ESA: No Conclusive Evidence of Big Bang Gravitational Waves 96
hypnosec writes: The European Space Agency has made a joint analysis of data gathered by the ground-based BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments and its own Planck satellite to try to verify previous reports of BICEP2's primordial gravitational wave detection. However, the ESA was unable to find evidence of primordial gravitational waves, and they think the earlier report was simply based on an outdated model that didn't take interstellar dust into account.
"The Milky Way is pervaded by a mixture of gas and dust shining at similar frequencies to those of the CMB, and this foreground emission affects the observation of the most ancient cosmic light. Very careful analysis is needed to separate the foreground emission from the cosmic background. Critically, interstellar dust also emits polarized light, thus affecting the CMB polarization as well. ... The BICEP2 team had chosen a field where they believed dust emission would be low, and thus interpreted the signal as likely to be cosmological. However, as soon as Planck’s maps of the polarized emission from Galactic dust were released (PDF), it was clear that this foreground contribution could be much higher than previously expected."
"The Milky Way is pervaded by a mixture of gas and dust shining at similar frequencies to those of the CMB, and this foreground emission affects the observation of the most ancient cosmic light. Very careful analysis is needed to separate the foreground emission from the cosmic background. Critically, interstellar dust also emits polarized light, thus affecting the CMB polarization as well. ... The BICEP2 team had chosen a field where they believed dust emission would be low, and thus interpreted the signal as likely to be cosmological. However, as soon as Planck’s maps of the polarized emission from Galactic dust were released (PDF), it was clear that this foreground contribution could be much higher than previously expected."
Thus confirming existing opinions: (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists and those who understand science: "Yep, that's how science works. No matter how exciting a new finding may be, if later analysis finds that its conclusions are flawed, it's out the door."
Popular media and pundits: "See? Science is a sham! They just make stuff up to get the big research bucks! Why are we wasting money on this, instead of spending it on something that matters, like welfare or fighter jets?"
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Re:Thus confirming existing opinions: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are a real scientist, you don't go around proclaiming final answers, ever. Science is a journey of discovery. The land of answers is religions turf.
Re:Thus confirming existing opinions: (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. The success of religion clearly shows that most people are not actually interested in knowledge or understanding, but rather want to be lied to as long as they like the lie and it comes as absolute truth.
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For many religious people, they are interested in knowing and understanding things, including things that can't be scientifically investigated. Science isn't the only source of truth, it's just by far the best we know of when applied to fields where scientific investigation is possible. Their evidence of God tends to be direct perception, which happens with some people and not others. While science can investigate this phenomenon, it can't distinguish between said perception being something more or less
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Of course, if you're being a real scientist, presumably you don't announce spectacular results till they've been peer-reviewed....
And even more than just announcing a non-reviewed piece of work, they went overboard with the hype it seems to me,
including the highly-staged video they made of arriving at Andre Linde's house and telling him the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Wrong, IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
There are 2 competing theories for the beginnings of the Universe. One that has been pounded into everyone's heads for the last century called "Big Bang" and another more recent theory called "Expanding Vacuum" (also called Quantum Vacuum).
The Big Bang, as mentioned, has been pounded into everyone's head as the right theory even though people have pointed out countless flaws with the theory since the beginning. The more recent theory has been ignored, largely by people claiming to be pro-science. The Big
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There are 2 competing theories for the beginnings of the Universe.
There are many more theories (read: thousands) for the expansion of the Universe since the last scattering (CMB) (the topic of your post), and hundreds for the origin of the early universe (mostly inflation, but also others). Another hundred theories for what Dark Energy is (the most recent expansion).
If you only hear people talking about one theory, you are probably in the wrong room.
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> because you're using terms like "pounded in everyone's head"
The BB theory is the only one that is well-known, because it's the only one that is mentioned in modern (and not so modern) textbooks, when making any cursory reference to a number of phenomena.
That doesn't make him a crank, it makes him savvy to the current state of education (largely, across the world). The crank part comes from promoting another theory as the only alternative.
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Religious thinking has always, and will always plague science. When people have invested a great portion of their lives researching something using a single model for the base of the research the idea of throwing out that model is terrifying. Making small changes to that model isn't s
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Or in other words: There are a lot of bad scientists around that cling to the little part of science that they thought they had mastered. When it turns out they did not, they turn irrational. Good scientists do not regard it as a loss if a theory they have worked on turns out to be invalid. They are intrigued, applaud the advancement of knowledge, regard their working on the failed theory as getting more insight and skill, and move on.
The sad thing is that Sturgeon's Law applies to scientists as well. It al
Re:Wrong, IMHO (Score:5, Informative)
I've been working in Cosmology for 10 years now and I haven't seen a single paper talking about your "EV" theory on the archive, or in any journal that I read.
There are hundreds of alternative guesses, but very few of them make any testable predictions. It's not a surprise that scientists hold on to old theories - the burden of proof of anyone positing a change from the status quo is that they have to 1) match the correct results of the existing theory and 2) introduce a new result that the old theory doesn't match. We don't hold on to old theories out of habit, or some sense of reverence - it's far, far better for us (career wise and ego wise) if we jump into a new area early and establish results there as we get our names on new things. However most of us are quite conservative in this regard because coming up with any old crap is easy. Coming up with something that both matches existing tests and predicts new ones is hard. If you've got a proof of your pet theory doing something new and testable, and you can show it matches (say) CMB observations etc. we'd all love to see it.
