“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.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 5:20 pm
I’m not confusing two topics, although of course the blast front analogy wasn’t apt.
I went back to Dr. S.’s first reply in search of his “essentially” rather than to resurrect your inapt (dare I say inept) analogy.
In the current & increasingly well supported cosmological model (excuse my blasphemy) new spacetime is being generated between galaxies, which are in effect along for the ride on the expanding balloon, essentially motionless in terms of the big picture, although they may be making insignificant movements relative to each other on their local areas of the balloon.
My own description of present understanding may well be faulty.
dbstealey says:
March 18, 2014 at 6:35 pm
Paul Westhaver says:
Lief, The galaxies are not still. You said they were. They are not.
Paul,
Funny, I think I understood what Lief was saying all along. ….
….I think he is saying
_________________________________________________________________
dbstealey,
I have no quarrel with you at all and neither do I have a quarrel with Lief beyond his poor communication and uninvited acerbity. The fact that you feel it necessary to think for him and explain what he actually meant, is making my only point.
If he was clear, and not in error by virtue of his poorly chosen words, he likely wouldn’t have to explain it a multitude of of times. I suspect the ole codger was exploiting boundary language to evoke intellectual shock and awe or maybe he thought he WAS being clear.
But then to suggest that I was willfully ignorant? Please! Where did that come from?
Lief Svalgaard simply said something that is not true, I called him on it, and now he is sulking about it rather than simply saying “Ok I could have said it better.” and moving on.
I was incapable of describing a new concept earlier, Lief criticized it, but the fault was mine because I could not find the words. So I let it go.
I any event, galaxies are moving. AND space is growing. Doppler is an adequate principle to communicate the concept of red-shift. Their may be a new orthopraxy regarding cosmological behavior of which I am unaware, but I do apprehend an eagerness to emphasize certain language.
milodonharlani,
You do not understand what I was saying in 2) in my response to Greg Roane at
March 17, 2014 at 11:56 am thought experiment. The fault is clearly mine since I did not adequately describe the scenario. Furthermore, I disclosed that they were my thoughts.
Inapt, inept or not, they are my thoughts and Lief was kind enough to offer criticism which exposed the weakness of my expression. It is absolutely unrelated to the present model. I will work on a better description of the idea for some other time.
A hint is that your (everyone’s) balloon model is a 2D elastic metaphor. In my model, I also consider the thickness of the balloon skin and even suggest it has a negative Poisson’s ratio. In that model, the localized general space expansion is consistent with the present model. However it implies also 1) the universe is incomprehensibly huge, 2) it has a center very very very far away. This is my model. Nobody has expressed it other than me to my knowledge. Again I doubt that I am clear so I intend to leave it at that until I can better describe it. This is not the same subject as the general idea of expansion.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 7:18 pm
Admirable that you criticize your own inadequate language, yet attack Dr. S. for IYO using inaccurate verbiage.
The expanding balloon is admittedly an inadequate analogy, but sufficient to demonstrate Dr. S.’s point IMO. Adding the wrinkle that the skin of the balloon could be thick doesn’t negate the merely “local” apparent motion of galaxies relative to each other, while they remain essentially still on the scale of the expanding universe.
milodonharlani says:
March 18, 2014 at 12:59 pm
Not to mention the fact that the Bible contradicts itself even from page to page in the same book.
For instance, the number of each “kind” God orders brought onto Noah’s Ark differs between Genesis 6 & 7. Besides which, the passage in Genesis 7 is anachronistic, since which animals are clean & unclean was only revealed in laws given to Moses after the exodus from Egypt, long after the alleged global flood, which of course itself is physically impossible. As is fitting all the “kinds” onto the ark, whatever “kinds” may mean, & caring for them all that time with so few humans.
Nor to mention how the extant & extinct kinds all got to the ark from continents as they existed 4500 years ago, nor what carnivores ate before the Fall, so that the herbivores would survive the first day after the flood waters receded, wherever they went.
milodonharlani,
I believe you are attention seeking. goodbye.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 7:40 pm
I get all the attention I can handle in real life. Rarely do I get the chance to comment without welcome “distractions” by friends or family.
You’re apparently willfully misunderstanding Dr. S.’s explanation, hence a troll. Thanks for clearing that up, if there were ever any doubt.
Time for some humour in this thread. This is how the universe can to be;
Patrick says:
March 18, 2014 at 8:27 pm
I’m still a little unclear as to why autotrophs should drool.
https://www.youtube.com/user/thebigbangtheory
phlogiston says:
March 18, 2014 at 4:11 pm
Is a “distant galaxy whose “recession velocity” is greater than the speed of light” out of our light cone?
