“This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar…”
From the Stanford Report, March 17, 2014 (h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard) video follows
New evidence from space supports Stanford physicist’s theory of how universe began
The detection of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole supports the cosmic inflation theory of how the universe came to be. The discovery, made in part by Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, supports the theoretical work of Stanford’s Andrei Linde.
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of today’s best telescopes. All this, of course, has just been theory.
Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence supporting this theory, known as “cosmic inflation.” Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the “first tremors of the Big Bang.” Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity.
“This is really exciting. We have made the first direct image of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time across the primordial sky, and verified a theory about the creation of the whole universe,” said Chao-Lin Kuo, an assistant professor of physics at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and a co-leader of the BICEP2 collaboration.
These groundbreaking results came from observations by the BICEP2 telescope of the cosmic microwave background – a faint glow left over from the Big Bang. Tiny fluctuations in this afterglow provide clues to conditions in the early universe. For example, small differences in temperature across the sky show where parts of the universe were denser, eventually condensing into galaxies and galactic clusters.
Because the cosmic microwave background is a form of light, it exhibits all the properties of light, including polarization. On Earth, sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere and becomes polarized, which is why polarized sunglasses help reduce glare. In space, the cosmic microwave background was scattered by atoms and electrons and became polarized too.
“Our team hunted for a special type of polarization called ‘B-modes,’ which represents a twisting or ‘curl’ pattern in the polarized orientations of the ancient light,” said BICEP2 co-leader Jamie Bock, a professor of physics at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Gravitational waves squeeze space as they travel, and this squeezing produces a distinct pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Gravitational waves have a “handedness,” much like light waves, and can have left- and right-handed polarizations.
“The swirly B-mode pattern is a unique signature of gravitational waves because of their handedness,” Kuo said.
The team examined spatial scales on the sky spanning about 1 to 5 degrees (two to 10 times the width of the full moon). To do this, they set up an experiment at the South Pole to take advantage of its cold, dry, stable air, which allows for crisp detection of faint cosmic light.
“The South Pole is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground,” said BICEP2 co-principal investigator John Kovac, an associate professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the deployment and science operation of the project. “It’s one of the driest and clearest locations on Earth, perfect for observing the faint microwaves from the Big Bang.”
The researchers were surprised to detect a B-mode polarization signal considerably stronger than many cosmologists expected. The team analyzed their data for more than three years in an effort to rule out any errors. They also considered whether dust in our galaxy could produce the observed pattern, but the data suggest this is highly unlikely.
“This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,” said co-leader Clem Pryke, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota.
Physicist Alan Guth formally proposed inflationary theory in 1980, when he was a postdoctoral scholar at SLAC, as a modification of conventional Big Bang theory. Instead of the universe beginning as a rapidly expanding fireball, Guth theorized that the universe inflated extremely rapidly from a tiny piece of space and became exponentially larger in a fraction of a second. This idea immediately attracted lots of attention because it could provide a unique solution to many difficult problems of the standard Big Bang theory.
However, as Guth, who is now a professor of physics at MIT, immediately realized, certain predictions in his scenario contradicted observational data. In the early 1980s, Russian physicist Andrei Linde modified the model into a concept called “new inflation” and again to “eternal chaotic inflation,” both of which generated predictions that closely matched actual observations of the sky.
Linde, now a professor of physics at Stanford, could not hide his excitement about the news. “These results are a smoking gun for inflation, because alternative theories do not predict such a signal,” he said. “This is something I have been hoping to see for 30 years.”
BICEP2’s measurements of inflationary gravitational waves are an impressive combination of theoretical reasoning and cutting-edge technology. Stanford’s contribution to the discovery extends beyond Kuo, who designed the polarization detectors. Kent Irwin, a professor of physics at Stanford and SLAC, also conducted pioneering work on superconducting sensors and readout systems used in the experiment. The research also involved several researchers, including Kuo, affiliated with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), which is supported by Stanford, SLAC and the Kavli Foundation.
BICEP2 is the second stage of a coordinated program, the BICEP and Keck Array experiments, which has a co-principal investigator structure. The four PIs are Jamie Bock (Caltech/JPL,) John Kovac (Harvard), Chao-Lin Kuo (Stanford/SLAC) and Clem Pryke (UMN). All have worked together on the present result, along with talented teams of students and scientists. Other major collaborating institutions for BICEP2 include the University of California, San Diego; University of British Columbia; National Institute of Standards and Technology; University of Toronto; Cardiff University; and Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique.
