Last Week's Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong 194
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "If you've been living under a stone, you might not have heard last week's announcement that astrophysicists from the BICEP2 experiment have found the first evidence of two extraordinary things. The first is primordial gravitational waves--ripples in spacetime from the very first moments after the Big Bang. The second is that these waves are evidence of inflation, the theory that the universe expanded rapidly, by twenty orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang. But that can only be possible if the gravitational waves formed before inflation occurred. Now critics have begun to mutter that the waves might have formed later and so provide no evidence of inflation. The new thinking is that as the universe cooled down after inflation, various phase changes occurred in the Universe which generated the laws of physics we see today. These phase changes would have been violent events that generated their own ripples in space time, which would look very much like the primordial gravitational waves that the BICEP2 team claims to have found. So the BICEP2 team must rule out this possibility before they can claim evidence of inflation. But the critics say the data does not yet allow this to be done. That doesn't mean inflation didn't occur. Indeed, the critics say this is still the most likely explanation. But until the phase change possibility is ruled out, the result must be considered ambiguous. So put the champagne back in the fridge."
No confirmation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No confirmation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No confirmation (Score:5, Funny)
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We are just going to have to recreate another big bang and then see what happens and therefore settle this debate once and for all.
Sadly, if they were climatologists, this is exactly what would be demanded of them in some quarters...
Re:No confirmation (Score:5, Informative)
Last year, another telescope in Antarctica — the South Pole Telescope (SPT) — became the first observatory to detect a B-mode polarization in the CMB (see Nature http://doi.org/rwt [doi.org]; 2013). That signal, however, was over angular scales of less than one degree (about twice the apparent size of the Moon in the sky), and was attributed to how galaxies in the foreground curve the space through which the CMB travels (D. Hanson et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 141301; 2013). But the signal from primordial gravitational waves is expected to peak at angular scales between one and five degrees...
Furthermore, data taken with a newer, more sensitive polarization experiment, the Keck array, which the team finished installing at the South Pole in 2012 and will continue operating for two more years, showed the same characteristics. “To see this same signal emerge from two other, different telescopes was for us very convincing,” says Kovac.
Nature [nature.com]
So it's not just one experiment, there are multiple other readings that support it, though I guess a complete experiment duplication is not yet complete. That nature article mentions that the SPT is a competitor to BICEP2, which published the findings, and they were literally a few meters away at the south pole. So I'd assume that SPT and maybe some other competitor is most of the way to confirming the findings, enough that they were confident in publishing.
That said, I'm totally not a physicist. It just sounds like this isn't a single experiment.
Re:No confirmation (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, because controlled experiments haven't established any of the laws being applied, right?
Are you a moron who'd say "we don't know what gravity on Jupiter is like because we haven't experimented there"?
No? Then why are you a moron who says "Carbon dioxide doesn't retain heat on a planetary scale because our experiments that clearly establish that mechanism have only been on a small scale"?
Observational evidence is evidence, and controlled experiments are only necessary for the process of establishing and challenging the laws that we use to assess the real world.
Please do not feed the trolls. (Score:2)
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Yes, a box in the lab is like the atmosphere in its entirety. This is called generalization, it is a fundamental process of science. When you contest a generalization, you propose a variable that has not been controlled for and launch a new controlled experiment, to establish that factor. You don't go "Ha, you can't know everything"
Or do you think quarks only exist in particle accelerators?
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A box in the lab is good enough to understand that CO2 absorbs IR energy.
THAT is what we are talking about.
You really, really, have no clue about climatology or Global warming, or science. I find the sad that you don't know anything about any of those and yet you state an opinion like it has meaning or relevance.
If you did have a clue you would have a chance to learn how to change your narrative when actually facts prove it wrong.
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In this particular case, I don't think it's a problem with me in that I can't really understand what it is you take issue with.
And we do have that particular problem solved, it's called a big decimal, and it's available as part of every even slightly modern language. You sacrifice FLOP speed and get indefinite precision tracking.
I don't know exactly how that relates to anything I was saying, so rebutting your post as a whole is like some non-euclidean nightmare, but suffice to say, you seem a bit... off.
Re: No confirmation (Score:2)
Maybe but you do so like to conflate difference experience. Somehow a computer model result is presented as the same as a bench experiment result. And if you are relying on flops because you have too many data points for your processor limits then big decimals are not very relevant. Indeed the thought becomes adding more bits to the processor word as in the case at CERN i referenced. In my world the models always support the funder's policy position. Hmm. Maybe it is different for you. Maybe you do
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That's not really true. There are multiple, competing models and they use multiple data sets to determine historical conditions. While it is true that climate science can never be as rigorously instrumented as theoretical physics, it does not mean that they cannot follow the scientific method.
