Is the Big Bang in the Bible?http://news.yahoo.com/big-bang-bible-040000314--politics.html (http://news.yahoo.com/big-bang-bible-040000314--politics.html)
The Daily Beast
By Karl W. Giberson 20 hours ago
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The “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe got a big boost this week when scientists reported the discovery of 14-billion-year-old echoes of the universe’s first moments—the first proof of an expanding universe, and the last piece of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Creationists and other conservative religious believers have a curiously ambivalent relationship with the Big Bang—unlike evolution, which is universally condemned. Young-earth creationists mock the Big Bang as a wild guess, an anti-biblical fantasy that only atheists determined to ignore evidence of God’s creation could have invented. In contrast, creationists who accept that the earth is old—by making the “days” of creation in Genesis into long epochs—actually claim that the Big Bang is in the Bible. Some of them are rejoicing in the recent discovery.
The leading evangelical anti-science organization is Answers in Genesis (AIG), headed by Ken Ham, the guy who recentlydebated Bill Nye. AIG’s dismissive response to the discovery is breathtaking in its hubris and lack of insight into how science works. They call for Christians to reject the discovery because the “announcement may be improperly understood and reported.” This all-purpose response would also allow one to deny that there is a missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.
Secondly, Answers in Genesis complains that the predictions being confirmed in the discovery are “model-dependent.” They fail to note that every scientific prediction ever confirmed, from the discovery of Neptune, to DNA, to the Ambulecetus transitional fossil is “model-dependent.” The whole point of deriving predictions in science is to test models, hypotheses, theories. Finally, AIG suggests that “other mechanisms could mimic the signal,” implying that, although the startling prediction was derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the inflationary model of the Big Bang, it could have come from “some other physical mechanism.” No alternative mechanism is suggested.
The AIG response declares instead that “Biblical creationists know from Scripture that the universe did not begin in a big bang … we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did.”
Not all biblical literalists take such a hard-line stance. Like Ham, the popular Christian apologist Hugh Ross is a biblical literalist who rejects all forms of evolution: Ross believes that the “days” of creation in Genesis are vast epochs and thus the universe can be billions of years old. Ross heads the organization Reasons to Believe, which is often ++attacked by AIG++ and other young earth creationist groups for having a “liberal” view of the Bible. (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross))
Ross, an astronomer by training, was delighted by the discovery of the gravitational waves and told the Christian Post that “The Bible was the first to predict big bang cosmology.” Ross, in fact, is convinced that many ideas in modern science—including the inflationary model for the Big Bang confirmed by the recent discovery—were actually predicted by the Bible. He argues—to the dismay of Hebrew scholars—that the word “bara,” translated “create” in Genesis 1:1, means “to bring into existence that which did not exist before.” Ross has ingeniously located much of modern physics in the Bible, including the laws of thermodynamics and the Big Bang.
The initial response from the Discovery Institute, the headquarters of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, maligned the motivations of the cosmologists searching for the gravity wave, claiming they found more theologically friendly models of the Big Bang “disturbing,” and wanted to refute them. The recent discovery of the gravity waves—after years of searching—is being trumpeted by the scientific community because it “saves the jobs of a thousand people at two national labs who are having to justify their expensive failure.
Despite his organization’s snarky cynicism, the Discovery Institute’s director, bestselling ID author Stephen Meyer, was in the this-new-discovery-proves-the-Bible camp. Meyer went on the John Ankerberg show to extol the theological virtues of the Big Bang. Using the same arguments as Hugh Ross, Meyer finds both the Big Bang and even the inflation model in the Bible: “We find repeated in the Old Testament, both in the prophets and the Psalms,” he told the Christian Post, “that God is stretching or has stretched out the heavens.” Meyer says this “stretching” means that “Space expanded very rapidly,” and the recent discovery provided “additional evidence supporting that inflation.”
Meyer and Ross are right that English translations of the Bible do speak of the heavens being “stretched out.” But to suggest that this is what has been confirmed by the recent discovery is simply not possible. A typical biblical passage supporting this claim is found in Isaiah 40:22 where we read that God “stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” Does this really sound like an event at the beginning of time when the universe experienced a momentary burst of expansion? And what do we make of the apocalyptic vision described in Revelation 6:14 that, at the end of time, “the sky rolled back like a scroll”?
The biblical authors—and most ancients—understood the sky over their heads to be a solid dome—an inverted bowl resting on a flat earth for the authors of Genesis, a crystalline sphere surrounding a round earth for Aristotle and most Christians until the scientific revolution. The Hebrew word used in Genesis for the sky is “raqia” which means “bowl” or “dome.” It does not mean “space-time continuum” and it is not something that could be “inflated.” It could, however, be “stretched out like a tent” or “rolled back like a scroll.” These divergent responses are full of hubris in both directions, making extravagant claims for or against scientific discovery, embracing or rejecting science on the basis of existing religious commitments. But these extremes aren’t the only ways for religious believers to respond to major scientific breakthroughs. Not every scientific idea has to have a theological interpretation, although the tendency to fit new science into ancient religious frameworks is often irresistible. And the Big Bang is certainly no exception.
The Big Bang theory, in fact, was developed in the 1920s by a Catholic priest who was also an acclaimed physicist, the Monsignor Georges Lemaître. It was ridiculed and rejected by Lemaître’s atheist colleague, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle applied the derisive term “Big Bang” to Lemaître’s theory in a 1949 BBC interview—a nasty label that stuck.
Hoyle, who labored heroically to produce an alternative theory, didn’t like the theological implications of the universe beginning suddenly in a moment of “creation.” It sounded too much like the first verse in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And, as Hoyle and others noted, Lemaître was a priest who might reasonably be suspected of trying to smuggle Catholic theology into science.
Hoyle’s concern was amply illustrated in 1951 when Pope Pius XII declared that, in discovering the Big Bang, science had indeed established the Christian doctrine of the “contingency of the universe” and identified the “epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.” “Creation took place,” the pope said. “Therefore, there is a creator. Therefore, God exists!”
Both Lemaître and the Vatican’s science advisor were horrified by the Pope’s confident assertion that physics had proven God. They warned him privately that he was shaky ground: the Big Bang was not a theory about the ultimate origin of the universe and should not be enlisted in support of the Christian belief in a Creator. The pope never mentioned it again.
Ironically, in this dispute, the atheist Hoyle was on the side of the pope in seeing a linkage between the Big Bang and God. It was Lemaître and the pope’s science advisors who saw clearly that scientific theories, no matter how well-established, should not be enlisted in support of theological notions. And, as the Catholic Church learned in the Galileo affair, scientific theories should not be opposed on theological or biblical grounds.
These lessons have been learned by Catholics, for the most part, as evidenced by the relative scarcity of prominent Catholic science-deniers. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same things for many evangelical Protestants, many of whom belong to truncated religious traditions that began after Galileo, or even after John F. Kennedy. They lack the accumulated wisdom that restrains the pope from inspecting every new scientific discovery and either rejecting it because it counters a particular interpretation of Genesis or enthusiastically endorsing it because it confirms this or that doctrine. And when the pope strays, his advisors quickly get him back on track. Catholic thinking on science is informed by the pontifical academy of science, an advisory group with no counterpart in Protestantism.
Ken Ham and his colleagues at Answers in Genesis, Hugh Ross and his colleagues at Reasons to Believe, and Stephen Meyer and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute are too quick to embrace, reject, or gloss with theological meaning the latest scientific discoveries. Rather than rushing to the Bible to see whether its ancient pages can accommodate the latest science, they would do well to heed this caution from Lemaître, as he spoke of the theory that he discovered:
“We may speak of this event as of a beginning. I do not say a creation … Any preexistence of the universe has a metaphysical character. Physically, everything happens as if the theoretical zero was really a beginning. The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations.”
"The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations.”Being a theophile, a creationist, and a science-minded person, this much I can agree with.
Confirming the Big Bang's Inflation: Q&A with Study Leader John Kovachttp://news.yahoo.com/confirming-big-bangs-inflation-q-study-leader-john-121047123.html (http://news.yahoo.com/confirming-big-bangs-inflation-q-study-leader-john-121047123.html)
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer 10 hours ago
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The tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (shown here as color) trace primordial density fluctuations in the early universe that seeded the later growth of galaxies
On Monday (March 17), a team of astronomers sent a jolt through the physics and cosmology communities and made front-page news around the world.
The researchers, led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announced that they had detected a type of polarization called "B-modes" in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the ancient light that began saturating the universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
The B-modes could only have been produced by gravitational waves a few tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, during a period called "inflation" which saw the universe expand from mere quantum fluctuations to something of macroscopic size, scientists say.
If it holds up — and most astronomers seem to think it will — the discovery opens a new window onto a realm of extreme physics and gives astronomers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.
Space.com caught up with Kovac recently to talk about the big find, its implications and what the discovery means to him and his team on a personal level.
Space.com: What does this mean for astronomy and cosmology? What's the biggest implication of this find?
John Kovac: Well, the B-mode signature in the CMB at the angular scales — angular scales from 1 to 5 degrees, that is — is widely regarded as the "smoking gun" signature of inflation. It's the unique prediction of inflation that we wouldn't expect to be there in the universe, according to any alternative theory. It's fundamentally built into the paradigm of inflation itself, this prediction.
So, having seen a signal with our telescopes, and very clearly, and with high signal to noise, that appears to match that prediction exactly — this is by far the most direct evidence that the universe has apparently offered us that inflation is in fact correct.
Space.com: How sure are you about the B-mode detection? Is there any other explanation, or is this pretty much a slam dunk?
Kovac: The paper describes the statistical confidence of the measurement, and it is between five and seven sigma. That is extremely significant; the signal to noise is very high.
We have for years pored over this dataset and done all kinds of internal consistency checks, and that high signal to noise allows us to slice up our data in many ways and confirm that the signal that we see is seen consistently in all parts of the data. That allows us to rule out many possible instrumental effects that one might worry about.
So we've done that very carefully, and we're very confident that the signal that we're seeing is real and it's on the sky. This is probably a direct image of gravitational waves across the sky, showing us the early universe.
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John Kovac, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in front of the Keck Array (right) and BICEP2 telescope (left), with the South Pole Telescope in the background (far left).
The possibility that a B-mode pattern in the polarization is produced by something other than inflation or gravitational waves is of course something that we can't rule out absolutely, but we explore the possibilities in our paper.
The possibility that the B-mode signal that we're seeing is produced by a pattern of polarized dust in our own galaxy, for example, is a possibility that many people consider and are rightly concerned about. And we'll say that the data that we've got right now disfavor that explanation through multiple lines of reasoning.
So we believe that by far the most likely explanation is that it is the B-mode signature from inflation, a direct image of the gravitational waves that are predicted by inflation.
It's going to be controversial. We can expect that people will try to shoot at it from every direction, and we invite that — that's the scientific process, and it'll be fun and interesting.
Space.com: So this detection is a smoking gun for inflation. But does it also tell us about how the inflation process occurred?
Kovac: Yes, it does. There are many details, many models of inflation. But the basics of the inflationary paradigm are well-established and are universal. One of them is that the amplitude of these gravitational waves directly corresponds to how fast the universe was inflating at the time those cosmological scales were projected out of the horizon during this early process. And how fast the universe was inflating directly tells you at what energy inflation was happening.
The scale that we are probing with our experiment, the scale at which we have detected this signal, corresponds to what has long been understood to be the predicted energy scale at which grand unified theories operate, and unify the strong, the weak and the electromagnetic force all together. So those are energies of 10^16 GeV or so, gigaelectron volts. That has long been a popular choice for imagining what is the likely energy scale of inflation, broadly speaking.
So an implication of seeing gravitational waves at the strength that we've seen them is that, yes, in fact, that is the energy scale of inflation. And another thing that is an important aspect of this that is quite fundamental is that the production of these gravitational waves during the inflationary process relies on the interaction of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It actually relies on there being gravitons, the gravitational field being quantized. And that is something of which we'd had no prior direct evidence.
Space.com: So the existence of gravitons is now on solid ground as well?
Kovac: Well, if gravity were not quantized somehow — and I think everybody assumes that it must be, or we don't really understand physics at all — but if it were not quantized, then you would not expect this background of gravitational waves from inflation.
So it's usually a starting assumption that is built into all of these theories of inflation, but it's not something to take for granted, either. This is a point that has been highlighted by some physicists recently — that many cosmologists take this point for granted, but it is quite fundamental.
Space.com: This discovery will doubtless inspire many other projects. What do you hope future experiments will do, or what do you expect them to do?
Kovac: There are many experiments out there that are already very actively looking for this B-mode signal from inflation, so I'm sure it will not be long before there is follow-up, from us and from others — including from the [European Space Agency's] Planck satellite, we hope. And that follow-up will broaden the coverage and the information we have about this signal to multiple frequencies and a larger fraction of the sky, and in the process we'll be learning more about the inflationary process.
As we cover a broader range of angular scales, we'll actually be tracking the evolution of inflation, the evolution of the energy scale as inflation unfolds. And that's a very exciting prospect.
Space.com: On a personal note, how does it feel to be the leader of the team that makes such a potentially monumental discovery?
Kovac: It's extremely exciting — many people on our team have worked for many years on this result. But we are all at this point focused on doing the most careful and correct job that we can of explaining our measurements to the scientific community, because we understand how important this is. We know that what we have is potentially very, very exciting in its implications.
Space.com: Finally, what have the last few days been like for you? And were you surprised that the results made such a big splash around the world, or were you prepared to become a sort of science rock star?
Kovac: Well, I must say that we appreciated how the importance of our results and their potential bearing on fundamental physics — we expected there would be news, but not this level; the response has been quite overwhelming. I'm exhausted, but it makes me appreciate (again) just how universal is our interest in the really big questions.
Andrew Lange, my mentor at Caltech and a great leader of these experiments who, sadly, passed away four years ago, used to inspire people about the potential of science by posing the question, "How far can we see?" I expect he would say now that it's apparent the answer is much farther back than we once dared imagine was possible. That has captured a lot of people's imagination.
NASA says it may have new evidence of the seeds of black holeshttp://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/nasa-says-it-may-have-discovered-the-seeds-of-black-holes-235047309.html (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/nasa-says-it-may-have-discovered-the-seeds-of-black-holes-235047309.html)
The Sideshow
By Eric Pfeiffer 4 hours ago
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The red dot in the center of this image taken from the NGC 4395 galaxy may be a supermassive black hole. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA says it may have found evidence of the seeds of black holes, pointing to the origins of the universe itself.
New information from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has revealed that supermassive black holes are located even in so-called dwarf galaxies. The finding is significant, because the standard belief is that black holes were formed when galaxies collided, forming larger celestial bodies.
"Our findings suggest the original seeds of supermassive black holes are quite massive themselves," said George Mason University’s Shobita Satyapal, lead author of the new study. The paper was published in the latest issue of Astrophysical Journal.
The use of infrared technology allows WISE to pick up details that other telescopes couldn’t otherwise detect through traditional visible light sources that are unable to penetrate through the thick layers of dust that occupy parts of deep space.
"Though it will take more research to confirm whether the dwarf galaxies are indeed dominated by actively feeding black holes, this is exactly what WISE was designed to do: find interesting objects that stand out from the pack," NASA astronomer Daniel Stern, who did not participate in the study, said.
Black holes remain an ongoing source of mystery and speculation in the scientific community. Most smaller galaxies observed by NASA are described as “bulgeless," meaning they do not appear to possess a cluster of stars near the galaxy's center. But the infrared data gathered by WISE indicates that there may actually be giant black holes existing at the center of these smaller galaxies.
For years, scientists have worked to confirm the existence of smaller, intermediate black holes. While those smaller black holes remain elusive, it has been assumed by some that they must have existed at some point before becoming the supermassive black holes we are more familiar with today.
But Satyapal says the WISE findings could mean that supermassive black holes have been around since the earliest days of the universe itself, approximately 15 billion years ago. As the universe itself has expanded over time, the black holes have also theoretically grown.
"We still don't know how the monstrous black holes that reside in galaxy centers formed," Satyapal said. "But finding big black holes in tiny galaxies shows us that big black holes must somehow have been created in the early universe, before galaxies collided with other galaxies."
Other scientists have theorized that exploding stars may be creating infant, intermediate black holes on a regular basis. As those newborn black holes consume gas from within their host galaxy, they would continue to grow over time. And the very existence of black holes, at least as we currently understand them, was recently brought into question by Stephen Hawking.
The WISE telescope was recently put back into service by NASA as part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s ongoing efforts to detect near-Earth objects, that is, asteroids that potentially pose a threat to Earth.
The phenomena you describe makes me wonder about the interpretation of relatively local observations - since dark matter is bull -it is- there must be something we don't understand about how gravity works on a galactic scale...
"Dark Matter Discovered in the Constellation Taurus"
Cosmologists Admit: Dark Matter So Much "Dark Matter"
"Dark Matter Discovered in the Constellation Taurus"Cosmologists Admit: Dark Matter So Much "Dark Matter"
What are you guys talking about? It isn't April yet...
QuoteIs the Big Bang in the Bible?http://news.yahoo.com/big-bang-bible-040000314--politics.html (http://news.yahoo.com/big-bang-bible-040000314--politics.html)
The Daily Beast
By Karl W. Giberson 20 hours ago
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The “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe got a big boost this week when scientists reported the discovery of 14-billion-year-old echoes of the universe’s first moments—the first proof of an expanding universe, and the last piece of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Creationists and other conservative religious believers have a curiously ambivalent relationship with the Big Bang—unlike evolution, which is universally condemned. Young-earth creationists mock the Big Bang as a wild guess, an anti-biblical fantasy that only atheists determined to ignore evidence of God’s creation could have invented. In contrast, creationists who accept that the earth is old—by making the “days” of creation in Genesis into long epochs—actually claim that the Big Bang is in the Bible. Some of them are rejoicing in the recent discovery.
The leading evangelical anti-science organization is Answers in Genesis (AIG), headed by Ken Ham, the guy who recentlydebated Bill Nye. AIG’s dismissive response to the discovery is breathtaking in its hubris and lack of insight into how science works. They call for Christians to reject the discovery because the “announcement may be improperly understood and reported.” This all-purpose response would also allow one to deny that there is a missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.
Secondly, Answers in Genesis complains that the predictions being confirmed in the discovery are “model-dependent.” They fail to note that every scientific prediction ever confirmed, from the discovery of Neptune, to DNA, to the Ambulecetus transitional fossil is “model-dependent.” The whole point of deriving predictions in science is to test models, hypotheses, theories. Finally, AIG suggests that “other mechanisms could mimic the signal,” implying that, although the startling prediction was derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the inflationary model of the Big Bang, it could have come from “some other physical mechanism.” No alternative mechanism is suggested.
The AIG response declares instead that “Biblical creationists know from Scripture that the universe did not begin in a big bang … we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did.”
