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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 ...
Why I mean is, prior to the big bang was a dimensionless point of infinite mass/energy, & that prior to the big bang there where no events, there was no time.
God is atemporal.
Many races believe that the Universe was created by some sort of god or in the Big Bang. The Jatravartids, however, believe that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call “The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief” (their version of the End of the Universe). The theory of the Great Green Arkleseizure is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI.
Einstein initially refused to accept the idea of an expanding universe; Lemaître recalled him commenting"Vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable"
One must accept, n'est-ce pas, that is was a playful God who created a new universe with abundant evidence that it was almost 14 billion years old.
By its very nature, if the universe is larger than the “observable universe” then we are at the center of the observable universe. It has to be that way (again, assuming that the actual universe is larger in all directions than the observable universe).
Unless we start talking about things like currents in the ether.
Read the article. The paper was just submitted today. A few select physicists were given advanced hard copy and asked not to spread it around. It may be expeditiously released pending peer review.
You might find this sneak preview interesting:
That does not appear to be how it works.
What is wrong with the champagne corks?
THHGTTG
You can???
Then why are they spending millions of $ to prove it true?
I was immortal, all the way up to the day I died! FUP
Calling President Bush!
Yes! That's a good way to say it. I tend to think of the universe as everything that is reality, and thus I always think of the observable universe as an infinitesimal part of the "universe." And I assume that I'm nowhere near the center. :) And of course, for something that's infinite, the concept of there even being something akin to a center is itself questionable. If God exists in the sense that I hope God exists, then God is the center of the universe. If God does not exist then I guess I REALLY AM the center of the universe! :)
Thanks so much. Swell link. Sorry I wasn’t as swift on the uptake.
Though currently 2:15p EDT and haven’t heard of the actual announcement yet.
No preprint yet, they did a “goodish” job keeping this held tight to their chest, but here’s some of the BICEP group’s past papers.
http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Kovac_J/0/1/0/all/0/1
Radio telescopes detect whatever segment of the electromagnetic spectrum we tune them to.
Visible light (an extremely tiny part of the spectrum) is easily obscured and not as useful as other frequencies of the spectrum.
We could move to another galaxy and pick any planet, and 'observe' the universe, and I would bet our 'conclusions' would be the same.
We might be in some far corner of the Universe (although I doubt it has a corner) and still our conclusion would be the same.
The Universe is larger than our imagination can fathom. If, as we used to be taught, it is infinite, then...
It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny.
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It’s big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It’s a big universe and we’re not.
“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.”
This just happened this AM...
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