Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed

[Damocles]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

The Big Bang event didn't come from anywhere. It happened at every point in the Universe simultaneously. This obviously leads into the question of "before the Big Bang" whcih has two problems to it.

Firstly, there is no known way to observe anything that happened before the Big Bang so it is scientifically useless to speculate.

Secondly, time itself seems to have been created at the Big Bang event. This is a tough concept for people to grasp the implications of. Causality is the idea that X must happen before Y to get Z to happen. You have to throw a ball so it accelerates in the air, it won't just go from rest on a table to bouncing without some external force. When we see a mobile phone we know that that mobile phone must have been created somewhere, it didn't just pop out of existence. Cause and effect as the saying goes.

This law of causality is because "information" cannot travel faster than the speed of light. If the reverse were true, it would be possible to send a message and receive it before you have sent it which is a paradox.

An easy way to think of this is to think of time as just another variable in a co-ordinate system. You have 3 axis coming out from your body. The X axis runs across your chest and past your arms. The Y axis goes from your head to feet. The Z axis pierces through your chest and out of your back. Theoretically speaking you can now define any object in the Universe in relation to your own personal axis. An apple in front of you might be at [0, 0, 5]. A plane above your head might be at [0, 500, 0]. Somebody stood shoulder to shoulder might be at [3, 0, 0]. The point is that now you have a way of defining the position of every object in the entire Universe and despite what my missus said, I'm defining the centre of the Universe to be myself.

[bigimg]http://i.imgur.com/k7Z4zkr.png[/bigimg]

So that apple in front of you is pretty well defined in your coordinate system. Sort of. You see that apple is moving at the exact same speed as you; the speed that the Earth moves, so you don't notice it moving. Just like where you can drive down the motorway and if you match the speed of the car next to you then you can look across and it's sort of like none of you are moving.

What if you wanted to define the exact position of Mars? Using the position of your coordinate system, you calculate it at [1000, 80000, 700] write it down and continue on your merry way. The problem here is that if I come along the day after, find the [0, 0, 0] of the coordinate system (so come at you with a tape measure essentially) then start measuring until I hit the point you have defined. Unfortunately Mars is not there as you moved and Mars have moved. So the way to get around this is to define a point in time as a fourth figure we can use. We can say that Mars is at X axis value of 1000, Y axis value of 80000 and Z axis value of 700 but tack on the t value of lets say 232323. This now perfectly describes where Mars is in the entire Universe when you measured it.

The point I'm making here is that the t value (the time value) is an intricate part of how you have to measure position in the Universe. Time is not a spatial dimension like width or height, but it is a marker that informs spatial dimensions.

Now, we know through a series of very clever experiments and theorising by Einstein and others that the global speed limit in the Universe is 299,792,548 metres a second almost exactly. This isn't negotiable; other things might warp it but anything that travels inside our Universe has that speed limit.

Knowing now that that is our speed limit and that we travel in four dimensions, it might become a bit clearer what the point of the axis example was. It is the TOTAL speed that you can travel across all dimensions. The faster you go in one axis (let's say accelerating a ship in the Z axis or "going forward"), the slower you can go in all other axis (like the time axis). This is exactly WHY time dilation occurs, the phenomena where accelerating to the speed of light means that we experience time slower than those who aren't travelling at the speed. Because we move so quickly going forward the other dimensions don't move as quickly to compensate for the speed limit.
It's also why anything that doesn't have mass such as light can travel at exactly the Universal speed limit. The speed of light isn't the Universal speed limit, the speed of light is something travelling at the Universal speed limit because it has no mass therefore nothing in the X, Y or Z spatial dimensions to hold it back.

Going back to "information" and causality bearing this in mind. When you throw that ball, you have applied a force to it. When you send a signal, you have communicated through electromagnetism (or smoke signals, whatever). These things all have a physical property and exist in the X, Y and Z dimensions so can never reach the Universal speed limit. Using massless things such as light it is possible to communicate at the speed of light. But never past it because it would break the idea that things have to happen in an order.

However, the law of causality is just a byproduct of the existence of time. Time is a thing not just a human invention. A clock is a tool for measuring time like a ruler is a measurement for measuring distances. You can warp time using energy (such as a relativity spaceship thought experiment) just as you can warp distance by energy (through expansion). What we call time is the result of various forces in nature such as causality and entropy showing continual change. Change IS applied time. And if we're getting technical, energy is just the name we use for things that have the potential to inflict change in time.