Not all biblical literalists take such a hard-line stance. Like Ham, the popular Christian apologist Hugh Ross is a biblical literalist who rejects all forms of evolution: Ross believes that the “days” of creation in Genesis are vast epochs and thus the universe can be billions of years old. Ross heads the organization Reasons to Believe, which is often ++attacked by AIG++ and other young earth creationist groups for having a “liberal” view of the Bible. (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross))
Ross, an astronomer by training, was delighted by the discovery of the gravitational waves and told the Christian Post that “The Bible was the first to predict big bang cosmology.” Ross, in fact, is convinced that many ideas in modern science—including the inflationary model for the Big Bang confirmed by the recent discovery—were actually predicted by the Bible. He argues—to the dismay of Hebrew scholars—that the word “bara,” translated “create” in Genesis 1:1, means “to bring into existence that which did not exist before.” Ross has ingeniously located much of modern physics in the Bible, including the laws of thermodynamics and the Big Bang.
The initial response from the Discovery Institute, the headquarters of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, maligned the motivations of the cosmologists searching for the gravity wave, claiming they found more theologically friendly models of the Big Bang “disturbing,” and wanted to refute them. The recent discovery of the gravity waves—after years of searching—is being trumpeted by the scientific community because it “saves the jobs of a thousand people at two national labs who are having to justify their expensive failure.
Despite his organization’s snarky cynicism, the Discovery Institute’s director, bestselling ID author Stephen Meyer, was in the this-new-discovery-proves-the-Bible camp. Meyer went on the John Ankerberg show to extol the theological virtues of the Big Bang. Using the same arguments as Hugh Ross, Meyer finds both the Big Bang and even the inflation model in the Bible: “We find repeated in the Old Testament, both in the prophets and the Psalms,” he told the Christian Post, “that God is stretching or has stretched out the heavens.” Meyer says this “stretching” means that “Space expanded very rapidly,” and the recent discovery provided “additional evidence supporting that inflation.”
Meyer and Ross are right that English translations of the Bible do speak of the heavens being “stretched out.” But to suggest that this is what has been confirmed by the recent discovery is simply not possible. A typical biblical passage supporting this claim is found in Isaiah 40:22 where we read that God “stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” Does this really sound like an event at the beginning of time when the universe experienced a momentary burst of expansion? And what do we make of the apocalyptic vision described in Revelation 6:14 that, at the end of time, “the sky rolled back like a scroll”?
The biblical authors—and most ancients—understood the sky over their heads to be a solid dome—an inverted bowl resting on a flat earth for the authors of Genesis, a crystalline sphere surrounding a round earth for Aristotle and most Christians until the scientific revolution. The Hebrew word used in Genesis for the sky is “raqia” which means “bowl” or “dome.” It does not mean “space-time continuum” and it is not something that could be “inflated.” It could, however, be “stretched out like a tent” or “rolled back like a scroll.” These divergent responses are full of hubris in both directions, making extravagant claims for or against scientific discovery, embracing or rejecting science on the basis of existing religious commitments. But these extremes aren’t the only ways for religious believers to respond to major scientific breakthroughs. Not every scientific idea has to have a theological interpretation, although the tendency to fit new science into ancient religious frameworks is often irresistible. And the Big Bang is certainly no exception.
The Big Bang theory, in fact, was developed in the 1920s by a Catholic priest who was also an acclaimed physicist, the Monsignor Georges Lemaître. It was ridiculed and rejected by Lemaître’s atheist colleague, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle applied the derisive term “Big Bang” to Lemaître’s theory in a 1949 BBC interview—a nasty label that stuck.
Hoyle, who labored heroically to produce an alternative theory, didn’t like the theological implications of the universe beginning suddenly in a moment of “creation.” It sounded too much like the first verse in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And, as Hoyle and others noted, Lemaître was a priest who might reasonably be suspected of trying to smuggle Catholic theology into science.
Hoyle’s concern was amply illustrated in 1951 when Pope Pius XII declared that, in discovering the Big Bang, science had indeed established the Christian doctrine of the “contingency of the universe” and identified the “epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.” “Creation took place,” the pope said. “Therefore, there is a creator. Therefore, God exists!”
Both Lemaître and the Vatican’s science advisor were horrified by the Pope’s confident assertion that physics had proven God. They warned him privately that he was shaky ground: the Big Bang was not a theory about the ultimate origin of the universe and should not be enlisted in support of the Christian belief in a Creator. The pope never mentioned it again.
Ironically, in this dispute, the atheist Hoyle was on the side of the pope in seeing a linkage between the Big Bang and God. It was Lemaître and the pope’s science advisors who saw clearly that scientific theories, no matter how well-established, should not be enlisted in support of theological notions. And, as the Catholic Church learned in the Galileo affair, scientific theories should not be opposed on theological or biblical grounds.
These lessons have been learned by Catholics, for the most part, as evidenced by the relative scarcity of prominent Catholic science-deniers. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same things for many evangelical Protestants, many of whom belong to truncated religious traditions that began after Galileo, or even after John F. Kennedy. They lack the accumulated wisdom that restrains the pope from inspecting every new scientific discovery and either rejecting it because it counters a particular interpretation of Genesis or enthusiastically endorsing it because it confirms this or that doctrine. And when the pope strays, his advisors quickly get him back on track. Catholic thinking on science is informed by the pontifical academy of science, an advisory group with no counterpart in Protestantism.
Ken Ham and his colleagues at Answers in Genesis, Hugh Ross and his colleagues at Reasons to Believe, and Stephen Meyer and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute are too quick to embrace, reject, or gloss with theological meaning the latest scientific discoveries. Rather than rushing to the Bible to see whether its ancient pages can accommodate the latest science, they would do well to heed this caution from Lemaître, as he spoke of the theory that he discovered:
“We may speak of this event as of a beginning. I do not say a creation … Any preexistence of the universe has a metaphysical character. Physically, everything happens as if the theoretical zero was really a beginning. The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations.”
...
Comments, gentlemen?
we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did.”
"we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars"
1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Does Dark Energy Spring From the 'Quantum Vacuum?'http://news.yahoo.com/does-dark-energy-spring-quantum-vacuum-130628574.html (http://news.yahoo.com/does-dark-energy-spring-quantum-vacuum-130628574.html)
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer 13 hours ago
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Observations of Planck and other satellites help to solve the equation of the state of dark energy.
The mysterious dark energy that's driving the universe's accelerated expansion may have its roots in the background "vacuum energy" that pervades all of the cosmos, a new study suggests.
"What we think is happening is a dynamic effect of the quantum vacuum, a parameter that we can calculate," co-author Joan Sola, of the University of Barcelona in Spain, said in a statement. "Nothing is more 'full' than the quantum vacuum since it is full of fluctuations that contribute fundamentally to the values that we observe and measure."
Though dark energy constitutes about 75 percent of the universe, scientists don't know exactly what it is. They've developed several different ideas, including the theory of "quintessence," which proposes a sort of anti-gravitating agent that repels rather than attracts.
Another concept posits the existence of a "phantom field" whose density continues to increase with time. This theory predicts an accelerating expansion so powerful that it will eventually break apart the bonds that hold atoms together, tearing the universe apart in a "Big Rip" about 20 billion years from now.
The quintessence and phantom field hypotheses are based partly on data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite— spacecraft that have studied the cosmic microwave background, the ancient light that began saturating the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
In the new study, Sola and lead author Spyros Basilakos of the Academy of Athens in Greece analyze the same spacecraft observations and find less support for either quintessence or the phantom field idea.
"Our theoretical study demonstrates that the equation of the state of dark energy can simulate a quintessence field, or even a phantom field, without being one in reality," Sola said. "Thus, when we see these effects in the observations from WMAP, Planck and other instruments, what we are seeing is a mirage."
Basilakos and Sola instead suggest that dark energy is a type of dynamic quantum vacuum energy — something different than Einstein's cosmological constant, which describes a static vacuum energy density and is another possible explanation of dark energy's nature.
Basilakos and Sola acknowledge there are some issues with the quantum vacuum energy theory but say it's a promising idea.
"However, quintessence and phantom fields are still more problematic; therefore the explanation based on the dynamic quantum vacuum could be the more simple and natural one," Sola said.
Relativistic van der Waals force[edit]Which describes exactly what I was thinking, only researched and articulated in well thought-out Scientific, as opposed to my vague notion.
Alternatively, a 2005 paper by Robert Jaffe of MIT states that "Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be computed without reference to zero-point energies. They are relativistic, quantum forces between charges and currents. The Casimir force (per unit area) between parallel plates vanishes as alpha, the fine structure constant, goes to zero, and the standard result, which appears to be independent of alpha, corresponds to the alpha → infinity limit," and that "The Casimir force is simply the (relativistic, retarded) van der Waals force between the metal plates."[15]
And leaving out the (distracting) black hole/microverse part, is it just possible that universal expansion is really a POV issue?
'Clever Editing' Warps Scientists' Words in New Geocentrism Filmhttp://news.yahoo.com/clever-editing-warps-scientists-words-geocentrism-film-120818059.html (http://news.yahoo.com/clever-editing-warps-scientists-words-geocentrism-film-120818059.html)
LiveScience.com
By Elizabeth Howell, Live Science Contributor 12 hours ago
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Geocentrism, a long-debunked idea, holds that the Earth is the center of the universe.
Four prominent cosmologists say they were misquoted in a documentary trailer promoting a claim debunked more than 450 years ago: that the Earth is in a privileged spot in the universe.
Producers of the independent film "The Principle" state that "science could be wrong" about the Copernican principle, or calculations by 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus showing that Earth orbits around the sun and not the other way around. An Earth-centered solar system or universe is also defined as a geocentric system.
Co-producer Robert Sungenis did not respond to multiple interview requests from Live Science. His trailer received universal ridicule among scientists interviewed for this story, including Lawrence Krauss, who was portrayed in the preview.
"I'd be more upset, except the idea is so stupid that in the end, it will just reflect badly on them," said Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. Krauss has authored more than 300 scientific publications and several mainstream books.
"People are afraid that science will threaten their faith, and there are two approaches: One is to deny the results — the science — and the other is to misuse science," he told Live Science. "I think these people think if they can hoodwink scientists, they can show off a thing or two, and of course they won't show anything."
'Clever editing'
The science of Copernicus and Isaac Newton (who formulated three laws of motion) underpin modern astronomy and physics. Their principles cover matters such as how spacecraft get from one planet to another and foundational mechanics governing how skyscrapers are built.
As for how the scientists appeared in "The Principle" in the first place, Michio Kaku — best known for his work on string theory – said it was a matter of "clever editing" of innocuous statements, which is hard to combat, since he likely signed a release form for his participation.
"It borders on intellectual dishonesty to get people to be a part of a debate they don't want to be a part of," said Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York who was also quoted in the trailer.
George Ellis, a mathematics professor emeritus at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said geocentrism never came up in his interview.
"The interviewers never put that idea to me, and if they had done so, I would, of course, have said I do not agree," Ellis wrote in an email to Live Science. "There is no reason whatever to support such a view."
British physicist Julian Barbour — cited in a trailer description of the documentary on YouTube – said his involvement in the film seems to have arisen from a gross misunderstanding of a 1977 paper he di-authored with Italian physicist Bruno Bertotti.
The paper, Barbour told Live Science, created a model showing that Newton's First Law — that objects in motion will continue to move in a straight line unless an external force is applied — can be explained by distant stars or masses in the universe. The physicists used a simple modelin which the sun is at the center of the universe, but the model was not supposed to fully represent reality. It also, Barbour pointed out, is not a geocentric model as the Earth is still going around the sun.
"There's an awful lot of people on your side of the Atlantic that don’t believe in evolution," Barbour said. "I think it geocentrism] might be the same kind of phenomenon.," Barbour sai.
Finding Earth's motion in space
Astronomer Chris Impey of the University of Arizona, who was not quoted in the trailer, – said geocentric views do not necessarily mean a disbelief in evolution. Scientific conspiracy views, however, tend to cluster, he said.
More scientific literacy is needed to combat such uninformed views, especially to explain the subtle arguments against geocentrism, he said.
"Earth moving versus the sun was not a trivial issue to resolve, and in fact, it was not completely resolved in the time of Copernicus," Impey told Live Science. It wasn't until 1728 that James Bradley reported the aberration of starlight, a phenomenon where Earth's motion in space makes it look like the stars are changing positions.
Producers of the documentary include Robert Sungenis, whose writings include the book "Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right" (CAI Publishing Inc., 2007), and Rick DeLano, who wrote a statement on "The Principle's" Facebook page.
DeLano said the documentary addresses information that "mainstream opinion makers" would not want publicized — for example, a 1922 statement by Albert Einstein saying the motion of the Earth "cannot be detected by any optical experiment."
DeLano did not mention the rest of Einstein's sentence, in which he added that the Earth is revolving around the sun, – or that Einstein's theory of special relativity explains stellar aberration.
The Search for Gravitational Waves: New Documentary on Project LIGO Launches (Watch Online)
SPACE.com
by Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer April 15, 2014 6:16 PM
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An aerial view of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facility in Livingston, La.
A newly released documentary brings the hunt for ripples in the fabric of space-time — called gravitational waves — into focus, and you can watch it live on Space.com.
The 20-minute film, called "LIGO, A Passion for Understanding," follows the scientists working to create one of the most powerful scientific tools ever made: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories, or LIGO for short. LIGO collected data between 2004 and 2010, but a newly upgraded version of the instrument is set to come online in 2015. You can [url-http://www.space.com/25455-ligo-documentary-film-complete-coverage.html]watch the LIGO documentary on Space.com[/url] now.
"As an aspiring filmmaker, it is my intent to focus on films which act as a conduit for science education and outreach," Kai Staats, the director of the new film, said of the inspiration behind the documentary. "While the general populous understands 'cancer research' and frequently quotes the most recent findings on age or diet, most people do not really understand what science is about, nor even what 'science' means."
The $205 million LIGO is designed to detect gravitational waves from Earth using a laser that shoots down two 2.5-mile (4 kilometers) arms outfitted with mirrors. In theory, if a gravitational wave passes, the two lasers will change size relative to each other.
The two LIGO observatories — one in Washington state and another in Louisiana — are seismically isolated so that scientists can try to be sure that they are measuring a gravitational wave instead of another event that could shake up the positioning of the lasers.
Staats worked with the LIGO scientists and used animation to show some of the more complex ideas explored in "LIGO, A Passion for Understanding."
"The film was shot in just 12 days at LIGO Hanford Observatory, mid December 2013," Staats told Space.com via email. "The 3D art was produced by the talented artist Leonardo Buono. The trailer was completed by mid January. Editing of the proper film was initiated the second week of February and completed (mostly) by mid March, with some fine-tuning of key sections. I estimate nearly two hundreds hours editing for the trailer and film."
LIGO's science is on the cutting edge of astrophysics today. Gravitational waves have recently made headlines, thanks to a new result from a telescope called BICEP2 (short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) in Antarctica.
Scientists using the South Pole instrument have discovered what look like the signs of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background — ancient light that spread throughout the universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. If the finding is confirmed, those early ripples in space-time could be the telltale signs of the universe's rapid expansion shortly after the Big Bang.
Although LIGO will not look for these early gravitational waves, Staats did want to include something about primordial gravitational waves in the film. He even crafted a section about them. But the timing didn't work out, so the late-breaking science didn't make the cut.
"Given the time to premiere, we chose to use the next film as a place to thoroughly explain the various frequencies of gravitational waves and what they mean to human observers," Staats said. "It is never easy to drop part of film … but now we can look forward to an in-depth, likely very creative visual explanation in the next chapter."
Staats hopes that he'll have a chance to follow up the new documentary with another. The next film will detail the stories of the founder of LIGO and the new scientists working with the detector today.
Editor's Note: This story was updated at 12:53 p.m. EDT on April 15.
Astrophysicists and theoretical mathematicians say the universe has no center because it loops and folds and twists in and on and through itself. Wherever you are in it, you can call that its local center. I don't have your answer, except to say that wherever you are in the universe at any given moment is the basis for that frame of reference. Of course, as for the bookkeeper: Could it be someone has a much broader reference point? :)God? Possibly - you do know what Bertrand Russell called that, don't you?
some field experimentation/observation...Something I wish was seriously possible in my (our?) lifetime.
Something I wish was seriously possible in my (our?) lifetime.QFT!
I'm thinking about the stuff with God hiding a message in the value of Pi; I don't remember much being made of it in the movie - a pity, too.
Poll: Big Bang a big question for most Americanshttp://news.yahoo.com/poll-big-bang-big-most-074021144.html (http://news.yahoo.com/poll-big-bang-big-most-074021144.html)
AP-GfK Poll: Most agree with scientists on smoking, fewer buy Big Bang, evolution or warming
Associated Press
By Seth Borenstein and Jennifer Agiesta, Associated Press 12 hours ago
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FILE - This March 2, file 2013 file photo shows a woman smoking a cigarette while sitting in her truck in Hayneville, Ala. Few Americans question that smoking causes cancer. But as we get farther from our own bodies and the present, a new AP-GfK poll shows Americans have much more doubts in other concepts that scientists say are basic truth: global warming, evolution, and their largest question mark was in the Big Bang that created the universe. “Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts,” said 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Scheckman. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- While scientists believe the universe began with a Big Bang, most Americans put a big question mark on the concept, an Associated Press-GfK poll found.
Yet when it comes to smoking causing cancer or that a genetic code determines who we are, the doubts disappear.
When considering concepts scientists consider truths, Americans have more skepticism than confidence in those that are farther away from our bodies in scope and time: global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and especially the Big Bang from 13.8 billion years ago.
Rather than quizzing scientific knowledge, the survey asked people to rate their confidence in several statements about science and medicine.
On some, there's broad acceptance. Just 4 percent doubt that smoking causes cancer, 6 percent question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain and 8 percent are skeptical there's a genetic code inside our cells. More — 15 percent — have doubts about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines.
About 4 in 10 say they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or that life on Earth evolved through a process of natural selection, though most were at least somewhat confident in each of those concepts. But a narrow majority — 51 percent — questions the Big Bang theory.
Those results depress and upset some of America's top scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, who vouched for the science in the statements tested, calling them settled scientific facts.
"Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts," said 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley.
The poll highlights "the iron triangle of science, religion and politics," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
And scientists know they've got the shakiest leg in the triangle.
To the public "most often values and beliefs [Sleezebag] science" when they conflict, said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the world's largest scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Political and religious values were closely tied to views on science in the poll, with Democrats more apt than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change.
Confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change decline sharply as faith in a supreme being rises, according to the poll. Likewise, those who regularly attend religious services or are evangelical Christians express much greater doubts about scientific concepts they may see as contradictory to their faith.
"When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can't argue against faith," said 2012 Nobel Prize winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University. "It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable."
But evolution, the age of the Earth and the Big Bang are all compatible with God, except to Bible literalists, said Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biology, philosophy and logic at the University of California, Irvine.
