Posted on 03/17/2014 8:46:48 AM PDT by Seizethecarp
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.
If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, “This is huge, as big as it gets.”
Dr. Kovac and his collaborators, working in an experiment known as Bicep, for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, reported their results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics here on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
Dr. Kovac said the chance that the results were a fluke was only one in 3.5 million — a gold standard of discovery called five-sigma.
Guth pronounced himself “bowled over,” saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hard not to be influenced by Ptolemy when dealing with the enormity of it all. He was the FIRST that we know of who would even conceive of the world "out there."
Side note: I would think that most astronomers would NOT be atheists. I took an astronomy class eons ago and still remember vividly my awe. I wasn't easily awed by professors or their subjects, but he AND astronomy HOOKED me.
So the universe is less than a second old, and it gets “wrenched apart”? Mighty big wrench.
In actuality, we can't see the Big Bang or the so called gravity waves. We detect much of the Universe with radio telescopes, so we are actually 'hearing' it rather than seeing it.
I know it’s a simplistic view, but it’s what I believe:
I believe in the Big Bang. God said “Let there be..” and BANG! there it was.
No, not at all. In relativity, proper time is the elapsed time between two events as measured by a clock that passes through both events. Since the entire universe passed through (or arbitrarily close to ) the same point at the start of the Big Bang, all clocks are keeping proper time with respect to that event, so it is meaningful to speak of time since the big bang for any point in space time. For events long after the Big Bang and for different observers separated in space, the time interval between events can be different. See this example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time#Example_1:_The_twin_.22paradox.22
I’ve been thinking that time itself runs faster or slower depending on gravity/mass/energy interaction too
Now if I can only get several Billion dollars grant I can prove it
It is kind of amusing to realize that relativity requires the edge of the universe to be equidistant. But it's not the same thing as being the center of the universe. Since you can only look into the past there is an ultimate limit to your perception - the ultimate horizon is the beginning of time.
“Doesn’t prove the ‘big bang.’ The ‘big bang’ is not a sufficient explanation for the origin of the universe.”
Thee article says that this model explains the portion of the universe that resulted from the “big bang” but indicates the model does NOT explain the “cosmos” within which the big bang occurred:
quote from article:
“Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.”
Now we are likened to bubbling pasta!
Big bang is a bunch of bullshit just like evolution, I don’t care what these fools think they’ve found. Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes, and nothing would ever “Bang(TM)” its way out of that. These clowns are doubling-down on stupid, just like the libtards and demokkkrats are.
Radio telescopes detect photons. It’s like seeing with glasses.
And I thought the Big Bang Theory only had 2 reasons going for it.
Didn't know there was an observatory at the South Pole. Are they sure they weren't just measuring their teeth chattering?
That's got to be one big pot!
Well I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But kidding aside, wouldn’t a point of infinite mass with no physical dimension be atemporal?
The "Big Bang Theory" is the most sufficient explanation available, unless you have an improvement to offer.
Or it could have just been the wake of a starship warp drive.
Anyone yet have a line on any peer reviewable paper?
I’ve poked around. Can’t find one yet.
I suppose a point of infinite mass with no dimensions would be atemporal, at least in the sense that such a concept is physically meaningless;)
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