OT: Major Space Discovery
The Board discussed this last week (HERE).
Researchers believe they discovered the signal in space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
The New York Times has an in-depth piece about the theory and the BICEP2 team on the South Pole "seeing" the radio waves dating 13.8 billion years ago.
Dr. Alan Guth is credited with the theory of "inflation," which explains why the universe expanded so quickly and uniformly. The idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second would seem to be confirmed by this discovery.
As I understand it, it means that there was something that happened before the Big Bang. Prior to the BB, a ripple in the space-time continuum (i.e., everything that is) basically caused everything that would become the universe to expand at a mind-bendingly fast rate. Like an electron becoming the size of the galaxy in a space of time so small it could barely be measured with our most precise instruments. That expansion is called "inflation". Only after that inflation did the BB occur.
This has been theorized, but never seen directly. I'm guessing it could have huge ramifications for quantum mechanics, general relativity, dark matter/energy, etc., but what those ramifications are we don't know yet. Now we'll also be able to look at the gravitational waves, make much better calculations of the rate of inflation, and get better ideas on what could have caused it and what that says about the nature of the universe.
No, inflation does not predate the big bang... inflation was a phase that lasted a fraction of a second after the big bang. This discovery appears to be confirmation of the inflation theory and says nothing of what (if anything) lead to the big bang.
I was going off memory of one of the first theories re: inflation. Sorry.
As far as not saying anything as to what lead to the big bang, can we really know that yet? Who knows what discoveries this might ultimately lead to? According to the linked article:
"Most of the hundred or so models that have been spawned by Dr. Guth’s original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion with atoms, stars and planets, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles here and there endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse."
Wouldn't that be at least some aspect of saying what lead to the big bang?
Colliding Branes?
...if String Theory holds true. Interesting question is whether a theory of branes could be shown as consistent or inconsistent with the findings of gravitational waves found here. Not sure how much String Theory is implicated here.
Hold on...(rustle, rustle)...Okay, found my weed.
Continue.
This essentially proves the inflation theory of the universe. Which states that the universe, at the big bang, expanded all at once at many time the speed of light. This is why the universe is uniform in terms of temperature and makeup. This lends creedance to the mutli-universe theory, because our universe had to have expanded in something, so it stands to reason that there are other universes also expanding in whatever this void is. So that is kind of a big deal.
Nailed it...
This discovery basically confirms the Big Bang theory.
I feel like there is a "second lead" in this story which was buried. The speed of light was exceeded... or theorized to have been exceeded. Symantecs as far as I am considered.
What repurcussions are there within physics if light is no longer considered the universal speed limit?
March 18th, 2014 at 11:13 AM ^
So did space not exist before the Big Bang? And does that mean space went from 0 to infinity, at faster than the speed of light, or does space end where matter ends?
I agree . . . "what" exactly went faster than the speed of light?
Speculation here - implications would lie with spacetime, the nature of time as related to gravitational and time dilation. The speed of light is not only a "max speed" for purposes of relational physics, but also a constant against which everything is relational.
So if speed of light is no longer a max speed, it's also no longer a constant, which would fuck up the relational nature of physics/timespace.
Which means the world should never have happened and become the veil of tears we now know it to be. Which means Einstein was wrong. But then again science can only explain our experiences, and as Kant would advise, even a full/precise account of our experiences would be just that - and would necessarily distort (but not necessarily have anything to do with) the "thing in itself."
So we're pretty much fucked either way.
March 18th, 2014 at 10:03 AM ^
So i get that a period of expansion such as inflation could result in a more heterogenous universe than we would otherwise expect were we not able to look that far back.
What I don't understand about your comment is how the theory of inflation lends any more credence to the multiverse theory than the knowledge that our universe is currently expanding (regardless of how it expanded in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.) Doesn't the same logic apply? It must be expanding into something, therefore possibly a multiverse?
All i'm asking is how this discovery adds to the multiverse theory?
The signal is probably just a disgruntled team member with an electric can opener.
Not quite as cool as I was expecting, though.
Are your serious? This is easily one of the more significant scientific discoveries of modern time.
THEN WHY HAVEN'T THEY FOUND THE DAMN PLANE YET
but when you're hoping for aliens, you're liable to get disappointed with most any news.