This is a bit tricky as ‘is’ implies the ‘present’, but what is the present for a galaxy 10 billion light-years away? Is it ‘now’ or is it when the light we see was emitted? As we see the galaxy as and where it was 10 billion years ago, it can by now easily be out of our light come.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 4:58 pm
He said it over and over and over again like it was his new exciting idea.
No, I’m just regurgitating what modern science says on this. And many times, since you are hard at learning.
Paul Westhaver says:
March 18, 2014 at 7:05 pm
I any event, galaxies are moving. AND space is growing.
As I have said, galaxies are indeed moving within their own little local group. In fact, the first galaxy for which movement was detected was blue-shifted [the Andromeda Nebula], but that has nothing to do with the expansion of the Universe as these local speeds are very small compared to the expansion speed; that is what ‘essentially’ means. Imagine a log rubber band being stretched constantly. On the band are two lumps of sugar each surrounded by several ants [attracted by the sugar]. The distance between the sugar lumps steadily increases as the rubber band is stretched, yet the ants move around their lumps regardless of the stretching of the band.
Doppler is an adequate principle to communicate the concept of red-shift.
But only when the speed is a rather small fraction [like less than a quarter] of the speed of light.
The concept fails completely for large red-shifts or for photons. The photons we see today in the CMB have been red-shifted to more than a 1000 times their original wavelength. Try to explain that as a Doppler shift.
lsvalgaard says:
March 18, 2014 at 9:04 pm
phlogiston says:
March 18, 2014 at 4:11 pm
Is a “distant galaxy whose “recession velocity” is greater than the speed of light” out of our light cone?
This is a bit tricky as ‘is’ implies the ‘present’, but what is the present for a galaxy 10 billion light-years away? Is it ‘now’ or is it when the light we see was emitted? As we see the galaxy as and where it was 10 billion years ago, it can by now easily be out of our light come.
Thanks again. I appreciate your patient answers. So parts of the universe inside our light cone are pulled out of it by cosmic expansion, which thus shrinks our cone. In a distant future we will be alone in our light-cone with a starless sky. Heat death of the universe is a dismal prospect.
I was looking up all this stuff, and see some odd things.
There is this problem that the universe we know appears to be extremely improbable from a big bang, yet we have multiple evidences that that bang happened (some arriving this week). This is known as the “fine tuning” problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation
Now we have gravity waves, pointing to “chaotic inflation”, which seems to need a lot less fine tuning, BUT:
It is a “large field model” which seems unlikely to work and successfully produce inflation, possibly once again reintroducing fine tuning to get it to work.
And the real biggie, the reheat phase necessary produces entropy, and already the universe seems to need to have started at a statistically impossibly low state of entropy, and now needs to start at even lower entropy. In addition, the idea that one could get around this by postulating that this universe was “born” out of one or two other universes interaction actually makes the problem worse, as the birthing universes must be at an even lower state of entropy, so you have multiplied impossible by 2 or 3, not exactly the way to go to get rid of fine tuning.
The conclusion appears to be that this universe is still just as improbable as it was a few days ago, and just as improbable as when the predicted cosmic background radiation was discovered and it was said “we are stuck with this preposterous universe”.
Legatus says:
March 18, 2014 at 10:09 pm
This is known as the “fine tuning” problem.
Lee Smolin has some thoughts on that: http://www.leif.org/EOS/PT-Lee-Smolin-2014.pdf
They are a bit like Richard Dawkin’s ‘Climbing Mt. Improbable’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_Mount_Improbable
Tomorrow Wednesday there will be colloquium at SLAC about the discovery:
The colloquium will also be *streamed live to the public* via this link:
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/kipac-colloquium-bicep2
_Tentative Schedule (speakers and exact timing subject to change):_
3:00pm: *Chao-Lin Kuo*, co-leader of the BICEP2 collaboration, assistant professor of physics at SLAC, Stanford
3:35pm: *Andrei Linde*, author of inflationary cosmology theory, Harald Trap Friis professor of physics at Stanford
4:00pm: *Eva Silverstein*, professor of physics at Stanford and SLAC
4:10pm: *Uros**Seljak*, professor of physics at UC Berkeley and LBNL
4:20pm: *Ryan Keisler*, Kavli Fellow at KIPAC
4:30pm: *Kent Irwin*, professor of physics at SLAC and Stanford
4:40pm: *Leonardo Senatore*, assistant professor of physics at Stanford and SLAC
4:50pm: *Renata Kallosh*, professor of physics at Stanford 5:00 pm: General Discussion
5:30 – 8 pm : Reception with Wine/Beer and light food.
