time you close your eyes, but in such a way to be indistinguishable when you open them again.

Re:the "laws" of physics

[iMadeGhostzilla]

It is an excellent point about the Occam's razor. However assuming Sun going around the Earth was also Occam's razor, and Earth around the Sun as we progressed was also Occam's razor. Now neither one is true per se and we have a bizarre space-time twisting with Einstein's GR that works the best so far. And we may well find exceptions to GR at some point and replace it with something stranger.

And it was the same on the atomic scale -- individual atoms = OR, then electrons orbiting the nucleus = OR, then the strangest of all, probability wave = OR, and standard model with numerous patches. That is the pattern with scientific discoveries has always been Occam's razor at certain depth, but at a deeper level the previous OR reasoning didn't hold true.

Maybe you can say it like this: if there is a finite depth you can go to, perhaps there are constant laws. But if you can always go deeper in observations -- which I would intuitively pick as the option -- then it might well be that the laws themselves can be nuanced into infinity. So the Truth presumed to be captured by the laws would always elude us by a hair's breadth.

Just a thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think: all that matter moving orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light... so much for Einstein...

Re:Just a thought...

[MightyMartian]

Except, of course, inflation doesn't violate Special Relativity.

Re:Just a thought...

[reve_etrange]

And even if there was a problem with space expanding superluminally, inflation would be the least of our worries, as we would need another explanation for the size of the observable universe. (We can see objects at ~40 billion light-years distance, even though the universe is only 13.8 billion years old).

Pesky science...

[rgbatduke]

... with all of that skeptical insistence on the consideration of confounding explanations that might also be compatible with the data.

Or is the term "skeptical" politically incorrect at this point, since everybody knows that no real scientist would disagree with the consensus view that he or she is told all of the other scientists have?

To be honest, the really cool thing isn't (yet) the origin of the gravitational waves observed, it is the observation of gravitational waves at all. So far, that has eluded researchers working equally hard on directly measuring them. Regardless of their cause, I'm sure we'll learn some useful stuff when issues like this are worked out, and kudos still go to the scientists involved. All of the rest of us (politically correct or not) tend to be at least marginally skeptical of transluminal neutrinos and direct evidence for the big bang until the assertions stand the test of time, even as we agree that (if correct) they are awesome achievements.

rgb

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[ClickOnThis]

Another one: "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy."

This is known as a Mondegreen.

Essence of science

[Anonymous Coward]

Every right-minded scientist knows knowledge has its limits. Whether inflation occurred can never, will never, be proven.

Not so fast with that cork

[ralphaostrander]

If either are true then so is the big bang. And with that gods a little more absent.

Penroses inflation free theory ..

[DTentilhao]

"Penrose cites concentric rings found in the WMAP cosmic microwave background survey as preliminary evidence for his model, as he predicted black hole collisions from the previous aeon would leave such structures due to ripples of gravitational waves". ref

Re:Penroses inflation free theory ..

[MightyMartian]

I think Penrose has humiliated himself enough in the last twenty or thirty years with his bizarre quantum mind nonsense that I doubt anyone pays particular attention to him any more.

Re:Penroses inflation free theory ..

[Anonymous Coward]

In all honesty I'd say that Penrose merely raised eyebrows with what you elegantly dub "bizarre quantum mind nonsense", but he certainly made himself look very silly with the circles in the sky stuff. The problem is that Penrose is not a statistician in any shape or form, and Gurzedayan somehow persuaded him that he's got a better understanding of cosmological statistics than everyone else. Which is, unfortunately for Penrose, not the case -- Gurzedayan is making arguments about the significance of the "circles" he's found that simply don't hold up to other analyses.

It doesn't help that the only citation they seem to make to the theory of Penrose's cyclic theory is to a semi-popular book. There don't seem to be any technical demonstrations of it. As I understand it, the idea is this: future infinity will inevitably be of a universe filled with photons. Matter will have fallen into black holes, which decay, or will have decayed itself (see proton decay in many GUTs) and ultimately radiation is the end state. Then the very concept of distance becomes entirely meaningless since the universe is composed of radiation which has a zero proper distance. All future directed geodesics will terminate at future null infinity, and here is the step Penrose has failed to explain: future null infinity is mapped onto past null infinity, at which distance *also* has no meaning. Certainly physically the two points could be argued as being equivalent and that's what Penrose does, but actually mapping one to the next is an unsubstantiated step. Anyway, the idea is then that if future null maps onto past null, we're back in early radiation domination and the universe can happily go through a form of reheating (so far as I know, through an unspecified mechanism) leading to the generation of the familiar standard model particle and a new cycle.

I've pieced that together from the papers that Penrose and Gurzedayan have put out, and occasional conversations with collegaues. I quite like the idea, if I'm honest, but where the circles in the sky come from I'm not clear (they're never satisfactorily explained), and the so-called "evidence" for them is not significant.

harps

[Anonymous Coward]

I...you mean....okay wait. Bill Keene, creator of the comic strip "Family Circus", told me (through his comic strip) that heaven is some old dudes in robes and sandals playing volleyball and looking over the edges of clouds at the losers and morons still stuck on Earth.

Now you are telling me that's *not* how it's going to be?

I wish you people would make up your damn minds about this.

you can stop reading right there

[slashmydots]

"The universe expanded rapidly, by twenty orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang." - what's the size of a singularity times itself 20 times? Still zero width. Great logic there. Then there's the fact that the universe expanding would actually flatten out waves. Then there's the fact that supernovas and black holes have been known to send out gravitational waves. There's actually no logic or science whatsoever behind the original headline-baiting bullshit.

Re:you can stop reading right there

[MightyMartian]

The singularity isn't a real thing, it's because General Relativity breaks down as you get close to the Planck constants, and thus starts producing nonsensical answers.

