Is the Big Bang in the Bible?

[Buster's Uncle]

That's third grade science they're failing, right there...

[Buster's Uncle]

Physicists Debate Discovery of Gravitational Ripples from the Big Bang
SPACE.com
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer  5 hours ago



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.

http://news.yahoo.com/physicists-debate-discovery-gravitational-ripples-big-bang-103450332.html

[Rusty Edge]

Headline: Steinhardt says Inflation Theory Overblown 

[Rusty Edge]

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.

[Dio]

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.

[Yitzi]

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.

Actually, 1026 is a pretty decent sample size; with a 75% rate in the population, the standard error with a sample size of 1026 (assuming a much larger population) will be around 1.35%, so you shouldn't be off by too much.

[Impaler]

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.

You really need demographic breakdowns to understand most pole numbers like this.

[Dio]

I will admit Yitzi is right about 1026 being a decent sample size. However, as Impaler stated, additional information regarding who was polled would help improve the study's quality.

[Geo]

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.

It was those 'old geezers', science knowledge notwithstanding, that rebuild and enhanced our technoligical base to where we stand today after the wars of the fourties-fifties.
Essentially, you're talking about my fathers generation, and I can say from personal experience quite a number of them are still busy with technical or scientific matters, even after retirement.
At least, in my acquintance circle that is.

[Lorizael]

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?

It's not GRBs relative newness in cosmology that makes them bad for time dilation studies but their non-uniform behavior over time. This means you can't really calibrate your measurements with them.

As far as quasars are concerned, there's more to them than average pulsation rate and redshift. The problem with looking at average pulsation rate is that there are high and low frequency quasars contributing to an average rate that might not actually reflect reality. You could look at particular populations of quasars based on frequency, but the current thought from quasar experts is that a lot about the environment of a quasar plays into its variability. Two big examples are microlensing effects (which are going to hit you more the farther away a quasar is) and disturbances in the central accretion disk (which could easily vary with the evolution of galaxies). Again, this all leads to the conclusion that quasars are not (yet) reliable when it comes to measuring time dilation and that supernovae are the best candidate.

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.

So, first of all, there is good reason to believe galaxies were smaller and brighter in the past. But they don't have to be smaller and brighter by the exact amount necessary to offset the changing surface brightness. They just have to be different enough to muddy the water and make the resulting tests harder. Regardless, what I've read suggests the exact opposite of what you're saying: that those tests have been passed. In fact, the tests done to date have confirmed the metric expansion of space and ruled out an alternative theory--tired light. (More about that below.)

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.

Tired light was a popular idea in the past but has since been falsified by two big findings. One is, near as I can tell, the Tolman surface brightness test. The other is the fact that tired light as required to produce the current observations would affect the CMB in a particular way. Specifically, it would change the spectrum of the CMB. In a non-expanding universe, photon density from the CMB doesn't change with time. The result is that we would receive more photons of particular frequencies than we end up seeing. As you point out in your post, the CMB is a point in favor of the Big Bang, but it's also a point against this alternative theory.

As for the rest of your argument, I don't want to quote it all but I do want to counter your central premise: that the Big Bang is in agreement with observations but doesn't pass tests to confirm it. There are three traditional tests of the Big Bang theory, all of which have been confirmed with stunning accuracy.

One is the CMB, which even you concede.

The second is Big Bang nucleosynthesis. It's not the high temperatures that produced the needed fusion for nucleosynthesis but the exact timing of the universe's cooling combined with the initial allotment of protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons. The high temperatures of the Big Bang were in fact sufficient to produce much, much heavier elements than were produced, but didn't for a couple of reasons.

Because physicists know the masses of those particles very well, they can predict with ease how much of each you're gonna end up with at any particular temperature. So that's a known. The result is that the early universe was the radiation epoch, where photons far outnumbered matter. This actually prevented fusion for minutes, because any particles that did fuse together were blasted apart by energetic photons. And as all this happened, the slightly higher mass and instability of neutrons eventually led to there being far more protons than neutrons. By the time the universe had expanded--and cooled--enough for fusion to continue unabated, there were simply too many protons and not enough neutrons to create stable heavy elements.

This is a specific prediction of the Big Bang, specifying an exact ratio of hydrogen to helium (plus minuscule amounts of lithium and beryllium) and observations match it precisely. Other plasmas--with different initial numbers of protons, neutrons, and photons--would have produced different elements. So any competing theory has to explain high temperatures but a lack of heavier elements, and no theory to date does that.

The third major prediction of the Big Bang is the general structure of the universe. The earlier universe is more uniform and consists of small clumps of small galaxies. The later universe is much clumpier and consists of larger, more evolved galaxies and gigantic super clusters. This is exactly what you would in an expanding, cooling universe where gravity eventually comes to dominate.

So the Big Bang theory makes several explicit predictions that it passes and is in accordance with virtually all evidence to date. While there are some holes in the theory, most of those holes are a result of inadequate data, and the alternative theories which explain those holes fail spectacularly to model the universe as a whole.