BICEP2 is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF also runs the South Pole Station where BICEP2 and the other telescopes used in this work are located. The Keck Foundation also contributed major funding for the construction of the team’s telescopes. NASA, JPL and the Moore Foundation generously supported the development of the ultra-sensitive detector arrays that made these measurements possible.
Technical details and journal papers can be found on the BICEP2 release website: http://bicepkeck.org
Video by Kurt HickmanAssistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, right, delivers news of the discovery to Professor Andrei Linde.
Marc77 says:
March 18, 2014 at 11:44 am
Only the universe is in expansion, not the cylinder. You have a red-shift when the distance between the emitter and the receiver is expanding.
since the cylinder [presumably] is bolted to the Earth which does not expand, the cylinder will not expand and no red-shift will occur. To see the [non-Doppler] cosmological red-shift the cylinder has to be millions of light-years long, which no walls.
If the photon bounces enough times from one mirror to the other, it will travel millions of light-years. And it will not have a red-shift. Also, it is not bolted to anything, it is just two mirror at a constant distance from one another. Just tie them to an iron rod.
Marc77 says:
March 18, 2014 at 11:54 am
If the photon bounces enough times from one mirror to the other, it will travel millions of light-years.
It will take it a million years to travel a million light-years…
Just tie them to an iron rod.
In that case, the cylinder will not expand as I have explained.
To get expansion and a cosmological [non-Doppler] red-shift the mirrors should not be connected, by an iron rod or by their mutual gravity. If the mirrors were millions of light-years apart, you will get twice the cosmological red-shift for each round trip: one on the way to the far mirror and one on its way back. With the elapse of time, the red-shift will steadily increase for each round-trip.
Hello. Just started regularly reading this site a few weeks ago; somewhat surprised I found a site so in line with my thoughts w/r/t CAGW.
Anyway, to answer just one of John’s questions, i.e….
>> And what the hell was he doing for the 13,998,000,000 million years before humans appeared? OK, we know there were dinosaurs from 13,750,000,000 years after the big bang, but that’s still a lot of sitting around doing nothing for billions of years, and anyway dinosaurs didn’t make it into the bible, as the people who made up the bible weren’t armed with any facts.<<
God, to believers like myself, was not “sitting around”. Your assertion makes me chuckle a little bit. If God created space, matter and time in the Big Bang, that means, by definition, he must exist completely outside of those things (different dimensions) , since you cannot be part of something that you have created. Therefore, God is outside of time, or, if you will, “eternal”, or “cannot die”. Sounds like Someone I know personally. It’s impossible to make a real good analogy, John, but consider that all “times” are present to God at the same “time” – something we cannot wrap out minds around, but then again, he’s God, and we aren’t.
God does not sit around and “wait” for anything. Because He sits completely outside of time he can know evereything we are going to do, but we STILL have a free will. Pretty cool, huh?
And , yes Sacred Scripture nails this one, too…
2 Peter 3:8
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
Psalm 90:4
For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
Or my personal favorite
Exodus 3:14
God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'"
John, may I humbly suggest that you expand your mind a little bit. The Creator of the Universe is not bounded by silly constraints like Time.
Disclosure: Catholic, and now that the Holy Father is no longer Polish, yes, I am more Catholic than the Pope.
Love the site, glad to find there are many others with my beliefs w/r/t CAGW. As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between the old population bomb movement, global cooling, global warning ,and now “climate change” – just the same thing over and over- with the sane social/political goals over and over again. Youse guys/gals are (much) smarter and informed than I so am I just going to sit back and learn from you all 🙂 Thanks for all your efforts.
TheLastDemocrat says:
March 18, 2014 at 6:58 am
Your citation from Job could not possibly correspond less to physical reality.
It would help if you had actually read the verse in Hebrew with benefit of the Ugaritic texts.
