Big Bang

Did Carlo Rovelli, start a fashion for debunking time with The Order of Time? Here’s science writer Marcia Bartusiak, author of Dispatches from Planet 3, asking whether it is time to just get rid of time: You might say that quantum mechanics introduced a fuzziness into physics: You can pinpoint the precise position of a particle, but at a trade-off; its velocity cannot then be measured very well. Conversely, if you know how fast a particle is going, you won’t be able to know exactly where it is. Werner Heisenberg best summarized this strange and exotic situation with his famous uncertainty principle. But all this action, uncertain as it is, occurs on a fixed stage of space and time, a Read More ›

Better known as Big Bang cosmology, it is not very popular in some quarters: Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the standard model has some sizable holes: It can’t explain dark matter — an ethereal substance so far detected only by its gravitational effects — or dark energy, a mysterious oomph that causes the cosmos to expand at an increasing rate. The theory also can’t explain why the universe is made mostly of matter, while antimatter is rare (SN: 9/2/17, p. 15). So physicists are on a quest to revamp particle physics by probing the standard model’s weak points. Major facilities like the Large Hadron Collider — the gargantuan accelerator located at CERN near Geneva — haven’t yet found where Read More ›

J. R. Miller offers a reasonable discussion of varieties of Biblical creationism: Maybe you have heard the accusation that biblical creationists are blinded by their ancient theology which forces them to reject the modern “scientific fact” of evolution. But what do people mean by this accusation? What is evolution? Is biblical creation a de facto rejection of evolution science itself or just a rejection of how some scientists interpret the data? The answer, it turns out, depends on how one defines evolution. Therefore, to properly address this supposed conflict between biblical creation and evolution theory let me start with some simple definitions. For example, So, if the Bible teaches the cosmos had a beginning, does that mean all Christian must Read More ›

Biola physics prof John Bloom offers some thoughts: For example, since the 1930s we have a growing body of data which show that the universe is expanding in a way which implies that everything in it came from a single point and an enormous burst of energy. Thus, it convincingly looks like our universe had a beginning and that something outside of this universe started it. Sound like God? Sure, and Christians can point to Genesis 1:1 and other verses as confirming this interpretation. But if science is restricted to only providing naturalistic answers to explain what we see, then no hypothesis can include God. Therefore, scientists must postulate “imaginary time,” or “a multiverse,” or some kind of preexistent “nothing” Read More ›

Yesterday, we noted the hunt for a mysterious fifth force of the universe involving dark photons. Here’s an item from last April that suggests the hunt may prove a disappointment: But the most precise measurement yet of the fine structure constant — which determines how strongly electrons and photons interact, or “couple” — has eliminated the possibility of dark photons at a large range of masses and coupling strengths. If they did exist, they would have to be much heavier than previously predicted, scientists wrote in a new paper describing the work. One possible hope: However, there’s still a narrow escape path, through which theoretical dark photons could escape the dustbin of discarded physics theories. The field of particle physics Read More ›

If they are not Buddhist or Hindu. From Zeeya Merali at Aeon: The discussion has gone on ever since. I partook in 2014, while researching my book, A Big Bang in a Little Room (2017), about experiments on recreating the origins of the Universe in the lab. Not only did I meet with Ashtekar at Penn State but also with his kindred spirit, the cosmologist Andrei Linde, at Stanford University in California. Linde had just returned from giving a series of guest lectures at the University of Hamburg in Germany on the philosophical implications of ‘quantum cosmology’, the discipline that applies the rules governing the micro realm – quantum theory – to the study of how the Universe evolved in Read More ›

From science writer Bruce Dorminey at Forbes: Time may be running out on the search for the cosmos’ exotic dark matter. Decades after the first searches for dark matter’s hypothetical exotic particle counterparts, researchers are mostly at a loss to explain why there still has been no direct detection. That is, one that could explain why such unseen, dark matter particles only appear to weakly interact with normal matter. … McGaugh says one huge problem is that while dark matter theory is ‘confirmable’ it is not ‘falsifiable’ as a scientific theory should be. “There is no clear way to know [that] what you’re looking for — but failing to find — doesn’t exist at all,” said McGaugh. “If you’re convinced Read More ›

