Posted on 03/16/2006 11:31:54 AM PST by The_Victor
Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.
The discovery — which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation — is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.
It also helps explain how matter eventually clumped together into planets, stars and galaxies in a universe that began as a remarkably smooth, superhot soup.
"It's giving us our first clues about how inflation took place," said Michael Turner, assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation. "This is absolutely amazing."
Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist, said: "The observations are spectacular and the conclusions are stunning."
Researchers found the evidence for inflation by looking at a faint glow that permeates the universe. That glow, known as the cosmic microwave background, was produced when the universe was about 300,000 years old — long after inflation had done its work.
But just as a fossil tells a paleontologist about long-extinct life, the pattern of light in the cosmic microwave background offers clues about what came before it. Of specific interest to physicists are subtle brightness variations that give images of the microwave background a lumpy appearance.
Physicists presented new measurements of those variations during a news conference at Princeton University. The measurements were made by a spaceborne instrument called the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, or WMAP, launched by NASA in 2001.
Earlier studies of WMAP data have determined that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few hundred thousand years. WMAP also measured variations in the cosmic microwave background so huge that they stretch across the entire sky. Those earlier observations are strong indicators of inflation, but no smoking gun, said Turner, who was not involved in the research.
The new analysis looked at variations in the microwave background over smaller patches of sky — only billions of light-years across, instead of hundreds of billions.
Without inflation, the brightness variations over small patches of the sky would be the same as those observed over larger areas of the heavens. But the researchers found considerable differences in the brightness variations.
"The data favors inflation," said Charles Bennett, a Johns Hopkins University physicist who announced the discovery. He was joined by two Princeton colleagues, Lyman Page and David Spergel, who also contributed to the research.
Bennett added: "It amazes me that we can say anything at all about what transpired in the first trillionth of a second of the universe."
The physicists said small lumps in the microwave background began during inflation. Those lumps eventually coalesced into stars, galaxies and planets.
The measurements are scheduled to be published in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
Well, there's an understatement if I ever heard one. LOL
There are two ways to arrive at our seeing this effect:
1. we are at the EXACT center of some region of space, and everything in the detectable Universe is running away from US in every direction we look.
or 2. we are at an arbitrary place in a space that is expanding, which creates the illusion of being at the center, NO MATTER WHERE IN THAT SPACE WE MAY BE LOCATED.
The fact of the matter is that to get identical redshifts in all directions, it is necessary to subtract out the local motion of the Milky Way galaxy (in which earth's solar system resides). When one does so, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is observed to isotropic in all directions, down to at least one part in 100,000. If we were at the true center as described in #1 above, we would stay there very long, due to the movement of our galaxy.
Thus, #2 seems to be the safe bet.
What exactly grew in that fashion? It is something natural that we can observe now? If not, we are talking about something supernatural.
That's relative time-
If you're inside the phart, time is slower than outside the phart.
Science Ping!
There is no edge and there is no center. It is an illusion.
However, there is a finite volume, which is far larger than the Hubble volume.
ping
No, and not supernatural either. Or, we might be seeing similar things all the time and not know what we are looking at.
I'm using the first entry in the definition of supernatural.
su·per·nat·u·ral 
( P ) Pronunciation Key (s
p
r-n
ch
r-l)
adj.
You can buy this home science stuff from Edmund Scientific. They got lots of goodies.
"As to not recognizing things we are 'looking at', God would fit in that category for some."
Well, sure, but God is an answer to the "Why?" question.
The astronomers and particle physicists, and dispassionate biologists, are focused on the "What?" question, because that's measurable.
You know, the "Why?" question probably really is answered by "God", objectively. Four separate controlled, peer-reviewed hospital studies of Near Death Experiences, and the amazing CSI-style forensic work performed in recent years on the Shroud of Turin both do point to an afterlife, and even to a miraculously improbable event occurring to put that image on the Shroud. So there is evidence that your answer to the "Why?" question is at least partially correct, and certainly there's no more important question than the "Why?" (or perhaps "Who?") question.
But that's just not what astronomers and physicists (or biologists) ought to be in the business of trying to answer. Just "What?" is hard enough, when you're dealing with things that are at the very edge of our ability to detect, and past the edge of our capacity to really understand.
To make it clearer: sure, God probably made it, and God probably is the reason the laws work as they do. So the really big, really important question, the one you and everyone else is most interested in, is answered to the extent that it can be.
But the natural mechanics of the world who really want to see how the machine runs are not going to settle for that. They're still going to try and figure out "What?" (and "When?" and "Where?") on those other 6 days of the week. On day 7, it's off to Communion to acknowledge the "Why" and the "Who". On days 1 through 6, there's a whole lifetime of fascinating study to figure out more of the "How", the "Where", the "When" and the "What".
To put it even more simply: we're all going to die and have our shot at heaven. Shall we, therefore, not encourage doctors to perfect the medical art, so that we can get to that happy place faster?
Rapid evolution of asexual populations, such as that of cancer cells or of microorganisms developing drug resistance, can include the simultaneous spread of distinct beneficial mutations. We demonstrate that evolution in such cases is driven by the fitness effects and appearance times of only a small minority of favorable mutations. The complexity of the mutation-selection process is thereby greatly reduced, and much of the evolutionary dynamics can be encapsulated in two parameters—an effective selection coefficient and effective rate of beneficial mutations. We confirm this theoretical finding and estimate the effective parameters for evolving populations of fluorescently labeled Escherichia coli. The effective parameters constitute a simple description and provide a natural standard for comparing adaptation between species and across environments.
1 Bauer Center for Genomics Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
2 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
3 Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
In the first Jurassic Park movie, the Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn't chasing the jeep. Chuck Norris was chasing the Tyrannosaurus AND the jeep.
No, but we also do not buy snake oil.
Why do you ask? I thought you thought it was all hooey.
I can't get to it today but I can tomorrow if I don't forget.
Snake oil is healthy for you, like chicken schmaltz.
People who drank snake oil, and they did used to sell it, did experience a mildly beneficial health effect.
This did not mean that the people selling it were not quacks.
Astronomers and particle physicists exploring these mysteries, also biologists and geneticists, are not quacks. They have undergone a strenuous amount of education to try and understand very complicated things and move the horizon of knowledge further. This doesn't meant that they are RIGHT in their analyses, but it does mean that most of them are sincere and trying to do good science and find answers, not produce propaganda. Of course, there are always a handful of frustrated politicians and theologians in lab coats who have an emotional agenda that is not related to the study at hand.
The best measure of real understanding of anything is the ability to reduce it to plain English. If you can describe it in plain English, you truly understand it. If you can't, you are unsure.
So, what it is that you are aiming at?
That evolution did not and does not happen?
That the universe is not expanding?
Do these things matter to you because they seem to contradict your understanding of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis? Is that really what we're going to go into?
We can, I suppose, but let's do it objectively.
I think some things are all hooey, but "simultaneous spread of distinct beneficial mutations." and "be approximated by an equivalent model, in which all beneficial mutations confer the same fitness advantage."[from the notice I received from Science] are things beyond an RMNS explanation.
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