Beyond religious belief, views on science may be tied to what we see with our own eyes. The closer an issue is to ourselves and the less complicated, the easier it is for people to believe, said John Staudenmaier, a Jesuit priest and historian of technology at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Marsha Brooks, a 59-year-old nanny who lives in Washington, D.C., said she's certain smoking causes cancer because she saw her mother, aunts and uncles, all smokers, die of cancer. But when it comes to the universe beginning with a Big Bang or the Earth being about 4.5 billion years old, she has doubts. She explained: "It could be a lack of knowledge. It seems so far" away.
Jorge Delarosa, a 39-year-old architect from Bridgewater, N.J., pointed to a warm 2012 without a winter and said, "I feel the change. There must be a reason." But when it came to Earth's beginnings 4.5 billion years ago, he has doubts simply because "I wasn't there."
Experience and faith aren't the only things affecting people's views on science. Duke University's Lefkowitz sees "the force of concerted campaigns to discredit scientific fact" as a more striking factor, citing significant interest groups — political, business and religious — campaigning against scientific truths on vaccines, climate change and evolution.
The AP-GfK Poll was conducted March 20-24, 2014, using KnowledgePanel, GfK's probability-based online panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. It involved online interviews with 1,012 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points for all respondents.
Respondents were first selected randomly using phone or mail survey methods and were later interviewed online. People selected for KnowledgePanel who didn't otherwise have access to the Internet were provided with the ability to access the Internet at no cost to them.
Dark Matter Could Send Asteroids Crashing into Earth: New Theoryhttp://news.yahoo.com/dark-matter-could-send-asteroids-crashing-earth-theory-103327056.html (http://news.yahoo.com/dark-matter-could-send-asteroids-crashing-earth-theory-103327056.html)
SPACE.com
by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor 17 hours ago
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These illustrations, taken from computer simulations, show a swarm of dark matter clumps around our Milky Way galaxy. Image released July 10, 2012.
Dark matter could sling lethal meteors at Earth, potentially causing mass extinctions like the cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, Harvard scientists say.
Physicists think the mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter makes up five-sixths of all matter in the universe. It was first detected by the strength of its gravitational pull, which apparently helps keep the Milky Way and other galaxies from spinning apart, given the speeds at which they whirl.
Scientists have recently suggested that a thin, dense disk of dark matter about 35 light-years thick lies along the central plane of the Milky Way, cutting through the galaxy's disk of stars. The sun travels in an up-and-down, wavy motion through this plane while orbiting the center of the galaxy.
Researchers suggest this disk of clouds and clumps made of dark matter might disturb the orbits of comets in the outer solar system, hurling them inward. This could lead to catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth, of the kind that likely ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece at Harvard University.
Past research has suggested meteor bombardment of Earth rises and falls in a cycle about 35 million years long. In the past, scientists have proposed a cosmic trigger for this cycle, such as a potential companion star for the sun with the dramatic name "Nemesis."
Instead of blaming a "death star" for these catastrophes, Randall and Reese point out that this cycle of doom closely matches the rate at which the sun passes through the central plane of the Milky Way. This hints that the galaxy's "dark disk" may be the actual culprit.
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Artist’s impression of a 6-mile-wide asteroid striking the Earth. Scientists think approximately 70 of these dinosaur killer-sized or larger asteroids hit Earth between 3.8 and 1.8 billion years ago.
The researchers analyzed craters more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) wide created in the past 250 million years, and compared their pattern against the 35-million-year cycle. They found that it was three times more likely that the craters matched the dark matter cycle than that they occurred randomly.
This cycle might have killed off dinosaurs about 67 million years ago. "The cycle is slightly off for that mass extinction, but we have an incomplete data set regarding impact craters, so maybe with more information the cycle might fit what we know better," Randall told Space.com.
Although a three-to-one chance sounds impressive, the researchers cautioned that this statistical evidence is not overwhelming.
The scientists note that the European Space Agency's Gaia mission could reveal the existence or nonexistence of a dark matter disk. Launched in 2013, this mission will create a precise 3D map of stars throughout the Milky Way, potentially confirming or denying the existence of a dark disk that gravitationally influences stellar motions.
"Even if it's a remote possibility that dark matter can affect the local environment in ways that have noticeable consequences over long periods of time, it's still incredibly interesting," Randall said.
The scientists detailed their findings online April 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Past research has suggested meteor bombardment of Earth rises and falls in a cycle about 35 million years long. In the past, scientists have proposed a cosmic trigger for this cycle, such as a potential companion star for the sun with the dramatic name "Nemesis."
Instead of blaming a "death star" for these catastrophes, Randall and Reese point out that this cycle of doom closely matches the rate at which the sun passes through the central plane of the Milky Way. This hints that the galaxy's "dark disk" may be the actual culprit.
Could Tiny 'Black Hole Atoms' Be Elusive Dark Matter?http://news.yahoo.com/could-tiny-black-hole-atoms-elusive-dark-matter-110706272.html (http://news.yahoo.com/could-tiny-black-hole-atoms-elusive-dark-matter-110706272.html)
SPACE.com
by Katia Moskvitch, SPACE.com Contributor May 1, 2014 7:07 AM
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Dark matter is an invisible material that emits or absorbs no light but betrays its presence by interacting gravitationally with visible matter. This image from Dark Universe shows the distribution of dark matter in the universe
Dark matter, the invisible and mysterious stuff that makes up most of the material universe, might be hiding itself in microscopic black holes, says a team of Russian astrophysicists.
No one knows what dark matter is. But scientists do know that it must exist, because there is not enough visible matter in the cosmos to account for all the gravity that binds galaxies and other large-scale structures together.
Astronomers have been on the hunt for dark matter for decades now, using detectors both on Earth and in space. The new hypothesis, formulated by astrophysicists Vyacheslav Dokuchaev and Yury Eroshenko at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, suggests that dark matter could be made of microscopic — or quantum — "black hole atoms."
The concept is not entirely new; others have suggested that various types of miniature black holes could make up dark matter, which is so named because it apparently neither absorbs nor emits light, and thus cannot be detected directly by telescopes.
Physicists have also long believed that microscopic black holes must have existed in the early universe, because quantum fluctuations in the density of matter just after the Big Bang would have created regions of space dense enough to allow the formation of such tiny black holes.
Some researchers believe that the universe could still be full of such "primordial black holes."
Enigmatic 'friedmons'
The new study by Dokuchaev and Eorshenko suggests a specific type of quantum black hole might exist: so-called black hole atoms. These microscopic black holes would originally have had an electric charge, the researchers say. This charge would have attracted protons or electrons, leaving the tiny black hole electrically neutral, just like an atom.
The idea is partly based on the "friedmon theory" proposed in the 1970s by prominent Russian physicists Moisei Markov and Valeri Frolov of the University of Alberta in Canada.
A friedmon is a mathematical solution of the Einstein field equations, which are key constituents of the theory of general relativity. To an external observer, a friedmon looks like a micro blackhole with anelectric charge the same as that of the electron.
However, the friedmon's interior can be macroscopically large — up to the size of the known universe, Frolov, who was not involved in the new study, told Space.com.
And a friedmon with an electron moving around it is similar to an atom, he added.
Markov and Frolov never made the link between the friedmon and dark matter. But Dokuchaev says that such neutral black hole atoms should have the same properties that dark matter is thought to possess.
The black holes would have about the same mass as an asteroid, from 10^14 kilograms to 10^23 kilograms, but be even smaller than atoms. Their interaction with ordinary matter would also be extremely weak — even weaker than that of neutrinos, the researchers said.
The quantum black holes would therefore be dark, massive, non-interacting particles – with properties that “"one needs for the dark matter candidates,”" write Dokuchaev and Eroshenko write in a paper published in March in the journal Advances in High Energy Physics.
Elusive dark matter
But Frolov doesn't think that the idea quite works.
"Using [friedmons] for the explanation of the dark matter looks contradictory. Dark matter must be formed of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), while friedmon atoms 'participate' in the electromagnetic interaction," he said.
"Possibly for this reason, Dr. Dokuchaev proposed to 'put' an electron orbit inside the friedmon. However, in this case the friedmon configuration will not be stabilized by an electric charge, and its external mass may be reduced to zero value," Frolov added. "Another unsolved problem of his model is the mechanism of the friedmon's formation. One can expect that in order to produce a sufficient number of friedmons to explain the dark matter, in the early universe there must exist large small-scale inhomogeneities. This is difficult to expect in the standard inflation models."
Other cosmologists also have doubts.
"Usually, black holes are not expected to be charged in astrophysical or cosmological environments, because they quickly get neutralized by accreting charged particles of opposite sign — electrons or protons — from their environment," said Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University.
But Dokuchaev is convinced that his concept is just as good as all the other dark matter theories; after all, no one has yet spotted this mysterious invisible stuff.
Black hole atoms now join a long list of candidates for dark matter particles, from supersymmetric neutralinos, WIMPs and axions to warm sterile neutrinos and many more, Dokuchaev told Space.com. Verifying whether any of them is the real deal will require catching one first, he added.
And spotting a neutral black hole atom should be possible, the Russian researchers say, because the formation of these peculiar invisible objects might produce a detectable signal.
When an electron is drawn into a quantum black hole so that a black hole atom is formed, the process would release energy in the form of a flash of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the researchers write. Also, electron jumps from one level to another would release photons, making black hole atoms "observable in principle," the researchers add.
Yes, whereas many SciFi authors spin a good yarn, LeGuin weaves an entire tapestry.
NASA's Dark Energy Hunt Combines Powerful New Tools and 2 Missionshttp://news.yahoo.com/nasas-dark-energy-hunt-combines-powerful-tools-2-110751699.html (http://news.yahoo.com/nasas-dark-energy-hunt-combines-powerful-tools-2-110751699.html)
SPACE.com
by Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor 6 hours ago
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An artist's rendition of the proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission, which will study dark energy, extrasolar planets and objects in the near-infrared.
Dark energy makes up nearly three-fourths of the universe, driving its accelerating expansion, but the substance is still mysterious to scientists that study it.
In upcoming years, NASA has plans to investigate this powerful force with the new WFIRST-AFTA mission and a strong role in the European Space Agency's Euclid mission.
"NASA has plans for a robust dark energy portfolio over the next decade," Jason Rhodes of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said during a news conference at the April meeting of the American Physics Society in Savannah, Georgia.
'A tripod of science'
NASA's proposed Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets, or WFIRST-AFTA, will use five probes to perform three complimentary surveys in its search to clarify the nature of dark energy.
"WFIRST-AFTA is a survey mission to make the most precise measurements on the influence of dark energy and dark matter on the universe," Neil Gehrels, WFIRST project scientist of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com by email.
Type Ia supernovas are thought to form from the explosion of a white dwarf star. Because these powerful detonations all share similar brightness that can be viewed in distant galaxies, they are regarded as "standard candles" of cosmology. Recording how dim a supernova appears provides an indication of their distance.
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An artist's view shows three different potential methods of forming Type 1a supernovae, the 'standard candles' used to measure the expansion of the universe. The first two panels show a white dwarf in a binary system accumulating matter
WFIRST-AFTA will survey nearly 3,000 Type Ia supernovas to determine how rapidly they are moving away from the Milky Way due to the expansion of the universe. Scientists think dark energy drives this expansion.
"We can trace out how the universe is expanding more rapidly in the current epoch than earlier in the history of the universe and use that to constrain models of dark energy," Gehrels said.
The telescope will also perform a High Latitude Imaging Survey to determine the effects of dark matter structures on the light from distant galaxies. Einstein predicted — and scientists have subsequently confirmed—that massive structures bend the light coming from objects behind them, serving as a gravitational lens. Astronomers have used such natural telescopes formed by features such as massive galaxies to study objects throughout the universe.
Dark matter works the same way, bending the light from galaxies that sit behind it. By searching for small distortions of galactic shapes, WFIRST-AFTA will allow scientists to determine the dark matter distribution along the lines of sight.
The third dark energy survey planned for WFIRST-AFTA will study baryonic acoustic oscillations, or BAOs. Ripples of sound waves left over from the early universe grew into the larger structures of the universe over time. Accurately measuring the position and distance of a hundred million galaxies will map these disturbances to determine the evolution of dark energy over time.
The three complimentary surveys combine to provide a broad portrait of dark energy.
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An artist's concept of the ESA's Euclid misssion to study dark energy.
"The combined power of all these probes will give the best understanding of dark energy in the current universe and how it evolved with time as the universe expanded," Gehrels said. "WFIRST-AFTA is the only observatory, space or ground based, that combines all of these probes."
Proposed to launch in the mid-2020s, WFIRST-AFTA is not searching solely for information about dark energy. Instead, it combines what Gehrels calls "a tripod of science." The telescope will also image planets outside the solar system and perform near-infrared surveys.
Euclid
In addition to its own mission, NASA will participate in the European Space Agency's Euclid mission. Last year, NASA nominated 40 American scientists to join the 14 American scientists already part of the international Euclid Consortium, the team responsible for the science, data production and instruments for the mission. NASA will also provide 16 infrared detectors for the telescope.
Euclid's goal is to understand the nature of dark energy and its role in the expansion of the universe. To do so, it plans to use two complimentary probes to study the phenomenon. The first probe will study weak gravitational lensing, while the second will examine BAOs.
Orbiting at the second Lagrangian point, Euclid will use two instruments to study a wide region of the sky free from the contaminating light from the solar system and the galaxy. It will also observe two "Euclid Deep Fields" of the early universe.
Of the approximately 10 billion sources Euclid intends to observe, more than 1 billion will be studied for weak lensing, while tens of millions of galaxies will be measured for clustering caused by BAOs.
"WFIRST-AFTA and Euclid will make complimentary observations, with WFIRST-AFTA observing fainter galaxies and Euclid observing more sky," Gehrels said.
"The combined data set will be much larger and more accurate than any other BAO measurement."
When combined with ground-based observations over a variety of wavelengths, the new observations that WFIRST-AFTA and Euclid will obtain should provide significant insights into dark energy and the expansion of the universe.
"The best constraints on dark energy in the 2020s will come from a combination of Euclid, WFIRST and ground-based data," Rhodes said.
It may seem circular, but not if you read the second paragraph. The point is that, if you accept GR and you accept modern astronomical observations, there is some amount of space-curving energy that exists in the universe. It was the initial observation of the accelerating expansion of the universe that showed this energy exists, but subsequent observations of a wide variety of different phenomena confirmed the amount of energy that is out there which cannot be accounted for by matter and radiation.You're telling me popular conclusions I'm already familiar with, not why this explanation works where no other does, or even why I should trust that the observations in question out to be considered complete enough.
I was wondering when you guys would ask that. To answer the question of, "Why isn't dark energy anything else?" I'd suggest reading these four blog posts:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/04/dark-energy-hard-to-kill-part/ (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/04/dark-energy-hard-to-kill-part/)
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/05/dark-energy-gaining-a-foothold/ (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/05/dark-energy-gaining-a-foothold/)
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/11/dark-energy-where-did-the-ligh/ (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/11/dark-energy-where-did-the-ligh/)
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/30/dark-energy-beyond-supernovae/ (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/11/30/dark-energy-beyond-supernovae/)
They provide a good explanation of what the original observations meant, what else scientists thought they could mean, and why scientists are now very confident that those other explanations don't hold up.
Additionally, this guy was going through grad school at about the time of the supernova discoveries. For several years, he (and many other cosmologists) did not believe that dark energy was responsible for the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe. But he eventually changed his mind as new evidence came in, and so did the cosmology community. Here's a good account of why he changed his mind.No sale. Those are too short and skip too many steps to be convincing. Still no explanation of what dark energy is, only what it's alleged to have done. Not good enough.
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/07/19/one-does-not-simply-believe-in-dark-energy/ (http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/07/19/one-does-not-simply-believe-in-dark-energy/)
No sale. Those are too short and skip too many steps to be convincing. Still no explanation of what dark energy is, only what it's alleged to have done. Not good enough.
My vote is something no one's thought of yet.
...I'm thinking about those braided rings of Saturn found by Voyager 1 in 1980 - Newton's laws are long-standing and rigorous, yet here was something they didn't even know was possible, and I don't believe the mechanisms are completely understood yet. -Because the universe tends to be more complex than we imagine, and our observations will never be complete...
Any way He said they ruled out dust and other explanations without explaining.
I'm still wondering if there aren't gravity waves and magnetic fields, or some other such residue of the big bang out there affecting the red shift in la supernovas .
Lori, can you explain the braided rings to me, then? Has anyone worked the math out and survived peer review?
Why energy?
Lorizael, would you care to comment on my doubts regarding the original SNIa time-dilation conclusions back on page one, here is a link
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=7876.msg44865#msg44865 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=7876.msg44865#msg44865)
So dark energy is more or less the cosmological constant? Nobody really understands the exactly what the latter is either, but it's at least a familiar concept - and the name doesn't trigger my bullcrap detector. Bad move w/ the new name, cosmology community. Some of us can think for ourselves and are buzzword-averse... ;clenchedteeth
So dark energy is more or less the cosmological constant? Nobody really understands the exactly what the latter is either, but it's at least a familiar concept - and the name doesn't trigger my bullcrap detector. Bad move w/ the new name, cosmology community. Some of us can think for ourselves and are buzzword-averse... ;clenchedteeth
There are a couple models of dark energy, but the leading candidate is essentially a cosmological constant--energy associated with space itself.
Any way He said they ruled out dust and other explanations without explaining.
The third post goes into some detail about why dust cannot be the culprit. It can't be normal dust because normal dust wouldn't affect all wavelengths of light equally the way observed dimming appears. And it can't be an unknown type of grey dust because that would cause a steadily increasing level of dimming the farther out you get, which is not what astronomers actually observe.QuoteI'm still wondering if there aren't gravity waves and magnetic fields, or some other such residue of the big bang out there affecting the red shift in la supernovas .
There are certainly gravity waves acting on large scales, but cosmologists have pretty good models of what sort of gravity waves would have been produced by the Big Bang, and there's no evidence at present to suggest that could account for extremely uniform dimming of distant supernovae. Moreover, there's significantly more evidence than supernovae alone pointing to dark energy.
Magnetic fields are extremely unlikely, however, because there's no good reason why magnetic fields would produce a uniform effect across the universe. Magnetic fields are only going to exist in the vicinity of charged particles, and which means they're only going to occur in areas of high density. So any effect from a magnetic field would depend on where you look, and to date the expansion of the universe looks identical in all directions.
Lori, can you explain the braided rings to me, then? Has anyone worked the math out and survived peer review?
Closer observation has revealed that the rings only appear braided and really just have a number of clumps in them. The clumps are thought to be due to the presence of a large number of hard to detect mini-moons that inhabit and influence the rings.QuoteWhy energy?
