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To: Alamo-Girl
Perhaps you would be more persuaded if the sound waves found in the cosmic background radiation, played back in reverse, actually said something like “Let there be light” in ancient language?

I'd probably still have serious reservations. As the argument from apparent design does not prove the existence of a designer, so the argument of the primal shout does not prove the existence of the shouter. There are lots of possible reasons why there might have been a compressive wave disturbance in the inflationary era, just as there are lots of reasons why there might be disruptions in, say, the perfectly smooth cyclone action you might see in a perfectly circular sink containing perfectly still water when you open the drain. Consider Bode's law of planetary formation: the universe does not guarantee that that which is placidly homogeneous will stay placidly homogenous, even in closed, uniform, homogenous systems in dynamic equilibrium.

2,664 posted on 01/03/2003 5:23:18 PM PST by donh
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To: donh
Thank you so much for your post 2664!

Indeed, I would expect the official reaction to be bucketing the observation into the Anthropic Principle rather than attempting to personify the origin.

But with regard to the meaning, the MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations made it clear that the structure of the universe is due to inflation, not to topological defects. Cosmological Patterns and Galaxy Biasing (pdf)

And from Berkeley Lab:

The width and position of the first peak indicate that fluctuations on all scales were already in place at the earliest moments of the universe. A period of rapid expansion in the early moments of the universe could have set these perturbations in place by blowing up microscopic quantum fluctuations to astronomical scales -- seeding the galaxies and nets of galaxies we see today...

Had the structure of the universe been seeded not by inflation but by topological defects, that is by phase changes in the extreme energies of the early universe, the first peak in the CMB power spectrum would have been broader and lacking harmonics.


2,709 posted on 01/03/2003 8:55:43 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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