“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.
Psalm 89:11-12
“The Heavens are yours and the Earth is yours; you have prepared the world in its fullness.
You have created the North and the South; Tabor and Herman sing your Name.”
Wonderful poetry, although nothing cosmological is implied, whatsoever. Or so I have now learned from milodonharlani. As well as learning that, in the OT, a place is never used to represent a general cardinal direction.
From the presentation linked by Lief, some things seen:
Large parts of string theory have now been falsified. Meanwhile, some other parts, such as “metastable vacuum string theory” have at least gained some respectability, though not “proven”. Many other (non string) theories have also been falsified or in need of revision. This is an advance, before this, many theories were not even falsifiable, plus, we can now concentrate on the remaining theories and not waste our time. Thus, many links to theories seen here may be “so last week”. On the presentation, they showed a long list of theories only one of which had not been falsified. A lot of what you read on the internet may be obsolete.
The idea that there was no big bang is falsified (actually, now multiple times). The idea that the universe had no beginning is falsified (multiple times). The ideas about other universes, or “eternal inflation” are in flux, some falsified, some given at least enough respectability now that they deserve consideration such as observations and experiments to look into their claims, since there is now a limited possibility that they may have some data which may or may not back them up.
And about this idea that “something from nothing” proves or disproves the idea “God” (defined as “the creator”), this is what is written: Rom 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.. Specifies are, “since the creation of the world” and “from what has been made”, this claims that there is evidence, it occurs in the time frame from the creation of the world and later, and it is visible or otherwise detectable. It makes no claim of evidence from before “the creation of the world”, only evidence FROM that world. There is thus no claim that negative evidence shows God.
Note that this makes the Bibles claims scientific, because with this verse, the Bible is scientifically falsifiable (the only religion to make such a claim). People on this thread have tried to do so, but using the usual “straw man” argument, make it say something that it clearly does not say (if you read and know exactly what it said and exclude what it did not say), then show that it says something false. Example, “the world was made in six days”, a false argument, because it was stated to be made in six “echad yom”, an undefined, possibly long period of time. Basically, treat it like science, with its word like scientific data, and do what the gravity wave people did, verify that what you think it said is what it really said before making a claim it said something false. Note also, most branches of creationism, especially the mainstream (“consensus”) version, are made by those ignorant of what is originally said, and often ignorant of science as well, hence they are basically just straw man arguments without knowing it, and are easily falsified. Falsifying creation does not falsify that Bible, since they are not one and the same, and are often not even close.
Also, the idea of multiple universes does not seem to make any difference to the God or no God argument, the original quote was Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth., there is clearly no mention there of how, or from what (if anything). That is not surprising, if it was mentioned, the bible would be a multi volume affair just to bring most of mankind throughout history up to snuff on the math, physics, etc. The only other applicable places are ones like this “Isa 44:24 “…who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens”, which has been at least shown to be not falsified by this weeks announcement of inflation. The current (as of this week) scientific evidence of multiple universes is that some ideas have been falsified and others now have the possibility of gaining enough respectability that you can say “well…maybe”.
One wonders what scientific advances (or retreats!) were made at the party after the presentation by drunken physicists.
Jim G says:
March 19, 2014 at 5:09 pm
The singularity is therefore the “something from nothing”, not the inflation.
\In quantum theory there is no singularity, and you should be careful to draw parallels between things that may not admit such. It is also possible that the energy content of the Universe is strictly zero as its potential energy [which is negative] may just equal its kinetic energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe
How come when I look in the mirror, my image is reversed left to right, but not up and down? How does it know?Someone (Feynman?) explained this … The left/right reversal is a psychological effect/illusion from imagining yourself walking around to the other side of the mirror and looking back that at yourself. In which case, you have (mentally) flipped yourself around left to right. Mirrors don’t reverse things: to prove this you can hold up a letter, or better yet a word, in front of you, between yourself and the mirror, and you will see that it is not backwards in the reflection.
lsvalgaard says:
“It is also possible that the energy content of the Universe is strictly zero as its potential energy [which is negative] may just equal its kinetic energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe”
I like this one best…..nothing from nothing!
