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Posted on 09/26/2014 11:54:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Inflation is dead, long live inflation! The very results hailed this year as demonstrating a consequence of inflationary models of the universe – and therefore pointing to the existence of multiverses – now seem to do the exact opposite. If the results can be trusted at all, they now suggest inflation is wrong, raising the possibility of cyclic universes that existed before the big bang.
In March experimentalists announced that primordial gravitational waves had been discovered. The team behind the BICEP2 Telescope in Antarctica had observed telltale twists and turns in the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) – the remnants of the earliest light produced in the universe.
Physicists thought the discovery was preliminary confirmation of inflation: the idea that for a sliver of a moment after the big bang there was a blisteringly fast expansion of the universe. The theory, the most widely held of cosmological ideas about the growth of our universe after the big bang, explains a number of mysteries, including why the universe is surprisingly flat and so smoothly distributed, or homogeneous.
But very quickly, the BICEP2 finding was shrouded in doubt, as it was revealed that the polarisation pattern could have been caused by cosmic dust. Cosmologists are waiting for space-based Planck telescope to reveal whether the dust could really make that pattern, and preliminary results released last week suggest dust might be able to.
But this week a team of theorists decided to analyse the polarisation signature further and ask: if it isn't completely caused by dust, what exactly does it say about inflation?
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Government Inflation is BIGGER in my opinion...
You mean Sagan, deGrasse Tyson & Hawkins might be wrong! I guess God can relax now!
Modern physics is so far unable to make its two great discoveries, relativity and quantum mechanics, mesh with each other. Until that is accomplished, the nature of the universe will be uncertain and disputed.
The ramifications of this most recent cosmic assertion are,
in a word, infinite.
My problem with inflation is that its the same sort of question-begging done by creation science. In a way, any model will beg a question until it can be experimentally confirmed. But the problem with inflation is that it throws away all normal laws for no reason other than that they could not have been.’
So if the universe could expand by some unknown reason for a factor of billions upon billions and then just stop expanding for some unknown reason, why not suggest that the stars were created at various phases of stellar progression and their light traveled incredibly fast until some unknown event, and now we’re stuck with “light speed”? Ultimately, inflation makes physics every bit as magical as six-day creation, while multiverses solve Occam’s Razor by dividing by zero.
inflation ping
They just need to stop debating and declare the science is settled. That’s the new scientific method.
They may be wrong. But Alan Guth is still on the right track.
I just don't think we know enough to really explain the conditions of the universe that far back, but I must admit that I'm fairly partial towards the idea that the universe is a cyclical construct that expands, contracts, then expands again. From a philosophical standpoint it seems more rational to me than a universe the explodes from nothing, then expends forever into the heat death of everything. That particular idea leaves me cold. (ahem).
I strongly suspect that the way the universe really works at both the quantum and macro level is ultimately even weirder than we now suspect.
Or the Universe will end with the Big Rip roughly 16 billion years or later from now.
From the way it is described, you will see the galaxies fly apart, then the stars, then the planets, then you.
It will be cool to watch. You could conceivably use near lightspeed space-travel via Einstein time-dialation to go foward in time to Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe and literally watch it all go foom while drinking champagne.
Those who favor 'inflation' have yet to dig into (mentally, at first of course) just how dimension Time and dimension Space evolved into the volume they now manifest. Was space spawned as point, then linear then planar then volume? ... etc.
Hmm, Alcubierre drives were in trouble enough as it was. I’m no physicist, but I have to wonder if this won’t be the final nail in the coffin for Alcubierre’s warp drive, inasmuch as Alcubierre’s work was based on a metric he derived from inflation theory, or so goes my admittedly quite limited understanding of these things.
Modern physics is so far unable to make its two great discoveries, relativity and quantum mechanics, mesh with each other.
...
Special Relativity has been merged with quantum mechanics. It’s gravity and general relativity that hasn’t.
You make a good point. In the case of inflation, science worked the way it should. Opposing scientists made the case that the claim couldn’t be made. Climatology, which is far less precise than cosmology, has had all opposition drummed out of it by the government, the media and academia.
Special R and General R are not the same thing.
No — and that observation does not contradict my point. More important, it is general relativity that describes gravity, and it is gravity that is not reconciled with quantum mechanics. Modern physics has stalled on that problem and is unable to offer definitive models of the cosmos and of high energy physics. Perversely, the goal of a Theory of Everything seems to recede the more we learn about the universe and the smallest components of matter.
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