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.
Um, no. Expansion is not limited by the speed of light because it's an expansion *of* space, not the speed of something traveling *through* space. Only the latter is limited to the speed of light.
Some physicists speculate that the speed of light has been slowing down since the Big Bang.
The only people I'm aware of who speculate such a thing are certain young-earth creationists who are trying think up reasons why the obvious age of the Universe doesn't actually mean that the Universe is older than 6,000 years old...
You *like* insulting misrepresentations which reveal a cartoon-level of (mis)understanding while misguidedly attacking people and topics via ignorance?
And that is my point, especially when the "analyses" counters things we can measure and observe now. Quantum mechanics defies our normal experience, but anyone with a few easily obtainable objects can observe its effects.
BUMP for later read.
Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his father.
Literally nothing, no space, no place, no location. Nothing
But which analyses?
The bit about expansion, or the bit about mutations in cancer cells, or both?
Big Bang....translation......God created!
Here's some more:
"Spontaneous beneficial mutations are the fuel for adaptation, the source of evolutionary novelty, and one of the least understood aspects of biology. Although adaptation is everywhere—cancer invading tissues, bacteria escaping drugs, viruses switching from livestock to humans—beneficial mutations are notoriously difficult to study (1, 2). Theoretical and experimental advances have been made in recent years by focusing on the distribution of fitness effects of spontaneous beneficial mutations (3–8). Mapping the options for improvement available to single organisms, however, is insufficient for understanding the adaptive course of an entire population, especially in asexual populations of microorganisms or cancer cells where multiple mutations often spread simultaneously (9–16). Here, we use modeling and experimental results to show that the seeming additional complication of having multiple lineages competing within a population leads in fact to a drastic simplification: Regardless of the distribution of mutational effects available to individuals, a population's adaptive dynamics can be approximated by an equivalent model in which all favorable mutations confer the same fitness advantage, which we call the effective selection coefficient. We provide experimental estimates of the effective selection coefficient and the corresponding effective rate of beneficial mutations for laboratory populations of Escherichia coli, and we demonstrate the predictive power of these effective parameters. "
But if you really want to get into it, read the paper. I don't want Science mad at me.
Most people are afraid of the Grim Reaper. Chuck Norris refers to him as a "promising rookie."
Indeed, "Fiat lux!"
He hasn't posted in four hours. The math needs to be "more complicated."
According to the effects of general relativity, this is indeed an "illusion". We do appear to be at the center, but any observer anywhere in the universe will appear to be at the center, from their own perspective.
It's sort of like being in an old video game (think back to the old Atari 2600 games) where if your spaceship flies off one edge of the screen, it comes back in on the other side. This is how the general relativity model of the universe works - except that in the real universe, the further away you move from the 'center', the faster objects recede, until the 'edges' (of the 'screen', if you will) are receding away from the observer at the speed of light. Because we can never reach these edges (of the event horizon, it's called), the paradox of flying off one edge of the universe and coming back in on the other side can never occur. ('Looking' at this edge, about 13.5 billion light years away, (which we can't quite see due to the infinite redshift at this distance) is, in essence, looking at the moment of the Big Bang.) If you could travel faster than light, in principle, you could travel out one edge of the universe and emerge on the opposite 'side' (which, one could say, is part of the very reason it's impossible).
Another way to look at it is to imagine being on the surface of a giant balloon that is inflating at a speed so fast that if you try to travel on its surface at maximum speed that you don't ever make it around to the opposite side. Anyone anywhere on the balloon will think the opposite side is an "edge" they can't reach. This all sounds strange, but this model of the universe is consistent with Einstein's relativity equations, the cosmic redshift and a homogeneous universe. (I find it fascinating, that even in principle we can't see far enough in space to see what happened at the moment of Creation.)
If you try a Google search on "Chuck Norris getting beaten up," it will pull up no results. It just doesn't happen.
What do you think of the inflationary universe? It works out to a total universe as much bigger than the Hubble volume as earth is to a grain of sand. One good thing about that model is that it explains why the universe appears so flat, isotropic, homegeneous if we can see only a tiny piece of the whole, which would be curved back on itself.
So you claim...yet you can't specify any one part of my textual explanation that was in error...
Just about all of it, actually. You just made a lot of claims you didn't even attempt to support (apparently they're just based on your own presumptions, which you mistake for established fact), and revealed a lot of basic misconceptions you have about physics.
But since all attempts to get you to "show your math" have been met with your usual brand of evasions and excuses and insults (in all my time watching you on these threads, that's *all* I've seen you do when asked to do any mathematical at all -- I have yet to see you produce any beyond basic arithmatic), here, let's turn it around -- feel free to explain, "textually" or otherwise, where the following might be in error (since it must be, if your "textual" ramblings are correct): The influence of the cosmological expansion on local systems.
(Now *that's* math...) Feel free to explain how, why, and *specifically* where, you find a flaw in it. Because it makes sense to me.
Also, feel free to explain why, exactly, when most people encounter something counterintuitive in an established field of science, would think to themselves, "hmm, that doesn't make sense to me, but since thousands of physicists have worked on this over the past decades and don't seem to find a fundamental flaw in it, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it and should ask some questions to clarify the matter", instead *you* consistently and reflexively think, "hey, I don't see how that could work, so without any doubt, 'THE THEORY IS HOOEY'..." Really, please explain this to me -- what sort of mental state leads to such public exhibitions of ludicrous presumptuousness?
Or -- and I ask this in all seriousness because I often consider it a very real possibility whenever I see you participate in a physics thread and I'd really like to know -- are you just trolling?
So stuff traveled at a million times the spead of light? Was time distorted in that event? Is our sense of time distorted in that event? Just asking.
But not rest mass. A photon may have finite momentum but zero rest mass. Photons aren't heavy, they're light.
So will this mean that Alan Guth finally gets the Nobel? :)
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