Leif,
You sure you’re not an Eastern Mystic in your off hours?
@Alexander Feht: “Lemaître developed his theory in constant consultations with Vatican.”
>> Source ? Was anyone in the Vatican even aware of this priest’s existence before 1930?
Leo Norekens says:
March 20, 2014 at 8:30 am
@Alexander Feht: “Lemaître developed his theory in constant consultations with Vatican.”
>> Source ? Was anyone in the Vatican even aware of this priest’s existence before 1930?
It doesn’t really matter as the assertion is false to begin with.
Here is more on Lemaitre:
http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/cosmic/p_lemaitre.html
http://www.leif.org/EOS/PT-Lemaitre-1.pdf
http://www.leif.org/EOS/PT-Lemaitre-2.pdf
When I look in a mirror, and look down at my right hand, the hand on the right side of the mirror is indeed my right hand.
If it did reverse things then you’d see something like raising your right hand and having the hand on the left side of the mirror do the same.
If I call my head “right” and my feet “left”, looking in a mirror doesn’t reverse their positions does it?
Maybe it’s easier for me because I have a mole above my right eye, so pictures are always kinda odd looking due to not matching my “expected” asymmetry.
I suspect meeting a clone of yourself with your natural left-right asymmetrical features reversed would inspire less unease as a perfect clone would.
Max™ says:
March 20, 2014 at 10:27 am
When I look in a mirror, and look down at my right hand, the hand on the right side of the mirror is indeed my right hand.
If you look at two mirrors set at an angle [e.g. 90 degrees] towards each other, the mirror image is not reversed.
Well, the in-out direction is reversed, which I neglected to mention.
So the image of me seems to be facing the opposite direction I am, lending to the psychological urge to define it as another you standing there facing that way, and thus waving at me with his left hand when I wave my right.
TheLastDemocrat says:
March 19, 2014 at 8:27 pm
As I commented, the word Zaphon did come to be used to represent the direction north in later Hebrew, which is why the passage got mistranslated in the first place, but that’s not what it means in the ancient Hebrew of Job 26, where it refers to the mountain, home to the god Baal. Both the grammar of the biblical verse itself & the Ugaritic, Phoenician & Aramaic texts found in the 20th century make this clear. And there is certainly no mention of the skies, as in the mendacious translations of creationist stooges.
An interesting parallel conversation is going on, and I would like to suggest that original data and replicability is central to both. Now, CMB radiation measurements have traditionally come from WMAP and there are some real problems with it as pointed out by Pierre Robitaille and Steven Crothers. I do not know if they have had a chance to look at the data or the instruments, or the computer processing over 3 years used by Stanford with BICEP2.
Likewise, what milodon is saying is also subject to tests because the original text is available to all of us to analyze. One tool anyone can use is Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and this shows that the word “north” in Hebrew is stafawn, 6828. Looking up that word in Strong’s shows that that is the only word for “north” used in the entire Old Testament, with one exception. It is used @129 times, to indicate the direction north, and in lists with the three other directions. He is free to handle the text any way – and I think he is a professional at telling students who haven’t read it (and likely won’t) what it says – but the original data is there for any one to replicate his analysis. Reading the entire book or the entire chapter is always a good idea. It really is a beautiful chapter.
Now it is kind of funny that the Book of Job discusses just how limited our own understanding of the natural world and of our experiences in it really is. At least there is a little Socratic humility about the limitations of human knowledge, and the difficulties of appearances from sensually ascertainable facts, in Job. A good lesson for every one.
Legatus says:
March 19, 2014 at 8:57 pm
I would urge you to study the OT in Hebrew before commenting upon it.
