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The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise. The notion of the Big Bang goes back nearly 100 years, when the first evidence for the expanding Universe appeared. If the Universe is expanding and cooling today, that implies a past that was smaller, denser, and hotter. In our imaginations, we can extrapolate back to arbitrarily small sizes, high densities, and hot temperatures: all the way to a singularity, where all of the Universe’s matter and energy was condensed in a single point. For...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

Scientists who made headlines last March by announcing that they'd found long-sought evidence about the early universe are now abandoning that claim. New data show that their cosmic observations no longer back up that conclusion, they say. The original announcement caused a sensation because it appeared to show evidence that the universe ballooned rapidly a split-second after its birth, in what scientist call cosmic inflation. That idea had been widely believed, but researchers had hoped to bolster it by finding a particular trait in light left over from the very early universe. That signal is what the researchers claimed they...

Inflation is dead, long live inflation! The very results hailed this year as demonstrating a consequence of inflationary models of the universe – and therefore pointing to the existence of multiverses – now seem to do the exact opposite. If the results can be trusted at all, they now suggest inflation is wrong, raising the possibility of cyclic universes that existed before the big bang. In March experimentalists announced that primordial gravitational waves had been discovered. The team behind the BICEP2 Telescope in Antarctica had observed telltale twists and turns in the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB)...

"The first evidence for the primordial B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been detected by astronomers working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope at the South Pole.".........

Explanation: Did the universe undergo an early epoch of extremely rapid expansion? Such an inflationary epoch has been postulated to explain several puzzling cosmic attributes such as why our universe looks similar in opposite directions. Yesterday, results were released showing an expected signal of unexpected strength, bolstering a prediction of inflation that specific patterns of polarization should exist in cosmic microwave background radiation -- light emitted 13.8 billion years ago as the universe first became transparent. Called B-mode polarizations, these early swirling patterns can be directly attributed to squeeze and stretch effects that gravitational radiation has on photon-emitting electrons. The...

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right. Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second...

South Pole Telescope scientists have detected for the first time a subtle distortion in the oldest light in the universe, which may help reveal secrets about the earliest moments in the universe's formation. The scientists observed twisting patterns in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background -- light that last interacted with matter very early in the history of the universe, less than 400,000 years after the big bang. These patterns, known as "B modes," are caused by gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that occurs when the trajectory of light is bent by massive objects, much like a lens focuses light.

Researchers focusing on gravitational waves find the first direct evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation, a faster-than-light expansion just after the big bang. Scientists staring at the faint afterglow from the universe's birth 13.8 billion years ago have discovered the first direct evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation — the mysterious and violent expansion after the big bang. The findings, made using radio telescopes at the South Pole, support the idea that our known cosmos make up just a tiny fragment in a much larger, unknown frontier that extends far beyond the reaches of light. During this period...

It's official, Elvis lives Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/01/2007 It might sound a little crazy, but our standard theories of cosmology and physics suggest that an infinite number of Presleys still exist, says Marcus Chown. And if that's not scary enough, it also means that you, and these words, are repeated ad infinitum across the universeElvis is alive. No, really! He didn't die of a cardiac arrest in his bathroom at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Instead, he slipped out of the back door under cover of darkness dressed as a nun, had a sex change and worked for several years...

Home About Edge Features Edge Editions Press Edge Search A striking consequence of the new picture of the world is that there should be an infinity of regions with histories absolutely identical to ours. That's right, scores of your duplicates are now reading copies of this article. They live on planets exactly like Earth, with all its mountains, cities, trees, and butterflies. There should also be regions where histories are somewhat different from ours, with all possible variations. For example, some readers will be pleased to know that there are infinitely many O-regions where Al Gore is the President...

Giant space-time ripples may cause cosmic expansion* 17:43 18 March 2005 * NewScientist.com news service * Maggie McKee Dark energy is not necessary to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe observed by astronomers, suggest controversial new calculations. Instead, gigantic ripples in space-time - larger than the observable universe - may be the cause. Astronomers have known since the 1920s that space itself has been expanding since the big bang about 14 billion years ago. But in 1998, they discovered the expansion must have sped up about a billion years ago, based on observations of supernovae that appeared farther away...

The Growth of Inflation Twenty-five years after Alan Guth turned cosmology on its head, what's the latest story of the universe's first moments? by Davide Castelvecchi Photo: Fred Ullrich It was a true Eureka moment if there ever was one. On the night of December 6, 1979, an obscure Stanford Linear Accelerator Center postdoc was up late, sweating over an even more obscure problem about particles called magnetic monopoles. Looking at his calculations the next day, the usually low-key Alan Guth annotated the words "SPECTACULAR REALIZATION" at the top of the page. Guth had discovered cosmic inflation, an idea which...

Cosmic Conundrum The universe seems uncannily well suited to the existence of life. Could that really be an accident?[snip]