Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed

I said before that those Intelligent Design folks tacked onto inflation as it supported their world view somewhat. It mean that the Universe was previously in what we might describe as a chaotic stage, then an inflationary period occurred which made the Universe much bigger in a trillionth of a second faster than the speed of light and made it uniform instead of lumpy all over whereby energy levels could drop low enough for matter to form.

They love that stuff.

It doesn't actually solve anything in any meaningful sense and arguably it went from a less uniform to more chaotic state but whatever.
 
Damocles said:
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.
Click to expand...
There we go Damocles. You've explained it better and more concisely than any other source so far. Excellent post.

Oh, and can I ask you something. There's one quote saying we were looking for a needle in a haystack and we found a crowbar, i.e. the ripples from the gravitational waves were much stronger than expected and therefore making them resemble something the size of a crowbar rather than a needle. Does this mean that inflation in the early universe was substantially faster/of greater magnitude than expected and would that have any implications for the size of the universe now?
 
Damocles said:
I said before that those Intelligent Design folks tacked onto inflation as it supported their world view somewhat. It mean that the Universe was previously in what we might describe as a chaotic stage, then an inflationary period occurred which made the Universe much bigger in a trillionth of a second faster than the speed of light and made it uniform instead of lumpy all over whereby energy levels could drop low enough for matter to form.

They love that stuff.

It doesn't actually solve anything in any meaningful sense and arguably it went from a less uniform to more chaotic state but whatever.
Click to expand...
Really good read all of that, cheers.
 
The best part of this news is all the new science documentaries we'll now get on the box. I know they often simplify everything to the point of uselessness, but I put one of those on just before bed and I drift straight off every time. Haven't found a better sleep aid yet.
 
Damocles said:
Leave it to the BBC to say:

"New science discovery: Here's no real information about it"

This is actually quite a large deal. One physicist wrote that outside of finding life on another planet or directly detecting dark matter this is the biggest near-present discovery we could have made.

To simplify it grossly, this is pretty much the first observable evidence for inflation in the early observable Universe. Indirect evidence, but it meets enough predictions that we can start focusing on exactly which model of inflationary theory is the correct one.
Click to expand...

can we ban religion now?
 
Skashion said:
There we go Damocles. You've explained it better and more concisely than any other source so far. Excellent post.

Oh, and can I ask you something. There's one quote saying we were looking for a needle in a haystack and we found a crowbar, i.e. the ripples from the gravitational waves were much stronger than expected and therefore making them resemble something the size of a crowbar rather than a needle. Does this mean that inflation in the early universe was substantially faster/of greater magnitude than expected and would that have any implications for the size of the universe now?
Click to expand...

Two parts to this. The needle in a haystack and found a crowbar thing was possibly because many people believed that the energy levels were much lower thus the B-mode polarization would be extremely hard to detect. It turned out that it was staring them in the face comparatively.

I can't really get this across succinctly so am going to have to simplify a bit. The CMB gave us the light first emitted within the Universe. As light is an electromagnetic field it is expected to be polarized a certain way. However, gravitational waves are literally just ripples in the gravitational field of spacetime. These are now so small as the field (i.e. spacetime) has stretched so large that some experiments are now been built underground and heavily shielded from radiation to (unsuccessfully so far) attempt to detect them from local sources. Because the Universe was much smaller (so gravity was stronger), gravitational waves actually effected the polarization of the light in the CMB which we have just seen.

Some people believed that by the time the CMB light was released the energy of gravity wasn't enough to show a huge effect on polarization. They have been shown to be wrong and it is the needle/crowbar analogy. Importantly though, as we have this energy level we now have a new minimum energy level at which the fundamental forces broke off and it is right near where some predicted.

Implications for speed of inflation isn't a really answerable question as there were several ideas and we've just confirmed one. Implications will come with more research. Some are claiming this as further evidence of Dark Energy

Size of the Universe is a bit of a misnomer. Since we have shown that the observable Universe has a flat topology, the Universe is considered to be infinite in size. Be aware that any time anybody uses the words "the Universe" in respects to the Big Bang model, they actually mean "the observable Universe". The Big Bang model covers only the observable Universe and not the Universe as a whole. In fact every time you see people say "the Universe" without qualification they are probably talking about the observable Universe.
 
The observable Universe is finite, the Universe is infinite.

EDIT: I look all weird now!
 
Skashion said:
Damocles said:
The observable Universe is finite, the Universe is infinite.

EDIT: I look all weird now!
Click to expand...
Yes, my apologies though I still don't understand how we would know the universe is infinite.
Click to expand...

It's an inference rather than anything else.

WMAP measured the curvature of the Universe within a 0.3% margin of error and it is flat. This would infer one of two things; either we currently live in a Torus shaped Universe which would be unnecessarily complicated in terms of squaring with other ideas on inflation, or we live in an infinite and unbounded Universe.

If our observable Universe is flat, there's no reason to presume the rest of the Universe is different.

Think of a Mandelbrot fractal

anifractal.gif


We don't know the size of the non-observable Universe, nor where other Big Bangs happened if they did or if that's even a thing.
 
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