Because so far scientists have seen nothing in the universe not composed of matter/energy. As far as we can tell, that's what reality is--matter and energy. If scientists find something new happening, there are two basic ideas: new matter/energy, or new laws. There's no reason to think any other option is meaningful at this point.
So yes, dark energy could be some heretofore unknown consequence of general relativity, but so far the evidence doesn't suggest that. And when you have an incredibly successful theory that has passed every test thrown at it with stunning accuracy, there's not currently a good reason to believe new laws are necessary.
Think about the discovery of Neptune. Newton's laws predicted that Uranus would behave in a particular way--and it wasn't. This surprised a lot of scientists at the time, because people pretty much thought Newton's laws were perfect. Rather than abandon the theory, however, scientists proposed that there was simply data they were missing: a new planet perturbing Uranus' orbit. Lo and behold, math was done, predictions were made, and Neptune was discovered.
Basically the same thing has happened with dark energy. An anomaly was discovered. Math was done, predictions were made, and everything discovered so far in the CMB and in cosmic structure has pointed to dark energy as the culprit. The only difference is that scientists haven't figured out exactly what dark energy is yet. But seriously, it's only been 16 years.
New laws are possible. And new laws do make their way into physics. After all, it turned out Newton's laws weren't perfect. They couldn't account for Mercury's precession, famously. At the time, just like with Uranus, astronomers predicted the presence of another planet. But it turned out they were wrong. What was needed was a modification to gravity. There's an important difference here, though. Einstein didn't invent general relativity to account for a simple astronomical anomaly. General relativity accounts for a gigantic amount of large-scale (and some small-scale) behavior.
The same will have to be true for any law that can explain the effect of dark energy. If you're going to modify gravity, it's going to have far-reaching consequences that make testable predictions. But the problem is that a century's worth of data has confirmed general relativity in essentially every regime but the quantum one. There's very little room for a new law of gravity that isn't quantum gravity. And if that's the case--well, you certainly can't claim scientists aren't working on that. Quantum gravity is an extremely active and vibrant field in theoretical physics.
I wonder how the observed "background mass" of the Universe would look with a gazillion starships flitting between stars at near lightspeed...
I don't know if this has been refuted since I first read it, but the faster something goes in interstellar space, the more massive it appears to be.
I'm totally lost when it comes to the part about dark energy having negative pressure. What does that mean in this context? I assume they aren't comparing it to Earth's atmosphere.
So the braiding of Saturn's rings turned out to be an optical illusion, and the surprising orbit of Uranus turned out to be more of something we already know- a planet.
That's the other reason why I was skeptical of dark energy. I presumed a red shift was either an optical illusion of some kind, or something out there that we've found elsewhere in the universe.
If not matter, then something else must be affecting the light, such as a force.
But if not that could something else have been distorted in the Big Bang? Time, Space, or Energy?
Explosions have shock waves, atmosphere condensed to the hardness of steel.
Here in the middle of the continent, we still get earthquakes from the crust decompressing from the ice age.
Could something we know have been compressed to the point of becoming a lens?
Could a decompression account for the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe?
As far as cosmologists are able to tell, the most profound distortions of the Big Bang are the local "clumps" of matter that formed--galaxies, stars, planets, you, me.
(BU, is there a multi-quote function somewhere I'm missing?)When you hit Quote, it shows up in the Quick-Reply, right? You can just do that over and over before you post.
It's a little misleading to say that 2 out of 3 tests are coming back negative. Astronomers have looked for time dilation in a lot of supernovae but not a lot of GRBs or quasars. The reason for this is the accepted reliability of 1a supernovae as standard candles. They're not perfectly reliable, no, which is why the studies done on them have a wide variety of criteria researchers can use to rule out a supernova as a good candidate. For example, there are anomalous super-Chandrasekhar mass supernovae with much greater than expected luminosities, but far lower kinetic energies. This difference is kinetic energy is a red flag that lets researchers toss out particular candidates.
Quasars and GRBs, however, have far more problems in the reliability of their light curves, so they haven't been looked at as often for use as standard candles or confirmation of time dilation. That they don't exhibit the expected level of time dilation suggests either that time dilation isn't occurring or that we simply don't have good data on GRBs and quasars. Cosmologists accept the latter interpretation because it is not time dilation alone that lends support to the theory expansion and the Big Bang. In fact, there is a wealth of evidence that supports the reality of the Big Bang and the metric expansion of space.
To begin with, general relativity itself suggests the Big Bang. The problem that originally led Einstein to introduce a cosmological constant is easily solved by assuming an expanding universe. That the universe is cold now and was once hot (as exhibited by the CMB) is evidence of the Big Bang. That distant galaxies are progressively redshifted is evidence of the Big Bang. That space is virtually flat on cosmic scales is evidence of the Big Bang. That the energy density of the universe was much greater in the past is evidence of the Big Bang. That hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements is evidence of the Big Bang. That galaxies are clustered the way they are is evidence of the Big Bang.
Essentially every piece of cosmological data suggests the Big Bang. Some pieces also suggest other theories, but when taken as a whole, it is the Big Bang that has the most solid observational foundation. So an anomaly in unreliable sets of data is not really trouble for the theory. It's a question that needs to be further examined, studied, and answered, but by itself it cannot tear down all the support that the Big Bang theory has.
4 in 10 Americans Believe God Created Earth 10,000 Years Agohttp://news.yahoo.com/4-10-americans-believe-god-created-earth-10-122212736.html (http://news.yahoo.com/4-10-americans-believe-god-created-earth-10-122212736.html)
LiveScience.com
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer 2 hours ago
Four in 10 Americans believe God created the Earth and anatomically modern humans, less than 10,000 years ago, according to a new Gallup poll.
About half of Americans believe humans evolved over millions of years, with most of those people saying that God guided the process. Religious, less educated, and older respondents were likelier to espouse a young Earth creationist view — that life was created some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — according to the poll.
Though the percentage of people who believe in creationism has changed little over the decades, the percentage of people who believe humans evolved without God has more than doubled, and the percentage who believe in God-guided evolution has decreased.
Supernatural beliefs
Americans consistently report high levels of belief in the supernatural. About 80 percent of Americans believe in miracles and three-quarters believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, according to a 2013 Pew survey.
At the same time, while most Americans have a healthy respect for science, many could use a refresher course in the basics. For instance, a 2014 National Science Foundation study found that only three out of four Americans know that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, and a large percentage didn't know the Earth's core was hot. Large percentages didn't know that the father's sperm determines a baby's sex.
Evolving views?
As part of the Values and Beliefs Survey, Gallup called a random sample of 1,028 landline and cellphone users and asked them which of three descriptions most closely matched their beliefs: that humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process; that humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process; or that God created human beings pretty much in their present form sometime in the last 10,000 years or so. Gallup has asked people similar questions since 1982.
About 42 percent espoused the creationist view presented, whereas 31 percent said God guided the evolutionary process, and just 19 said they believe evolution operated without God involved.
Religion was positively tied to creationism beliefs, with more than two-thirds of those who attend weekly religious services espousing a belief in a young Earth, compared with just 23 percent of those who never go to church saying the same.
Just over a quarter of those with a college degree hold creationist beliefs, compared with 57 percent of people with such views who had at most a high-school education, the poll found.
Knowledge key
Most of the people who believed in evolution also said they were knowledgeable about the theory, whereas those who said they were not too familiar with the theory also were less likely to believe in it.
Americans' belief in creationism is at odds with scientific consensus. Almost all scientists who study human origins believe that we evolved from other life-forms over millions of years. In fact, humans, or individuals in the genus Homo, are said to have emerged on Earth some 2.5 million years ago.
Inept questions, if phrased as the article has them...
Physicists Debate Discovery of Gravitational Ripples from the Big Banghttp://news.yahoo.com/physicists-debate-discovery-gravitational-ripples-big-bang-103450332.html (http://news.yahoo.com/physicists-debate-discovery-gravitational-ripples-big-bang-103450332.html)
SPACE.com
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer 5 hours ago
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This artist's illustration depicts the creation of gravitational waves from two orbiting black holes as ripples in space-time. In March 2014, astronomers announced the first detection of long-sought gravitational waves
NEW YORK – The physics world was agog in March over the announcement that astronomers had possibly found ripples in space-time from the earliest moments of the universe. But some scientists now question whether the findings may be nothing more than galactic dust.
If the finding of these ripples, or primordial gravitational waves, is confirmed, it would represent the best evidence yet for inflation, the idea that the universe underwent an explosive burst in size in the earliest fractions of a second after the Big Bang. If the findings are discounted, inflation could still be correct, but scientists must provide other evidence.
A panel of well-known cosmologists debated the discovery and the model of cosmic inflation itself at an event here on Friday (May 30) at the World Science Festival, moderated by theoretical physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University in New York.
A rapid expansion
One of the panelists, cosmologist Alan Guth of MIT, developed the hypothesis of inflation in 1980 to explain the large-scale structure of the universe. Another panelist, cosmologist Andrei Linde of Stanford University, helped develop the model of inflation.
The Big Bang left behind remnant heat, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Radio astronomer Robert Wilson, who was in the audience, discovered the CMB along with physicist Arno Penzias in 1964. The CMB contains tiny temperature variations, but is remarkably uniform, which might be expected if the universe expanded from a very small region.
If inflation occurred, scientists suspect it might have left an imprint on the CMB, produced by gravitational waves, which would appear as a swirly pattern in the CMB. John Kovac, an astronomer at Harvard University — another of the panelists — and colleagues claimed to have detected this pattern in March using the BICEP2 instrument at the South Pole.
Controversy brewing
But since Kovac's team announced its findings, the results have come under fire from scientists who question whether the team had ruled out other possible sources that would produce the same swirly signature, such as galactic dust. In fact, two independent analyses of the data now suggest it could be accounted for by dust in the Milky Way.
In the panel discussion, Kovac admitted some uncertainty, but defended the findings. "The pattern is not there by random chance," Kovac said. His team has further analyzed their data and feels "very confident" the results were not spurious, he said.
But not everyone took the controversy lightly, including cosmologist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, who helped develop the model of inflation but now believes in an alternative model of the universe that suggests the existence of higher dimensions. Steinhardt took issue with how Kovac's team characterized their findings in March, saying that they were too confident in their statements at the time.
Other groups are also looking for these ripples from the Big Bang, including balloon-based and space-based telescopes. The European Space Agency's Planck satellite is expected to release its own data very soon, possibly in the next three weeks, and should offer strong evidence one way or the other.
Exciting times
Despite having helped develop it, Steinhardt now questions inflation itself. He said the theory was in some ways not falsifiable, which veers closer to the realm of metaphysics.
But inflation is still the most widespread theory for how the universe began, Alan Guth said. Andre Linde compared inflation to democracy, which has been called "the worst form of government there is, except for all the other forms."
As the evening panel concluded, Linde steered the discussion to a more hopeful note, about what it means to be a part of the endeavor to understand the universe in these times.
"There's something very exciting happening right now," he said.
That's third grade science they're failing, right there...
Some of these individuals appear to be ignorant of many basic scientific facts. Does Gallup call many of the same people year after year asking these types of questions? Can I make it anymore clear? One thousand and twenty-six people are not a representative sampling of everyone in the United States of America.That's third grade science they're failing, right there...
I'm okay if they're not teaching baby building to third graders.
The fact that so many adults don't know what they're doing, not so much.
So, if many believe that the sun orbits the Earth, same as the moon, I'm presuming they don't know why we have seasons and years, either. Well, at least they don't think the Earth is flat.
Some of these individuals appear to be ignorant of many basic scientific facts. Does Gallup call many of the same people year after year asking these types of questions? Can I make it anymore clear? One thousand and twenty-six people are not a representative sampling of everyone in the United States of America.That's third grade science they're failing, right there...
I'm okay if they're not teaching baby building to third graders.
The fact that so many adults don't know what they're doing, not so much.
So, if many believe that the sun orbits the Earth, same as the moon, I'm presuming they don't know why we have seasons and years, either. Well, at least they don't think the Earth is flat.
Remember a LOT of people in a representative sample are going to be GEEZERS, 65+, who were educated in the 1950's or earlier, lots of these things were either unknown or were not considered 'basic' back then. Then account for their decades of non-usage and their senile brains and it would be a miracle if most seniors know ANY science what so ever.
I don't find it misleading, it is a valid test, perhaps not a test of the same quality as the SNIa as you claim but doesn't mean it can be ignored. While I agree that GRBs are very new phenomena the Quasar is quite old and their should be no shortage of study on them, granted Quasars are not believed to be standard candles, but this isn't required because they pulsate and we can simply look at the average pulsation rate vs Redshift and the time-dilation would readily pop-out of a large sample size if it was really their, we should have more faith in that large data set then the vastly smaller and perhaps overly pruned set of SNIa's?
Outside of time-dilation their is another property of expanding space geometry which is very simple and direct, distant objects should appear to have their angular size stretched and the surface brightness diminished in proportion to the spacial expansion. This is call the Tolman surface-brightness. When galaxies are examined we also fails to get the effect BB theory requires, and the defense offered that galaxies were brighter and smaller in the past it just the right amount to cancel out the expected effects is quite a stretch.
To run down some of the other big piece of evidence and show that they aren't really as strong as described.
Redshift - Light could easily be stretched by another phenomenon in empty space, this is called 'Tired Light' and while we have no theoretical model for WHY such a thing might happen we can test between them by looking for time-dilation which would occur in BB but not in a Tired Light model. But the existence of Redshift in and of itself simply rules out any model which lacks one of the two mechanisms that could produce it.
The SN 2003fg (designated SNLS-03D3bb by the Canada-France-Hawaii Supernova Legacy Survey and sometimes called the "Champagne Supernova"), was an aberrant type Ia supernova discovered in 2003 and described in the journal Nature on September 21 of 2006.[1] It was nicknamed after the 1996 song "Champagne Supernova" by English rock band Oasis.[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_2003fg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_2003fg)
It may potentially revolutionize thinking about the physics of supernovae because of its highly unusual nature, in particular the mass of its progenitor. According to the current understanding, white dwarf stars go supernova type Ia when they approach 1.4 solar masses (1.4 times the mass of the Sun), termed the Chandrasekhar limit; the explosion occurs when the central density grows to a critical 2 × 109 g/cm3. The mass added to the star is believed to be donated by a companion star, either from the companion's stellar wind or the overflow of its Roche lobe as it evolves.[3]
However, the progenitor of SN 2003fg reached two solar masses before exploding, more massive than thought possible. The primary mechanism invoked to explain how a white dwarf can exceed the Chandrasekhar mass is unusually rapid rotation; the added support effectively increases the critical mass. An alternative explanation is that the explosion resulted from the merger of two white dwarfs. The evidence indicating a higher than normal mass comes from the light curve and spectra of the supernova—while it was particularly overluminous the kinetic energies measured from ejecta signatures in the spectra appeared smaller than usual. The explanation is that more of the total kinetic energy budget was expended climbing out of the deeper than usual potential well.[4]
This is important because the brightness of type Ia supernovae was thought to be essentially uniform, making them useful "standard candles" in measuring distances in the universe. Such an aberrant type Ia supernova could throw distances and other scientific work into doubt; however, the light curve characteristics of SNLS-03D3bb were such that it would never have been mistaken for an ordinary high-redshift Type Ia supernova.
The discovery was made on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Keck Telescope, both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and announced by researchers at the University of Toronto.[1] The supernova occurred in a galaxy some 4 billion light-years from Earth.
BB Theory is not at all 'useful', indeed no Cosmology of any culture or any times has ever been useful in the material way that we expect 'science' to be, the satisfaction of 'knowing' is all we ever get from cosmology which makes all cosmology dangerously close to philosophy. I think this is why we consistently feel TOO confident in our cosmology theories, they are not theories which ever get put to work like a real theory should, cosmology isn't allowed to have rough edges (and if it dose it's an observational problem never the fault of the theory).
In contrast GR is actually being used to do stuff like GPS satellites in which time-dilation is critical to the calculations that makes the system work. Quantum Mechanics is used to design every Solar-Panel and is increasingly becoming relevant in Integrated circuits. These theories don't need to be monolithic explanations of everything because they work in their respective territories, and the admission that GR is false doesn't prevent us from using it.
But we do one more very important think because of falsification, we ACTIVELY search for replacement theories. People who want to work on Quantum Gravity are not scoffed at and told 'that's impossible' the way anyone who dares to question BB theory is. So I see a big difference in the kind of attitude that should exist around a falsified (but still taught and studied) BB theory vs the currently unquestionable status it has within the astronomical community.
I agree with eternal meta-stability because I find a 'beginning' of time without an end asymmetrical and illogical (closed universes and eternal ones are both acceptable).
A far better way to approach is to go piece-meal with theories that explain particular things better then some aspect of BB theory. The best example of this is MOND which can predict with incredible accuracy all the velocity and structure in galaxies without the freedom of putting dark matter wherever we wish, and on a cluster scale is only needs modest quantities of normal gas between galaxies to work at that level too. MOND dose not presume to explain the whole cosmos, it just knee-caps one leg of the BB theory with a single very tight observation/model linkage that makes Dark matter look useless by comparison. I foresee more such little theories emerging and a sticking, then only once these pieces are in place will they be fitted together into a new cosmology.
Experts cast doubt on Big Bang bolstering discoveryhttp://news.yahoo.com/experts-cast-doubt-big-bang-bolstering-discovery-060400200.html (http://news.yahoo.com/experts-cast-doubt-big-bang-bolstering-discovery-060400200.html)
AFP
By Jean-Louis Santini 11 hours ago
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A NASA image shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of the Milky Way galaxy (AFP Photo/)
Washington (AFP) - Astrophysicists are casting doubt on what just recently was deemed a breakthrough in confirming how the universe was born: the observation of gravitational waves that apparently rippled through space right after the Big Bang.
If proven to be correctly identified, these waves -- predicted in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity -- would confirm the rapid and violent growth spurt of the universe in the first fraction of a second marking its existence, 13.8 billion years ago.
The apparent first direct evidence of such so-called cosmic inflation -- a theory that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in barely the blink of an eye -- was announced in March by experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The detection was made with the help of a telescope called BICEP2, stationed at the South Pole.
"Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today," John Kovac, leader of the BICEP2 collaboration at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said at the time.
The telescope targeted a specific area known as the "Southern Hole" outside the galaxy where there is little dust or extra galactic material to interfere with what humans could see.
By observing the cosmic microwave background, or a faint glow left over from the Big Bang, the scientists said small fluctuations gave them new clues about the conditions in the early universe.
The gravitational waves rippled through the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and these images were captured by the telescope, they claimed.
If confirmed by other experts, some said the work could be a contender for the Nobel Prize.
- 'Serious flaws' -
But not everyone is convinced of the findings, with skepticism surfacing recently on blogs and scientific US journals such as Science and New Scientist.
Paul Steinhardt, director of Princeton University's Center for Theoretical Science, addressed the issue in the prestigious British journal Nature in early June.