“Echad Yom” refers to the first day of creation, not the following five days. Interestingly, it should be translated literally as “Day One” or “Day of the One”, not as the “First Day”, which would be “Yom Rishon”. The subsequent days of creation use ordinal rather than cardinal numbers, ie Second Day, Third Day, etc. The name of the first day thus emphasizes the action of the Creator Himself in making the universe & all that would be within it.
“Day” in Hebrew has much the same range of meanings as it does in English, so could be more than 24 hours. Hence, you’re right that the number of hours in each of the days of creation is not specified, although each has a morning & an evening, even before God made the sun. However the source for this first of the two creation myths in Genesis was a Mesopotamian story in which the creator god Enki set up the seven day week. For Babylonians, the first, seventh & 15th days (like the Roman Ides) of the week were holy, perhaps due to phases of the moon.
Supposing that the days of creation in Genesis 1 lasted on average around two billion years (to approximate the age of the universe) however presents problems. On Day One, God made night & day, but the waters of the deep already existed. On the Second Day, He let the firmament be in the midst of the pre-existing waters, to divide them into those above the solid vault of heaven & those below (this goes back to ancient Sumeria). On the Third Day, God gathered together those waters under heaven into seas, so that dry land could appear, then He let that newly exposed land bring forth plants. But now science has discovered that water collected on earth only after its molten surface cooled.
On the Fourth Day, God created the sun & the moon, & attached the stars to the firmament, from which we learn later in the Bible that they are in danger of falling to earth, & when they do, they’re people, as also is the sun. How the plants got along without for the sun for perhaps two billion years remains a mystery; maybe that day was shorter than the others. Note also that the sun is not the source of light, but merely a sign marking time. On the Fifth Day, God let the waters bring forth swimming & flying creatures. In the actual history of the earth, however, marine animals predate green plants. Primary producers in the Cambrian ecosystem were cyanobacteria, not plants.
On the Sixth Day, God let the earth (or land) bring forth land animals, then he made humans. So Genesis 1 has that part right, since land animals did follow sea creatures in the actual order of appearance on our planet. But the process didn’t take two billion years. Large animals with hard body parts abounded in the Cambrian & Ordovician & had definitely moved onto land by the Silurian Period, but probably sooner than that.
If you limit the days of creation to less than a billion years each to match the age of the earth rather than the universe, these problems don’t go away. Trying to inject modern science into ancient myth doesn’t work.
Zeke says:
March 20, 2014 at 11:58 am
Strong’s Concordance is old & sometimes wrong, although still helpful. Strong died in 1894, before the many great 20th century discoveries of ancient texts.
As I’ve said at least twice before, Zaphon came to be used to indicate north, but its original meaning was the name of a mountain now on the Syrian-Turkish border, which marked the northern end of the Levant.
Translators in previous centuries wrongly assumed that “tsfn” (Hebrew being written in consonants) meant “north” in places where it in fact refers to the mountain whence the direction name came, as has been made plain through study of the texts detailing the stories about Baal Zephon.
If you really want to know what the Bible actually says, it pays to stay on top of the scholarship of the past 85 years or so. Recent translations that try to be accurate rather than support creationist lies, like the NRSV Catholic Edition, now use “Zaphon” instead of “north”. But then creationists rarely actually read the Bible, preferring to swallow whatever lies they are fed.
Job is indeed a powerful meditation on how little humans can understand God. The passage in Job 26 about Mt. Zaphon is very much in line with this message.
Milodon, Strong’s Concordance itemizes every single Hebrew word from the Masoretic Text and every single Greek word in the Septuagint – including prepositions and articles – so that English speakers can compare every single occurrence of any word in the Bible, and look at the words in Hebrew and Greek. It is an excellent tool. I highly recommend it. Cosmic Microwave Background radiation on the other hand is harder to check, and so are the adjustments and computer analysis used to extract some signal from the noise.
Zeke says:
March 20, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Strong’s Concordance itemizes every single Hebrew word from the Masoretic Text …It is an excellent tool. … Cosmic Microwave Background radiation on the other hand is harder to check, and so are the adjustments and computer analysis used to extract some signal from the noise.