The worst science I've seen in the climate area have been people throwing out simple correlations. Everyone who bothers to build a more complicated model seems to trend toward consensus.
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Troll? Wow, idiots have control of the point today.
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The Limbaugh is strong in this one, LOL. Yeah, troll is pretty weird.
Phase changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Phase changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. Regardless of whether the results confirm or are consistent with the theory of Inflation, the every existence of coherant structure the scale of the universe itself is an amazing result. By default, there is no reason to expect any structure whatsoever at the highest cosmic sale. (I would argue that up to now this, there was essentially no struture to the CMB)
Yet here we have "waves" of polarisation over a gigantic region of the night sky. The Universe has uniform strutures at the most enormous scales. It's a deep and awesome result that must be addressed, by inflation or whatever other theory we can propose for it.
Re:Phase changes (Score:5, Funny)
Now imagine phase changes on a multiversal scale. All those infinite chaotic dimensions then BLAM a few align such that their properties harmonize and propagate in a brilliant momentary flash before returning to chaos time and again like fireworks and then the energy density becomes low enough that the explosions stop among some dimensions and yet occur among others, and one of those final big bangs was this universe wherein at the smallest levels of reality we see the infinitely differentiable quantum uncertain foam from which chaotic energy crystallizes into matter momentarily and is destroyed in tiny little flashes, like fireworks, before returning to the chaos.
Now imagine phase changes on a gigaversal scale... For this experiment beings aware of less than 12 dimensions will need a visual aid. You'll need to wrap your cognitive locus in tin-foil and have access to an old microwave oven. A turn table is optional -- it's the lamp and timer's "Ding" that's most important.
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I think phase changes on a universal scale is an amazing thing to ponder.
When we're talking about the moments after the Big Bang, a "universal scale" is actually quite tiny ;)
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Nope, those phase changes must be after Inflation, when the Universe was already quite big.
Creationisticism (Score:5, Insightful)
This aspect of the story is great as an example of science.
It seems stubborn to hold onto a single interpretation of evidence during pursuit a theory, including the origin of the universe.
Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be.
When you won't relegate the evidence, then you are practicing faith (in the evidence) instead of science.
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I'm not sure you're criticism is valid. He said, "Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be."
I don't think he was saying that valid evidence would be dismissed because it didn't fit the theory, but that it would be admitted to be less significant if it's found to insufficient to support the theory.
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", but that it would be admitted to be less significant if it's found to insufficient to support the theory."
and it might be depending on prior plausibility.
When that happens, more data is need and more tests are run.
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Ridiculous. The creationists, anti-vaccination advocates, anti-global warming people, bigfoot hunters and investigators of Atlantis all tell me that scientists totes agree with each other on everything and never succeed by competing and challenging each other's ideas. That many quacks can't possibly be wrong about everything.
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Yip. If you want to know the truth you have to do the research yourself (so I've been told). http://www.davidicke.com/ [davidicke.com] is apparently the place to start.
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No thinks, I don't look good in Turquoise. aha, I kid. I look good in anything, and fabulous in nothing.
Joking aside, that guy is crazy.
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Science - evidence and knowledge of the unseen supported by understanding what is seen.
I notice that faith talks about things unseen, but doesn't mention how they know about these unseen things (heaven, hell, G*d, etc.). Science also talks about things unseen all the time - but only in the context of what we know. Faith quite handily skips that inconvenient reliance on facts.
Back in the fridge? (Score:3)
the result must be considered ambiguous. So put the champagne back in the fridge.
Already drank the champagne... Um, my fridge is, er, full, can we use yours?
I think more people would be interested... (Score:2)
... in what caused or happened before the big bang. Even so someone interested in cosmology like myself, I can only take so much more "and at 1 second after the big bang this happened and 1 min after this". Yeah ok , thats all good fun for particle physics types, but its not actually that interesting compared to the Big Question of why is there something rather than nothing? Which frankly I get the impression not many cosmologists appear to be too interested in finding out, being more content to leaving it
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At the moment, that question is not answerable, and in fact may never be answerable.
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No, we have a hard time answering these questions because they point to events that are incredibly difficult to probe. Even if and when we demonstrate that inflation happened (it is the most favored theory at the moment, but by no means a near-absolute certainty yet), that gives virtually no information on the condition of the universe prior to inflation. There are some theories that may give some answers, but currently they are pretty much untestable and thus remain little more than educated conjecture.
