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| Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun; This is *BIG* | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 25 2014, 04:54 AM (731 Views) | |
| Maxie | Mar 25 2014, 04:54 AM Post #1 |
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Oh,Goodness
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year's appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics. He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant. If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean. "SPECTACULAR REALIZATION," Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it. 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 old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct. Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved. If corroborated, Dr. Kovac's work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation. Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over. In our own universe, it would serve as a window into the forces operating at energies forever beyond the reach of particle accelerators on Earth and yield new insights into gravity itself. Dr. Kovac's ripples would be the first direct observation of gravitational waves, which, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should ruffle space-time. Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, "This is huge, as big as it gets." He continued, "This is a signal from the very earliest universe, sending a telegram encoded in gravitational waves." The ripples manifested themselves as faint spiral patterns in a bath of microwave radiation that permeates space and preserves a picture of the universe when it was 380,000 years old and as hot as the surface of the sun. Dr. Kovac and his collaborators, working in an experiment known as Bicep, for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, reported their results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics here on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. Dr. Kovac said the chance that the results were a fluke was only one in 10 million. Dr. Guth, now 67, pronounced himself "bowled over," saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime. "With nature, you have to be lucky," he said. "Apparently we have been lucky." -snip- Corroboration might not be long in coming. The Planck spacecraft will report its own findings this year. At least a dozen other teams are trying similar measurements from balloons, mountaintops and space. The data traced the onset of inflation to a time that physicists like Dr. Guth, staying up late in his Palo Alto house 35 years ago, suspected was a special break point in the evolution of the universe. Physicists recognize four forces at work in the world today: gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces. But they have long suspected that those are simply different manifestations of a single unified force that ruled the universe in its earliest, hottest moments. As the universe cooled, according to this theory, there was a fall from grace, like some old folk mythology of gods or brothers falling out with each other. The laws of physics evolved, with one force after another splitting away. That was where Dr. Guth came in. Under some circumstances, a glass of water can stay liquid as the temperature falls below 32 degrees, until it is disturbed, at which point it will rapidly freeze, releasing latent heat. Similarly, the universe could "supercool"and stay in a unified state too long. In that case, space itself would become imbued with a mysterious latent energy. Inserted into Einstein's equations, the latent energy would act as a kind of antigravity, and the universe would blow itself up. Since it was space itself supplying the repulsive force, the more space was created, the harder it pushed apart. What would become our observable universe mushroomed in size at least a trillion trillionfold - from a submicroscopic speck of primordial energy to the size of a grapefruit - in less than a cosmic eye-blink. Almost as quickly, this pulse would subside, relaxing into ordinary particles and radiation. All of normal cosmic history was still ahead, resulting in today's observable universe, a patch of sky and stars billions of light-years across. "It's often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch," Dr. Guth likes to say, "but the universe might be the ultimate free lunch." Make that free lunches. Most of the hundred or so models resulting from Dr. Guth's original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse. So the future of the cosmos is perhaps bright and fecund, but do not bother asking about going any deeper into the past. We might never know what happened before inflation, at the very beginning, because inflation erases everything that came before it. All the chaos and randomness of the primordial moment are swept away, forever out of our view. "If you trace your cosmic roots," said Abraham Loeb, a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer who was not part of the team, "you wind up at inflation." SOURCE:NewYorkTimes This. Is. BIG. Like Newton and Einstein big. I wish I had the words to illustrate how monumental this discovery really is. |
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| Maxie | Mar 25 2014, 05:14 AM Post #2 |
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Oh,Goodness