Just as we must trust Strong to have done a faithful and correct job, we must also trust the authors of the result under discussion to have done a faithful and correct job…
Zeke says:
March 20, 2014 at 12:35 pm
As I said, Strong’s is useful, but OT scholarship has moved on since his time, as has astrophysics. Some of the translations common in his time have been found false. More fundamentally, the whole Masoretic text of the OT (relied on for centuries by Protestant scholars) has been called into question by discovery of ancient Hebrew originals of many books, which have shown the Greek Septuagint preferable to the later (post-Christian) Masoretic text. Both post-Temple Judaism & Christianity edited & selected scripture for their own purposes.
Surviving biblical texts disagree with each other in details large & small. It’s not IMO justifiable to imagine that texts & translations of the Bible are somehow more trustworthy than telescopic observations & analyses of the cosmic background radiation.
As for Mt. Zaphon, you might enjoy reading this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Aqraa
Better yet, I suggest Fox’ 2009 book, cited in the Wiki entry. In the 1940s some scholars called the identification of Mt. Aqraa with Zaphon into question, but IMO Fox pretty much nails it.
Baal himself is the Canaanite version of the late Mesopotamian storm & water god Marduk, patron of Babylon, whose mythological lineage goes back to Sumer, just as do the creation stories in Genesis & other OT books. Maybe strange that Canaan would be more influenced by Mesopotamian than Egyptian mythology, but that seems to be the case. There were similarities between the two ancient river valley cultures & their cosmologies, however.
lsvalgaard says:
March 20, 2014 at 12:42 pm
The gravity wave team’s work can be checked both as to its result & the statistical significance they found for it, is being & will be more.
IMO it’s actually harder to check Strong’s work because so much scholars would like to know about ancient texts is not as readily observed as the CMBR. Finding better texts is accidental, while the radiation is all around us all the time.
It’s wrong to take present or past understanding of Holy Writ as holy writ. It’s subject to further elucidation as new evidence emerges, just as is science. Understanding of God’s Word has grown just as it has of God’s Work, which better reveals His Mind than does the Word, written, complied, copied & translated by fallible people with agendas.
Yes, Dr S, Stanford took the temperature of the Universe from the South Pole and now knows how the complex system originated and functions to many decimal points of certainty. I am familiar with the tune.
(However, I don’t have to “trust” Strong because I have Masoretic and Greek versions and I can refer to those as well.)
Zeke says:
March 20, 2014 at 1:32 pm
I am familiar with the tune
so you then do have strong confidence in their result, right?
(However, I don’t have to “trust” Strong because I have Masoretic and Greek versions and I can refer to those as well.)
and have you, indeed, extensively cross-checked Strong and verified that his references are correct, based on your own deep knowledge of Hebrew and Ancient Greek?
I got here very, very late. I’m not going to try to enter the discussion other than to say, “God said it and BANG! It happened.”
(PS BibleWorks is an excellent program. It’s expensive but worth it.)
Milodon, philologists really are such interesting people. And they have a lot to contribute. But expert classes of interpreters, priests and scholars do historically introduce their own problems, and I like reading primary sources. Remember, spiritual laws, like scientific discoveries, are only useful insofar as you personally apply them to real life, and practice practice practice.
To illustrate, I might like to have Maxwell’s books on the shelf, but I am far happier using the electricity to run the bread maker, coffee maker, slow cooker, and incandescent lights while I read other books too. It is no good to only apply linguistics in this situation.
Try Zarathustra’s “good thoughts, good words, and good actions” for a few months. (If you fail, you might need a savior.) Please release me from this conversation now. Nice to see you.
lsvalgaard says:
March 20, 2014 at 1:43 pm
Zeke says: March 20, 2014 at 1:32 pm I am familiar with the tune
so you then do have strong confidence in their result, right?
Thank you Dr S, I do have strong confidence in critical discussion of scientific questions asked, tools used, measurements taken, and interpretations and processing of data.