Going back to the "before the Big Bang" non-question, it should now be clear about why it's one of those things that we cannot ever hope to explain without a major leap forward. This is attempting to define a period during which the t dimension didn't exist. If that doesn't exist then causality doesn't exist; energy as we know it doesn't exist, change doesn't exist. This is also one of the reasons why I don't believe the question even needs an answer. The idea of X happening before Y is a consequence of time. Time didn't exist so causality didn't exist. If causality didn't exist then nothing needed to happen to start something.

 

[aguero93:20]

Need to figure out some way to time travel for all this shit.

 

[AlgarveBlu]

Managed to understand some of the explanations, but I really don't understand where the Big Bang came from? I.e was there just a minute ball of energy that exploded? Please answer me so I can get a good nights sleep...

The Big Bang event didn't come from anywhere. It happened at every point in the Universe simultaneously. This obviously leads into the question of "before the Big Bang" whcih has two problems to it.

Firstly, there is no known way to observe anything that happened before the Big Bang so it is scientifically useless to speculate.

Secondly, time itself seems to have been created at the Big Bang event. This is a tough concept for people to grasp the implications of. Causality is the idea that X must happen before Y to get Z to happen. You have to throw a ball so it accelerates in the air, it won't just go from rest on a table to bouncing without some external force. When we see a mobile phone we know that that mobile phone must have been created somewhere, it didn't just pop out of existence. Cause and effect as the saying goes.

This law of causality is because "information" cannot travel faster than the speed of light. If the reverse were true, it would be possible to send a message and receive it before you have sent it which is a paradox.

An easy way to think of this is to think of time as just another variable in a co-ordinate system. You have 3 axis coming out from your body. The X axis runs across your chest and past your arms. The Y axis goes from your head to feet. The Z axis pierces through your chest and out of your back. Theoretically speaking you can now define any object in the Universe in relation to your own personal axis. An apple in front of you might be at [0, 0, 5]. A plane above your head might be at [0, 500, 0]. Somebody stood shoulder to shoulder might be at [3, 0, 0]. The point is that now you have a way of defining the position of every object in the entire Universe and despite what my missus said, I'm defining the centre of the Universe to be myself.

[bigimg]http://i.imgur.com/k7Z4zkr.png[/bigimg]

So that apple in front of you is pretty well defined in your coordinate system. Sort of. You see that apple is moving at the exact same speed as you; the speed that the Earth moves, so you don't notice it moving. Just like where you can drive down the motorway and if you match the speed of the car next to you then you can look across and it's sort of like none of you are moving.

What if you wanted to define the exact position of Mars? Using the position of your coordinate system, you calculate it at [1000, 80000, 700] write it down and continue on your merry way. The problem here is that if I come along the day after, find the [0, 0, 0] of the coordinate system (so come at you with a tape measure essentially) then start measuring until I hit the point you have defined. Unfortunately Mars is not there as you moved and Mars have moved. So the way to get around this is to define a point in time as a fourth figure we can use. We can say that Mars is at X axis value of 1000, Y axis value of 80000 and Z axis value of 700 but tack on the t value of lets say 232323. This now perfectly describes where Mars is in the entire Universe when you measured it.

The point I'm making here is that the t value (the time value) is an intricate part of how you have to measure position in the Universe. Time is not a spatial dimension like width or height, but it is a marker that informs spatial dimensions.

Now, we know through a series of very clever experiments and theorising by Einstein and others that the global speed limit in the Universe is 299,792,548 metres a second almost exactly. This isn't negotiable; other things might warp it but anything that travels inside our Universe has that speed limit.

Knowing now that that is our speed limit and that we travel in four dimensions, it might become a bit clearer what the point of the axis example was. It is the TOTAL speed that you can travel across all dimensions. The faster you go in one axis (let's say accelerating a ship in the Z axis or "going forward"), the slower you can go in all other axis (like the time axis). This is exactly WHY time dilation occurs, the phenomena where accelerating to the speed of light means that we experience time slower than those who aren't travelling at the speed. Because we move so quickly going forward the other dimensions don't move as quickly to compensate for the speed limit.
It's also why anything that doesn't have mass such as light can travel at exactly the Universal speed limit. The speed of light isn't the Universal speed limit, the speed of light is something travelling at the Universal speed limit because it has no mass therefore nothing in the X, Y or Z spatial dimensions to hold it back.

