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Big Bang

Announced at Forbes: The Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: The Universe began not with a whimper, but with a bang! At least, that’s what you’re commonly told: the Universe and everything in it came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Space, time, and all the matter and energy within began from a singular point, and then expanded and cooled, giving rise over billions of years to the atoms, stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies spread out across the billions of light years that make up our observable Universe. It’s a compelling, beautiful picture that explains so much of what we see, from the present large-scale structure of the Universe’s two trillion galaxies to the leftover glow of radiation permeating all of Read More ›

Do we live at a special time in the history of the universe, for making science observations?

Our Jonathan Bartlett (johnnyb) wrote recently at Answers in Genesis: Lawrence Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer surprised the cosmology world in 2007 when they published an essay titled “The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology.” The paper showed that, assuming the truth of the current big bang model, in the far future (hundreds of billions of years from now) many evidences for the big bang itself will be gone, preventing future cosmologists from even being able to detect evidence for it. … The conclusion that Krauss and Scherrer come to after this examination of the present and future state of cosmology is that we live in a very special time in the universe. We live in Read More ›

Researcher: Black holes formed shortly after the Big Bang

From ScienceDaily: A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe’s very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars. Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of physics, and Eric Cotner, a UCLA graduate student, developed a compellingly simple new theory suggesting that black holes could have formed very shortly after the Big Bang, long before stars began to shine. Astronomers have previously suggested that these so-called primordial black holes could account for all or some of the universe’s mysterious dark matter and that they might have seeded the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers Read More ›

At SciAM: Lawbreaking particles a “a complete revolution” in physics

From Jesse Dunietz at Scientific American: Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting The evidence comes from electrons and their more massive cousins, muons and tau leptons. According to the Standard Model, these three particles should behave like differently sized but otherwise identical triplets. But three experiments have produced growing evidence—including results announced in just the last few months—that the particles react differently to some as-yet mysterious influence. The findings are not yet conclusive, but if they hold up, “it would be a complete revolution,” says California Institute of Technology theorist Mark Wise. More. Many have been revolting against the Standard Model and the Big Read More ›

Claim: Hawking wrong space-time infinite at Big Bang

From the Daily Galaxy: According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their “no-boundary proposal”, and by Alexander Vilenkin with his “tunnelling proposal”. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able Read More ›

The Big Bang: Put simply, the facts are wrong.

They always have been. And Cool never changed that. Typing “Big Bang Theory” into a search bar links us immediately to the long-running (debut 2007), immensely popular CBS sitcom, a post-modern look at the lives of Caltech physicists. The conventional meaning of the term, our universe’s origin starting with a small singularity currently pegged at 13.8 billion years ago, is a mere second thought. Even “relativity” cannot match that pop culture success: The first hit I tried offered to define the term, as if that really matters. But the Big Bang is unpopular among cosmologists. It survives on evidence alone. And sadly, evidence matters much less than it used to. Science historian Helge Kragh tells us that astronomer Fred Hoyle Read More ›

The Big Bang was a Catholic plot. You knew that, right?

From Ray Cavanaugh at Salvo: After his ordination [to the priesthood], Lemaître won a scholarship to study abroad and headed to Cambridge University, where he worked with the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He then migrated from Cambridge in the U.K. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he could study at Harvard and M.I.T., where he earned a doctoral degree. Returning to Belgium (at least for a while), he was appointed professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. Right around this time, he published the formidably titled paper, “A Homogenous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radiation, Taking Account of the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae,” which questioned Einstein’s idea of a static universe. … By the latter half of the 1920s, Read More ›

Inflation and its critics

The firestorm ignited by Ijjas, Loeb & Steinhardt’s blog post in Scientific American,  is very much worth your time reading. It engages Peter Woit’s string-theory criticism on his blog. But the scientists do not divide into sides very rationally, as Woit notices, “This is getting very weird. It’s not normal to respond to a scientific argument by enlisting letter writers on your behalf, even less normal to put your university press office to work on a response..” Abraham Loeb is a cosmologist age 55 at Harvard who came from a Jewish farming community in Israel. He is known for creativity and writing on many sides of an issue. Paul Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist age 65 at Princeton, Read More ›

But it can’t really be Fake Physics because humans did not evolve to perceive reality

Peter Woit comments at Not Even Wrong on his review (paywall; no paywall) at Wall Street Journal of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali: My concern about the topic of the book is that it’s Fake Physics, not that religion is motivating the author (and likely motivating the Templeton Foundation to fund this project). A book about the religious views of physicists would be an interesting one that I’d certainly read, and the material in this book on that topic is quite interesting. One of the odder twists here is that the two blurbs from physicists promoting the book are from Sean Carroll and Martin Rees, with Carroll writing So you Read More ›

Multiverse explains why progress in fundamental physics is slow?

