Posted on 08/03/2005 6:21:00 AM PDT by conservativecorner
A new analysis of 'cool' spots in the cosmic microwave background may cast new doubts on a key piece of evidence supporting the big bang theory of how the universe was formed.
Two scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) looked for but couldn't find evidence of gravitational "lensing" where you might expect to find it, in the most distant light source in the universe -- the cosmic microwave background.
Results of this research by Dr. Richard Lieu, a UAH physics professor, and Dr. Jonathan Mittaz, a UAH research associate, were published Monday in the "Astrophysical Journal."
In the same paper, Albert Einstein's 1917 theory that at a certain "critical" density the counteracting forces of gravity and expanding space can result in a "flat" universe no matter how irregular the distribution of matter might be, is proven mathematically for the first time.
Proving Einstein right might become a problem for the standard cosmological model of how the universe was formed because Einstein's theory also predicts that the cosmic microwave background shouldn't look the way it does, according to Lieu.
The problem, he says, is that cool spots in the microwave background are too uniform in size to have traveled across almost 14 billion light years from the edges of the universe to Earth.
"Einstein's theory of how gravity attracts light, coupled with the uneven distribution of matter in the near universe, says you should have a spread of sizes around the average, with some of these cool spots noticeably larger and others noticeably smaller," he said. "But this dispersion of sizes is not seen in the data. When we look at them, too many cool spots are the same size."
The cosmic microwave background is believed to be the afterglow of hot gases that filled the fledgling universe immediately following the big bang. These microwaves permeate the sky, coming to Earth from every direction in a nearly homogeneous blanket of weak radiation.
Nearly homogeneous because some spots are slightly cooler than the average "temperature" of less than three Kelvin -- three degrees Celsius above absolute zero.
Cosmologists have theorized that these cool regions in the microwave blanket are the birthmarks of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that condensed out of the primordial plasma a few eons after the big bang.
Based on theories about disturbances in gases that existed for millennia after the big bang, cosmologists developed detailed estimates of how big these cool spots should have been when they emitted the radiation reaching us as microwaves today.
These cool spots were studied in detail by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which found that the average spot is about the size that had been forecast for a flat, smooth universe.
The problem, says Lieu, is that not only is the average about right, but far too many of the spots themselves are "just right" with too little variation in sizes. Given the uneven distribution of matter in an expanding universe, he says, we should see a broader size distribution among the cool spots by the time that radiation reaches Earth.
The distribution of matter and the expanding universe are important because they have opposite effects on the "shape" of space and the paths taken by light, microwaves and other radiation as they zip through the cosmos.
An expanding universe would tend to "stretch" space, causing radiation to disperse as it flies through. That dispersion would make objects appear to an observer to be smaller than they really are, as if the light went through a concave lens.
"As far as we know," said Lieu, "the expansion takes place smoothly everywhere. When the universe reaches a certain age all points in space at this moment expand in the same way."
Matter -- or more specifically gravity -- tends to constrain space. And because matter is distributed unevenly across the universe, so are its gravitational effects.
If you have enough matter in one small place, such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, that super concentration of gravity can act like a convex lens, bending inward both space and any light traveling through it. When light from a distant galaxy is bent by gravity as it passes another galaxy or galaxy cluster, these distortions can appear as Einstein rings or weak lensing shear effects.
If the object emitting light is like a cool spot in the microwave background, the focusing effect of galaxy clusters or groups of galaxies between those spots and Earth might make the spots appear to be larger than they really were.
A large portion of the mass in the nearby universe is concentrated in small volumes of space. These are galaxies and massive galaxy clusters, which are surrounded by vast empty voids of intergalactic space. If the standard big bang model is correct, that means the microwave radiation from some cool spots would travel through mostly empty space, would be dispersed by the expanding universe and would look small by the time that radiation reached Earth.
Radiation from other cool spots, however, would pass around or near massive gravity lenses. These focused spots would appear to be larger than the average cool spot.
"But you don't see this fluctuation," said Lieu. "There appear to be no lensing effects whatsoever. This lack of variation is a serious problem."