Going back to "information" and causality bearing this in mind. When you throw that ball, you have applied a force to it. When you send a signal, you have communicated through electromagnetism (or smoke signals, whatever). These things all have a physical property and exist in the X, Y and Z dimensions so can never reach the Universal speed limit. Using massless things such as light it is possible to communicate at the speed of light. But never past it because it would break the idea that things have to happen in an order.

However, the law of causality is just a byproduct of the existence of time. Time is a thing not just a human invention. A clock is a tool for measuring time like a ruler is a measurement for measuring distances. You can warp time using energy (such as a relativity spaceship thought experiment) just as you can warp distance by energy (through expansion). What we call time is the result of various forces in nature such as causality and entropy showing continual change. Change IS applied time. And if we're getting technical, energy is just the name we use for things that have the potential to inflict change in time.

Going back to the "before the Big Bang" non-question, it should now be clear about why it's one of those things that we cannot ever hope to explain without a major leap forward. This is attempting to define a period during which the t dimension didn't exist. If that doesn't exist then causality doesn't exist; energy as we know it doesn't exist, change doesn't exist. This is also one of the reasons why I don't believe the question even needs an answer. The idea of X happening before Y is a consequence of time. Time didn't exist so causality didn't exist. If causality didn't exist then nothing needed to happen to start something.

Wow.. Thanks for the explanation which kind of makes sense...I had also heard that it was possibly created from a point of singularity from a previous black hole that had kind of sucked everything up in a previous universe and then exploded again...saying that I might of seen that theory whilst watching Ben 10 with the kids...

 

[Damocles]

It's one possibility amongst many, all of which have very, very little evidence if any. We shouldn't discount absolutely anything but talking about the exact moment of the Big Bang is in the realms of philosophy rather than science at the moment and conceivably forever.

Singularity is one of those fun words in physics that means more when you say it than when you explain it. Singularity is a term that means "no fucking idea mate", so it's accurate to say that the moment of the Big Bang event is a singularity.

I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are running a race on a track. Now somebody could use your 4 dimensional coordinates to map where you are. Essentially saying that you are at the 50m line after 50 seconds. That's a pretty useful tool in seeing where you will be at any time as we can work out your speed in metres per second.

Now let's presume that somebody sees you at the 60m line in 55 seconds. What initial thoughts did we just prove to be incorrect? What new possibilities does it open up? Is the race to 50 the same as the race to 60? Maybe you sped up in this part of the race for a reason? Maybe we did your initial speed wrong?

Now let's say that we see you are the 65m, 70m, 72m, 80, 125m and 250m lines. We should have enough evidence to give some impression of the race that you are running and where you will be in 20 minutes.

Crucially though you can use the same maths to roll the clock backwards and see where you were at an earlier point in time. This is the power of physics equations; they work the same no matter what.

The Big Bang model is essentially this idea. We have seem millions of other racers running along the same track and we roll back all of our clocks together. We call the exact moment a singularity though as all of those equations we used to roll back the clock start coming up with impossible answers. We know here that there are missing pieces that we do not see, and the continued search for evidence of the early Universe such as these gravitational waves allow us to adjust our variables and equations to fit reality in all contexts and not just up until a certain time where they break down.


It's like when I tried to explain M-Theory. The Big Bang Model and the answers that it spits out often show us that we're missing something somewhere. This gives new areas to start formulating ideas and testing them. After a long time something like this or the discovery of the Higgs Boson comes along and says "Yay, you guys were on the right track!"

Potentially in the far flung future several million or billion years into the lifespan of humanity, the word singularity shouldn't exist any more. It's remarkable how far we have come in only a century. Unbeknownst to many, we're actually living in a golden age of scientific discovery in the last 100 years thanks to computing power and no other period of human history and even the human future may ever see the rate of groundbreaking discoveries that are happening here every year. People will look back on this period in eons to come as we look back at the Renassiance

 

[AlgarveBlu]

It's one possibility amongst many, all of which have very, very little evidence if any. We shouldn't discount absolutely anything but talking about the exact moment of the Big Bang is in the realms of philosophy rather than science at the moment and conceivably forever.