Following the colloquium KIPAC invites staff to stay and discuss the results with their colleagues.
I’ll attend,certainly after 5:30.
[Note: times are Pacific Standard. GMT –8, I think. ~mod.]
lsvalgaard:
“All of infinite space expands. This simply means that the distance between ANY two objects [no matter where] increases with time.”
and
“As I said several times the expansion only occurs for particles [that are not ‘pesky’] that are far enough from each other that their mutual gravitational attraction is negligible. And that is FAR: several million light years.”
Thank you for the clarification. So the reference to “any two objects” is only referring to those that are not experiencing meaningful gravitational interaction. Just to make sure I’m understanding, I wanted to ask a follow up.
Presumably the expansion (which is great enough to occur C+ speeds) is generalized across the universe and is not prevented from operating locally. So would we then be saying that the reason we don’t observe expansion on a smaller scale is because gravity is strong enough to overcome the expansion effect within, say, our local gravitationally-bound region?
Thanks,
Funny how this release of 3 year old news has coincided with the ending of the fiscal year and all that means to research. One might say.
Other than that I would think that the only two ways to expand the space between two objects without moving them is to either throw a curved ball, so to speak, or speed-up the clock.
So, I assume we now have everyone on the same page that distant galaxies may in fact be in motion at a given velocity, which may in fact be towards us, in relation to various reference frames at least.
Galaxies move around at hundreds of km/s while Hubble’s Constant is ~67 km/s per megaparsec (3.26 megalightyears), so we can look at Andromeda, which is heading towards us at ~120 km/s and is under 1 mpc away at about 2.54 mly.
If Andromeda was say, three or four times as far from us it would no longer exhibit blueshift and may even have a slight redshift (fun fact, M31 is one of the very very few blueshifted galaxies in the sky) due to the metric expansion increasing the distance between it and us at a greater rate than it is traveling.
Bump that up to hundreds or thousands of mpc and you’re looking at tens of thousands of km/s away from us.
At the other end of the scale, hold your arm out, the space between your fingertip and your nose is expanding at around 2×10^-18 m/s, so, good luck identifying that.
Relative to the CMBR we’re moving around 600 km/s, incidentally.
Oh, about the doppler-or-not discussion, cosmological redshift is another effect entirely, it is quite possible for a body to be moving towards us rapidly enough that it would have a noticeable blueshift except it is so far away that it is extremely redshifted by the expansion of the universe.
climatereflections says:
March 18, 2014 at 10:43 pm
So would we then be saying that the reason we don’t observe expansion on a smaller scale is because gravity is strong enough to overcome the expansion effect within, say, our local gravitationally-bound region?
Yes, that is correct.
wyn palmer says:
March 17, 2014 at 12:22 pm
“If the rate of expansion is increasing, as measurements suggest, then possible explanations include quintessence or phantom energy and eventually the big rip will occur so that everything, down to and including sub atomic particles will be ripped apart into nothingness…”
You should start a new political party.
milodonharlani says (March 18, 2014 at 12:23 pm): “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.”
Milodonharlani, the Gnostic:
Your response makes no sense.
You might want to read the passage in context.
Job is talking abt how awesome God is.
It makes no sense, in context, to say that God stretched out a local mountain over the nearby valley of chaos.
This is a poetic review of the creation story in Genesis. The creation story is referenced many times in the OT, as well as often in the NT. So, referencing the creation story is normal, not unusual. If this use of a term for “north” were unusual, it would not fit with the rest of the OT. But it does.
The word in my JPS is “Zaphon.” A proper noun.
What common word is this proper noun based on?
It is based on a Hebrew term for “north.”
The local “Zaphon” was likely named after the term for the poetic location of God’s throne, poetically recognized as on top of a high mountain. “Zaphon” is in Job and the Psalms, both recognized as, in their most recognized oldest existing in-writing forms, being among the oldest if not the oldest writings of the OT. So, your rendering may be totally backward: the mountain may be named after the poetic, supreme, heavenly-throne location, not vice-versa.
Isaiah 14 has a similar passage – noting God’s complete, cosmological awesomeness, and using “Zaphon” for astronomical north, above everything else, like we say the North Star is above all of us. In other places, Isaiah discusses local places clearly as local places. It is quite clear when Isaiah is referring to local places and to allegorical or metaphorical places and things.
The North Star is not really “above” any of us anymore than Alpha Centauri is. It is a poetic expression that happens to be totally congruent with the creation story in Genesis: God spread the heavens out over the earth, and later in the Bible, in many places, continues to spread the heavens – written way closer to BC 1,000 than AD 2,000.
