Free Republic

Evidence for Inflation, or Inflating the Evidence? Feb 24, 2009 — Cosmic inflation has become an accepted truth in cosmology, but its appeal is primarily philosophical and theoretical. Something as weird as a universe jumping 26 orders of magnitude in size in one trillion trillion trillionth of a second (see 02/21/2005) should raise eyebrows in any scientific circle. Is there any evidence for it?...

Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth. The finding is based on new results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of radiant heat left over from the Big Bang, which is the theoretical beginning to the universe. This radiation is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and it is the oldest light in the universe. Using WMAP data, researchers announced in 2003 that they had pieced together a very detailed...

Grey Hautaluoma Headquarters, Washington (202) 358-0668 Susan Hendrix Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (301) 286-7745 March 16, 2006 RELEASE: 06-097 NASA Satellite Glimpses Universe's First Trillionth of a Second Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence to support the concept of inflation. The concept poses the universe expanded many trillion times its size in less than a trillionth of a second at the outset of the big bang. This finding, made with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), is based on three years of continuous observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the...

A handful of researchers posit an alternative theory of origin — the universe has no beginning Many, if not most, people assume that certain aspects of nature’s workings are absolutely known. Outside of intelligent design circles, no modern biologist doubts the theory of evolution by natural selection; it is too well established by harmonious data across a multiplicity of fields. No credible doctor questions the germ theory of disease. And, one might think, no serious cosmologist disagrees with the standard cosmological model. The SCM is the official designation of what is informally called “the big bang”: that relatively recent but...

Creationist cosmologies explain the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer spacecraft by D. Russell Humphreys A broad class of creationist cosmologies offer an explanation for the ‘Pioneer effect’, an apparent small Sunward anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. If a large volume of empty space surrounds the matter of the cosmos, so that the cosmos can have a centre of mass, then the matter is in a deep gravitational potential ‘well’. If space is expanding and spreading the matter outward, then the depth of the well is decreasing. According to general relativity, especially a new solution of Einstein’s equations...

WHEN he was buried - at the insistence of the Catholic Church in unconsecrated ground - Galileo Galilei left behind at least two conundrums: how could a man with impaired eyesight have made the observations that revolutionised astronomy; and did his faulty vision alter what he saw and recorded? When his body was moved to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, some 100 years later on the initiative of local freemasons, it gave rise to a third riddle: who was the woman found buried alongside him? Scientists are planning now to solve all three questions with the help of...

A Brief History of Intolerance in Modern Cosmology by Dr. Jerry Bergman January 21, 2009 Abstract A review of some recent well-documented cases of intolerance in the cosmology field illustrates a common problem in science. Many relate to the Big Bang theory, such as the case of Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and Halton Arp. None of the accounts involved Intelligent Design advocates or creationists. This selection removes this compounding factor from the evaluation, but the cases have direct relevance to both Intelligent Design and creationism because both groups face the same resistance. It was concluded that it is critical for...

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not...

The UWA Zadko Telescope, owned by the University of Western Australia, was the first one in the world to capture the massive Universe event that saw a giant star collapsing into a black hole and emitting a massive gamma ray burst , fortunately for us in a very distant galaxy. The emission is believed to be about 11 billion years old, and is visible only now because of the time the light needed in order to travel from the site of the collapse to our planet. Australian astronomers say that, if such an explosion were to happen in a place...

A stunning new book by a physics professor purports to show more firmly than ever how light from the most distant stars would have reached Earth in a very short time....

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

Everyone agrees: our universe appears fine-tuned for human existence. You have two choices: it was designed by God, or there is a multiverse (other universes we cannot detect). Amanda Gefter is unhappy with that choice. In New Scientist, she asked, why can’t we have more options?...

Is there a God or a multiverse? Does modern cosmology force us to choose? Is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere? This choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's New Scientist. It follows an article in Discover magazine, in which science writer Tim Folger quoted cosmologist Bernard Carr: "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."...

The fact is that the history of the universe cannot be determined from a model which cannot be independently tested. The Big Bang cosmology is verified in the minds of those who already hold to that belief—that the Universe created itself about 14 billion years ago—ex nihilo. To me the biblical big picture is far more believable...

“Our universe is perfectly tailored for life"..."Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation:"...

Three different trends in physics each suggest that our universe is just one of many.We usually think of the universe as being “everything there is.” But many astronomers and physicists now suspect that the universe we observe is just a small part of an unbelievably larger and richer cosmic structure, often called the “multiverse.” This mind-bending notion – that our universe may be just one of many, perhaps an infinite number, of real, physical universes – was front and center at a three-day conference entitled "A Debate in Cosmology — The Multiverse," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics...

~~~snip~~~ Electromagnetic waves are far too slow to be the only means of signalling in an immense universe. Gravity requires the near-instantaneous character of the electric force to form stable systems like our solar system and spiral galaxies. Gravitationally, the Earth ‘sees’ the Sun where it is this instant, not where it was more than 8 minutes ago. Newton’s famous law of gravity does not refer to time. We must have a workable concept of the structure of matter that satisfies the observation that the inertial and gravitational masses of an object are equivalent. When we accelerate electrons or protons...

A tangle of spidery filaments stretches outward from the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275 as if they were dendrites of an intergalactic nerve cell. NGC 1275, located 235 million light-years from Earth near the center of a clump of galaxies known as the Perseus cluster, has posed a puzzle: How have these filaments, which are made of gas much cooler than the surrounding intergalactic cloud, persisted for perhaps 100 million years? Why haven’t they warmed, dissipated or collapsed to form stars? Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, with 10 times the resolution of earlier photographs, reveal that the filaments,...

Goldilocks isn’t the only one who demanded everything to be “just right.” The Earth and its fellow seven planets also needed perfect conditions to form as observed, and those right conditions occur rarely, a new computer simulation shows. The new simulation, described in the Aug. 8 Science, is the first to trace from beginning to end how planetary systems form from an initial gas disk encircling a baby star. “The really striking result of the new model is how chaotic and even violent the average story of a planet’s birth is,” says Edward Thommes, an astrophysicist now at the University...

Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory. The background patterns of space could help us focus on quantum problems.NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics...