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 ...
no no no... the speed of light was the same- only the dimensions were so small...
no no no... the speed of light was the same- only the dimensions were so small...
OUTSTANDING OBSERVATION, Buggman!!!
SHALOM
Scientists make clever theories on the universe which are only a guess which they really want to become truth yet the existance of God has to be concrete otherwise it doesnt exist
Thanks for the ping!
The Creator is above all the laws He has created.........they appear to limit our universe - but they don’t limit His.........
Evolution is considered a theory
If you get your britches tied in a knot over the Big Bang and Evolution, you might as well complain about geology, genetics, and linguistics too. They are used as consistent measures in how change occurred over time. Go and take as much science as possible out of your life to comfort thyself.
That, or their mass would be decreased by the square of C's increase, which would prevent distant stars and galaxies from cohering together. Yet there they are, so we know that isn't happening.
I used to be enamoured of the possibility of C-decay making the universe younger than thought, until someone pointed out the very obvious rammifications of that in light of E=MC^2. It simply doesn't work, even if we didn't have the ability to directly measure the energy--and therefore the speed--of light at the moment it left those distant stars and galaxies . . . and we do. Look up hyperfine split lines.
Just as much to the point, YEC might be required for a literal understanding of the English translation of Genesis, but it is not for the original Hebrew. The more I have learned about the Hebrew words used, what they mean, how they fit together, how they are conjugated, and how the language just works differently than English (lacking much in the way of tenses, for example), the more comfortable I have become with the reality of an old universe.
Shalom.
Remember, the ancient Israelites had no idea just how vast and old the universe is. Heck, we didn't even know that there were other galaxies until a century or so ago. Therefore, when Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," it could be referring to the universe as we know it . . . but it doesn't have to be. To Moses "the heavens and the earth" where the part of the universe visible to his naked eyes, so it could be referring only to our home planet or solar system.
Alternatively, it could indeed be referring to the whole universe, but verse 2 skips over 13 billion years of cosmic history to focus on what was important to Israel, the creation of the world they actually lived on.
If this is the case, we note that before day 1 starts, we have an earth covered in a primordial ocean. According to Job 38 (at work so I don't have the exact verse on-hand), this primordial ocean was swaddled in thick clouds. Now, when God says, "Let there be light," the Hebrew is Yihi 'or, with yihi being the imperfect form of the verb hayah. Unlike bara, this verb does not mean that the subject never existed in any form before.
For example, in the story of Ruth, when Naomi finds out that Boaz looked out for her daughter-in-law, she says, "May he be (yihi) blessed." She's obviously not saying that blessing never existed in the universe before, nor even that Boaz had never been blessed before (he was, after all, a wealthy landowner). She was simply asking that the Lord's blessing be manifest upon Boaz for the good deed he had done.
In the same way, we can read, "And light was" (veyhi 'or) not to mean that light never existed anywhere in the universe before, but as meaning that God was now parting the enshrouding clouds so that light could manifest on the primordial ocean, thus beginning the process of preparing the heavens (in the sense of the sky or atmosphere) and the earth for life to exist.
Shalom
Big IFs.
The great imponderables.
Big IFs.
Takes a BIG mind to contain BIG IFS..
Amen! When a creator is involved, “all bets are off”.
We can discuss the relative age of a very large tree right next to a very small one, bringing all of our arboreal expertise to bear, and have a spirited scientific discussion regarding them. We can all agree that the size, shape, branching, leaf distribution, and color of the barks determine that one tree is 75 years old and the other is only 10 years old.
Then we talk to the creator - an artist who PAINTED the picture of two trees, and find that the smaller one was painted on Monday last week, and the larger one is two days younger.
Our worst assumption is that we have all the facts, and are smart enough to do these things.
This assumes the light we see today represents the energy at the light's origin. If the the speed changes it would assume that the energy it represents would change with it along it's travels (if all laws decay together). Whether the origin had more or less energy than it does today, assuming all laws of physics are changing as "time" and "space" change, then would the results not remain consistent (red shift)?
In deep space we measure mass and energy based on gravity (and how light is affected as it travels). If the energy of the light that has been traveling for billions of years decayed at the same rate as the speed, and at the same rate of the origin's mass and energy, would the red shift not show what we see today? Remember, we assume gravity as a constant function of mass and space throughout the universe too. Yet we do not understand the source/force that causes magnetic attraction associated with mass. If the laws of gravity have evolved along with energy, speed of light and mass traveling in the universe, then our snapshot is accurate but not representative of Universal Laws of Physics at the moment of the Big Bang.
For that matter, what if gravity as a function of mass is different in every galaxy? We can only assume the consistencies beyond a certain distance and speed as we rely on light and use that data based on established Laws of Physics. The very mass of our own planet is established based on it's own gravity and it's consistency with that of our moon and surrounding planets. These functions are observable in our own solar system and establish our understanding of the mass of our sun and our neighboring planets. But Satellites verify the size of our planet based on the known distance of our moon based on bouncing lasers off of solid objects. We can't bounce lasers off of distant stars (and galaxies) so we rely on the light they sent to us billions of years ago.