I'm
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And thus we see more clearly the strong link between post classical physics and linguistics studies.
We cannot hypothesize about that which we cannot yet express in language, where language includes all that we can do in natural speech, mathematics, or computer simulations. That is an inherent limitation of science.
Since we have no way of framing the questions, we cannot talk about what was there before the big bang, what is on the other side of a black hole's event horizon, or what is going on in that p
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Imagine you set up a ridiculously-powerful computer to simulate a universe - literally a particle-by-particle perfect simulation. (You might need this to be a fairly small universe, of course)
The simulation begins with everything in one tiny place and then it explodes outwards, cools down, matter starts to coagulate, etc. etc.
Within the simulation, there was no time before that universe's Big Bang. You could pause and even rewind the simulation and this could never be noticed from inside. The simulation onl
"Computer - end program." (Score:2)
Actually you could in a way (Score:2)
Try measuring smaller and smaller lengths until you hit the limit of the computers precision. Then you either can't subdivide any further or things start to get all fuzzy as rounding errors creep in.
Hold on, where have I heard of something like that in physics already....
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... in what caused or happened before the big bang.
I still can't believe we haven't sent an expedition to see what's North of the North Pole!
(This is the analogy Stephen Hawking uses when asked about "before the Big Bang")
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The point is, since time started at the Big Bang, it's meaningless to talk about "before."
Yes, I know that sounds like a dodge. It's unsatisfying to me as well. The best I can do is consider that we need some other word than "before" to describe it.
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Well, take a deep look at Inflation teories. You'll be surprized.
The kind of questions cosmologists are asking nowadays is simply amazing.
But it's still inflation? (Score:2)
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Re:But it's still inflation? (Score:4, Informative)
I urge anyone interested in these questions to go to Professor Matt Strassler's blog: http://profmattstrassler.com/ [profmattstrassler.com] . In particular he goes to some length to describe what BICEP2's data might mean.
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I got the impression that it was a by product of expansion (which occurred after inflation) not inflation itself (which, while cosmoligists appear to have reached a concensus is still itself a theory, not a fact).
What really happened. (Score:3, Informative)
What really happened was that Wolowitz and Koothrappali rigged the electric can opener to create false postitive results for Sheldon's test equipment. He shouldn't have announced his findings so soon.
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And they should have been fired.
Well, then. Just run the experiment again, eh? (Score:2)
It's the only way to be sure. Don't forget those safety glasses!
Don't you just hate ... (Score:2)
Inflation (Score:2)
If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn't reach a consensus.
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You do realise that this is an article about physics, right?
Also, I don't think researchers in any area would reach a consensus if you get they all toguether.
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In the exact sciencies, you get consensus to nearly all questions that you craft well enough to exclude any kind oppinion, but you'll get plenty of "nobody knows". You won't get any kind of consesus on the likehood of a non-mainstream theory being right, and very little on how right (or wrong) are the mainstream theories, except if you use some completely objective measurement.
In human sciences you won't have any "nobody knows" answer to those first questions. You'll have consensus on the known ones, and pl
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Great assumed premise, guys, really. (Score:2)
Great assumed premise, guys, really.
We've jumped way past the point of claiming that polarized background cosmic radiation = gravitational waves detected (right now, the polarization is just consistent with a theory that, IF there are gravitational waves, AND a particular inflation theory requiring gravitational waves to be possible is correct, THEN the observed polarization is consistent with fossil pre-inflation gravitational waves.
We are now to the point of "alternate explanations for the gravitational w
the "laws" of physics (Score:2)
...as someone said once are human-centered idea, that there are laws obeyed by nature that we can grasp with our minds and that those laws must be unchanging. This is the unspoken assumption, that the models that would explain the physical processes never changed in the course of the evolution of the Universe. I'm beginning to think that such assumption is no different from Newton's "mind of God" that he wanted to know -- we just call it slightly differently.
And how is this claim relevant? If those "laws" h
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Are you proposing that the laws change randomly or something?
If the laws of physics change with time, then what we thought were the laws aren't actually the laws, but rather the actual laws with parameterized time. It might make some experiments more difficult, but there is no philosophical conundrum. Actually, this idea is already implicit in lambda-CDM ("standard model" of cosmology), where there is a time-dependent "scale factor" in the Friedman equations.
Pesky science... (Score:2)
... with all of that skeptical insistence on the consideration of confounding explanations that might also be compatible with the data.
