Slashdot Mirror
How Do We Know the Timeline of the Universe?
StartsWithABang writes The history of the Universe happened in a well-known order: inflation ends, matter wins out over antimatter, the electroweak symmetry breaks, antimatter annihilates away, atomic nuclei form, then neutral atoms, stars, galaxies, and eventually us. But scientists and science magazines often publish timelines of the Universe with incredibly precise times describing when these various events occur. Here's how we arrive at those values, along with the rarely-publicized uncertainties.
Early Universe ideas? Not fact. Not "well-known". Guesses.
That's... really selling science - and the scientific method - way short.
It's not "guesses", it's hypotheses, which are by their nature our best explanations of something given our current understanding of how those things work.
Calling these "guesses" reduces all the science that's actually going on and puts it on the same level as Joe Schmoe's wild-ass guessing on subjects he's not familiar with.
There is a world of difference between Joe guessing what happened in the early days of the universe and a scientist that has devoted several years of his life studying the matter putting forth a hypothesis of what happened.
Please don't paint these as the same thing, it's just doing the anti-science folk a service, and the rest of us a disservice.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I know I'm probably feeding the trolls here but...
Fine. I'm a post-doctoral research associate working on inflationary model fitting comparing anisotropies in the power spectrum with the anisotropies of galaxy distribution, with a side interest in the formation of stars at redshifts of about 5. In my time here I've done a host of jobs from outreach to 14-18 year olds, fundamental research, presentation to international conferences. And I've also cleaned the toilets twice, so yeah, I guess janitor could be on my CV too, if you care about that kind of thing (our janitors, for the record, are actually remarkably nice people, far more cheerful that I would be if I had their job, but I guess they only deal with literal shit that you can flush away, not the metaphorical shit that morons post on the internet).
The link to XKCD, if you know what you're talking about (which I strongly suspect that you don't) is a fit of a black body spectrum to the CMB. The point is that the data matches to such an amazing degree. The whole point of that comic is to state that our models work. They work incredibly well, far better in fact, than most of us would have thought when we first posited them.
The other links were just the beginnings of what is a very long list of ways we've tested our models against reality. I'm not your google guide - look them up yourself. What you'll find is that we see across a host of observations from different teams, different equipment, different phenomena covered that the predictions line up with observations to a very very high degree. The final result, as posited by the webcomic you so like to deride, is the tag line to that comic.
It works, bitches.