"Serious flaws in the analysis have been revealed that transform the sure detection into no detection," Steinhardt wrote, citing an independent analysis of the BICEP2 findings.
That analysis was carried out by David Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist who is also at Princeton.
Spergel queried whether what the BICEP2 telescope picked up really came from the first moments of the universe's existence.
"What I think, it is not certain whether polarized emissions come from galactic dust or from the early universe," he told AFP.
"We know that galactic dust emits polarized radiations, we see that in many areas of the sky, and what we pointed out in our paper is that pattern they have seen is just as consistent with the galactic dust radiations as with gravitational waves."
When using just one frequency, as these scientists did, it is impossible to distinguish between gravitational waves and galactic emissions, Spergel added.
The question will likely be settled in the coming months when another, competing group, working with the European Space Agency's Planck telescope, publishes its results.
That telescope observes a large part of the sky -- versus the BICEP2's two percent -- and carries out measurements in six frequencies, according to Spergel.
"They should revise their claim," he said of the BICEP2 team. "I think in retrospect, they should have been more careful about making a big announcement."
He went on to say that, contrary to normal procedure, there was no external check of the data before it was made public.
Philipp Mertsch of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University said data from Planck and another team should be able to "shed more light on whether it is primordial gravitational waves or dust in the Milky Way."
"Let me stress, however, that what is leaving me (and many of my colleagues) unsatisfied with the state of affairs: If it is polarized dust emission, where is it coming from?" he said in an email.
Kovac, an associate professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard, declined to respond to requests for comment.
Another member of the team, Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology, also declined to be interviewed.
At the time of their announcement in March, the scientists said they spent three years analyzing their data to rule out any errors.
I'm totally lost when it comes to the part about dark energy having negative pressure. What does that mean in this context? I assume they aren't comparing it to Earth's atmosphere.
Nearly a Century Later, Edwin Hubble's Legacy Lives On (Op-Ed)http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-century-later-edwin-hubbles-legacy-lives-op-192323608.html (http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-century-later-edwin-hubbles-legacy-lives-op-192323608.html)
SPACE.com
By Patrick McCarthy, director, Giant Magellan Telescope Organization 6 hours ago
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In this space wallpaper, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have assembled a comprehensive picture of the evolving universe among the most colorful deep space images ever captured by the 24-year-old telescope.
Patrick McCarthy was part of the Wide Field Camera 3 science team and currently serves as director of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
In the fall of 1917, after a decade of labor, the 100-inch (2.5-meter) telescope at Mount Wilson in Southern California was dedicated. Edwin Hubble would spend many cold nights at the Newtonian focus of the instrument, which was the world's largest telescope at that time. Now, nearly a century later, another 100-inch telescope — the aptly named Hubble Space Telescope (HST) — has just provided the most complete, informative and breathtaking image of the deep universe.
Hubble and his assistant, former mule skinner Milton Humason, made painstaking, long exposures to obtain the sharpest images and spectra of the spiral nebula. Hubble showed that nebulae are "island universes" like Earth's own Milky Way galaxy, but at vast distances. Hubble improved scientists' understanding of the size of the cosmos by orders of magnitude. More remarkably still, he discovered that the universe of galaxies is not static, but rather expanding at an astonishing rate.
The new Hubble Ultra-Deep Field is humanity's first truly "full color" image of the cosmos. By combining deep ultraviolet with visible light and near-infrared images of distant galaxies, the pan-chromatic deep field allows scientists to trace the birth, life and death of stars across the full span of cosmic time. The Ultra-Deep Field provides an awe-inspiring view of more than 100,000 galaxies — a small but representative sampling of the more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
Galaxies like Earth's own Milky Way are composed of roughly 100 billion stars. Some, like the sun, emit most of their radiation in the visible band — with wavelengths between 0.3 and 1.0 microns. Others, like the red giant Betelgeuse in Orion, emit copious radiation in the infrared, while the massive young star Rigel, also in Orion, pumps much of its prodigious output of photons in the vacuum ultraviolet, light with wavelengths less than 0.3 microns that is absorbed by ozone in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
To assemble a full census of the stellar content of a galaxy, and a full census of the contents of the universe, astronomers must sample a broad spectral range — from the deep ultraviolet to the thermal infrared.
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Patrick McCarthy was part of the Wide Field Camera 3 science team and currently serves as director of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization.
If you think of a galaxy as an orchestra — an ensemble of players that work in harmony to produce a whole greater than its parts — the visible light samples the violins and the brass, the infrared captures the bass and kettle drums, while the ultraviolet picks out the flutes, piccolos and triangles.
In the case of galaxies, the ultraviolet-bright stars carry the tune of creation — they trace the formation of stars and the conversion of hydrogen to helium, and then helium to carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and on through the periodic table to iron. The white-to-yellow stars, the midrange of the galaxy spectral band, is filled by middle-mass and middle-aged stars. The long-lived low-mass dwarf stars are vast in number, and like the bass viola, provide a foundation to the orchestra out of the limelight occupied by the brighter instruments. The young massive stars shine brightly in the ultraviolet for a short time and then exit the stage via spectacular supernova explosions.
The first Hubble Deep Field image, captured in 1994, changed scientists' view of the universe by revealing a rich tapestry of galaxies with shapes and structures foreign to the galaxy shapes that are seen in the universe today. Many are in the throes of violent collisions and mergers that may transform them from one type of galaxy — such as spirals like the Milky Way — into other types, like the massive elliptical galaxies that are dominated by random orbits rather than orderly rotation.
A major technical addition to Hubble's suite of cameras has allowed astronomers to first add the infrared, and now the ultraviolet, to create the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field images. For the first time, astronomers can hear the full orchestra of galaxies and their constituent stars. Wide-Field Camera 3, the instrument that revitalized HST in 2009, is a marvel of technology. It contains two separate cameras — one optimized for the ultraviolet, and the other for the infrared. Each uses optics crafted to optimize performance in the selected waveband and focused on state-of-the-art detectors. The ultraviolet camera uses a charge coupled device (CCD) similar to that found in handheld digital cameras, but optimized for low-light-level work in the harsh environment of space. The infrared camera uses a diode array that is only sensitive to light in the range from 0.6 microns to 1.7 microns. This makes it blind to the thermal radiation from the warm optics on Hubble. By staring deeply into space for hundreds of hours, the camera collected a handful of photons per galaxy — photons that have traveled for billions of years before reaching Hubble's mirror.
The Deep Field provides a rich image of the distant cosmos, but many of the key questions regarding the evolution of the universe require spectroscopy — the dispersal of the light into its constituent colors — to reveal their distances, masses and internal dynamics. Fortunately, there is a new generation of telescopes on the horizon, both in space and on the ground, that promise to revolutionize our understanding of the distant universe.
NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency are poised to launch the successor to Hubble — the James Webb Space Telescope — in 2018. The Webb is optimized for the near- and mid-infrared, and will produce redshifts and internal dynamics for many thousands of galaxies. With its 21-foot-diameter (6.5 meters) primary mirror, cooled to the frigid temperature of minus 387 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 233 degrees Celsius), Webb will have unmatched sensitivity at wavelengths longer than 2 microns.
A new generation of giant telescopes are also under construction here on Earth. These "extremely large telescopes" will have 100 times the light-gathering power and 10 times the angular resolution of Hubble. I am involved in the development of one of these, the Giant Magellan Telescope, being designed by an elite engineering team in Southern California, while its giant mirrors are taking shape in a high-tech optics laboratory in Arizona. Our team has already prepared its future home high in the Chilean Andes, and over the next several years, hundreds of scientists, engineers and construction workers will assemble the 82-foot-diameter (25 m) telescope so that, as the next decade starts, astronomers will have a new tool for exploring the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Two other giant telescopes are also under development: the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, and another in the far north of Chile, the European Extremely Large Telescope.
Newton once wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." The next generation of astronomers will, indeed, see further by standing on the shoulders of giants — telescopes like Hubble, Webb and the Giant Magellan Telescope and its brethren. The view will be spectacular.
Universe's Expansion Measured With Unprecedented Precisionhttp://news.yahoo.com/universes-expansion-measured-unprecedented-precision-145252498.html (http://news.yahoo.com/universes-expansion-measured-unprecedented-precision-145252498.html)
SPACE.com
by Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor 2 hours ago
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An artist's view of how quasars and BOAs work together to measure the expansion of the universe. Light from distant quasars is absorbed by gas, which is imprinted with a pattern of BOAs from the early universe.
Scientists studying more than 140,000 extremely bright galaxies have calculated the expansion of the universe with unprecedented accuracy.
The distant galaxies, known as quasars, serve as a "standard ruler" to map density variations in the universe. Physicists were able to extend their calculations almost twice as far back in time as has been previously accomplished.
Using the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), two teams of physicists have improved on scientists' understanding of the mysterious dark energy that drives the accelerating universe. By nearly tripling the number of quasars previously studied, as well as implementing a new technique, the scientists were able to calculate the expansion rate to 42 miles (68 kilometers) per second per 1 million light-years with greater precision, while looking farther back in time. [8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries]
Andreu Font-Ribera, of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led one of the two teams, while Timothée Delubac of EPFL, Switzerland, and France’s Centre de Saclay headed the other one. Font-Ribera presented the new findings in April at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Savannah, Georgia.
The new research "explores a region of the universe that was not explored before," Font-Ribera said.
Stretching the standard ruler
The expanding universe stretches light waves as they travel through it, a process astronomers refer to as redshifting. An object's physical distance from the observer depends on how quickly the universe is expanding.
Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) are sound waves imprinted in large structures of matter in the early universe. Competing forces of inward-pushing gravity and outward, heat-related pressure cause oscillations similar to sound waves in the baryonic, or "normal" matter in the universe.
Dark matter, which interacts with normal matter only gravitationally, stays at the center of the sound wave, while the baryonic matter travels outward, eventually creating a shell at a set radius known as the sound horizon.
Quasars, like other galaxies, are surrounded by dust. Light leaving galaxies streams through that dust, revealing the imprint of the BAOs. Studying this light allows researchers to map the distribution of quasars, as well as the gas in the early universe.
By using BOSS, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to map BAOs, scientists can determine how matter is distributed in the early universe. When it comes to measuring the expansion of the universe, BAOs serve as a "standard ruler."
"We think we know its size, and its apparent size depends on how far away it is," Patrick McDonald, of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, said at the conference.
Previously, astronomers have used BAOs to measure the distances to galaxies in order to determine the distribution of mass in the universe, and thus the universe's expansion rate. But galaxies grow fainter at greater distances, so previous studies were limited to looking back only 6 billion light-years into the universe's 13.8-billion-year lifetime.
Font-Ribera and his team, which included McDonald, pioneered a method of measuring BAOs by using quasars, which are galaxies that are far brighter than normal due to the activity of a supermassive black hole at their center. As matter falls into the black hole, it grows extremely hot, radiating light at far brighter wavelengths and over farther distances than conventional galaxies. This allowed the scientists to measure the mass distribution of the universe out to 12 billion years.
Font-Ribera's research involved approximately 50,000 quasars. The new study published by Delubac's team reviewed nearly three times as many sources, more precisely calculating the expansion rate to an accuracy of 2.2 percent.
"If we looked back to the universe when it was less than a quarter of its present age, we'd see that a pair of galaxies separated by a million light-years would be drifting apart at a velocity of 68 kilometers a second as the universe expands," Font-Ribera said in an accompanying press release.
"The uncertainty is plus or minus only a kilometer and a half per second."
The expanding universe
In the early twentieth century, astronomer Edwin Hubble determined that the galaxies in the universe are all moving away from the Milky Way because the universe is expanding. Further studies led astronomers to conclude that the rate of expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down.
McDonald compared the process to a ball thrown in the air.
"Acceleration is like you throw the ball up, and it starts going up faster and faster," McDonald said. "No normal attractive gravity will do that."
Astronomers determined that an unseen force, dubbed "dark energy," causes the acceleration. McDonald calls dark energy a "placeholder" because scientists aren't certain what, precisely, it is.
"To me, it seems quite possible that it's related to some fundamental hole in our understanding of physics," he said.
In order to patch that hole, scientists must continue to learn more about dark energy, including its role in accelerating the expansion of the universe.
'Big G': Scientists Pin Down Elusive Gravitational Constanthttp://news.yahoo.com/big-g-scientists-pin-down-elusive-gravitational-constant-171614687.html (http://news.yahoo.com/big-g-scientists-pin-down-elusive-gravitational-constant-171614687.html)
LiveScience.com
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer 54 minutes ago
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A painting of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller, dated to 1689.
A fundamental constant that sets the size of the gravitational force between all objects has finally been pinned down using the quirky quantum behavior of tiny atoms.
The new results could help set the official value of the gravitational constant, and may even help scientists find evidence of extra space-time dimensions, said study co-author Guglielmo Tino, an atomic physicist at the University of Florence in Italy.
Elusive value
According to legend, Sir Isaac Newton first formulated his theory of gravity after watching a falling apple. In Newton's equations, the force of gravity grows with the mass of two objects in question, and the force gets weaker the more distant the objects are from each other. The English polymath knew the object's masses had to be multiplied by a constant, or "big G," in order to arrive at the gravitational force between those two objects, but he wasn't able to calculate its value. ("Big G" is different from "little g," which is the local gravitational acceleration on Earth.)
In 1798, scientist Henry Cavendish calculated big G in order to determine Earth's mass. To do so, Cavendish suspended dumbbells on a wire, with enormous lead spheres placed at different distances nearby, and then measured how much the dumbbells rotated in response to the attractive pull of gravity from the neighboring dumbbell. [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]
Since then, almost every attempt to measure big G has used some variation of Cavendish's method. Many of those experiments got extremely precise values — which didn't agree with one another. That's because it was too difficult to identify all potential sources of error in the complicated systems used, said Holger Müller, an atomic physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study.
"The gravitational force is just super tiny, so anything from air currents to electric charges can give you a false result," Müller told Live Science.
As a result, big G is known with much less precision than other fundamental constants, such as the speed of light or the mass of an electron, Tino told Live Science.
Keeping cool
The big systems didn't seem to be working, so the researchers decided to go very small.
The team cooled rubidium atoms to just above the temperature of absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), where atoms hardly move at all. The researchers then launched the atoms upward inside a vacuum tube and let them fall, in what's called an atomic fountain.
They also placed several hundred pounds of tungsten nearby.
To see how the tungsten distorted the gravitational field, they turned to quantum mechanics, the bizarre rules that govern subatomic particles. At small scales, particles such as atoms can also behave like waves — meaning they can take two different paths at the same time. So the team split the paths the rubidium atoms took as they fell, and then used a device called an atomic interferometer to measure how the waveforms of those paths shifted. The shift in the peaks and valleys of the paths when they recombined was a result of the gravitational pull of the tungsten masses.
The new measurement of G — 6.67191(99) X 10 ^ -11 meters cubed / kilograms seconds ^2 — isn't as precise as the best measures, but because it uses single atoms, scientists can be more confident the results aren't skewed by hidden errors that foiled the more complicated setups of past experiments, Tino told Live Science.
The achievement is impressive, Müller said.
"I thought this experiment would be close to impossible, because the influence of those masses [on gravitational pull] is just very small," Müller told Live Science. "It's really a great breakthrough."
New value
The new experiment raises the hope that future measurements can finally settle on a more precise value for big G.
The findings also could help scientists discover if something more bizarre is at play. Some theories suggest that extra dimensions could warp the gravitational fields in our own four-dimensional world. These distortions would likely be very subtle and would only be noticeable at very small distances. In fact, others have suggested that the different results other labs have gotten were caused by this extradimensional intrusion, Tino said.
By ruling out methodological errors, the new technique could be used to find evidence of extra dimensions, he said.
The new value of G was published today (June 18) in the journal Nature.
Just One Type of Blazar? How Jet-Spewing Galaxies Evolve Over Timehttp://news.yahoo.com/just-one-type-blazar-jet-spewing-galaxies-evolve-171719801.html (http://news.yahoo.com/just-one-type-blazar-jet-spewing-galaxies-evolve-171719801.html)
SPACE.com
By Joseph Castro, Space.com Contributor 5 hours ago
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Scientists now think that two kinds of active galaxies known as blazars actually represent a hybrid kind of blazar that evolves from one type into the other. Image uploaded June 17, 2014.
The two different classes of jet-spewing active galaxies called blazars may, in fact, be a single hybrid type that evolves over time, according to new research.
The luminous cores of most if not all galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, which is millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun. In some "active galaxies," gas trapped by the black hole's gravity forms a hot accretion disk as it spirals down.
Before crossing the point of no return (the event horizon), this material generates huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation and, in the case of quasars, blasts out two jets of subatomic particles that travel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light.
Blazars appear to produce more gamma radiation than other types of active galaxies, but this may be because one of their jets is pointed toward Earth. (Blazars are generally defined as quasars that are viewed jet-on).
Astronomers currently recognize two types of blazars. Those known as flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) have smaller black hole masses and weaker jets but strong accretion disk emissions and much higher luminosities. On the other hand, the type known as BL Lacs are completely dominated by their jets, with accretion disk emissions either being weak or nonexistent.
"We can think of one blazar class as a gas-guzzling car and the other as an energy-efficient electric vehicle," study lead researcher Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University in South Carolina, said in a statement. "Our results suggest that we're actually seeing hybrids, which tap into the energy of their black holes in different ways as they age."
Ajello and his team came to this conclusion after studying how the distribution of blazars changed over time. They collected redshift data on BL Lacs using numerous instruments, including the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas, the Keck Telescope in Hawaii and NASA's Swift satellite. (To measure distances of faraway objects, astronomers rely on redshift, or how much the expansion of space has stretched an object's light to redder wavelengths).
They obtained the distances of about 200 BL Lacs and compared the galaxies' distribution across time with a similar sample of FSRQs. They found that FSRQs began to decline in number around 5.6 billion years ago — the same time at which BL Lacs, particularly those with the most extreme energies, steadily increased in numbers.
"What we think we're seeing here is a changeover from one style of extracting energy from the central black hole to another," said team member Roger Romani, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology in California. That is, the FSRQs became BL Lacs over time.
The idea goes like this: Early in the universe's history, large galaxies grew out of collisions and mergers of smaller galaxies. The activity provided the supermassive black holes with bountiful gas, which resulted in large, bright accretion disks. Some of that gas powered the jets of the "gas-guzzling" FSRQs, while the rest fell into the black holes, increasing their spins.
The galaxy collisions eventually slowed as the universe expanded, leaving less spiraling material for the black holes. The accretion disks became depleted, and the resulting black holes were fast-spinning and more massive than ever.
The accretion energy the FSRQs once had was stored in the increasing rotation and mass of the supermassive black holes. That stored energy allowed the blazars to continue shooting out their particle jets and high-energy emissions as BL Lac objects, even without large accretion disks.