From physicist Jonathan Link (Director of the Center for Neutrino Physics) at Scientific American: To be fair, the Standard Model of particle physics is a remarkable scientific achievement; the crown jewel of the physics revolution that dominated the 20th century, but in the 21st century its apparent infallibility saps the vitality of the field. That’s why today nearly all of particle physics is focused on finding a crack, any crack, in its relentless edifice. For example, there are dozens of experiments trying to make a direct detection of particle dark matter, long known to cosmology but unknown to particle physics; there are searches for other particles beyond the Standard Model particle with names like axions and magnetic monopoles; a third Read More ›

A philosophical question to wake you up. A reader directs our attention to a 2015 piece by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Inference Review (2015): THE ANSWER to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed. More. He offers the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem by way of evidence: Loosely speaking, our theorem states that if the universe is, on average, expanding, then its history cannot be indefinitely continued into the past. More precisely, if the average expansion rate is positive along a given world line, or geodesic, then this geodesic must terminate after a Read More ›

The universe is currently estimated to be about 13.8 billion years old. From Laurel Hamer at ScienceNews: That’s earlier than the 550 million years ago suggested in a previous estimate that also measured starlight from the early universe (SN Online: 2/9/2015). But it’s in the same ballpark as observations reported in March (SN: 3/31/18, p. 6), which suggest star formation began around 180 million years after the Big Bang. That conclusion, however, was drawn from radio signals rather than direct observations of starlight. “If [those] results were true, our results would independently support their claims that star formation activity had already initiated at a very early stage of the universe,” Hashimoto says. More. If it holds up, this finding will Read More ›

From science writer Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience, addressing a point raised in astrophysicist Brian Keating’s Losing the Nobel Prize: … anti-religious sentiments provided underlying motivation to debunk Lemaître’s theory. Many atheist scientists were repulsed by the Big Bang’s creationist overtones. According to Hoyle, it was cosmic chutzpah of the worst kind: “The reason why scientists like the ‘big bang’ is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis.” In contrast, the Steady State model was the rightful heir to the Copernican principle. It combined the banality of space with humanity’s mediocrity in time. Thanks to Hoyle, humanity had humility. Hoyle, however, did not. Over the decades, as more and more evidence lined up in favor of the Big Bang Read More ›

From Cardiff University at Eurekalert: The birth of stars from dense clouds of gas and dust may be happening in a completely unexpected way in our own galaxy and beyond. This is according to an international team of researchers, including scientists from Cardiff University, who have found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as we think. The underlying reasons as to why a star eventually grows to a specific mass has puzzled scientists for some time. It has been assumed that a star’s mass mostly depends on the original structure – known as a star-forming core – Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience, on understanding the Big Bang: “It certainly looks like the universe that we observe around us… definitely had a beginning,” MIT cosmologist Alan Guth, the originator of the theory of cosmic inflation, said in an interview for the PBS show Closer to Truth. “That doesn’t mean that that beginning was necessarily the ultimate beginning of all of reality. There may have been some prehistory to what we’re here calling the beginning.” Fanciful ideas abound to account for that prehistory. Eternal inflation suggests that our universe is but a mere bubble in what physicist Matt Francis described as a “larger froth of inflation” of an even grander universe. Cyclic inflation proffers that our observable universe is Read More ›

From Jon Cartwright at New Scientist, Although everyone has heard of the big bang, no one can say confidently what it was like. After all, recounting the beginning of time is about finding not just the right words, but the right physics – and ever since the big bang entered the popular lexicon, that physics has been murky. Perhaps no longer, thanks to an unusual way of delving into our universe’s backstory that has emerged over the past few years. In this view, the essence of space and time can exist beyond the confines of the cosmos, but in a state of roiling chaos we would not recognise. The big bang is not a hard-and-fast beginning, but a moment of Read More ›