"Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust

An anonymous reader writes Scientists have shown that the swirl pattern touted as evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in space and time dating to the universe's explosive birth — could instead all come from magnetically aligned dust. A new analysis of data from the Planck space telescope has concluded that the tiny silicate and carbonate particles spewed into interstellar space by dying stars could account for as much as 100 percent of the signal detected by the BICEP2 telescope and announced to great fanfare this spring. The Planck analysis is "relatively definitive in that we can't exclude that the entirety of our signal is from dust," said Brian Keating, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the BICEP2 collaboration.

Comments

Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[fyngyrz]

Oh hey, I'll just fix that for you:

- The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe did not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe was not created.

Cheers!

Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[buchner.johannes]

Oh hey, I'll just fix that for you:

- The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe did not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe was not created.

Cheers!

Thermodynamics is a theory valid for a large number of particles, and deals with the emerging phenomena based on a statistical basis, i.e. what constitutes rare phenomena. This is not enough to deal with the early universe. Even if it was, there might be an infinite "time" or "tries" before our universe exists so we can observe it.
Also, the term "create" is vague. Arguable, one can speak of creation as early inflation expands the universe and cools the soup of radiation into massive particle. In that sense some earlier state *did* create the universe as we understand it (time, space, and matter).

Also it is not true that "The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this." It is possible to create a universe from nothing. What you do is borrow energy from a quantum fluctuation. You would have to give it back in a time proportional to the energy borrowed. Then inflate the universe by 10^26 so that the quantum fluctuation becomes a size-able scale, and quantum mechanics do not apply anymore. The energy borrowed obviously necessitates a balancing energy, which is stored (as negative energy) in the curvature of the universe. In a sense, enormous inflation allows you to run away with borrowed energy.
Sorry for being brief in my explanation, but the above is not a crackpot theory. It is one that is consistent with the data of the CMB and large-scale structure correlations (e.g. galaxy clusters), and commonly presented in cosmology talks. You can find some books on the subject if you search for "universe inflation", one by Alan Guth who came up with the basic theory.

The right answer is "We do not know yet where the universe came from."
and "We do not know yet if the quest for a 'cause' makes sense in the early universe or has a testable answer. But we will continue trying."

Now it is possible to call the "creation" of the universe a god, in the Greek sense of the word. The creator. A mechanism. But it is a long way from there to argue a currently present, omnipotent but willfully acting, personally addressable God.