“Northern skies” is a totally bogus mistranslation. The text says nothing about skies. The word rendered wrongly as “the north” in older translations actually refers to Zaphon, ie Mount Aqraa on the Turkish-Syrian border, which marked the northern border of the Levant in ancient times as now. It was the abode of the pagan god Baal. (Baal Zaphon figures prominently in the Old Testament, including, perhaps surprisingly, in Exodus.) “Nothing” or “the void” in the verse refers to the wasteland below the sacred mountain.
I have no problem with theism. I have plenty of problem with creationists who imagine falsely that the Bible contains valid astronomy, physics, chemistry, meteorology or biology. To suppose it does violates both religion & science.
Boo hoo, indeed.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 17, 2014 at 7:24 pm
What makes you think I’m an atheist?
How is biblical translation a rant & but gushing over an expurgated Genesis not a rant?
The multiverse hypothesis will either be confirmed by the scientific method or not. If creation myths in the Bible were regarded as figurative poetry rather than literally true science, there would be no need for translation. But as young earth creationists choose to spread so many lies, it takes some space to correct them.
I should add, one of the common themes that people with “near death” experiences talk about afterwards is a compete sense of timelessness; that the entire concept of time is in a sense foreign to them while they are “out of their bodies” fascinating stuff.
REPLY: and none of this has anything to do with the topic at hand, so please refrain from further off-topic comments – Anthony
Tom In Indy says:
March 17, 2014 at 11:13 am
“In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of today’s best telescopes”.
p@ur momisugly Dolan says:
March 17, 2014 at 5:19 pm
No, it doesn’t say that, though it seems that way. What happened, according to the theory, is that the universe jumped in size from about the size of a marble to something large enough to contain our galaxy in the space of about 3.10^-36 seconds, at something like 1×10^-35 seconds into the existence of time (the numbers are off the top of my head; …
Actually the inflationary period expanded the universe from a little bigger than the Plank length to about the size of a grape, over about 10e-27 seconds. After that it was back to business as usual.
If one reads even superficially as I have done about cosmology you cannot fail to grasp that this discovery is a special moment indeed in science. A wedding of theory and experiment after a very long and tortuous on-off engagement.
Superstring theory indicates that the universe has about 11 dimensions including time, and frames the big bang as less of an ab initio or ex nihilo event as just a break-out of three out of the 11 dimensions. Before the even the universe was happily confined to its 1e-32mm Plank length – the distance that quantum string theory shows is the minimum distance that physically exists.
Now that the 3 spatial dimensions have leaked out, the remaining 7 (excluding time) are internal dimensions curled or involuted inwards, only encountered at scales near the Plank length. The maths of Calabi-Yau multi-dimensional manifolds tries to find out these superstring geometries. I hope that this confirmation of inflation will somehow help in the search for progress in working out the formidably complicated string geometries.
No – it was 10e-36 (12×3) not 10 e-27 (9×3) seconds – duration of the inflationary period.
milodonharlani… to answer your first question, read your last statement. You might want to consider an MRI.
>>REPLY: and none of this has anything to do with the topic at hand, so please refrain from further off-topic comments – Anthony<<
I apologize, and I won't comment any further. This place is way outta my league anyway. I'm glad that it mostly sticks to pure science. (Now in read-only mode).
Hey Lief… easy with the adhoms… If your arguments were so convincing you wouldn’t have to resort to such sophomoric tactics.
I can provide 100s of citations (not that #s matter) written by reputable practitioners of science that make the case opposite that you make. Because you resort to insults make me wonder if you really know what you are talking about on other matters. You are really sounding like there is something wrong.
Next time I’m in town I’ll be sure to come by and offer you tea and a chance to explain yourself better.
Janice Moore says:
March 17, 2014 at 5:55 pm
You cannot know what will happen to you after death. You can only believe. If you knew, then it would not be a matter of faith. If you were able to be certain, then your faith would be of no value.
Genesis specifically says that the pre-sun light separates day from night. But in fact it is the earth’s turning toward & away from the sun which makes day & night.
Everywhere in the Bible the earth is flat, even in the New Testament. There is no passage in which the earth is spherical. The earth is also immovable & the sun goes over it. In some parts, the earth is square or rectangular & others possibly circular, but always flat.
As for the stretched out heavens, that passage refers to their being like a tent, but as I’ve showed, elsewhere in the Bible, the vault of heaven is shiny metal. It was the tent verse that caused Augustine so much trouble in his discussion of taking the Bible literally. Early Church Fathers’ insistence on the biblical flat earth was then (AD 400) creating problems for the propagation of the faith, as anti-scientific “intelligent design” does now.