[Impaler]

It seems that once any set of observations is sufficiently 'muddy' enough you feel that nothing can be drawn from it and their seems to be a consistent pattern that any data set that isn't in agreement with BB THUS muddy.

I can understand the desire for firm footings but it seems like a double standard because evidence that was previously considered firm like SNIa stand-candle nature is now very muddy to the point that people are seriously considering if mergers are the dominant progenitor to SNIa's.  Yet this data is now having concepts as outlandish as Dark Energy hung on it alone as if it was a gold standard.

You say their is a good reason to believe galaxies were smaller in the past, is that good reason the expansion of space under BB theory itself or the finite age of the universe under BB which requires modern galaxies to have formed from aggregation of smaller structures?  Both of these would be blatantly begging the question wouldn't they, we should look for evolution in galaxies first not assume it, and all the data I've seen (admittedly lay summaries) is that galaxies very Far back look identical (structurally) to modern ones and even have comparable metal contents.  Their is thus only a small window in the early universe where we can't see yet in which ALL the galaxy formation needs to occur, the galaxies produced need to be brighter then anything ever observed by many orders of magnitude.

Here is a paper by Eric Learner http://bigbangneverhappened.org/lernerpaper4.pdf in which he examines galaxies out to z ~5 in the Hubble Ultra Deep field.  Prior studies look at far closer galaxies where the divergence between the two theories is much smaller.

Lastly you set up a false burden on me that I must 'model the universe as a whole' in order to have evidence that falsifies the BB theory be considered on it's merit.  You confuse the burden of falsifying current theory with that of overturning the current concordance theory with another theory.  We CAN have a concordance theory which is also know to be false, as I said earlier GR is exactly such a theory, known to be false for decades due to discrepancy with quantum effects, but still useful and the best thing we have.  Falsifying BB theory is completely independent of any other theories status or merit.

[Buster's Uncle]

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]

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_2003fg

[Impaler]

Super-Chandrasekhar SNs can occur from the either mergers of two white dwarfs OR the extra support of high spin and/or magnetic fields of a single mass-accreting dwarf.  The new equations were done by another Indian astronomers Upasana Das and Banibrata Mukhopadhyay, here is a summary.

http://www.2physics.com/2013/02/new-mass-limit-for-white-dwarfs.html

[Lorizael]

Sorry for disappearing.

Imapler, I did not mean to imply that you must model the whole universe, because I didn't presume that you were in support of some other theory. You're linking to Lerner, so I suppose that means you believe in some version of plasma cosmology. Okay. My point about alternative theories such as plasma cosmology failing to model the universe as a whole is that, while it's certainly possible the big bang didn't happen, there are at present no viable theoretical alternatives.

And that almost makes the discussion of whether the theory is true moot. As far as working scientists are concerned, the big bang theory has immense explanatory power that makes it a valuable tool for doing astronomy and cosmology, whether it's right or wrong. This is its value as a theory.

Nevertheless, I think the stunning accuracy of its core predictions presents a strong case for it bearing some resemblance to reality. Yes, not every piece of data supports the big bang. And some of the evidence is weaker than astronomers would like. But it seems to me that the flaws in the theory at present are due mostly to our significant, but limited powers of observation. There are just things we're not very good at measuring yet, and some things we don't even have a way of measuring yet. For example, we have no idea if the neutrino background exists because there's at present no way to detect neutrinos with that little energy.

I have to repeat, I really don't think the case against the reliability of 1a supernovae is very strong. As I explained in my freakishly long post, astronomers are acutely aware of the fact that not all supernovae are created equal, and they don't attempt to use irregular supernovae as standard candles. There are differences in the spectra of the super chandrasekhars that are immediately obvious to astronomers. What this means is that there is a population of 1a supernovae that are known to be reliable because their output is pretty much exactly what theory predicts. This is the population that is used as a standard candle.

Objecting to that is akin to objecting to the use of quartz crystals in clocks because not all quartz crystals make good oscillators. The ones that do, do. The ones that don't, don't.

[Impaler]

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.

Lastly wither regard to 'Plasma Cosmology', I do not really think it ever should have been called a cosmology, that set the whole theory/theories up for failure right from the get go because of this demand for total comprehensiveness that is the hallmark of cosmology.  Lerner really just has a scale-invariant plasma structure theory combined with an eternal meta-stable universe principle, plus a bunch of BB falsification evidence which is really separate.  This doesn't close the loop on a whole range of processes like fusion, radiation, black holes etc which would need to be recycled to create a meta-stable universe.

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).  Also I think Learner makes good point the plasma physics has been short changed when considering structure formation (which is changing), but I don't go so far as to say Plasma is dominant as he dose.  Lerner's BB falsifications are what I find most intriguing (even more then his fusion device which really looks like it's got potential to succeed) but these should really have been presented on their own without presenting his alternatives because this inevitably moves us from a discussion of 'Is BB falsified?" to "Is BB replaced by this other theory?" which he is not going to win because he doesn't have a complete cosmology, a whole new cosmology that could win that debate is the work of a generation not just one man, falsifying BB is what can free a generation of astronomers to DO that work.

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.