Further to “Atheist cosmologist warns “deeply religious” people not to put their faith in “apparent” fine-tuning” (Nature), Columbia mathematician and string theory skeptic Peter Woit (of Not Even Wrong) offers a review at Wall Street Journal of the same book, A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, “Searching for God at the Centre of the Big Bang,” in which h notes, … Mr. Guth was initially fascinated by the idea of baby universes getting produced and making up a multiverse, though he imagined these other universes would all have the same physics as ours. Ms. Merali relates that he quickly lost interest: Why care much about cosmological models producing not just Read More ›

New evidence for the universe as a hologram?

From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: New Evidence for the Strange Idea that the Universe Is a Hologram One of the great mysteries of modern cosmology is how our universe can be so thermally uniform—the vast cosmos is filled with the lingering heat of the Big Bang. Over time, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, but it can still be seen in the faint glow of microwave radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background. In any direction we look, the temperature of this cosmic background is basically the same, varying by only tiny amounts. But according to the standard “cold dark matter” model of cosmology, there wasn’t enough time for hotter and cooler regions of the Read More ›

Could we reproduce science exactly if it all disappeared? What about religion?

From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus: Colbert, an idiosyncratic but sincere Catholic, was not really playing devil’s advocate when he challenged Gervais to an argument about the existence of God on his show. Gervais is outspoken about his disbelief and is fond of tweeting the reductio ad absurdum of various religious arguments, yet initially he seemed at a loss for how to deflect Colbert’s skepticism of the Big Bang. … Stephen Colbert: “You’re just believing Stephen Hawking, and that’s a matter of faith in his abilities. You don’t know it yourself—you’re just accepting that because someone told you.” Ricky Gervais: “Well but science is constantly being proved all the time,” Gervais said. “If we take something like any holy book and Read More ›

The Big Bang as a theory no one really wanted. Except nature maybe?

From John Farrell, author of The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaiître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, at Nautilus: But Lemaître wasn’t satisfied. By 1931, he had come to believe that Einstein’s “initial condition” state could not be stable. Reaching back to Friedmann, he proposed his Primeval Atom hypothesis, essentially the Big Bang 1.0, that the universe must have initially started from a fantastically dense kernel and expanded outward. “The Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation,” was how the priest phrased it. This was too much for Einstein, Eddington, and their other colleagues. They disliked the metaphysical implications of a universe with a temporal origin—it was too tempting for some to see God lurking behind it. Progress stalled Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter: Darwin and the Pope

Concluding our religion News coverage for the week, From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God: at his book blog: Over the weekend, I had a friend ask me about this story, in which Pope Francis has seemingly cast in with Darwinian evolution. Now, I have learned from previous experience, that pressing some Catholics on this will often result in some long response about the Pope being mis-interpreted. So, I’ll let others decide if this is really what the Pope said. But, let’s at least roll with what the story declares. “The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand’, Pope Francis has Read More ›

Ethan Siegel: Why there is more to universe than the standard model

At Forbes: While experiments are telling us that low-energy supersymmetry and extra dimensions probably don’t exist (or are so constrained that they’re irrelevant), there are plenty of pieces of evidence that there’s more to existence than the Standard Model alone. What else is out there? There are five strong, independent lines of inquiry that reveal there’s got to be something. Including: During the last decade, when neutrino masses were constrained for the first time (via neutrino oscillations), it surprised many that they were found to be very low in mass, but to have definitively non-zero masses. Why is that? The general way of explaining this — the see-saw mechanism — typically involves additional, very heavy particles (like, maybe a billion Read More ›