If you’d like to learn more about biblical & ancient Near Eastern cosmology, read the Book of Enoch, only parts of which made it into the Nicaean canon or the Masoretic OT text, but which was preserved in its entirety in Ethiopian Orthodoxy. It was also one of the most popular books among Jesus’ sect, the Essenes.
That there is no valid science in the Bible, in which rabbits chew their cud instead of their feces & in which serpents & donkeys talk, is a matter of fact, not belief.
Which is it? Is the Bible literal or figurative? In fact it’s both, although the literal parts are of course written with an agenda.
I don’t need to look for creationists near me, since I’ve known them all my life. As do some real Christians.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 12:59 pm
Hey Lief… easy with the adhoms… If your arguments were so convincing you wouldn’t have to resort to such sophomoric tactics.
what ad-homs?
The links you provided ARE dumbed down [bad bad NASA] and you believe them. I rest my case.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 12:46 pm
I’d recommend the same treatment for you.
Apparently you’re unfamiliar with the Anthropic Principle, the opponents of which consider it theistic.
That I’m open to scientific tests of the multiverse hypothesis hardly makes me an atheist.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 12:59 pm
Next time I’m in town I’ll be sure to come by and offer you tea and a chance to explain yourself better.
I have explained myself in about 90 comments on this thread. How many more will it take?
Leif, thank you wore all your comments in this thread. You have repeated many times that it is a non-Doppler red shift that is occuring. This got me thinking. If it were a Doppler red shift and the farther galaxies were from us the faster they were moving away and hence more red shifted, wouldn’t this be evidence that the universe expansion is slowing down since the farther things are from us the farther back in time they are? More distant + father back in time + moving faster = slowing down.
Now I want to understand how we know it is not a Doppler shift, I have reading to do!
Joseph Murphy says:
March 18, 2014 at 1:06 pm
More distant + father back in time + moving faster = slowing down.
Rather than me typing in a long explanation, I would refer you to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
Since Lief has rested his case, we don’t have to abide by the odd notion that the galaxies are not moving.
From the Olber’s Paradox at:
“Since the 17th century, astronomers and other thinkers have proposed many possible ways to resolve this paradox, but the currently accepted resolution depends in part upon the Big Bang theory and in part upon the Hubble expansion. In a universe that exists for a finite amount of time, only the light of finitely many stars has had a chance to reach us yet, and the paradox is resolved. Additionally, in an expanding universe distant objects recede from us, which causes the light emanating from them to be redshifted and diminished in brightness.”
Chase, S. I.; Baez, J. C. (2004). “Olbers’ Paradox”. The Original Usenet Physics FAQ. Retrieved 2013-10-17.
Specifically, related to the so called stretching notion I give you Nicole Bell at FermiLab
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/inquiring/questions/motion_universe.html
Question:
I am interested in the concept of absolute ‘still’ vs. all the speed references we have. I have been attempting to calculate the speed at which an individual is traveling through the universe when standing ‘still’. i.e., the rotation speed of the earth, the speed of the orbit of the earth around the sun, the solar system withing our galaxy, the galaxy…etc. The odd question that struck me was that given all the relativity applications and explainations, is there such a measurement or ‘thing’ as absolute STILL?
Answer:
In our universe, there is really one reference frame that I would call an “absolute rest frame” – it is the frame that cosmologists refer to as the “co-moving frame”.
In this reference frame, an observer is a rest, apart from the expansion of the universe, that is, someone in this reference frame is not moving with respect to distant galaxies.
Think of the universe like the surface of a balloon, with pennies stuck onto the surface. These pennies are the clusters of galaxies. As you blow the balloon up, the pennies get further and further apart – this is the expansion of the universe. (The pennies/galaxies don’t get bigger, because they are held together by gravity, or gravitationally bound.) The co-moving frame is the reference frame in which the coordinates expand along with the balloon. This is the closest you can get to having an absolute rest frame in an expanding universe.
So, after you account for the motion of the earth around the sun, [the motion] of the solar system within the galaxy, the [motion of a] galaxy within a cluster of galaxies, etc, eventually all you are left with is the expansion of the universe…and that’s about as close as you could get to being absolutely still!