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Actually, I found a piece by Astronomer Phil Plait that can explain some of this in much better terms than I could: Up until now this was all like trying to write a history book about the United States and talking about the Civil War without ever knowing exactly what happened at the time ... and then finding photos and diaries and battlefields. This inflation-spawned gravitational-wave-induced B-mode polarized light is like having the words appear on what were before blank pages in a chapter about the Universe itself. This light is showing us what happened in the tiniest fraction of a second after the birth of our cosmos. This is crucial. There are many different physical models of how inflation might have worked, and observations like this will be able to help us figure out which ones work, which ones don't, and which ones might need tweaking. The strength of the gravitational waves was stronger than predicted by models, for example, so you know a lot of cosmologists are right now standing in front of blackboards, hunched over papers, or sitting back in their chairs with their hands interlocked behind their heads, puzzling over what variables, what parameters, what equations must be poked at to reproduce these new observations. Inflation was a time of a huge phase change in the Universe. Finding direct evidence for it will trigger a similar phase change in the way we understand it. I mentioned the Higgs boson earlier; that beast is the linchpin in modern particle physics, and finding evidence of it was a very big deal. This discovery of evidence for gravitational waves from inflation is a similarly important event in the field of cosmology. If the findings stand up, I imagine there might be a Nobel Prize in store for someone (or someones). But what does this meant to you? Well, that's up to you, of course. Most of us can live our daily lives without worrying overly much about gravitational waves, subatomic particles, or what the Universe was like in the tiniest sliver of the first moment of its existence. But think about that: We can understand what the Universe was like in the tiniest sliver of the first moment of its existence! These aren't wild guesses, or just-so stories, or fanciful myths. This work is the result of an intense amount of research, the application of math, science, physics, and technology over hundreds of years, the painstaking acquisition of knowledge that must withstand the fires of scientific scrutiny and skepticism to survive. And so far, they have. There are practical concerns here as well. Inflation is based on principles of quantum mechanics, while gravitational waves are the purview of relativity. QM has brought us computers, solar power, atomic energy-a huge amount of modern tech. Relativity is critical in many aspects of our lives as well, including GPS and also nuclear power. In the past these two concepts haven't played well together, but now we have a direct and profound connection between them. This result is new, and we have a long, long way to go to understand it better. There's no way to know what will result from this. Yet. But whenever we open up new fields of science, all sorts of interesting things follow. Bet on it. And a final note. I am not a cosmologist; I am an astronomer. But I'm also a human, and when I look out into the dark sky at night or gaze at a gorgeous image from a telescope, I wonder how this all came to be, why things are the way they are, and how they happened to shape themselves into the Universe we see today. I bet you've wondered about them too. These questions have been asked since we've been able to ask questions. Science is now answering them. SOURCE:slate.com Yeah. This discovery changes *everything*. We can't even guess right now what practical applications will follow from this. |
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| Isis | Mar 28 2014, 12:47 PM Post #3 |
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The Goddess of Darkness & Desire
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this makes sense but I'm not sure there isn't more to this.
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Isis, The Goddess of Desire & Darkness. In The Darkness, We Find The Light. This is a Drama Free Zone..! | |
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| Maxie | Mar 28 2014, 02:36 PM Post #4 |
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Oh,Goodness
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Well, this isn't *the* answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but it's a huge discovery that takes us back to the Big Bang. Put it this way. There was a great physicist that lived in the time of Queen Victoria. He was a nerd really, James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell developed a series of vector calculus equations to describe the behavior of electricity and magnetism. He played with various values to see what would happen to electricity and magnetic fields in a vacuum. By doing so, Maxwell discovered the principals that lead to radio, radar, and TV. But he was wrong about the medium that he thought made electromagnetism move in vacuum. Maxwell and others that that the "aether" carried the waves. People spent a long time looking for the aether. Einstein developed Special Relativity to explain why there is no aether. The "problem" in physics now is that Special and General Relativity don't always conform to the observed effects of Quantum Mechanics. This new discovery though, might lead to a union of Relativity and QM! If humanity can survive the 21st Century, we might find that the Universe opens to us.
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| Isis | Apr 16 2014, 05:45 AM Post #5 |
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The Goddess of Darkness & Desire
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Im not sure but I think your right, if we don't blow the earth up we might just make it into space.
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Isis, The Goddess of Desire & Darkness. In The Darkness, We Find The Light. This is a Drama Free Zone..! | |
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