“All we are is dust in the wind”
All we are is dust in the wind.
The Scientific Method once again proves itself.
There is no other area of knowledge that polices itself as rigorously as Science.
This is a null value determination. But a really good catch.
Ahhh yes. The Big bang. When there was nothing and then it blew up.
And I thought that this was settled science and that the evidence of primordial gravitational waves was incontrovertible and accepted by 97% of physicists.
According to the article, within six months there will be much better data for dust and CMB light that could settle the issue. It’s been over 13 billion years. A few more months won’t hurt.
Drat.
The Big Bang theory says the universe expanded from a single point. Have they ever located where in the universe that is? Seems like they should be able to figure that out.
It looks like it’s possible that the original optimism around the “findings” of gravitational waves in the ripples in the background radiation might have been misplaced, that it was the effect of dust on the observations that was causing the results to be misinterpreted.
So what does that mean?
As far as the Big Bang goes, it means nothing. Those ripples were not part of the Big Bang theory, the evidence for which is in the background radiation itself, not the ripples. So the Big Bang survives this as a theory, which is no surprise.
What is in question here isn’t the Big Bang but the Theory of Cosmic Inflation. These ripples, as possible evidence of gravitational waves, were seen as strong support for Inflation.
Well, now that support (using these recent observations) is turning to dust, but that just means that these observations can’t be used as evidence for inflation... it does not mean they are evidence against inflation.
First of all, the jury is still out on just how much of this is dust and how much remains that just might actually be what the original interpretations said it was: evidence of gravity waves.
Second, bigger, better, more precise instrumentation is going to be trained on this subject — properly subtracting out the dust and properly getting the precise measurements required — to eventually be able to answer the question: Is there evidence of gravitational waves in the background radiation or not? And these improvements aren’t that many years away so the question will be answered fairly soon.
Third, even if no gravitational waves are found, that doesn’t mean the theory of inflation is dead. Before you kill inflation, you better come up with a credible alternative. You better come up with a theory that explains everything inflation explains but without the inflationary epoch to do it and as far as I know there are currently no credible alternatives out there. There are alternatives, but they all explain less than inflation does and they all introduce problems of their own.
Anyway, we might live in very depressing times as far as the crumbling of the Western and American Civilizations goes, but we certainly live in fascinating times if you consider what we are going to be finding out about our universe in the coming decades. Not just with regard to the background radiation, but in terms of being able to detect biological activity in atmospheres of exoplanets. It’s all good stuff. Too bad the situation here on earth is taking such a unenlightened turn. Scientific progress against a background of declining personal freedom. Bright lights in a collapsing cave.
Its really a struggle to explain in scientific terms how nothing became a universe. Christians are fine with “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. Science wants to understand what happened in a blink of an eye, by the spoken word of a creator.
