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Scientists have possibly found original signal for Big Bang?


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I've always believed in the Big band theory dating back to a child in the 60's.

The real question comes down to what came before the big bang and why it exploded.

The entire universe can be no more than atoms to some larger plane of existence the same way as

atoms are small to us in our reality. I always found it interesting how so few substances that were supposed to

have been involved in the initial bang turned into so many others. There's just so little we actually know about

so much in life and we tend to fill in those gaps with false information, myths, and assumptions instead of admitting we don't know it all.

 

Instead of leaving those gaps open as mysteries that spur the imagination and give us reason to ask why and how, we dump false information

into those holes just to feel complete. The problem is when you do that you can build your whole life upon bits of false information its like a house of cards

that can be destroyed when you need to replace that false info with correct (or at least better) info.

 

I was asked once very young by a teacher in a class whether the universe was created by God or the big bang.

(Teachers were allowed to do that back then without having major repercussions from parents)

My answer was neither. My belief was, and still is there is no beginning or end to the Universe.

 

Man is the one who needs a definite date when something begins and ends because his life has a beginning and end

and he still sees everything in life that way. True the earth may no longer be flat and the center of the universe, but in

most other respects his still that self centered animal that has those instincts.

 

Beginnings and ends to matter and energy cant be understood by use and still remain a big question mark even with the best minds

or our generations. Maybe someday we'll have more facts that can shed light on the truth of all nature including our own.

Or it may all be revealed when we face that biggest mystery at the end of the road. There's just no way of knowing.

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Yeah, looks like another great advance. I'm not sure the BBC headline is very accurate - this was not a project with an intention of proving the Big Bang occurred so much as confirming an implication that was drawn when the Big Bang idea was first formulated.

 

I misunderstood the Big Bang concept for the longest time, having never really read very deeply about it. I had this vague notion that there was "in the beginning" a big empty space in which some tiny compact blob of matter for some unknown reason exploded and tossed the matter out into space like shrapnel from a grenade. Instead of (quoting the NPR article linked below) that "a tiny pocket of space-time is stretched to become the entire observable universe." And it's still the case that science is working out what happened, but there's still a terrific mystery as to why it happened.

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/03/17/290866227/scientists-announce-a-big-bang-breakthrough

 

nat whilk ii

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They are very up front about this requiring additional study and peer review. It's nonetheless quite fascinating.

 

"But inflation came with a very specific prediction - that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky - the famous Cosmic Microwave Background. The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal. Scientists call it B-mode polarisation. It is a characteristic twist in the directional properties of the CMB. Only the gravitational waves moving through the Universe in its inflationary phase could have produced such a marker. It is a true "smoking gun".

Speaking at the press conference to announce the results, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a leader of the BICEP2 collaboration, said: "This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics - the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe."

 

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The real question comes down to what came before the big bang and why it exploded.
One of the interesting things about this is that it confirms a theory that sheds light on this subject.

 

First, what was confirmed was not "The big bang" but "inflation", which is the theory that allows the big bang to make sense based on the observations. The observations show a universe that's way too big for how old it is and how fast it's growing. At first there were various conjectures about that, and one of them involved a very brief period of very rapid expansion. That was called the "inflation" theory. It made a few predictions, and one of them related to the nature of the polarization of light that was emitted before the expansion. The recent observation matched that prediction quite nicely. The prediction was fairly specific and not easily attributable to other causes, so this observation (assuming it's repeatable by other parties and rendered valid) is pretty strong evidence for the inflation theory.

 

Part of the cool thing about the inflation theory is that it explains our big bang (somewhat) and suggests that ours might not be the only one, but rather, one of an infinite number of them. Here's an explanation from someone who knows more about this than I do. (Not that I know much, but this guy does.)

 

Inflation is the transition of the "inflaton" (in'-fluh-tahn) field from a higher energy false ground state to a lower energy state, thereby releasing an ungodly amount of potential energy all at once. The entire inflaton field doesn't necessarily experience this phase transition all at once, though. Pockets of the field decay and, thus, inflate up to form a universe, but in many (relatively) straightforward inflation models, this process doesn't just cease after that one inflationary process. Rather, inflation continues eternally, only in disparate places that are separated from each other by entire universes that have inflated up. While these models make some naturalness concerns go away, they introduce others. Suffice it to say that it's an open question.
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