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Call me a skeptic, but the fact that you don't know the EV/QV theory indicates that you don't really work in Cosmology. At least as a scientist.
There are hundreds of alternative guesses, but very few of them make any testable predictions.
See above, read "A Universe from Nothing" and then talk. Spouting from ignorance does not change my skepticism in your favor.
the burden of proof of anyone positing a change from the status quo is that they have to 1) match the correct results of the existing theory and 2) introduce a new result that the old theory doesn't match.
This is wrong on just about every level, and surely not science. In fact doing this is exactly the Einstein definition of insanity. "Well, we know it's wrong but fuck it..."
Now if we were talking about something like gravity, we have thing
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Nope, it really doesn't. Post a link to a peer reviewed paper, a posting on the ArXiv, or something concrete. "A Universe from Nothing" is a book by Lawrence Krauss in which he posits that the big bang came to be as a quantum fluctuation. Nothing to do with some new "There was no big bang" theory. It seems to me that you are the one who knows just about nothing here. Krauss also works on, and /requires/ dark energy in his model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org].
You're also misquoting Einstein, and have no
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people invest a lot of time into their opinions and it's very difficult to change them.
Oh people's opinions are easily changed. The problem however is that theories are just that. They exist in models and mathematics which all seems to work out quite well for a small subset of scenarios. We have one model of gravity for interaction of galaxies, and another model for interaction of subatomic particles. Both of them are "wrong" in a way.
I have no doubt if someone discovers the Theory of Everything and models it and can show the model remains consistent all the way to the start of the universe m
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And, with the size of the expense, it's valid to weigh whatever benefits may possibly come against said expense. It's a noteworthy point that the money is seldom, if ever, out of the scientist's pocket.
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Unfortunately, your observation is very accurate. And with politics and religions liking what science finds less and less, it gets worse.
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Back to steady state in our lifetimes? (Score:2)
I just have this feeling...
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Guess that means we should ignore you when it comes to astrophysics!
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The idea of the big bang always wreaked of religion to me anyway. It just seems like a way to reconcile our inability to conceive the universe as being eternal. We look at all things as having a beginning and an end. To accept that the universe has neither can be mind shattering. It is so much easier to interpret the data in a way which shows a beginning and insinuates an end.
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That was exactly my thought. I believe creationism and religion has had an influence on the big bang theory, as it has on everything else in our society.
The haters up there don't see that their reaction to having the big bang questioned is the same reaction the religious have to having their stuff questioned.
Einstein's gut was steady state, and he had to be convinced of the big bang. I'm just trying to keep my mind open.
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Oops, nobody's perfect.
Except for creationists, so they claim.
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That is actually a complete fail on your part. The theory is getting refined, not invalidated. That is a different process. Also, if it is an entity then it is real. Really, you are confused and rather dramatically so.
If everything started from a point in space/time.. (Score:1)
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If everything is moving away from us, perhaps we -are- the center of the Universe! Sounds like there are still things we dont understand about the observable universe if we cant get the red/green shift stuff to make consistent sense.
Get a rubber balloon and a marker, or just use your imagination. Put a bunch of dots on the balloon. Now choose one dot as a reference and inflate the balloon--all of the other dots move away as the balloon expands. Try using a different dot as the reference and you get the same result. Note that there are limitations to this analogy [ucla.edu], but I found it helpful.
P.S. It's red/blue [space.com] shift, not red/green.
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a 14 billion year birthday card standing on the mantel?
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Discovering a star that is older than the Big Bang.
This was the case for quite awhile during the late 80's and 90's. Astronomers studying the age of the universe calculated its age to be between 10 and 15 billion years old, while other astronomers studying ancient stars calculated their ages to be between 15 and 20 billion years old. Eventually they discovered more accurate ways to take measurements and the calculations worked this apparent paradox out.
Finding a star that is older than the big bang wouldn
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If you come up with a different theory that can explain doppler shift and the cosmic microwave background, as well as all other phenomena predicted by the big bang theory, while simultaneously correctly predicting observations that the big bang theory fails to predict, then yes, it is possible.
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The difference between modern and pre-20th century science is that we now have very good mathematical models and very poor representations. Our human minds simply cannot understand general relativity and quantum mechanics intuitively.
So we don't disprove the big bang but we disprove formula A and replace it with formula B which may be a scientific revolution but may still match the global idea of a big bang.
Multiple medium Bangs? (Score:1)
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well, going on what the radical religious claim, something that proves that nothing in the universe can possibly be older than ~6630 years?
(we've got organisms on this planet, for example a 5,000 year old bristlecone pine, that are older than that, and they spend their entire lives metabolising - no dormant stages for them. Carrion beetles and hydras are both known as organisms that absent physical hazards, are basically immortal. Those three examples alone show the religious right to be a bunch of crocks).
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that's your opinion and you're welcome to it, valueless to anyone else though it is. I was offering a theory, all you've offered is a character attack, which not knowing me clearly marks YOU as the troll. Now, kindly fuck off and die.
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Big Bang gravitational waves? (Score:2)
Hofstadter isn't THAT heavy...
Cyclic (Score:2)