Singularity is one of those fun words in physics that means more when you say it than when you explain it. Singularity is a term that means "no fucking idea mate", so it's accurate to say that the moment of the Big Bang event is a singularity.

I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are running a race on a track. Now somebody could use your 4 dimensional coordinates to map where you are. Essentially saying that you are at the 50m line after 50 seconds. That's a pretty useful tool in seeing where you will be at any time as we can work out your speed in metres per second.

Now let's presume that somebody sees you at the 60m line in 55 seconds. What initial thoughts did we just prove to be incorrect? What new possibilities does it open up? Is the race to 50 the same as the race to 60? Maybe you sped up in this part of the race for a reason? Maybe we did your initial speed wrong?

Now let's say that we see you are the 65m, 70m, 72m, 80, 125m and 250m lines. We should have enough evidence to give some impression of the race that you are running and where you will be in 20 minutes.

Crucially though you can use the same maths to roll the clock backwards and see where you were at an earlier point in time. This is the power of physics equations; they work the same no matter what.

The Big Bang model is essentially this idea. We have seem millions of other racers running along the same track and we roll back all of our clocks together. We call the exact moment a singularity though as all of those equations we used to roll back the clock start coming up with impossible answers. We know here that there are missing pieces that we do not see, and the continued search for evidence of the early Universe such as these gravitational waves allow us to adjust our variables and equations to fit reality in all contexts and not just up until a certain time where they break down.


It's like when I tried to explain M-Theory. The Big Bang Model and the answers that it spits out often show us that we're missing something somewhere. This gives new areas to start formulating ideas and testing them. After a long time something like this or the discovery of the Higgs Boson comes along and says "Yay, you guys were on the right track!"

Potentially in the far flung future several million or billion years into the lifespan of humanity, the word singularity shouldn't exist any more. It's remarkable how far we have come in only a century. Unbeknownst to many, we're actually living in a golden age of scientific discovery in the last 100 years thanks to computing power and no other period of human history and even the human future may ever see the rate of groundbreaking discoveries that are happening here every year. People will look back on this period in eons to come as we look back at the Renassiance

Again thanks for your explanations most insightful and interesting...I presume your job as a mod is something you do in a parallel dimension to your job with stephen Hawkins ;-)

 

[BlueBearBoots]

I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are running a race on a track. Now somebody could use your 4 dimensional coordinates to map where you are. Essentially saying that you are at the 50m line after 50 seconds. That's a pretty useful tool in seeing where you will be at any time as we can work out your speed in metres per second.

Now let's presume that somebody sees you at the 60m line in 55 seconds. What initial thoughts did we just prove to be incorrect? What new possibilities does it open up? Is the race to 50 the same as the race to 60? Maybe you sped up in this part of the race for a reason? Maybe we did your initial speed wrong?

Now let's say that we see you are the 65m, 70m, 72m, 80, 125m and 250m lines. We should have enough evidence to give some impression of the race that you are running and where you will be in 20 minutes.

Crucially though you can use the same maths to roll the clock backwards and see where you were at an earlier point in time. This is the power of physics equations; they work the same no matter what.

Thanks for the explanation it's really interested me but I'm a bit puzzled. In the example of the race, aren't there too many variables for it to be reliable? If we arrived halfway through the race and plotted certain points so we could predict where you would be 20 mins from now, it's just a prediction? A calculated guess? There may be an outside force we hadn't bargained for which changes the expected outcome? The same trying to calculate where the runner was 10 mins before you arrived to plot his position and course, speed etc? Does that make sense?

 

[Damocles]

Thanks for the explanation it's really interested me but I'm a bit puzzled. In the example of the race, aren't there too many variables for it to be reliable? If we arrived halfway through the race and plotted certain points so we could predict where you would be 20 mins from now, it's just a prediction? A calculated guess? There may be an outside force we hadn't bargained for which changes the expected outcome? The same trying to calculate where the runner was 10 mins before you arrived to plot his position and course, speed etc? Does that make sense?