Regards,
Nicole Bell
Astrophysicist
To suggest that the motions don’t exist and only space expansion is all there is, is misinformation at best and sophistry at worst.
Dr. S, your nice pictorial was the key to my little understanding. I stared at it for quite a while yesterday and early this morning got up and reviewed DIV, GRAD and CURL. While out on a 50 mile bike ride (+10 IQ) it all came together. Not that I would dare to try to explain it to another as you have, but that will come too with time and conversations. I think I do have a hint of it.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 1:34 pm
Since Lief has rested his case, we don’t have to abide by the odd notion that the galaxies are not moving.
You got this wrong. I rested my case about your complaint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
Metric expansion of space:
from the observational evidence section:
Scientists have tested carefully whether these assumptions are valid and borne out by observation. Observational cosmologists have discovered evidence – very strong in some cases – that supports these assumptions, and as a result, metric expansion of space is considered by cosmologists to be an observed feature on the basis that although we cannot see it directly, scientists have tested the properties of the universe and observation provides compelling confirmation.[18] Sources of this confidence and confirmation include:
1) Hubble demonstrated that all galaxies and distant astronomical objects were moving away from us, as predicted by a universal expansion.[19] Using the redshift of their electromagnetic spectra to determine the distance and speed of remote objects in space, he showed that all objects are moving away from us, and that their speed is proportional to their distance, a feature of metric expansion. Further studies have since shown the expansion to be extremelyisotropic and homogeneous, that is, it does not seem to have a special point as a “center”, but appears universal and independent of any fixed central point.
Hubble, Edwin, “A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae” (1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173
Therefore relative and measurable velocities of remote objects is a “feature of expansion.”
Lief want to dismiss this solely as the measuring stick changing length. Everyone else says both happen. So galaxies are moving. Space is expanding Distances are increasing.
How to calculate the speed of a galaxy as described by Harvard for NASA’s Office of Space Science by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory © 2001 Smithsonian Institution
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/galSpeed/
STEP 4 of the guide
“This phenomenon is called the “Doppler effect.” It applies to all kinds of waves, such as light waves, sound waves, and water waves. Why don’t you observe this effect when you ride a bicycle down the street, for example? (Hint: For the effect to be noticeable, how fast should the source be moving, relative to the speed of the waves themselves?)”
” This phenomenon is called a “redshift. Based on your experiments with the Doppler effect, would you conclude that Galaxy 1 is moving away from Earth or towards Earth?”
STEP 6 of the guide
“It turns out that the amount of the observed redshift is proportional to the speed of the source (for speeds that are not close to the speed of light). For example, for a galaxy moving away from us at 10% of the speed of light, its light will be redshifted by 10%. So, for this example, the hydrogen line that was at 656 nanometers will be redshifted by about 65 nanometers.
As noted above, the galaxies are moving according to Harvard and NASA.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 2:14 pm
1) Hubble demonstrated [in 1936] that all galaxies and distant astronomical objects were moving away from us, as predicted by a universal expansion.
Here are some questions/answers that might be educational:
http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/cosmologyprimer/faq.html
“A profound feature of relativity is that two objects passing by each other cannot have a relative velocity greater than the speed of light. An even more profound feature, one which has received much less publicity, is that the concept of “relative velocity” does not even make sense unless the objects are very close to each other. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity (which describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime), there is no way to define the velocity between two widely-separated objects in any strictly correct sense. The “velocity” that cosmologists speak of between distant galaxies is really just a shorthand for the expansion of the universe; it’s not that the galaxies are moving, it’s that the space between them is expanding. If the distance isn’t too great, this expansion looks and feels just like a recession velocity, but when the distance becomes very large that resemblance breaks down. In particular, it’s perfectly plausible to have distant galaxies whose “recession velocity” is greater than the speed of light. (We couldn’t see such galaxies directly, since light from them would never reach us, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.) The resolution to this paradox is simply that we have taken a convenient analogy too far, and there isn’t a well-defined “speed” between us and distant objects.”
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 2:14 pm
Reading farther in your Wiki link on the metric expansion of space would have shown you that in fact Dr. S.’s explanation was correct under current, increasingly well confirmed cosmological theory & observation.