This hybrid blazar idea implies that the luminosity of BL Lacs should decrease as their core black holes continue to lose energy and spin. The researchers hope to test this hypothesis with larger blazar samples.
Universe Shouldn't Be Here, According to Higgs Physicshttp://news.yahoo.com/universe-shouldnt-according-higgs-physics-220219618.html (http://news.yahoo.com/universe-shouldnt-according-higgs-physics-220219618.html)
LiveScience.com
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer 19 hours ago
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The BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, seen at twilight.
The universe shouldn't exist — at least according to a new theory.
Modeling of conditions soon after the Big Bang suggests the universe should have collapsed just microseconds after its explosive birth, the new study suggests.
"During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang," said study co-author Robert Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King's College in London. "This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse."
Physicists draw that conclusion from a model that accounts for the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle, which is thought to explain how other particles get their mass; faint traces of gravitational waves formed at the universe's origin also inform the conclusion.
Of course, there must be something missing from these calculations.
"We are here talking about it," Hogan told Live Science. "That means we have to extend our theories to explain why this didn't happen."
Bang!
One possible explanation holds that during the fiery flash after the primordial Big Bang explosion, matter raced outward at breakneck speeds in a process known as cosmic inflation. This bent and squeezed space-time, creating ripples known as gravitational waves that also twisted the radiation that passed through the universe, Hogan said.
Though those events would have occurred 13.8 billion years ago, a telescope at the South Pole known as the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) recently detected the faint traces of cosmic inflation in the background microwave radiation that pervades the universe: in particular, characteristic twisted or curled waves called the B-mode pattern. (Other scientists have already begun to question the findings, saying the results may just be from dust in the Milky Way.)
But gravity wasn't the only force at play in the early universe. A ubiquitous energy field, called the Higgs field, permeates the universe and gives mass to the particles that trudge through the field. Scientists found the telltale sign of that field in 2012, when they discovered the Higgs boson and then determined its mass.
With a greater understanding of cosmic inflation's properties and the Higgs boson mass, Hogan and his colleague, Malcolm Fairbairn, who is also a physicist at King's College London, tried to recreate the conditions of cosmic inflation after the Big Bang.
What they found was bad news for, well, everything. The newborn universe should have experienced an intense jittering in the energy field, known as quantum fluctuation. Those jitters, in turn, could have disrupted the Higgs field, in essence rolling the entire system into a much lower energy state that would make the collapse of the universe inevitable.
Missing ingredient
So if the universe shouldn't exist, why is it here?
"The generic expectation is that there must be some new physics that we haven't put in our theories yet, because we haven't been able to discover them," Hogan said.
One leading possibility, known as the theory of supersymmetry, proposes that there are superpartner particles for all the currently known particles, and perhaps more-powerful particle accelerators could find these particles, Hogan said.
But the theory of cosmic inflation is still speculative, and some physicists hint that what looked like primordial gravitational waves to the BICEP2 telescope may actually be signals from cosmic dust in the galaxy, said Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of "The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World" (Dutton Adult, 2012).
If the details of cosmic inflation change, then Hogan and Fairbairn's model would need to adapt as well, Carroll told Live Science. Caroll was not involved in the study.
Interestingly, this isn't the first time that physicists have said the Higgs boson spells doom for the universe. Others have calculated that the Higgs boson's mass would lead to a fundamentally unstable universe that could end apocalyptically in billions of years.
The mass of the Higgs boson, about 126 times that of the proton, turns out to be "right on the edge," in terms of the universe's stability, Carroll said. A little bit lighter, and the Higgs field would be much more easily perturbed; a little heavier, and the current Higgs field would be incredibly stable.
Hogan will present his findings Tuesday (June 24) at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Portsmouth, England, and the study was published May 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Higgs quest deepens into realm of 'New Physics'http://news.yahoo.com/higgs-quest-deepens-realm-physics-035140731.html (http://news.yahoo.com/higgs-quest-deepens-realm-physics-035140731.html)
AFP
By Mariette Le Roux 13 hours ago
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A worker walks past equipment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, during maintenance works on July 19, 2013 in Meyrin, near Geneva (AFP Photo/Fabrice Coffrini)
Paris (AFP) - Two years after making history by unearthing the Higgs boson, the particle that confers mass, physicists are broadening their probe into its identity, hoping this will also solve other great cosmic mysteries.
Sifting through mountains of experimental data, they have now pieced together a partial sketch of the evasive boson's traits and behaviour.
But, some of them admit to be puzzled.
The better they become acquainted with the Higgs at the infinitely small quantum level, the further the experts seem from explaining certain cosmic-scale questions, like dark matter.
"The observed characteristics of the Higgs boson, such as its mass, interaction strengths and life-time, provide very powerful constraints on our understanding of the more fundamental theory," Valya Khoze, director of the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP) at Durham University, told AFP.
From next year, scientists will smash sub-atomic particles at ever higher-speeds in the upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, which announced the Higgs discovery on July 4, 2012.
Not only will they hope for new particles to emerge, but also for the Higgs to show signs of, well, weirdness.
So far, the Higgs has conformed well to the traits predicted in the Standard Model of particle physics, the mainstream theory of how our Universe is constructed.
Too well, for some.
The model has weaknesses in that it doesn't explain dark matter or dark energy, which jointly make up 95 percent of the Universe. Nor is it compatible with the theory of gravity.
Scientists have proposed alternative theories to explain the inconsistencies -- like supersymmetry which postulates the existence of a "sibling" for every particle in the Universe and may explain dark matter and dark energy.
No proof of such symmetric particles has been found at the LHC, currently in sleep mode for an 18-month overhaul to super-boost its power levels.
Supersymmetry, additionally, predicts the existence of at least five types of Higgs boson, and physicists will thus be watching the LHC Higgs closely for signs of behaviour inconsistent with the Standard Model.
- 'New Physics' -
"It would give us a very good hint that there is physics there beyond the Standard Model and that there's new, additional physics coming soon," said Dave Charlton, who heads the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.
"It could help to explain many of the other problems we have in physics at the moment."
The LHC is a facility of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) which celebrated its 60th anniversary on Tuesday.
The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model, a theory developed in the early 1970s to explain the five percent of the Universe composed of visible matter and energy, all carried by fundamental particles.
But some of the boson's newly discovered properties have left physicists scratching their heads.
For starters, they don't understand how it can have such a small mass.
Nor is the evidence consistent for the role it played in the development of the early Universe after the Big Bang -- issues that may be resolved by so-called New Physics the experts hope will follow soon.
When the LHC fires up again next year, scientists will be on the lookout for new particles, including other types of Higgs, and possible "invisible decays" of the boson to indicate the presence of dark matter.
"All of the particles of the Standard Model have now been discovered," said Charlton.
"If we see new particles, it's something new... if we see new particles, it will point to something whether it is supersymmetry or some other new theory.
"It will tell us that the Standard Model is broken, that there is something else."
Charlton said we may never know if the Higgs found at the LHC was exactly the Standard Model version or something that just resembles it.
Themis Bowcock, particle physics head at the University of Liverpool, said confirmation of several Standard Model predictions over the past two years have placed a new focus on what is not yet known.
"It allows us to step back and view the boundaries of our knowledge with a keener eye," he told AFP.
"We realise we have mastered our closest and most obvious challenges, but like a 15th century navigator we are motivated to venture beyond our mapped lands to discover the missing 95 percent -- the New World."
'Revolutionary' Physics: Do Sterile Neutrinos Lurk in the Universe?http://news.yahoo.com/revolutionary-physics-sterile-neutrinos-lurk-universe-152137211.html (http://news.yahoo.com/revolutionary-physics-sterile-neutrinos-lurk-universe-152137211.html)
LiveScience.com
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer 2 hours ago
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The detector for the MicroBooNe is gently lowered into place.
A completely new subatomic particle — one so reclusive and strange that it passes undetected through ordinary matter — could be lurking in the universe.
If so, a detector set to turn on later this year could find the first convincing evidence for the particle, called a sterile neutrino. The new experiment, whose 30-ton detector was recently lowered into place at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, will look for traces of this elusive particle transforming into another type of neutrino.
Unlike the Higgs boson, the particle thought to explain why other particles have mass and which most physicists predicted should exist for decades, sterile neutrinos would be in the realm of completely unknown physics that only some physicists believe exist, said Bonnie Fleming, the experiment's spokeswoman and a physicist at Yale University. "It would be completely revolutionary," Fleming said.
Ghostly particles
Neutrinos are miniscule, nearly massless subatomic particles that form during nuclear reactions in the hearts of stars, supernovae and other explosive cosmic events. Though trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, they almost never interact with other matter, giving them the nickname "ghost particles."
The known neutrinos come in three different types, or flavors — electron, muon and tau — and in the last 15 to 20 years, scientists have learned that those flavors oscillate, or change into one another, with a certain frequency. (During collisions, electron neutrinos can also turn into electrons, muon neutrinos can transform into muons, and tau neutrinos can turn into tau leptons, particles that are similar to electrons.
But a few hints suggest there could be a totally new type of neutrino out there. For instance, experiments in the 1990s to detect neutrinos from the sun found possible evidence that electron neutrinos were disappearing. Another experiment designed to probe neutrino oscillation found extra electron neutrinos appearing. One explanation for these anomalies is that the neutrinos were morphing into an intermediate particle called a sterile neutrino.
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The 30-ton argon detector has been under construction for two years.
If such sterile neutrinos exist, they would interact only with matter through the incredible weak force of gravity, making direct detection impossible, Fleming told Live Science.
Hunting sterile neutrinos
So starting late this year or early in 2015, Fleming and her colleagues will look for indirect evidence of sterile neutrinos. The experiment, called MicroBooNE, will shoot a beam of pure muon-flavored neutrinos 0.3 miles (0.5 kilometers) through a 30-ton metal tank filled with argon. Though most of these ghost particles will travel through the argon unchanged, some will occasionally change flavor to an electron neutrino, tau neutrino — or possibly a sterile neutrino.
Some fraction of these neutrinos will then go on to collide with the nuclei of argon atoms in the detector.
"They will shatter that nucleus, and parts of that nucleus will go everywhere," said Matt Strassler, a physicist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. As part of the collision, electron neutrinos will sometimes morph into electrons, Strassler added.
The detector then identifies where, when and what type of particles were created by analyzing the trail left by ionized, or charged, particles after the collision.
Because the researchers know how often electron neutrinos should convert into electrons during such collisions, any deviation from expectations could be a sign that a muon neutrino morphed into an intermediate sterile neutrino, then into an electron neutrino, and finally into an electron.
Longshot physics
Though the discovery of a sterile neutrino is a possibility, it's not likely, Strassler said.
MicroBooNE is working to clarify tantalizing hints in data from a precursor experiment called MiniBooNE, but there's a good chance that MiniBooNE's "dirty measurement" is picking up other processes instead, Strassler said.
Even if the new experiment uncovers something strange, there's no guarantee sterile neutrinos caused the signal, rather than some other completely different interaction, he said.
"There's a very small — not zero — chance that they're actually going to uncover one of the great secrets of the universe," Strassler told Live Science.
The New York Times | Science
The Upshot | Debate That Divides
When Beliefs and Facts Collide
Brendan Nyham | July 5, 2014
Do Americans understand the scientific consensus about issues like climate change and evolution?
At least for a substantial portion of the public, it seems like the answer is no. The Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 33 percent of the public believes “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” and 26 percent think there is not “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades.” Unsurprisingly, beliefs on both topics are divided along religious and partisan lines. For instance, 46 percent of Republicans said there is not solid evidence of global warming, compared with 11 percent of Democrats.
As a result of surveys like these, scientists and advocates have concluded that many people are not aware of the evidence on these issues and need to be provided with correct information. That’s the impulse behind efforts like the campaign to publicize the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists believe human activities are causing global warming.
In a new study, a Yale Law School professor, Dan Kahan, finds that the divide over belief in evolution between more and less religious people is wider among people who otherwise show familiarity with math and science, which suggests that the problem isn’t a lack of information. When he instead tested whether respondents knew the theory of evolution, omitting mention of belief, there was virtually no difference between more and less religious people with high scientific familiarity. In other words, religious people knew the science; they just weren’t willing to say that they believed in it.
Mr. Kahan’s study suggests that more people know what scientists think about high-profile scientific controversies than polls suggest; they just aren’t willing to endorse the consensus when it contradicts their political or religious views. This finding helps us understand why my colleagues and I have found that factual and scientific evidence is often ineffective at reducing misperceptions and can even backfire on issues like weapons of mass destruction, health care reform and vaccines. With science as with politics, identity often trumps the facts.
So what should we do? One implication of Mr. Kahan’s study and other research in this field is that we need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues – for instance, by making clear that you can believe in human-induced climate change and still be a conservative Republican like former Representative Bob Inglis or an evangelical Christian like the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
But we also need to reduce the incentives for elites to spread misinformation to their followers in the first place. Once people’s cultural and political views get tied up in their factual beliefs, it’s very difficult to undo regardless of the messaging that is used.
It may be possible for institutions to help people set aside their political identities and engage with science more dispassionately under certain circumstances, especially at the local level. Mr. Kahan points, for instance, to the relatively inclusive and constructive deliberations that were conducted among citizens in Southeast Florida about responding to climate change. However, this experience may be hard to replicate – on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, another threatened coastal area, the debate over projected sea level rises has already become highly polarized.
The deeper problem is that citizens participate in public life precisely because they believe the issues at stake relate to their values and ideals, especially when political parties and other identity-based groups get involved – an outcome that is inevitable on high-profile issues. Those groups can help to mobilize the public and represent their interests, but they also help to produce the factual divisions that are one of the most toxic byproducts of our polarized era. Unfortunately, knowing what scientists think is ultimately no substitute for actually believing it.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life.
(http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/06/upshot/06up-science/06up-science-articleLarge.jpg) Eiko Ojala
Big Dipper Hotspot May Help Solve 100-Year-Old Cosmic Ray Mysteryhttp://news.yahoo.com/big-dipper-hotspot-may-help-solve-100-old-135703814.html (http://news.yahoo.com/big-dipper-hotspot-may-help-solve-100-old-135703814.html)
SPACE.com
by Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor 3 hours ago
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A map of the northern sky shows the concentration of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays stemming from the constellation of Ursa Major.
A hotspot of powerful, ultrahigh-energy particles streams toward Earth from beneath the handle of the Big Dipper constellation. This collection of cosmic rays may help scientists nail down the origin point of the powerful particles, a century-old mystery.
"This puts us closer to finding out the sources — but no cigar yet," Gordon Thomson, of the University of Utah, said in a statement. Thomson is the co-principle investigator for the Telescope Array cosmic ray observatory in southern Utah, which discovered the hotspot, and one of the 125 researchers on the project.
"All we see is a blob in the sky, and inside this blob there is all sorts of stuff — various types of objects — that could be the source," he added. "Now we know where to look."
A hundred-year-old mystery
Gordon worked with an international team of scientists to capture 72 ultarhigh-energy cosmic rays with the Telescope Array over a period of five years. If powerful cosmic ray sources spread evenly across the sky, the resulting waves should also be evenly distributed. Instead, 19 of the detected signals came from a 40-degree circle that makes up only six percent of the sky. The hot spot lies in the constellation Ursa Major, home of the Big Dipper.
"We have a quarter of our events in that circle instead of 6 percent," collaborator Charlie Jui, also from the University of Utah, said in the same statement.
Jui describes the hotspot's location as "a couple of hand widths below the Big Dipper's handle." The region would appear like any other region of the sky to regular optical telescopes.
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solar-powered detector at the Telescope Array cosmic ray observatory measures the strength and direction of cosmic rays after they travel through Earth's atmosphere.
According to the researchers, the odds that the hotspot is a statistical fluke rather than real are only 1.4 in 10,000.
The hotspot region of the sky lies near the supergalactic plane, which contains local galaxy clusters such as the Ursa Major cluster, the Coma cluster and the Virgo cluster.
The research, which is an international collaboration of over 100 scientists, was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Discovered in 1912, cosmic rays are thought to consist of the bare protons of hydrogen nuclei, or the centers of heavier elements. The powerful particles stream in from various regions of the sky, with energies reaching as high as 300 billion billion electron volts. Cosmic rays are classified as "ultrahigh-energy" if they carry the energy of 1 billion billion electron volts, comparable to a fast-pitch baseball.
While low-energy cosmic rays come from stars like the sun over the course of their life or explosive deaths, the origins of more energetic rays remain a mystery.
Suggested progenitors for the more powerful cosmic rays include Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), where material is sucked into supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, or gamma-ray bursts from the explosive supernova death of massive stars. Other potential causes include shockwaves from noisy radio galaxies and colliding galaxies. More exotic possibilities include the decay of "cosmic strings," hypothetical one-dimensional defects proposed by string theory.
Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays stem from outside the Milky Way, but are weakened by interactions with the cosmic microwave background radiation — the leftover fingerprint from the Big Bang that kicked off the universe. As a result, 90 percent of the detected ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays originate within 300 million light-years of Earth.
According to Jui, a separate study currently in progress suggests that the distribution of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays in the northern sky is related to concentrations of large-scale structures like clusters and superclusters of galaxies.
"It tells us there is at least a good chance these are coming from matter we can see, as opposed to a different class of mechanisms where you are producing these particles with exotic processes," Jui said.
The Telescope Array houses 523 detectors spread over 300 square miles of desert. Physicists hope to make the observatory more sensitive by doubling the number of detectors and quadrupling the area they cover, which should capture more cosmic rays.
"With more events, we are more likely to see structure in that hotspot blob, and that may point us toward the real sources," Jui said.
A preprint of the article may be found online at arXiv.org
First Glimpse of Higgs Bosons at Work Revealedhttp://news.yahoo.com/first-glimpse-higgs-bosons-revealed-122000650.html (http://news.yahoo.com/first-glimpse-higgs-bosons-revealed-122000650.html)
LiveScience.com
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer 7 hours ago
An extremely rare collision of massive subatomic particles could reveal the nuts and bolts of how the subatomic particles called Higgs bosons impart mass to other particles.
The Higgs boson particle, which was detected for the first time in 2012, is essentially tossed around like a ball between two force-carrying particles known as W-bosons when they scatter, or bounce off of one another, a new data analysis revealed.
The data comes from the ATLAS experiment, the same proton-collision experiment that revealed the Higgs boson, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mille-long (27 kilometers) underground atom smasher on the border of Switzerland and France.
By studying how much the Higgs sticks to the W-bosons during this scattering process, the team could learn new details about how strongly the elusive Higgs boson interacts with the field that gives all particles their mass.
"We are basically observing the Higgs boson at work to see whether it does its job the way we expect it to," said study co-author Marc-André Pleier, a physicist with the ATLAS project, and a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.
Higgs Field
For decades, the Standard Model, the reigning physics theory that describes the menagerie of subatomic particles, was both astonishingly predictive and obviously incomplete.