Or is the term "skeptical" politically incorrect at this point, since everybody knows that no real scientist would disagree with the consensus view that he or she is told all of the other scientists have?
To be honest, the really cool thing isn't (yet) the origin of the gravitational waves observed, it is the observation of gravitational waves at all. So far, that has eluded
you can stop reading right there (Score:2)
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The singularity isn't a real thing, it's because General Relativity breaks down as you get close to the Planck constants, and thus starts producing nonsensical answers.
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Only in theorectical physics... (Score:3)
Only in theoretical physics is one allowed to say that the immutable laws of physics somehow changed as a way to blend the theories of the early universe after the big bang to the expanding universe we see today. The speed of light is a constant, oops, only from this point forward, same with the effects of gravity, motion and everything else.
If all of that is true, that the laws of physics, of nature, itself, can mysteriously change with no rhyme or reason, it's almost as if some external force were directing the formation of the universe. Oh, wait, that sounds too much like a deity, so that can't be correct. No, instead, we have to accept that somehow, everything around was was created in an instantaneous blink of an eye. Well everything, that is except physics. That was created separately some time later.
Or maybe, the physics didn't change, but math did. Maybe in the earliest universe it was permissible to divide by zero. I'm not sure who would have granted that permission, but if you are allowed to divide by zero, you can pretty much prove anything mathematically, so anything goes at the moment of the big bang! After all, dividing by zero just yields infinity and at the point of the big bang, the universe was an infinitesimally small place, so infinity was a lot smaller, too. So, like the speed of light, maybe infinity is relative, too, in which case it turtles all the way down (and up).
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no, there are many models of the early universe with their own internal rules. Experiments and observations are being used to support those most likely to be useful. None of these models are built of things randomly chosen from a hat as you seem to imply.
I'd guess you've never formally studied cosmology or field theories.
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symmetry breaking is a big part of many models.
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Actually, the immutable laws of physics are treated as, um, immutable. The speed of light is, and was, a constant, and Special Relativity was in effect. Special Relativity doesn't say nothing can ever move faster than light, although it does put some restrictions on such movement. In particular, the Universe can inflate faster than light, although I'm not going through the details here.
Physics also doesn't answer the questions of how or why the Big Bang happened, or really what happened before inflati
You have fast eyes (Score:2)
by twenty orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang
A blink of an eye is in the order of 10^-3 seconds. The inflationary epoch lasted roughly in the order of 10^-33 seconds.
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At least I'll be warm compared to the frozen wasteland your God has created on Earth.
Re:What a crock of shit. (Score:4, Funny)
This is un-provable and wild and rampant speculation. Keep twisting the evidence to support your beliefs, meanwhile I will worship God and be granted life Everlasting. You, on the other hand, will burn in the Pit.
Have you heard the bitchin' news?! I reject your god because I don't need some elitist hipster cloud club. I've had my fill of standing in lines and getting judged at the door in this life, screw doing it again in the next. So, I bought my front-row ticket to the hottest show in Earth because all the good bands and fun people will be there.
You may be interested in my pamphlet, "So, you've decided to go to Hell."
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Have you heard the bitchin' news?! I reject your god because I don't need some elitist hipster cloud club. I've had my fill of standing in lines and getting judged at the door in this life, screw doing it again in the next. So, I bought my front-row ticket to the hottest show in Earth because all the good bands and fun people will be there.
You may be interested in my pamphlet, "So, you've decided to go to Hell."
This made me so very happy! Well done!
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You'r god is tiny and weak if he can't make a universe that changes with time.
Heads up: There is no god.
Re:Jumping the gun (Score:5, Insightful)
The media hyped this up. The BICEP2 team did nothing wrong.
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They forgot to flex when they were talking to the media.
Re:Jumping the gun (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down. Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed? Regardless, if the alternate interpretation proves true, I find it no less significant.
It's customary in science to present your findings exactly as they are, with the statistical certainty associated with the findings. They never said their results were confirmed or "concrete", they said their findings confirmed several other theories and that they were highly certain of the results given the known sources of error and the model they were using. You can always come up with other theories that would also fit the observational data: heck, half the point of publishing your data is so the scientific community can look at it and see if you did something wrong, or if there are other interpretations that fit the data better.
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Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down.
I don't recall anyone saying those results were "concrete". I think that a lot of the science skeptics are simply not capable of thinking as a scientist. If you take the political and faith based systems as an example, the person makes up their mind, such as "All liberals are evil" or "The Bible says the entire world was covered with water, so it was, and I'll accept no evidence to the contrary." It is people like that who have difficulty understanding the way the scientist thinks.