Again, I assume you to be of superior knowledge on this subject, but am fascinated with Science's inability to reconcile our Laws of Physics with what is theorized as our Universe's origin. I recall learning some Physicists frustrated conclusion that the Physics to support the Big Bang Theory do not fit the Laws established today. As a neophyte, this has always begged the question for me, "Why do we assume the laws are constant over billions of years?" Couple that with recent revelations that Quantum Physics is finding particles that don't obey our established laws and I say it is fair to explore taboo ideas that go against the established Laws of Physics. After all, is that not what science is?
I've had this discussion before (likely with less knowledgeable subjects) where someone finally said, ALL scientists agree..... CONSENSUS? LOL Ultimately, I giggle at the ambitious and sometimes presumptuous human effort to figure out how God did it. But I admit to being curious myself and I think God programmed us to be this way.
Thank you for your effort, I am learning a lot.
Then we'd be able to see the galaxies behaving in different ways despite similar masses.
What you're proposing is not one or two laws of physics being in flux--it's all of them being in flux in such a way that the net effect is exactly zero in terms of stellar luminosity, gravitational attraction, etc. That's not only a gross violation of Occam's Razor, it also makes no sense from a theistic viewpoint: If we believe in One God as both the Creator and the Lawgiver, and we believe that He is unchanging and constant, why would we hypothesize that He is constantly changing the laws of reality in a way that we can't even observe the effects?
There's a similar problem for those who posit that God created the light of distant stars and galaxies in transit to give the universe an appearance of age: Quite aside from the very obvious question, "Why bother?" that means that nothing outside of 6-10,000 light-years actually exists, and God made the universe to lie to us. That is, when we see the light of a supernova in the next galaxy over, the star it's apparently coming from never existed, and it's all a lie.
Either way, you end up with a "universe" that is either Lovecraftian or the Matrix, and a God very different from the One who presents Himself in the Bible.
I don't think God is deceptive. I do think that it's possible to misinterpret both the record of nature and the words of the Bible, but I don't think that the Lawgiver gave us constantly shifting laws just to mess with us.
Shalom
Is it blasphemous to try and postulate what and how the where/when which Angels inhabit? Without time events do not occur and without space things do not exist. I believe the Bible, so I believe Angels exist ... in some where/when. I’m just deeply involved in thinking ‘how God did it’.
Shalom
I think you will find it to be interesting -- and on topic... '-)
The work by men like Bernard Haisch and his coauthors points to the fundamental background state (the zero point field) being the 'sea of spacetime' into which God spoke creative waves. The opening of this realm of spacetime has at the leading 'edge' a soliton of time, but within the volume of spacetime are many continuua of space and time geometries, only one of which is our '4D' realm.
I am convinced that life is ubiquitous in this realm. However, the Bible teaches me that spiritual life is not ubiquitous to this 4D realm, that it is one of the special conditions established by The Creator. I postulate that life is interwoven with the 4D realm due to the reality of a completely different dimension I call --for want of a better term-- the dimension of life force. I postulate there is also a dimension of spirit which by God's Creating can intertwine with the dimension of life force in the specially created beings, like humans/the reborn. Jesus told Nicodemus that except a man be born of water and the spirit ... it is noteworthy that in my paradigm the dimensions of life force and spirit are independent of dimensions time and space, except where intertwined with these other dimensions.
The consciousness of a living thing is sourced somewhere else from spacetime, yet uses the realm of spacetime to accumulate information and thus 'grow in Grace and knowledge.'
The earliest attributes we learn of God are that God is conscious, that God is Creative, that God is love, and that God is Spirit. Each dimension of His Creating has a means to be 'touched' by the IS of God.
All variable expressions possible in each dimension and in all the interwinings of these expressions are accessible to God but cannot bind Him. Jesus showed this by rising from the grave, because death could not bind Him. Imperfection could not resist His miraculous transformations (miracles), and limits could not defy His creative commands (feeding thousands with meager rations).
It is often asked by skeptics 'why would being so much more technologically advanced than we humans waste so much time visiting our planet?' The simplest answer is, perhaps these other beings lack something God has created in humans, namely the dimensional quality of spirit. The Big Bang brought about the initial conditions which through His Word have brought forth we and they and the Angels. But even with their abilities, Angels are inferior to humans. Jesus/The Word made flesh Who dwelt among us/God with us made Himself a little lower than the Angels to be with us. His miraculous living shows that 'less than' was not a measure of technologies, and He told His Disciples, These things I do ye shall do and greater still.'
The thought that the most (stupendously complex) “simple” single-celled organism could spring to life when its chemical parts are mixed together is laughable.
Spirited: Yes, it is laughable. In fact the notion that life will eventually arise from the transmutation of dead things (chemicals) belongs to alchemy and Hermetic magic, two main elements of the ancient royal occult science of gnostic magicians.
CS Lewis understood that modern science and occult science are twins. For an all too brief period of time modern science was a search for how things really work. But for quite a long time now it’s been sliding back into its’ old ways. The Big Bang (Orphic Cosmic Egg) for instance, is an ancient pagan motif bespeaking an inexplicable cosmic explosion that unleashes the forces of chaos responsible for evil and suffering. In this way of thinking, man is not fallen, the material world is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.