The long-sought missing piece of the Standard Model was the Higgs boson, a particle proposed by English physicist Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to explain how certain particles get their mass. The theory held that particles like W-bosons pick up mass as they travel through a field, now known as the Higgs field. The more particles "drag" through the field, the more massive they are. If the Higgs field did exist, then by extension another particle, the now-famous Higgs boson (dubbed "the God Particle," a nickname scientists dislike), should also exist as a vibration of that field when other subatomic particles interact with the field.
In 2012, scientists announced they had found the Higgs boson. In the years since, physicists have been busy analyzing data from collisions at the LHC to figure out exactly how the Higgs boson does its job of giving particles mass.
Impossible physics
Other parts of the Standard Model didn't add up without the Higgs boson. For instance, in theory proton collisions could produce pairs of W-bosons that would then scatter, or bounce off of, one another. (W-bosons mediate the weak nuclear force, which governs radioactive decay and fuels the chemical reactions at the hearts of stars, Pleier said.)
At high-enough collision energies, however, the theory predicted that W-boson scattering would occur more than 100 percent of the time, which is physically impossible, Pleier said.
So physicists proposed a subatomic game of catch, where a Higgs boson could bounce off one W-boson in a colliding pair, and be absorbed by the other member of the pair, Pleier said.
The extra Higgs, in essence, fixed the mathematical glitch in the theory.
But W-boson scattering was incredibly rare: It occurs only once in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions, so scientists never had a chance to test their theory, Pleier said.
"It's even rarer to observe than the Higgs boson," Pleier told Live Science.
Higgs at work
While poring over data from the ATLAS experiment, researchers saw, for the first time, glimpses of elusive W-boson scattering, Pleier said.
So far, the team has seen hints of just 34 W-boson scattering events, which showed that the Higgs boson does play some role in this scattering process.
But there is still too little data to say exactly how "sticky" the Higgs boson is to these W-bosons, which would reveal how sticky the Higgs field is. That, in turn, could help reveal more details about how the Higgs field gives other particles their mass, Pleier said.
If follow-up data reveals that the Higgs Boson doesn't seem to be sticky enough, that's an indication that other subatomic particles may be involved in W-boson scattering, he said.
When the LHC ramps up again in 2015 at higher energies, the team should be able to produce 150 times more data than they were collecting when the atom smasher shut down in 2013, which could help flesh out the now-shadowy picture of the Higgs boson in action.
The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters and were published in the preprint journal arXiv.
Milky Weigh: scientists take weight of the galaxyhttp://news.yahoo.com/milky-weigh-scientists-weight-galaxy-144138703.html (http://news.yahoo.com/milky-weigh-scientists-weight-galaxy-144138703.html)
AFP
4 hours ago
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This image obtained from NASA on January 24, 2013 shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way (AFP Photo/)
London (AFP) - The Milky Way galaxy is lighter than previously thought, according to new research published by British-based scientists on Wednesday.
The study led by the University of Edinburgh is the first time that scientists have been able to measure accurately the mass of the galaxy that contains our solar system, the researchers said.
The Milky Way was found to contain only half the mass of its neighbour Andromeda, which has a similar spiral structure to our own.
"We always suspected that Andromeda is more massive than the Milky Way, but weighting both galaxies simultaneously proved to be extremely challenging," said Doctor Jorge Penarrubia, who led the study.
The research concluded that the extra mass of the Andromeda galaxy was down to dark matter, a little-understood invisible substance that accounts for most of the outer regions of galaxies.
The scientists estimate that the Milky Way contains approximately half as much dark matter as its neighbouring galaxy, though the two are of similar dimensions.
The Milky Way and Andromeda are the two largest in a region of galaxies known to astronomers as the Local Group.
Ninety percent of the matter in both galaxies is invisible, and until now scientists have been unable to prove which is larger.
Previous research has only measured the mass of a galaxy's inner region, but the new study was able to calculate how much invisible matter is contained in outer regions.
Researchers say the findings will help them to understand how the outer regions of galaxies are structured.
"Our study combined recent measurements of the relative motion between our galaxy and Andromeda with the largest catalogue of nearby galaxies ever compiled to make this possible," said Penarrubia.
The findings of the study are supported by research at the University of Cambridge, which used a different set of data to reach very similar results.
The study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.
Supernovas Might Create Weird 'Zombie Stars'http://news.yahoo.com/supernovas-might-create-weird-zombie-stars-193726668.html (http://news.yahoo.com/supernovas-might-create-weird-zombie-stars-193726668.html)
SPACE.com
by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor 3 hours ago
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These observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show before and after views for the supernova SN 2012Z in the outskirts of the galaxy NGC 1309, 108 million light-years from Earth. Inset: SN 2012Z is seen in 2013, while data from 2005-2006 show its perceived progenitor star pair. Image released Aug. 6, 2014. Credit: NASA and ESA, Curtis McCully and Saurabh W Jha (Rutgers), Ryan J Foley (Illinois)
The most powerful stellar blasts in the universe may not always destroy stars in explosive supernovas as scientists had thought, but instead leave behind a remnant "zombie star," astronomers say.
These new findings may shed light on the origins of a mysterious kind of star explosion known as a Type Iax supernova, the researchers added.
Supernovas are the most powerful star explosions in the universe. They are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies.
Scientists think a kind of stellar blast, known as a Type Ia supernova, occurs when one star pours enough fuel onto a dying companion star, known as a white dwarf, to trigger an extraordinary nuclear explosion. However, researchers have never actually seen what stars actually give rise to these outbursts, thus making their origins uncertain.
"Astronomers have been searching for decades for the progenitors of type Ia's," study co-author Saurabh Jha, an astronomer at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., said in a statement. "Type Ia's are important because they're used to measure vast cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe."
Supernova sleuths
To learn more about white-dwarfsupernovas, astronomers looked at an explosion dubbed SN 2012Z, discovered by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search in 2012. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope also took images of the supernova's host galaxy — NGC 1309, located 110 million light-years away — in 2005, 2006 and 2010 before the explosion took place.
This past data helped researchers discover the apparent progenitor of the supernova. The likelihood the star they detected is related to the supernova is more than 99 percent, they said.
"We were tremendously excited to see a progenitor system for this supernova," lead study author Curtis McCully, an astronomer at Rutgers, told Space.com. "No one had ever seen a progenitor system for a white-dwarf supernova in pre-explosion data, so our expectation was that we wouldn't see anything. Nature surprised us, which is always exciting."
The researchers had expected that the supernova's progenitor system would be too faint to see, as was the case with previous searches for type Ia supernova progenitors.
"I was very surprised to see anything at the location of the supernova," McCully recalled.
Strange supernova science
SN 2012Z was actually a mysterious kind of exploding star known as a Type Iax supernova. First recognized 12 years ago, Type Iax supernovas were originally thought to be fainter cousins of the more common Type Ia supernova, but they now seem to be a related but distinct class. So far, astronomers have identified more than 30 of these unusual Type Iax supernovas, which occur at a rate of about one-fifth that of Type Ia supernovae, but release only between 1 and 50 percent of the energy.
The astronomers found that the progenitor system of SN 2012Z apparently consisted of a white dwarf and a bright-blue companion star. The researchers suggested the companion is a "helium star" whose outer shells of hydrogen have been stripped away, leaving only its helium core.
"Our results show that at least some white-dwarf supernova explosions arise from a white dwarf that accretes material from a luminous companion star," Jha told Space.com.
Instead of destroying the exploding star — as supernovas are often thought to do — SN 2012Z may have left behind a battered and bruised white dwarf, which the researchers called a "zombie star."
"There are indications that the white dwarf may not have been completely disrupted," study co-author Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Space.com.
These findings suggest that Type Ia supernovas may have different origins than Type Iax supernovas. For instance, before and after images of Type Ia supernovas like SN 2014J and SN 2011fe would have been capable of revealing any blue progenitor system if one existed.However, none was seen.
"It certainly seems like most normal Type Ia supernovae cannot have a luminous blue companion star like in the case for this Type Iax supernova," Jha told Space.com.
Instead, this Type Iax supernova resembles a nova star explosion — a much-less-powerful stellar blast — called V445 Puppis, an explosion in the Milky Way that astronomers detected in 2000. Novas are like Type Ia supernovas in that they occur when white dwarfs accumulate fuel from a companion star, but novas do not completely destroy their stars like supernovas are thought to do. The researchers added that the progenitor system V445 Puppis nova is thought to consist of a white dwarf and a companion helium star, maybe just like SN 2012Z.
One possible scenario for this system the researchers modeled is that it originally consisted of two stars — one weighing four times the mass of the sun, and the other seven times the mass of the sun. The stars began exchanging hydrogen and helium fuel back and forth, with the larger star eventually dwindling to become a white dwarf about the mass of the sun, the researchers suggested.
The blue companion star, in turn, swelled in size and shed its outer layers, until it became a helium star about twice the mass of the sun. The white dwarf then siphoned matter from its blue companion until the extra fuel made it explode as a Type Iax supernova and blow off about half its mass, instead of completely dying, the researchers explained.
However, the researchers acknowledged that they cannot yet rule out other possibilities for the identity of the blue star they saw. For instance, it could have been a massive star 30 to 40 times the mass of the sun that destroyed itself when it detonated.
To settle the question once and for all, the researchers "will get future observations of the system in late 2015 with the Hubble Space Telescope after the supernova light has faded," Jha said. There are two possibilities: Either researchers will see no star at all, as would be the case if the supernova's progenitor was a massive star, or a helium star will be there "but it will have changed due to the explosion," Jha said. "We also hope to see the remnant zombie star," Jha added.
The research is detailed in the Aug. 7 edition of the journal Nature.
What?! The Universe Appears to Be Missing Some Lighthttp://news.yahoo.com/universe-appears-missing-light-125115861.html (http://news.yahoo.com/universe-appears-missing-light-125115861.html)
SPACE.com
by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor 3 hours ago
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New data from the Hubble Space Telescope and computer simulations have revealed that the universe has much less ultraviolet light than previously thought.
An extraordinary amount of ultraviolet light appears to be missing from the universe, scientists have found.
One potential source of this missing light might be the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the mass in the cosmos. But a simpler explanation could be that ultra violet light escapes from galaxies more easily than is currently thought, according to the new research.
This puzzle begins with hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, which makes up about 75 percent of known matter. High-energy ultraviolet light can convert electrically neutral hydrogen atoms into electrically charged ions. The two known sources for such ionizing rays are hot young stars and quasars, which are supermassive black holes more than a million times the mass of the sun that release extraordinarily large amounts of light as they rip apart stars and gobble matter.
Astronomers previously found that ionizing rays from hot young stars are nearly always absorbed by gas in their home galaxies. As such, they virtually never escape to affect intergalactic hydrogen.
However, when scientists performed supercomputer simulations of the amount of intergalactic hydrogen that should exist and compared their results with observations from the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, they found the amount of light from known quasars is five times lower than what is needed to explain the amount of electrically neutral intergalactic hydrogen observed.
"It's as if you're in a big, brightly-lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs," lead study author Juna Kollmeier, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "Where is all that light coming from? It's missing."
The researchers are calling this giant deficit of ultraviolet light "the photon underproduction crisis."
"In modern astrophysics, you very rarely find large mismatches like the one we are talking about here," Kollmeier told Space.com. "When you see one, you know that there is an opportunity to learn something new about the universe, and that's amazing."
"The great thing about a 400 percent discrepancy is that you know something is really wrong," study co-author David Weinberg at Ohio State University said in a statement. "We still don't know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day universe isn't true."
Strangely, this missing light only appears in the nearby, relatively well-studied cosmos. When telescopes focus on light from galaxies billions of light years away — and therefore from billions of years in the past — no problem is seen. In other words, the amount of ultraviolet light in the early universe makes sense, but the amount of ultraviolet light in the nearby universe does not.
"The authors have performed a careful and thorough analysis of the problem," said theoretical astrophysicist Abraham Loeb, chairman of the astronomy department at Harvard University, who did not take part in this research.
The most exciting possibility these findings raise is that the missing photons are coming from some exotic new source, not galaxies or quasars at all, Kollmeier said. For example, dark matter, the invisible and intangible substance thought to make up five-sixths of all matter in the universe, might be capable of decay and generating this extra light.
"You know it's a crisis when you start seriously talking about decaying dark matter," study co-author Neal Katz at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst said in a statement.
There still may be a simpler explanation for this missing light, however. Astronomers could be underestimating the fraction of ultraviolet light that escapes from galaxies in the nearby universe. "All that one needs is an average escape probability on the order of 15 percent to relieve the discrepancy," Loeb told Space.com.
Nearby, recent "low-redshift" galaxies have less gas to absorb ultraviolet rays that more distant, early "high-redshift" galaxies, Loeb noted.
"The more I think about it, the more plausible it appears that the escape fraction of ultraviolet photons is higher in local galaxies than in high-redshift galaxies," Loeb said.
On the other hand, "the biggest problem with this possible solution is that there are measurements of local galaxies that indicate the average escape fraction is significantly lower than 15 percent — more like 5 percent," Kollmeier said."In principle, it is possible that these galaxies are not representative and therefore we need to do more such measurements, but we cannot just dismiss the data."
Another potential explanation is ionization of intergalactic hydrogen by x-rays and cosmic rays, Loeb said. Although he noted this radiation does not play a major role in ionizing intergalactic hydrogen in the most distant corners and earliest times in the universe, astronomers may want to see how much of a role x-rays and cosmic rays play in the nearby universe, "where they are produced more vigorously," he said.
The scientists detailed their findings in the July 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
3D Galactic Map May Solve Interstellar Puzzlehttp://news.yahoo.com/3d-galactic-map-may-solve-interstellar-puzzle-181959255.html (http://news.yahoo.com/3d-galactic-map-may-solve-interstellar-puzzle-181959255.html)
SPACE.com
By Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor 44 minutes ago
(http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/DMqAvZOt04AEpDBgenSwFw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTQyNztweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz01NzU-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_US/News/SPACE.com/3D_Galactic_Map_May_Solve-68cb19a52e40ed4257836b503266dd21)
Maps of the measured DIB absorption in respect to the area they cover in our galaxy.
Scientists have created the first 3D map of a type of astronomical interference that has puzzled astronomers for nearly a century.
The new map could help scientists finally nail down the identity of the material that creates "diffuse interstellar bands" (DIBs) in observations of stars, the study authors said.
The researchers focused on the single DIB 8620, one of over 400 absorption lines, with the goal of narrowing down its source.
"DIB 8620 does not seem special compared to other DIBs," lead author Janez Kos, of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, told Space.com by email.
However, as a spectral feature often used to measure stellar motion, it is "the most observed DIB."
The result was the first large-scale map of DIB interference, and the first three-dimensional study of the DIB-bearing clouds in the interstellar medium.
(http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/511My0iOpDQSoJDlbxvi.g--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTU3MTtweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz01NzU-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_US/News/SPACE.com/3D_Galactic_Map_May_Solve-2051b93f141cfe8a1b564b15af7fe417)
These maps show the amount of light absorbed by the DIB (left) and the dust between stars (right). Red indicates that more light was absorbed than blue. The top maps show the northern galactic hemisphere, while the bottom row shows the southern
Astronomers break the light streaming from distant stars into prismlike lines called spectra, separated by wavelength, in order to determine what stars are made of. Some of the light is absorbed by the material it passes through along the way, creating absorption bands in the data.
While some of the bands are caused by cool gases in the stars' atmospheres, diffuse interstellar bands have remained a mystery since their identification in 1922. These bands are spread across visible, infrared, and ultraviolet wavelengths, and correspond to no known atom or molecule.
Some of the first proposed sources were molecules on dust grainsbetween stars, according to Kos. It has also been suggested that the strange absorption bands are caused by carbon-based molecules that are either simple or in long chains.
"None of these were ever proved to be the carriers," Kos said.
In order to investigate DIB 8620, Kos and his international team of astronomers turned to the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) survey of stars in the Milky Way created by the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s Schmidt telescope. RAVE contained the spectra of almost half a million stars across the galaxy, all located in the southern sky.
Using the measurements of DIB 8620 in the spectra of the stars, Kos and his team created a map of the interference source across the galaxy, measuring the density of the material by how strong its absorption line is in the stars detected by RAVE. The data taken from the survey revealed the distance of each star, allowing for the 3D mapping of the material in the interstellar medium.
The scientists then compared the DIB map with an independently constructed map of the interstellar dustalong the plane of the galaxy.
While the results are similar, the two maps don’t match up precisely, suggesting that there is a "strong correspondence between the two," according to the research paper. Rising above the plane of the galaxy, the density of the source for DIB 8620 drops more slowly than the density of the dust — a surprising find since the two sources otherwise align fairly well.
"Even though the correlation between the DIB and dust is good, the two components do not share the same distribution in the interstellar medium," Kos said.
The implication is that "DIBs experience a mechanism of their own during their creation and migration through the galaxy," Kos said.
The team cautions that these implications should not be extended to all DIBs, as different bands demonstrate different behavior. However, the techniques used to study DIB 8620, combined with other surveys of the Milky Way, should allow for similar maps to be made, narrowing down the source of a century-old mystery. RAVE limited the team to studying only a single band, but different surveys should allow for the study of some of the other 400-plus measurements.
The research was published online today (Aug 14) in the journal Science.
Stephen Hawking Says 'God Particle' Could Wipe Out the Universehttp://news.yahoo.com/stephen-hawking-says-god-particle-could-wipe-universe-193636349.html (http://news.yahoo.com/stephen-hawking-says-god-particle-could-wipe-universe-193636349.html)
LiveScience.com
By Kelly Dickerson, Staff Writer 1 hour ago
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Simulated data from the Large Hadron Collider particle detector shows the Higgs boson produced after two protons collide.
Stephen Hawking bet Gordon Kane $100 that physicists would not discover the Higgs boson. After losing that bet when physicists detected the particle in 2012, Hawking lamented the discovery, saying it made physics less interesting. Now, in the preface to a new collection of essays and lectures called "Starmus," the famous theoretical physicist is warning that the particle could one day be responsible for the destruction of the known universe.
Hawking is not the only scientist who thinks so. The theory of a Higgs boson doomsday, where a quantum fluctuation creates a vacuum "bubble" that expands through space and wipes out the universe, has existed for a while. However, scientists don't think it could happen anytime soon.
"Most likely it will take 10 to the 100 years [a 1 followed by 100 zeroes] for this to happen, so probably you shouldn't sell your house and you should continue to pay your taxes," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, said during his lecture at the SETI Institute on Sept. 2. "On the other hand it may already happened, and the bubble might be on its way here now. And you won't know because it's going at the speed of light so there's not going to be any warning."
The Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the 'god particle,' much to the chagrin of scientists who prefer the official name, is a tiny particle that researchers long suspected existed. Its discovery lends strong support to the Standard Model of particle physics, or the known rules of particle physics that scientists believe govern the basic building blocks of matter. The Higgs boson particle is so important to the Standard Model because it signals the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible energy field present throughout the universe that imbues other particles with mass. Since its discovery two years ago, the particle has been making waves in the physics community.