Re:you can stop reading right there

[dfsmith]

Unless someone has plausably measured the curvature of the universe to be !=0 without telling me, the "singularity" can still be infinite in extent.

Re:you can stop reading right there

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you still pretending you know anything about science, when everyone knows you actively go out of your way to avoid ever learning anything about it?

Only in theorectical physics...

[Dcnjoe60]

Only in theoretical physics is one allowed to say that the immutable laws of physics somehow changed as a way to blend the theories of the early universe after the big bang to the expanding universe we see today. The speed of light is a constant, oops, only from this point forward, same with the effects of gravity, motion and everything else.

If all of that is true, that the laws of physics, of nature, itself, can mysteriously change with no rhyme or reason, it's almost as if some external force were directing the formation of the universe. Oh, wait, that sounds too much like a deity, so that can't be correct. No, instead, we have to accept that somehow, everything around was was created in an instantaneous blink of an eye. Well everything, that is except physics. That was created separately some time later.

Or maybe, the physics didn't change, but math did. Maybe in the earliest universe it was permissible to divide by zero. I'm not sure who would have granted that permission, but if you are allowed to divide by zero, you can pretty much prove anything mathematically, so anything goes at the moment of the big bang! After all, dividing by zero just yields infinity and at the point of the big bang, the universe was an infinitesimally small place, so infinity was a lot smaller, too. So, like the speed of light, maybe infinity is relative, too, in which case it turtles all the way down (and up).

Re:Only in theorectical physics...

[iggymanz]

no, there are many models of the early universe with their own internal rules. Experiments and observations are being used to support those most likely to be useful. None of these models are built of things randomly chosen from a hat as you seem to imply.

I'd guess you've never formally studied cosmology or field theories.

Re:Only in theorectical physics...

[Anonymous Coward]

The OP might not be well versed in cosmology and field theories, but I am, At least well enough to know that those models don't show how their own internal rules change to today's observed rules? It's relatively easy to come up with models to explain the early universe. It's much harder to come up with models that explain what caused the early models to morph.

Re:Only in theorectical physics...

[iggymanz]

symmetry breaking is a big part of many models.

Re:Only in theorectical physics...

[david_thornley]

Actually, the immutable laws of physics are treated as, um, immutable. The speed of light is, and was, a constant, and Special Relativity was in effect. Special Relativity doesn't say nothing can ever move faster than light, although it does put some restrictions on such movement. In particular, the Universe can inflate faster than light, although I'm not going through the details here.

Physics also doesn't answer the questions of how or why the Big Bang happened, or really what happened before inflation. Make up your own ideas about it if you like, but remember that they aren't scientific theories until you have a clue how to test them.

However, we do know something about math, since it isn't based on physics, and your speculations are nonsense. "Infinity" is not a number, and doesn't work like one. There are larger and smaller infinities (the number of real numbers is an infinity greater than the number of integers, for example), but the difference is massive, and not continuous. You can't just add to aleph-null (the number of integers) and eventually get a larger infinity.

Re:Only in theorectical physics...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the immutable laws of physics are treated as, um, immutable.

Um, yeah. If by "immutable" you mean "for a fraction of a second they were completely different to anything we can experience in the universe today" with a side order of "we have no idea what the laws of physics are at those energies". Even the principle that the laws of physics are immutable over such timescales is just an assumption, and we have zero evidence for it. But we know that the laws behaved very different then to now even if we like to assume there is a single set of equations that are "the laws of physics".

So ... the Big Bang itself is basically a supernatural event, as far as modern physics is concerned. And I suppose it's just complete coincidence that Western science from the Christian traditional has come up with a hypothesis that's basically exactly the same as the Christian creation myth ... "let there be light", indeed ...

Maybe one day we'll understand how gravitation and quantum effects interact when they're both significant. Until then, our scientific hypotheses in this direction are little more modern creation myths - childish, ignorant, metaphorical at best ... and yet a great many of us actually believe they are literally true.

Re:Only in theorectical physics...

[Vincie]

Help me, dear friend, can you help me find the laws of physics? I seemed to have lost them; I thought I wrote them down but then I remember just seeing them somewhere too...

The motion of your emotion

[Anonymous Coward]

The waves were the changing of the mind origin as the ego inflated at the non origination, original non, noun = word, verb, = adverb, before, was I? ; )

Re:What a crock of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

But we will have such a grand time saying hi and swapping stories with all our friends that we won't notice the heat.

You, on the other hand, will have to play a harp in perfect harmony with everyone else, which means every moment you are not actually performing you will have to spend tuning the infernal instrument. That's not my cup of tea.

You have fast eyes

[m2]

by twenty orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang

A blink of an eye is in the order of 10^-3 seconds. The inflationary epoch lasted roughly in the order of 10^-33 seconds.

Re:Are you fucking stupid?

[Langalf]

It was an honest question, because I tend to assume people can be taught (I know, an ignorant assumption).

Re:Happy Monday from The Golden Girls!

[geekoid]

wrapped up like a douche.

Re:What a crock of shit.

[geekoid]

You'r god is tiny and weak if he can't make a universe that changes with time.

Heads up: There is no god.

Re:What a crock of shit.

[uninformedLuddite]

I hope you aren't dissing on AGW

Re:What a crock of shit.

[uninformedLuddite]

So how do you feel about evolution? I am dying to know

Rorschach, ink blobs

[ebvwfbw]

At the risk of bursting bubbles, getting flames - Rorschach would be proud. They are seeing what they want to see. Couldn't help but think that as soon as I saw it.

Big Bang theory - Everything that there ever was and ever will be out of a single point in this universe. Seems that would be really massive and nothing could escape.

I know, I know... like evolution - it's the best story Science can come up with.