Did we win?
The aliens took us down.
At least it wasn't the Bug People.
Great video here of Stanford Professor Andrei Linde hearing the news. He is a big name in the "theory" of inflation. Sorry can't imbed.
Their brains are filled with too much science.
I'm impressed that his wife knew right away what it meant. She picked up the physics from years of being around him.
If you came to my door and said "We got McDowell!", my wife would be like "Who?"
Uh, she's a physicist.
You're not alone, the part where he says that he wants to believe because it's beautiful was my favorite.
Jesus christ, I know that most of us don't understand the implications of this or even how it works, but damn... this comment section looks more like YahooNews or CSM.
NO RELIGION, you heathen.
Last week when this was being rumored, it was suggested this would be proof of the "multiverse" theory.
The NYT article suggests that this proves the universe is probably wider than we can see -- we only observe our little area that's 13.77 billion lightyears radius around us. But there could well be stuff beyond that 13.77 billion lightyear line -- frankly, trillions of lightyears or farther -- but we can't see it because it's too far away, light signals haven't had time to get from that stuff to us.
Is what the NYT describes the same thing as "multiverse"? I thought multiverse meant, multiple universes with potentially different laws of physics, sort of in separate 'places.' But the NYT description suggests one set of laws of physics, just something so big you can't see the whole thing.
Anyone who's more geek than me able to explain?
Gravity waves might perhaps be the signature of the "collision" or other interaction of other realities that spawned ours.
The other thing is that the inflation appears to have moved at multiples of light speed, at least for a relatively short time early on. For one thing, the radius of the observable universe is NOT 13.77 billion light-years. The radius is actually around 45 billion light years, so this has been a bit of a puzzle. Confirmation of an inflationary model with faster-than-light speed provides a potential solution to this issue.
I find this exciting because apparently faster-than-light speed is possible, at least under very specific physical conditions, perhaps via the warping of space-time.
How does the observable universe have a radius of 45 billion light years? I thought since the universe is only 13.77 billion years old, we can only see 13.77 billion light years away from us, no?
But it has to do with the nature of electromagnetism and early-universe behavior. The 13.77 billion number applies if only classical physics were at work. But there's more to the story. From Wiki:
Sometimes astrophysicists distinguish between the visible universe, which includes only signals emitted since recombination—and the observable universe, which includes signals since the beginning of the cosmological expansion"Recombination" having to do with photons, meaning that maybe LIGHT can only be seen from 13.77 billion light-years away, but the comoving distance to the CMB is 45-46-ish billion light-years.
Ahh, thank you for that explanation.
Soooooo.....
Like I said somewhere in that thread last week, this is something the average person doesn't really care about. The scientists believe it is important and I believe them that it is, but this news is just "meh" for me. I was hoping for something way more interesting.
Helps increase knowledge of how the universe in which we lived formed? I don't know I think that's pretty valuable.
I think having a better understanding of how the universe was formed is useful and interesting in and of itself. From what I gather, you're looking for something that cures cancer in a flash or makes fossil based fuels obsolete or something and those types disocveries are the only ones that are useful.
I think that if we're smart enough to figure things like this out, that's surely a good sign that we can make strides in these more "practical" areas. It's part of the scientific process and the push towards achieiving more knowledge. These types of intellectual curiousocities are what generates interest in science.
It's not that every discovery needs to "cure cancer in a flash" but there is a difference between something that is interesting and something that is useful. Many are both, but to me, this seems of very little use to society. There is lots and lots of science breakthroughs that can help out the human race in a big way. I just don't see that with this.
"Could anything at first sight seem more impractical than a body which is so small that its mass is an insignificant fraction of the mass of an atom of hydrogen?"
-- J.J. Thomson.
From a very practical, nuts-and-bolts, engineering, here-on-the-ground-right-now standpoint, you're right.
What is impossible to know today is what practical discoveries that might be made with this information a century or two from now. When Einstein was initially developing his theories, the notion of harnessing the atom, for good or ill, was far-fetched, and even Albert himself declared in 1934 that “there is not the slightest indication” that atomic energy was possible. Just a decade or so later, he was proven wrong.
This is why it's crazy to cut back funding of basic scientific research: it's impossible to predict just what discovery will lead to what breakthrough engineering achievement.