Is this fudging of the meaning from “Mount Zaphon” to “north” acceptable? Yes. in many places, proper nouns have double-meaning with their common nouns, and in many places, this is explicit (i.e., “Gilgal” in Joshua), not just tacit. This is normal.
And, you failed to use your Gnostic knowledge to address the issue of the earth hanging on nothing, rather than on turtles or whatever people otherwise believed in 1,000 BC.
So, while my interpretation of this scripture from Job could be wrong, by no means can it be said that, “Your citation from Job could not possibly correspond less to physical reality.”
Job says that God is spreading the heavens out over us. This is current, prevailing cosmology, per Hubble’s red shift. The earth is suspended over nothing. This is current, prevailing astronomy, fairly certain since we have boats, planes, satellites, and space ships that have circumnavigated the globe in many directions, with no one yet detecting any sort of platform upon which the earth rests.
What would it take for semi-nomads in the Bronze-Age to arrive at such advanced cosmology?
In trying to be clever, and trying to figure out any and every way to discredit Jews or Christians, you are going to end up working yourself into a corner. You likely don’t see this, since all of us are “moronic.” You are also thumbing your nose at God, who created you and loves you despite your faults.
He is very interested in having a better relationship with you.
My comments are censored now. If a photon bounces back and forth on two parallel mirrors that are kept at the same distance by a solid link. This photon is constantly travelling in a universe in expansion and it does not have a red-shift.
The farthest objects are red-shifted by a factor of 1000 because they are moving away very fast and their internal clock is therefore slowed down by a relativistic effect. If people were living there, they would see the same thing when looking in our direction. The twin paradox is exactly that, both twins see the other twins age slower for as long as no acceleration is happening.
The red-shift is always proportional to the slowing of time. The objects with a red-shift of 100 are evolving 100 times slower from our referential. Special relativity is enough to explain the red-shift. The expansion is very likely the be the reason why those objects are moving away. But the red-shift has nothing to do with the expansion.
[Your comments are not censored by anyone at WUWT. ~mod.]
Marc77 says:
March 19, 2014 at 7:00 am
The farthest objects are red-shifted by a factor of 1000 because they are moving away very fast and their internal clock is therefore slowed down by a relativistic effect
The cosmic microwave background are photons that are red-shifted by a factor of 1000 since they were last scattered 379,000 years after the Big Bang. The temperature then was 3000 K and is thus now 1000 times less, i.e. 3 K. Space has thus expanded by a factor of 1000, as simple as that.
***
phlogiston says:
March 18, 2014 at 10:03 pm
In a distant future we will be alone in our light-cone with a starless sky. Heat death of the universe is a dismal prospect.
***
Prb’ly true, but right now we’re in the “Golden Age” of the universe. Revel in it. And if this multiverse stuff is correct, if we’re smart enough we can just tunnel over into another, younger universe. 🙂
philjourdan says:
March 19, 2014 at 7:28 am
#3 – so beyond the galaxies, we have just a bunch of empty space?
There is no ‘beyond’. There are galaxies all the way
@Lsvalgaard – My questions were written before I read the entire thread (I had read up to the point that the comment was in reply to). So I have a better understanding now. I do not recall who posted the point out “relative speed”, but using the analogy of the cat walking towards him and the perspective was very good.
Actually, while it may be a bit frustrating for you and Paul Westhaver, I am reading all the comments and learning a lot. In a field we are proficient in, we often forget that others do not see the connection from A to B and so we do not talk about it. But the conversation you have been having with Paul has caused some of those connections to come out and made it a lot easier to understand. So Thank you and Paul and I will continue to read.
milodonharlani
Reading about Einstein he once indicated that if God was involved in physics he probably set the rules in place but did not then interfere with their operation. He also believed that the bottom line rules would be “simple” like his E=MC2. Interpreting the Bible as if it were a present day document, and not allegorical, will get one nowhere. Even if the writers were “enlightened”, I am sure that such enlightenment would not include present day physics or paleontology to be used for interpretation. They wrote in terms that fit their understanding at that time. In the end, belief in God will be a matter of faith, not scientific proof. However, without resorting to the anthropic principle, the mere facts of science such as the energy levels within the atom, the expansion rate of the universe, the DNA changes and differences relative to time and mutation rates, etc., etc. would lead one to necessarily be a strong believer in coincidence or believe in a Designer for everything to be as perfect as it is for this universe and we who inhabit it to exist today. I cannot bring myself to believe in that much coincidence and yes I do have a very good understanding of probability and statistics and am aware of the various multiverse theories. The “something from nothing” theories still beg the question of the origination of the mechanism or the initial something, initial conditions and boundary conditions.