Now that scientists measured the particle's mass last year, they can make many other calculations, including one that seems to spell out the end of the universe.
Universe doomsday
The Higgs boson is about 126 billion electron volts, or about the 126 times the mass of a proton. This turns out to be the precise mass needed to keep the universe on the brink of instability, but physicists say the delicate state will eventually collapse and the universe will become unstable. That conclusion involves the Higgs field.
The Higgs field emerged at the birth of the universe and has acted as its own source of energy since then, Lykken said. Physicists believe the Higgs field may be slowly changing as it tries to find an optimal balance of field strength and energy required to maintain that strength.
"Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states," Gian Giudice, a theoretical physicist at the CERN lab, where the Higgs boson was discovered, explained during a TED talk in October 2013.
Right now the Higgs field is in a minimum potential energy state — like a valley in a field of hills and valleys. The huge amount of energy required to change into another state is like chugging up a hill. If the Higgs field makes it over that energy hill, some physicists think the destruction of the universe is waiting on the other side.
But an unlucky quantum fluctuation, or a change in energy, could trigger a process called "quantum tunneling." Instead of having to climb the energy hill, quantum tunneling would make it possible for the Higgs field to "tunnel" through the hill into the next, even lower-energy valley. This quantum fluctuation will happen somewhere out in the empty vacuum of space between galaxies, and will create a "bubble," Lykken said.
Here's how Hawking describes this Higgs doomsday scenario in the new book: "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 [billion] gigaelectronvolts (GeV). … This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming."
The Higgs field inside that bubble will be stronger and have a lower energy level than its surroundings. Even if the Higgs field inside the bubble were slightly stronger than it is now, it could shrink atoms, disintegrate atomic nuclei, and make it so that hydrogen would be the only element that could exist in the universe, Giudice explained in his TED talk.
But using a calculation that involves the currently known mass of the Higgs boson, researchers predict this bubble would contain an ultra-strong Higgs field that would expand at the speed of light through space-time. The expansion would be unstoppable and would wipe out everything in the existing universe, Lykken said.
"More interesting to us as physicists is when you do this calculation using the standard physics we know about, it turns out we're right on the edge between a stable universe and an unstable universe," Lykken said. "We're sort of right on the edge where the universe can last for a long time, but eventually it should go 'boom.' There's no principle that we know of that would put us right on the edge."
Not all doom and gloom
Either all of space-time exists on this razor's edge between a stable and unstable universe, or the calculation is wrong, Lykken said.
If the calculation is wrong, it must come from a fundamental part of physics that scientists have not discovered yet. Lykken said one possibility is the existence of invisible dark matter that physicists believe makes up about 27 percent of the universe. Discovering how dark matter interacts with the rest of the universe could reveal properties and rules physicists don't know about yet.
The other is the idea of "supersymmetry." In the Standard Model, every particle has a partner, or its own anti-particle. But supersymmetry is a theory that suggests every particle also has a supersymmetric partner particle. The existence of these other particles would help stabilize the universe, Lykken said.
"We found the Higgs boson, which was a big deal, but we're still trying to understand what it means and we're also trying to understand all the other things that go along with it
"This is very much the beginning of the story and I've shown you some directions that story could go in, but I think there could be surprises that no one has even thought of," Lykken concludes in his lecture.
Stephen Hawking makes it clear: There is no Godhttp://www.cnet.com/news/stephen-hawking-makes-it-clear-there-is-no-god/#ftag=YHF65cbda0 (http://www.cnet.com/news/stephen-hawking-makes-it-clear-there-is-no-god/#ftag=YHF65cbda0)
The physicist explains that science now offers more convincing explanations for existence. He is therefore an atheist.
CNET
by Chris Matyszczyk @ChrisMatyszczyk/September 26, 2014 9:33 AM PDT
(http://cnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2014/09/26/7a42837e-657a-4c79-92af-86ae53cca366/resize/370xauto/72700ecc31945c54ca85d18452a45b67/hawk56.png)
Stephen Hawking comes right out and says it. He is an atheist. Hadoualex/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
If I were a scientist, I'd stick to the Goldman Sachs principle: bet on both sides.
"Believe in science, believe in God" seems to cover all the possibilities and gives you the best chance for a cheery afterlife.
For a time, it was thought that astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had also left a tiny gap in his credo window for a magical deity. However, he has now come out and declared that there is no God.
He gave an interview to Spain's El Mundo in which he expressed his firm belief that el mundo was the work of scientifically explainable phenomena, not of a supreme being.
Hawking said: "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation."
I'm not sure whether there was a specific moment in which science overtook the deistic explanation of existence. However, El Mundo pressed him on the suggestion in "A Brief History of Time" that a unifying theory of science would help mankind "know the mind of God."
Hawking now explained: "What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn't. I'm an atheist."
He added: "Religion believes in miracles, but these aren't compatible with science."
Perhaps. But some look at, for example, the human eye and wonder how that exciting ball of jelly could have come about scientifically.
Hawking's been tending toward such an absolute pronouncement for a while. In a speech last year, he offered an explanation of how the world came to being without God. He mused: "What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
I do worry, though, about Hawking's sweetly divine faith in humanity. He told El Mundo: "In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind."
If that's true, the human mind still has to develop exponentially to explain everyday phenomena, such as social networking. And then there's Hawking's insistence that his speech synthesizer, which gives him a curiously American accent, has had this consequence: "With the American accent, I've had far more success with women."
We definitely need some serious research to explain that.
QuoteStephen Hawking makes it clear: There is no Godhttp://www.cnet.com/news/stephen-hawking-makes-it-clear-there-is-no-god/#ftag=YHF65cbda0 (http://www.cnet.com/news/stephen-hawking-makes-it-clear-there-is-no-god/#ftag=YHF65cbda0)
The physicist explains that science now offers more convincing explanations for existence. He is therefore an atheist.
CNET
by Chris Matyszczyk @ChrisMatyszczyk/September 26, 2014 9:33 AM PDT
(http://cnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2014/09/26/7a42837e-657a-4c79-92af-86ae53cca366/resize/370xauto/72700ecc31945c54ca85d18452a45b67/hawk56.png)
Stephen Hawking comes right out and says it. He is an atheist. Hadoualex/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
If I were a scientist, I'd stick to the Goldman Sachs principle: bet on both sides.
"Believe in science, believe in God" seems to cover all the possibilities and gives you the best chance for a cheery afterlife.
For a time, it was thought that astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had also left a tiny gap in his credo window for a magical deity. However, he has now come out and declared that there is no God.
He gave an interview to Spain's El Mundo in which he expressed his firm belief that el mundo was the work of scientifically explainable phenomena, not of a supreme being.
Hawking said: "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation."
I'm not sure whether there was a specific moment in which science overtook the deistic explanation of existence. However, El Mundo pressed him on the suggestion in "A Brief History of Time" that a unifying theory of science would help mankind "know the mind of God."
Hawking now explained: "What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn't. I'm an atheist."
He added: "Religion believes in miracles, but these aren't compatible with science."
Perhaps. But some look at, for example, the human eye and wonder how that exciting ball of jelly could have come about scientifically.
Hawking's been tending toward such an absolute pronouncement for a while. In a speech last year, he offered an explanation of how the world came to being without God. He mused: "What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
I do worry, though, about Hawking's sweetly divine faith in humanity. He told El Mundo: "In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind."
If that's true, the human mind still has to develop exponentially to explain everyday phenomena, such as social networking. And then there's Hawking's insistence that his speech synthesizer, which gives him a curiously American accent, has had this consequence: "With the American accent, I've had far more success with women."
We definitely need some serious research to explain that.
Pope Francis says Big Bang theory does not contradict role of God
Reuters October 28, 2014 2:45 PM
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Scientific theories including the "Big Bang" believed to have brought the universe into being 13.7 billion years ago and the idea that life developed through a process of evolution do not conflict with Catholic teaching, Pope Francis said on Tuesday.
Addressing a meeting of the Pontificial Academy of Sciences, an independent body housed in the Vatican and financed largely by the Holy See, Francis said scientific explanations for the world did not exclude the role of God in creation.
"The beginning of the world is not the work of chaos that owes its origin to something else, but it derives directly from a supreme principle that creates out of love," he said.
"The 'Big Bang', that today is considered to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the creative intervention of God, on the contrary it requires it," he said.
"Evolution in nature is not in contrast with the notion of (divine) creation because evolution requires the creation of the beings that evolve," the pope said.
The Church once opposed early scientific explanations of the universe that contradicted the account of creation in the Bible, famously condemning the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei who showed that the earth revolved around the sun.
However, more recently it has sought to shed its image as an enemy of science and the pope's comments largely echoed statements from his predecessors.
Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans in 1950 and Pope John Paul reiterated that in 1996.
In 2011, the former Pope Benedict said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.
(Reporting by Antonio Denti; writing by James Mackenzie; editing by Ralph Boulton)
Sometimes I think religion and science aren't so very different, just two different reflections of the human mind.
One second after the Big Bang, the Higgs boson should have caused a Big Crunch, collapsing the universe to nothing. But gravity saved the day.
(http://en.es-static.us/upl/2014/11/bigbang.jpg)
Time line of the universe via NASA/WMAP Science Team
(view much larger: http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2013/bigbang.jpg (http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2013/bigbang.jpg))
Since the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in 2012, researchers have studied this mysterious particle – which is responsible for giving mass to all particles – to learn its contributions to our universe’s inner workings. One startling announcement earlier this year was that the Higgs boson should have made our universe collapse less than one second after it began expanding outward from the Big Bang. The universe did not collapse – it has been known for decades to be expanding – and now European physicists say they can explain why without the need for “new physics.”
Publishing in Physical Review Letters on November 17, 2014, the researcher describe how the spacetime curvature – in effect, gravity – provided the stability needed for the universe to survive expansion in that early period.
The team investigated the interaction between the Higgs particles and gravity, taking into account how it would vary with energy. They show that even a small interaction would have been enough to stabilize the universe from collapsing back to nothing, within a second after the Big Bang. Arttu Rajantie of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London said in a press release:
The Standard Model of particle physics, which scientists use to explain elementary particles and their interactions, has so far not provided an answer to why the universe did not collapse following the Big Bang
Our research investigates the last unknown parameter in the Standard Model – the interaction between the Higgs particle and gravity. This parameter cannot be measured in particle accelerator experiments, but it has a big effect on the Higgs instability during inflation [a faster-than-light expansion just after the Big Bang]. Even a relatively small value is enough to explain the survival of the universe without any new physics!
The team says it will now use observations of the universe on the largest scales to look at this interaction in more detail. In particular, they say, they will use data from current and future European Space Agency missions measuring cosmic microwave background radiation and gravitational waves. Rajantie explained:
Our aim is to measure the interaction between gravity and the Higgs field using cosmological data. If we are able to do that, we will have supplied the last unknown number in the Standard Model of particle physics and be closer to answering fundamental questions about how we are all here.
Bottom line: A second after the Big Bang, the Higgs boson should have caused a Big Crunch, collapsing the universe to nothing. But gravity stepped in to save the day.
Via phys.org (http://phys.org/news/2014-11-gravity-universe-big.html#jCp (http://phys.org/news/2014-11-gravity-universe-big.html#jCp))
Study Says Gravity and Higgs Boson Interacted to Save the Universe
EARTHSKY // SCIENCE WIRE, SPACE
RELEASE DATE: NOV 22, 2014QuoteOne second after the Big Bang, the Higgs boson should have caused a Big Crunch, collapsing the universe to nothing. But gravity saved the day.
(http://en.es-static.us/upl/2014/11/bigbang.jpg)
Time line of the universe via NASA/WMAP Science Team
(view much larger: http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2013/bigbang.jpg (http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2013/bigbang.jpg))
Since the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in 2012, researchers have studied this mysterious particle – which is responsible for giving mass to all particles – to learn its contributions to our universe’s inner workings. One startling announcement earlier this year was that the Higgs boson should have made our universe collapse less than one second after it began expanding outward from the Big Bang. The universe did not collapse – it has been known for decades to be expanding – and now European physicists say they can explain why without the need for “new physics.”
Publishing in Physical Review Letters on November 17, 2014, the researcher describe how the spacetime curvature – in effect, gravity – provided the stability needed for the universe to survive expansion in that early period.
The team investigated the interaction between the Higgs particles and gravity, taking into account how it would vary with energy. They show that even a small interaction would have been enough to stabilize the universe from collapsing back to nothing, within a second after the Big Bang. Arttu Rajantie of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London said in a press release:
The Standard Model of particle physics, which scientists use to explain elementary particles and their interactions, has so far not provided an answer to why the universe did not collapse following the Big Bang
Our research investigates the last unknown parameter in the Standard Model – the interaction between the Higgs particle and gravity. This parameter cannot be measured in particle accelerator experiments, but it has a big effect on the Higgs instability during inflation [a faster-than-light expansion just after the Big Bang]. Even a relatively small value is enough to explain the survival of the universe without any new physics!
The team says it will now use observations of the universe on the largest scales to look at this interaction in more detail. In particular, they say, they will use data from current and future European Space Agency missions measuring cosmic microwave background radiation and gravitational waves. Rajantie explained:
Our aim is to measure the interaction between gravity and the Higgs field using cosmological data. If we are able to do that, we will have supplied the last unknown number in the Standard Model of particle physics and be closer to answering fundamental questions about how we are all here.
Bottom line: A second after the Big Bang, the Higgs boson should have caused a Big Crunch, collapsing the universe to nothing. But gravity stepped in to save the day.
Via phys.org (http://phys.org/news/2014-11-gravity-universe-big.html#jCp (http://phys.org/news/2014-11-gravity-universe-big.html#jCp))
http://earthsky.org/space/new-study-says-gravity-and-higgs-boson-interacted-to-save-the-universe (http://earthsky.org/space/new-study-says-gravity-and-higgs-boson-interacted-to-save-the-universe)
So who/what created/made the Higgs Boson and Gravity? What went on before 13.7 billion years ago? :)
SO - a question for anyone who thinks they can wrap their head around it:I believe that's an intelligently-framed question for a layman (with no formal education in cosmology at all)...
The entire universe is expanding - the furthest parts we'd observed when I was a lot younger displayed a red-shift indicating they were receding at about half the speed of light, according to our frame of reference. So according to the reference frame of a hypothetical inhabitant of the far side of the universe, we're doing the receding, and I suppose the relativistic space/time dilatation balances/cancels out. Fine.
But imagine that I'm aboard a starship, we'll call it the Unity, heading for Alpha Centauri at 10%C, making for a forty year journey (from an outside "resting" reference point). The universe has no center -something I don't really understand, BTW- and all of it is moving relative to the rest of it, and the time/space dilation of special relativity is a function of %C - is the frame of reference for relative velocity the average position of the rest of the entire universe, and what/where/how's the bookkeeping to determine relative velocity taking place?
Keep in mind that I'm stupid at math, if you think you know the answer. I would like a layman's understanding, though. Please.
...
BTW, I hadn't seen the first episode of new Cosmos yet when I said that about the universe maybe being an in-falling black hole...
SO - a question for anyone who thinks they can wrap their head around it:
The entire universe is expanding - the furthest parts we'd observed when I was a lot younger displayed a red-shift indicating they were receding at about half the speed of light, according to our frame of reference. So according to the reference frame of a hypothetical inhabitant of the far side of the universe, we're doing the receding, and I suppose the relativistic space/time dilatation balances/cancels out. Fine.
But imagine that I'm aboard a starship, we'll call it the Unity, heading for Alpha Centauri at 10%C, making for a forty year journey (from an outside "resting" reference point). The universe has no center -something I don't really understand, BTW- and all of it is moving relative to the rest of it, and the time/space dilation of special relativity is a function of %C - is the frame of reference for relative velocity the average position of the rest of the entire universe, and what/where/how's the bookkeeping to determine relative velocity taking place?
Keep in mind that I'm stupid at math, if you think you know the answer. I would like a layman's understanding, though. Please.
But if the 'other side' of the universe is receding at .5C, our dilation and theirs would be equal and as if no relativistic time effect was ever present, from both frames of reference(FOR) (the space-compression part of the tau effect is another matter, but way too far away to ever hope to measure, so irrelevant), yes? But wouldn't the Unity, heading at .1C (Yes. The average is .1C(approx.) for a(n approximately) four light-year journey taking 40 years, QED)
towards the far side of the universe (not that it has one, but you know, the oldest, farthest part observable from our frame) in that direction knock the tau factor difference to that FOR to 40%C and therefore seem to be experiencing time FASTER instead of SLOWER from that far FOR as special relativity demands?
But what IS motion?
(I always understood 40-year trip, so 2060. 'Spose you could look it up...)
Wait, did the Unity leave in 2060, or 2016?
You mean YET born? Haven't kept track. Domai was recently, IIRC, and I think Zak was in the last six years.
Remember, if two spaceships pass each other moving at 0.2c each, then each will see the other's time as passing slower than its own.I do not recall ever knowing that. Tough to wrap my noodle around, logically, too. ;brainhurts
;domai; b.06-17-2011 ;nodRemember, if two spaceships pass each other moving at 0.2c each, then each will see the other's time as passing slower than its own.I do not recall ever knowing that. Tough to wrap my noodle around, logically, too. ;brainhurts
Y'know, I ask what IS space and what IS motion for the purposes of special relativity because --- how does the local space-time in our .1C ship measure what's going on when motion's everywhere and all relative and the markers are scant in empty space and adjust the internal space-time tau appropriately? I seriously see a problem there that seems to demand some universal substrate bookkeeping to work, for all that the very problem is extremely difficult to even articulate. ;brainhurts
...I don't buy that about observing light for a second. SOMEthing's carrying 'Universal Positioning System' data between FORs, but I doubt it's photons...
Also? My brain ;brainhurts turns off at too many numbers - the wedges are a blur to me. Can you try again with less maths?
Ancient Galaxy Is Most Distant Ever Found (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=16764.msg79040#msg79040)
...Speaking of the oldest and fastest currently observed...
---
Now as to your answer, Lori, it addresses the appearance to an outside observer fine, but I don't think it answers my question; motion is relative, so what's the frame of reference for the Unity to determine relativistic effects/
“Men in their arrogance claim to understand the nature of creation, and devise elaborate theories to describe its behavior. But always they discover in the end that God was quite a bit more clever than they thought.”
Quote“Men in their arrogance claim to understand the nature of creation, and devise elaborate theories to describe its behavior. But always they discover in the end that God was quite a bit more clever than they thought.”
I love this line its so true. One book I remember called Sargon the magnificent.
The best part was the end. A female Scientist went through the beginning of Genesis.
She went through and translated it all from poetry to scientific terms.
It actually matches up pretty closely. It just has to be interpreted properly.
"Days" means "ages" for example.