In his "Cosmological Considerations of the General Theory of Relativity," Einstein theorized that the net effect of the counteracting forces of expansion and gravity should remain the same if the amount of matter in the universe stays the same.
While Einstein developed this theorem based on a universe where the distribution of matter is "smooth," the UAH mathematical work shows for the first time that the net effect on the propagation of light doesn't change even if the universe is "clumpy."
If the cool spots are too uniform to have traveled to Earth from near the beginning of time, Lieu says cosmologists are left with several alternative explanations.
The first is that the cosmological parameters (including the Hubble constant, the amount of dark matter, etc.) used to predict the original, pre-lensed sizes of the cool and hot spots in the microwave background might be wrong. These parameters could be adjusted to predict a narrower range of sizes on either side of the "pre-lensed" average.
Then, after the effect of gravitational lensing is folded in, the resulting average size and size dispersion would agree with what WMAP actually saw, said Lieu. "This approach is the most conservative, but would still result in an overhaul of the standard model."
"Or, could it be that although the radiation itself is from far away, some of these cool spot structures are caused by nearby physical processes and aren't really remnants of the universe's creation?" Lieu asked. "Could they have been imprinted locally and aren't cosmological at all? Given that we find no lensing, that might be one possibility.
"Or is it possible that as light goes through the vast areas of space there is some other, unknown factor damping the effects of dispersion and focusing? There is certainly plenty of room for unknowns."
The most contentious possibility is that the background radiation itself isn't a remnant of the big bang but was created by a different process, a "local" process so close to Earth that the radiation wouldn't go near any gravitational lenses before reaching our telescopes.
Although widely accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists as the best theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang model has come under increasingly vocal criticism from scientists concerned about inconsistencies between the theory and astronomical observations, or by concepts that have been used to "fix" the theory so it agrees with those observations.
These fixes include theories which say the nascent universe expanded at speeds faster than the speed of light for an unknown period of time after the big bang; dark matter, which was used to explain how galaxies and clusters of galaxies keep from flying apart even though there seems to be too little matter to provide the gravity needed to hold them together; and dark energy, an unseen, unmeasured and unexplained force that is apparently causing the universe not only to expand, but to accelerate as it goes.
In research published April 10 in the "Astrophysical Journal, Letters," Lieu and Mittaz found that evidence provided by WMAP point to a slightly "super critical" universe, where there is more matter (and gravity) than what the standard interpretation of the WMAP data says. This posed serious problems to the inflationary paradigm.
Recent observations by NASA's new Spitzer space telescope found "old" stars and galaxies so far away that the light we are seeing now left those stars when (according to big bang theory) the universe was between 600 million and one billion years old -- much too young to have galaxies with red giant stars that have burned off all of their hydrogen.
Other observations found clusters and super clusters of galaxies at those great distances, when the universe was supposed to have been so young that there had not been enough time for those monstrous intergalactic structures to form.
cosmic ping!
The new theory will be called "The Big Poof".
ping
No scientist has seriously argued that the world is flat since Leucippus in the 5th century BC. The sphericity of the earth was recognized even from the very earliest recorded scientific inquiry on the matter by Pythagoras. The irony is that this nonsense originated in the early 19th century as an anti-religious myth, and is now ridiculously turned around on science. The last notable people that argued the flatness of the earth were a handful of the Christian patristic writers in the 2nd century AD basing their inanity on scripture, not on science.
No scientist has seriously argued that the world is flat
------
I once fell of the edge.
Yet scripture says the earth is a ball suspended by nothing- from Job, which is considered the oldest book in the bible, (1400-2000BCE?) So was Leucippus in the 5th century BC as much out of touch with the common man back then as the flat earthers are today?
> It's amusing and disturbing to me that many scientists
> are comfortable with presenting their theories as fact.
That just raises their discomfort level when new facts
unseat the old theory.
Cosmology has undergone a revolution just in my lifetime.
I expect at least a couple more instances of
"everything we knew was mistaken"
while I'm still here.
The real test of a scientist is whether or not they are
willing to be mistaken. If they aren't, then they're
just a zealot in a white lab coat.