Yeah it absolutely makes sense. We're talking about confidence of the data that we have gathered and it's something that is worked out and posted with many major discoveries. The discovery in this thread was posted at 5 sigma +/-0.2 which means that the chance of the patterns observed being randomly generated was one in several million. That's an extremely slight chance.

In terms of the race though, the more datapoints we can measure the more accurate the predictions are. As every star in the sky is essentially a datapoint and we have been taking pictures of their position for many years, we have an extremely large dataset that all show the same behaviour.

The key to this though are the non-physical objects such as light. Light is actually an electromagnetic wave no different from an X-ray or a microwave or even a radio signal. The only difference is that the wavelength is in the exact spot where our eyes can perceive it. This is actually what colours are; they are different wavelengths of electromagnetism that are interpreted differently by the receptors in our eyes. We see only a very tiny amount of this spectrum; many animals see the world in a very different manner than us, especially with new technologies such as WiFi becoming prevalent.
Here's a decent diagram:

Anyway, a very famous and brilliant astronomer called Edwin Hubble (who the Hubble telescope is named after) was once looking up at the stars and discovered that stars that were very, very far away were "redshifted". That meant that the light that came from them became a bit redder than it should have been because the wave was stretched.

This is actually called the Doppler effect and we see it all of the time on Earth. Notice how the sound of the horn in this video starts lower then becomes higher pitched and then gets lower again?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3RfULw7aAY[/youtube]

This is the Doppler effect. Something moving towards you at speed becomes a higher pitch right until you hear it properly then it becomes a lower pitch as it moves away from you.

"Redshifting" is the light version of becoming a lower pitch. As something moves towards you, the wavelengths shrink in size (which in sound wise produces a higher pitch) whereas moving away from you the wavelengths become larger.

One of the ways in which we have calculated the race, is that we have looked at the light from millions of stars and worked out how redshifted they were. All of them are. This means that every star is moving away from every other star and it's another crucial piece of evidence in how we can support the Big Bang model.

 

[BlueBearBoots]

Thanks again for the time taken to,post that. So chaos doesn't come into it then? The calculations show absolutely that no unexpected events could have changed the expected? What we observe now and have been observing for many years show that the pattern is constant , no unexpected event occurred since "the Big Bang" to throw all the theories up in the air?
Not having studied physics I'm struggling explaining what I mean, I just think that certain facts and evidence are used for calculations but maybe just maybe chaos should be taken into account - too many variables. But thanks you are obviously passionate about your subject and I find it mind blowing that such discoveries are being made - just what our children and their children will discover!!

 

[Damocles]

I'm sort of jealous of our children's children. For the entire lifespan of the human species, and our ape cousins, we have always been stirred by the horizon. The adventure of over the next hill fascinates every human, no matter who they are. We have a saying for thi in "the grass is greener".

It speaks to a greater instinct within us all. Every single generation, for hundreds of thousands of years, has had those who ventured into the unknown. Whether that was us crossing over a mountain instead of living in our current field. Whether that's the great explorers circumnavigating the globe or discovering the Americas. Our boundaries challenge us, define us and complete us. One of the things that I feel is a very real problem in the world of today is that many people do not have that ocean to cross; to wonder what mysteries and creatures live on the other side of it. We have explored every continent. We have mapped the globe.

Much of my interest in space is that the passage to the Moon was no different from the passage away from Lake Victoria. Out of Africa. Over the Atlantic. It is the extension of the human spirit. Many look into the sky and see dots of lights in some remote blackness far removed from their everyday existence. I look there and see the next ocean that we will cross; the next Americas and Indias shining back at us, almost taunting us to reach out. To steal a quote from a hero of mine, many people in society now have a deep restlessness, an unfulfilled nature that cries out to technology for distraction; we see the Space Shuttle, the Moon landing and the Mars rovers and we automatically know that this is a good thing. Like sailors on a becalmed sea, we feel the stirring of a new breeze.

 

[BlueBearBoots]

That's Carl Sagan!!!! Beautiful don't know much about him but come across him a few times<br /><br />-- Wed Mar 19, 2014 10:27 pm --<br /><br />

That's Carl Sagan!!!! Beautiful don't know much about him but come across him a few times

Wasn't he really interested in finding aliens?