Posted on 03/18/2014 7:57:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There’s no way for us to know exactly what happened some 13.8 billion years ago, when our universe burst onto the scene.
But scientists announced Monday a breakthrough in understanding how our world as we know it came to be. If the discovery holds up to scrutiny, it’s evidence of how the universe rapidly expanded less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
“It teaches us something crucial about how our universe began,” said Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. “It’s an amazing achievement that we humans, doing science systematically for just a few hundred years, can extend our understanding that far.”
What’s more, researchers discovered direct evidence for the first time of what Albert Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity: Gravitational waves.
These are essentially ripples in space-time, which have been thought of as the “first tremors of the Big Bang,” according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
A telescope at the South Pole called BICEP2 — Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 – was critical to the discovery. The telescope allowed scientists to analyze the polarization of light left over from the early universe, leading to Monday’s landmark announcement.
Scientists use the word “inflation” to describe how the universe rapidly expanded after the Big Bang in a ripping-apart of space. The BICEP2 results are the “smoking gun for inflation,” Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy, said at a news conference.
Kamionkowski also was not involved in the project. “Inflation is the theory about the ‘bang’ of Big Bang,” said Chao-Lin Kuo, an assistant professor of physics at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and a co-leader of the BICEP2 collaboration, in a Stanford video.
(Excerpt) Read more at kfor.com ...
BANG!
Thank you.
Good points.
Science requires what it considers constants to be, well, constant. And there’s simply no way of knowing if they are or not.
Science, in its rejection of theology, makes a number of philosophical assumptions based on something. Necessity, most likely since they HAVE to make those assumptions for their theories to hold.
“(I think I pulled a neuron.)”
Always happens when the “finite” try to put the “infinite” in a box...! lol
Logical necessity.
Except for the results of a very basic physical formula that we all know: E=MC^2. If the speed of light (C) were higher in the past, the energy (E) or mass (M) of distant stars would be likewise effected, and we could clearly see that they were operating under different physics. They aren't.
For that matter, if C were high enough 6000 years ago to bring us the light of stars billions--or even millions--of light-years away, Adam would have been instantly incinerated by the vastly increased light of the Sun.
Even Danny Faulkner, being a Young-Universe Creationist but also an astronomer, admits that speed of light decay is a non-starter for defending the position.
Food for thought. Shalom.
God spoke and bang! it happened.
I’m good with that.
Untrue. Thanks to powerful telescopes and a finite speed of light, we can directly observe the past and measure many of the constants. So far, every observation is that they have remained, well, constant throughout the history of the universe. And that makes sense, since God several places in His Word points to the constant laws of nature as being proof of His justice and steadfastness to Israel (e.g., Jeremiah 31-33).
Shalom
Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur . . .
Very cool. Thanks.
God has given us evidence that the creation of the Universe took place approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
There’s no way for us to know exactly what happened some 13.8 billion years ago, when our universe burst onto the scene.This really depends on the Creationism you go for. If you're like me, Catholic, you believe in Old Earth Creationism and the whole question of evolution and all that is moot. If you're a believer in Young Earth Creationism, well, then the universe wasn't created 13.8 billion years ago, so that's false anyway. The world was created on October 23rd, 4004 BC, at 9:30 AM - assuming you use the Ussher Chronology.
not only that…but what is 13.8 billion years. Einstein, and modern quantum physics demonstrates that time is a physical property, and has not been constant over the life of our universe. In fact, the multiple indicates that as time has changed speeds….14 billion years might equal about 6 thousand years today.Eh, no, that's not right. It's not that time has not been constant. It's that the faster you go, the more time dilates for the object/person going faster. Time dilation doesn't mean that time changes speeds. It's all relative to the observer.
Since the scope of science is confined to our laws of physics, it can’t begin to even deal with that. Using science to prove or disprove God is like trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer. It’s the wrong tool for the job.That's the best description I've heard. You're exactly right. Science is the How. God is the Why. They are non-overlapping magisteria.
It could therefore be postulated that the speed of light over the course of time has changed.That would be C-Decay Theory, and would solve the starlight problem in YEC. The problem is, since the development of electronic digital counters and pulsed lasers, it has been possible to measure the speed of light in the laboratory with great precision. Even if the speed of light reached the proximity of its final value decades ago, there would be enough residual decay as the value reached its limit asymptotically for our modern apparatus to detect. There is none, which means that for the theory to work you have to toss out the exponential decay which governs nearly every phenomenon in the universe in favor of trigonometric functions that only work by brute force curve-fitting. Since it doesn't satisfy Occam's Razor, that's why C-Decay Theory has been abandoned. There are better (meaning, simpler and more accurate) scientific explanations. If C-Decay DID exist, there would be some pretty far-reaching implications. It would not simply mean that "the speed of light has changed over time". It would also mean that the very fabric of reality would be subject to change in the temporal dimension. For example, that would imply that energy is not conserved, thus negating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which changes how entropy works completely.
I’m sure the earth is significantly older than 6K years old. I’m not even debating the big bang component of creation. But I would argue that E=MC^2 because speed is regarded as constant.
If you allow for the possibility that the laws of physics are evolving with the universe, then what we understand about the universe today may confuse our theories about how our universe started 13 billion years ago. Steven Hawking is confounded about how a infinate amount of mass stored an infanite amount of energy in an infanitely tiny space at some (yet undiscovered) quantum level of existence. If as you point out, the nature of energy itself has also changed with the “C”, then more energy starts to fit in less mass and less space. Does it not? Run the calcs. Then drop Hawking a note.
Kind of like AWG David? Wonder if he is one of the 97% who have already determined this is "settled science".
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Actually (( IF )) eternity Future is possible, eternity PAST must be as well...
If theres an eternity PAST then the BIG BANG is a sci-fi YARN.
You know..... for small minds....
...and your PhD in astrophysics tells you this?
I suppose you know how to make the universe's accelerating expansion reverse direction...?
I bet your ears would pop.
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