The scientist is ready
Re:Jumping the gun (Score:4, Informative)
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My question is, do these ACs PURPOSEFULLY misquote this song? By now, everyone should know that the last word in the first stanza is "confidant"; enough people have pointed it out. Or, is this just a 'bot with a fixed text file that is never updated?
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This is Slashdot - if the last word of the song was confidant then it wouldnt be on topic.
Its like "Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard"
or
California Dreaming, I've got your Womans Day
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Another one: "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy."
This is known as a Mondegreen. [wikipedia.org]
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wrapped up like a douche.
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I've often wondered something similar myself (but I was too lazy to become a physicist). What if the universe is infinite and inflation is simply the result of a 'local' (e.g. at least a 15 billion light year radius) eddy in the flow of infinite space/time.
If you want to know bring some marijuana.
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I think most cosmologists believe in an infinite universe, wherein inflation has led to many "bubble" observable universes due to the finite speed of light and finite age of the universe. See chaotic/eternal inflation [wikipedia.org].
The observable universe is actually much larger than ~15 billion ly. The farthest objects we can see are at extremely high redshifts implying distances of about 40 billion ly. You may note that this is greater than the age of the universe times the speed of light.
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Ah, is he? Is he?
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Equally valid - when we see "evidence" of accelerating expansion at the "edge" of the Universe - when did that expansion actually take place?. For bonus points - how far apart were those distant points in space back when they emitted the light we're observing now?
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The proposed acceleration is not at the "edge" of the observable universe. It is (apparently) everywhere that matter is not bound by gravity. Inflation, which is most likely quite distinct from our current expansion, was likewise everywhere in space during its brief moment after the big bang.
In any event, the universe is very close to 13.8 billion years old, yet the farthest objects we can see are some 40 billion light years away.
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There are parts of the universe expanding faster then light can travel through the universe whose light we will never see.
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Possible exception to the "law"... (Score:2)
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First, massless particles, like the photon or graviton, don't go past c. They go exactly c. Anything going faster would be a tachyon [wikipedia.org], which isn't like any of the massless particles we know. BTW, these BICEP2 results seem to confirm the existence of gravitational waves, and thus of gravitons. Otherwise, I would have said "supposed gravitons" or something like that.
There is also the concept of tachyonic fields, which are fields whose particles have imaginary mass. The Higgs before symmetry breaking occurred i
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If nothing had mass at the instant of the Big Bang, how does Einstein's theory of Relativity apply? Objects become infinitely massless as their speed approaches c?
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the assumption that the current physical laws and constants were true then. By definition, they weren't - the four fundamental forces did not assert themselves until a finite period of time
If they didn't "assert themselves," does that imply that they did exist? I think that this way of speaking is a little confusing, because we believe that current "laws" represent special cases of more general laws, rather than different laws entirely.
If nothing had mass at the instant of the Big Bang, how does Einstein's theory of Relativity apply? Objects become infinitely massless as their speed approaches c?
Massless particles inherently move at c. They can't be accelerated or decelerated because they have no inertia, although they do have momentum.
As far as we know, this was just as true right after the big bang. Particles, or field excitations or whatever, had no
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(oi vey)
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The parent may have confused you with the choice of terminology. All particles, including the Higgs boson, are excitations of fields which permeate all spacetime. These fields have existed at least since the big bang. There is no need for any of them to have "come first."
It is true that today there are many sorts of massless particles, and it is very likely true that cooling after the big bang led to some rearrangements of the quantum fields (called the 'Higgs mechanism') which led to many particles acquiri
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Boson, gluon and photon are massless particles.
Being massless is why they can move at the speed of light.
You're pretty ignorant of this matter and you are looking really foolish.
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Only matter and radiation must move at or below the speed of light. Relativity poses no limit on the relative velocities of objects, provided these velocities are acquired via the expansion of space. During the inflationary epoch after the big bang, space itself (probably) expanded at a rate faster than the speed of light. We think this process magnified small fluctuations, which nucleated the aggregation of matter into galaxies, that it separated different regions of the universe after they were in thermal
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Shut you ignorant pi hole and listen.
The universe is expanding faster then the speed of light, as predicted. Light within the universe only travels at the speed of light.
Look it up and try to use your neurons to learn something.
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Except, of course, inflation doesn't violate Special Relativity.
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I think Penrose has humiliated himself enough in the last twenty or thirty years with his bizarre quantum mind nonsense that I doubt anyone pays particular attention to him any more.