Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed

[dronefromsector7g]

Have they found God yet?

 

[Damocles]

Have they found God yet?

The Intelligent Design people will be happy with this as inflation was a major part of their ideas

 

[Skashion]

That's a decent explanation

Not really. What does that mean to anyone?

 

[Damocles]

That's a decent explanation

Not really. What does that mean to anyone?

Ok. Maybe I should have said "I thought that's a fairly simple explanation on what has been released today"?

It shows the polarisation patterns in the CMB, explains what the CMB is and why it's ~380,000 years after the Big Bang, shows what inflation is and how long it lasted and why it's remarkable that predictions in a pre-light Universe have evidence for them. It also sort of shows why the polarisation pattern changes with the gravitation field "line".

I dunno, I thought it was pretty good.

 

[Skashion]

That's a decent explanation

Not really. What does that mean to anyone?

Ok. Maybe I should have said "I thought that's a fairly simple explanation on what has been released today"?

It shows the polarisation patterns in the CMB, explains what the CMB is and why it's ~380,000 years after the Big Bang, shows what inflation is and how long it lasted and why it's remarkable that predictions in a pre-light Universe have evidence for them. It also sort of shows why the polarisation pattern changes with the gravitation field "line".

I dunno, I thought it was pretty good.

But your original complaint is that BBC hadn't really explained why it's so important. I've looked at a few articles now. Has anyone done a good job of that. I know you're a huge fan of this sort of stuff. It's why you say Carl Sagan is one of your greatest heroes. Plenty have emphasised what a huge discovery it is but who's done a good job of saying why. Your image is an ok simplified explanation of what has been detected. What does it mean though to the average person though. What does the discovery mean beyond squiggly lines and patterns? I find popular science magazines like New Scientist and Nature tend to be the ones that manage it.

 

[Yaya_Tony]

The question will be ... what caused the signal that set the super-rapid expansion ?

God did it of course.

 

[Damocles]

It's because it's so incredibly hard with this minutia of stuff without venturing into the realm of speculation. I'll have a go on the significance of the findings.

• This is extremely good evidence for the "inflation" period of the Big Bang model. Many are referring to this as a "smoking gun" as the type of deviation seen in the polarisation pattern was predicted almost exactly by gravitational waves. It is worth noting that inflation is a term used to describe a specific period/event in the Big Bang model rather than the expansion we see all of the time since Edwin Hubble.
  
  
• Something that I find particularly compelling is that lots of stuff has just changed in terms of what ideas might be right and what might be wrong. Many predictions have just been shown to be false, some others have shown to be true. This is how science is done and many authors are going back to the drawing board this week which is very exciting. This also provides evidence for many other models such as General Relativity which predicted this.
  
  
• We've known that gravitational waves existed for a long time but the strength of them in this period is something that has surprised many people. This is important for many different reasons but one of them is that the energy range is close to that some GUT theories predict and we now have empirical evidence of what that range is. Essentially, the idea that all of the fundamental forces were initially of equal strength and intertwined has had a nod towards it. A GUT theory means Grand Unified Theory about how all the forces were once the same thing that broke off into different energies and would be a phenomenal discovery if ever found that had applications everywhere in physics.
  
  
• This provides a picture of the Universe when it was 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds old. This data gives us a look at the Universe in an earlier state than anybody has ever seen before as light took the 380,000 years to start propagating.
  
  
• Moving inflation into the realm of the heavily supported solves a bunch of differing problems concerning the missing particles from SUSY, curvature of the Universe, and the like. Inflation has just wrapped them all up in a bow and thrown them out of the window.

 

[ForzaMancini]

The question will be ... what caused the signal that set the super-rapid expansion ?

 

[Damocles]

Just to tack onto that; this is evidence for inflation as those waves couldn't be correlated unless they expanded faster than the speed of light. Because we've seen the effects of them to a very high confidence (purely by chance is in the millions to one range), we can now assert that the waves DID move faster than the speed of light (as they must do to exist and show that pattern) which means that spacetime expanded faster than the speed of light in that period (which is the period we call "inflation"). Inflation period is a shorthand for a period of time which spacetime expanded faster than the speed of light in the very early Universe.

 

[talkativesprout]

The question will be ... what caused the signal that set the super-rapid expansion ?

God did it of course.

And lowe, gods mother spake unto him thus.
"God stop fucking about with that Quantum, if it goes off it will create one hell of a bang"