That's why recently when someone on FR posted an article relating to the 20 greatest unanswered scientific questions, I had to LOL. We know squat when it comes to so many things that to think otherwise is foolish. I'm not saying don't ask the questions, but please have some humility when you ask them. We are after all only human.
I was always told that everyone in medievil(sp?) times thought the world
was flat,but I have never been directed to a scientific
tome (for that time) which actually states that the world
is flat.Do you know of any, cause I'd like to see it myself?
Also, there must be some writings where someone mentions
the flatness of the world. I have never heard of, or seen one,
all I hear is "yeah, everybody thought the world was flat."
Regarding the big bang theory, it's amazing how some theory
could be thought of, and have so much backing, only to have
so many pinholes in it, makes you wonder about the theories of
science...
Alternative term for beginning of cosmos: Bertha D. Universe
But, getting back to the point, Thales of Miletus in the 6th century BC conceived of the earth as flat and floating on water. His ideas carried down through a series of noteworthy philosophers (esp. Anaximander) until Leucippus and his student Democritus refined them a century and a half later. I won't go into all the details, but the very prescient atomic theory derived from the same line of philosophizing as did the very incorrect flat earth cosmogony. Democritus later abandoned at least most of Leucippus' errors, while arriving at an even more remarkably precise view of the world. He wrote this:
There are innumerable worlds of different sizes. In some there is neither sun nor moon, in others they are larger than in ours and others have more than one. These worlds are at irregular distances, more in one direction and less in another, and some are flourishing, others declining. Here they come into being, there they die, and they are destroyed by collision with one another. Some of the worlds have no animal or vegetable life nor any water.--Democritus, according to Hippolytus
Meanwhile, Pythagoras who was a contemporary of Leucippus (except on the other end of the Hellenic world) had come up with his harmony of the spheres, including at its center the sphericity of the earth. Plato and Aristotle would embrace the Pythagorean spherical earth and the harmony of the spheres rather than the Miletan philosophy of the (tympanic) flat earth. Unfortunately, Aristotle also threw out the baby (atomic theory and the open universe) with the bathwater.
So, did I actually answer your question? LOL Hmm.. Well, most common men don't ponder such topics very deeply, but to the extent that they did many of them probably had some dim awareness of sphericity. The big huge tip-off that anyone can see is the moon. It's spherical. A modicum of thought takes you from that to a spherical earth. The only real confusion arises from the disc-like optical illusion, which very little thought can usually overcome. But, yes, the ancient philosophers were very out of touch with the common man, who was mostly interested in getting laid, making money, and bashing heads, not necessarily in that order. =)
No part to my knowledge states that the earth was flat, but that didn't stop a few from interpreting it as such. I think one verse refers to the "four corners" of the earth (a sphere doesn't have corners) and another refers to the earth as the foundation of God's house or the floorboard of his chariot or something like that (foundations and floorboards are literally flat). I guess it's all a matter of just how literalist one wants to be.
Eratosthenes in the 2nd Century BC knew the Earth was round. He even accurately estimated the circumfrence of the Earth at around 25,000 miles. Columbus would have starved had he not blundered into the New World on his way to find India.
"It's turtles all the way down."
Harvey Firestein has already copyrighted that.
What part of "scientific method" don't you understand? All of it, maybe?
Scientists do not present theories as fact. There is a complete method used in science (cleverly called the scientific method) which outlines how it is done.
Facts are little things, like the hardness of a rock or the color of a solution. But science is not just piling up facts. Science is facts AND theories. Facts alone are of limited use and lack meaning. A valid theory organizes them into greater usefulness. And, a powerful theory includes all relevant facts and allows predictions to be made and tested (i.e., falsified). When theories are tested, they are either retained, modified, or sometimes discarded.
Non-scientists often don't understand this procedure. They sometimes even gloat when a theory has to be modified or discarded. "Look, those scientist boys don't know everything after all, tee hee tee hee!"
You see that on the creation/ID posts here on FR. That gets old after a while.
I once did too. The hangover the next day was one of the worst I've had.
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