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 ...
There will be champagne corks popping today.
What it means is that Space-Time CAN be manipulated................................
“Reaching back across 13.8 billion years”
And apply Einstein’s theory of Relativity (time and space are not constants), and you may find this took place
not “quite” that long ago, in terms of “actual” vs. “apparent” time...
“There will be champagne corks popping today.”
quote from article:
Dr. Linde, who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983, was about to go on vacation in the Caribbean last week when Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford colleague and a member of Dr. Kovac’s team, knocked on his door with a bottle of Champagne to tell him the news.
Confused, Dr. Linde called out to his wife, asking if she had ordered Champagne.
“And then I told him that in the beginning we thought that this was a delivery but we did not think that we ordered anything, but I simply forgot that actually I did order it, 30 years ago,” Dr. Linde wrote in an email.
Calling from Bonaire, the Dutch Caribbean island, Dr. Linde said he was still hyperventilating. “Having news like this is the best way of spoiling a vacation,” he said.
end quote
>What it means is that Space-Time CAN be manipulated....
Was, Is and Will be again. Simply finding the just-out-of-reach cookie jar is half the battle.
So... reality is atemporal?
Scientists still suffer from Ptolemaic influences, no matter how far out their sphere of reference goes.
We’re born: I’m the center of the universe!
We’re a kid: I’m the center of the neighborhood!
We’re a schoolboy: I’m the center of the class!
We’re in college: I’m the center of my girlfriend’s world!
We’re a scientist: I’m the center of the universe!
“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.”
Anyone know if this scientific “gold standard” is applied also to the results thus far in proving the theories of evolution and anthropogenic global warming? ( so-called “settled science”)
Theroasly...Can there be a Big Bang if there is no ear to hear it?
God works in the most mysterious, yet simplest ways.
“Hugh and Series! “
Naw! Mute and irrevalunt! A looser!
So, this a big deal?
Bazinga!!!!
Evolution is a large field of biology. I imagine that genetic evidence probably is subject to such measurement standards, however other areas where the evidence is historical or observational, probably not.
Right...do I still have to go to work today?
Great story!
Doesn’t prove the “big bang.” The “big bang” is not a sufficient explanation for the origin of the universe.
We don't need to hear it. We can see it.
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