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    Parts Guy tigeraid's Avatar
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    Science

    Don't see how we can have a "Religion" thread without it. Maybe a weekly update with "what's going on in science!" ?

    Anyone been watching Cosmos lately? What a great, great way to get science across to the average viewer. My wife is loving it. She even pauses it and asks me clarifying questions throughout the show. Learning is fun!

    In related news, this happened in science this week:

    Incredible Discovery Provides Evidence for the Big Bang Theory

    http://space.io9.com/have-physicists...yes-1545591865

    Kamionkowski and his team were there to announce that B-modes of gravitational waves have been detected in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Put simply, this is the best evidence yet that our universe was formed when very rapid expansion known as the Big Bang started a process that physicists call "inflation." As a result of this rapid inflation of physical space, everything in the universe was born.

    Gravitational waves have been observed before, but the B-mode polarization is something new. This is a kind of gravitational wave that cosmological theorists have predicted would peak during those first 10-34 seconds of the primordial universe when we exploded from nothing into everything. So this announcement today confirms our first real observations of early inflation. Now that we can see B-mode gravitational waves, those observations put limits on just what happened when our universe was young, and how it got to be way it is today.

    This isn't the first time gravitational waves have been detected. The 10-meter South Pole Telescope detected gravitational wave B-modes last summer, then Polarbear confirmed those results. What makes the BICEP-2 discovery different is that it's detecting primordial gravitational waves right at that early moment in the universe when waves from inflation are expected to peak. The actual signal is the faint twisting pattern in the polarization data. Mathematically, it's the curl. Colloquially, today's stories are going to be full of swirls.

    Why does it matter? In a world with no data, all theories are equal. We now have data, so the number of inflation models that still make sense is a much smaller set. Even with this announcement, research isn't done — more projects going forward will be expanding and confirming these results. For more on all the details, Nature is running an entire special on gravitational waves and inflation. We also had some awesome discussion in the comments section yesterday about potential implications, with cosmologists from other projects jumping in to clarify.
    Here's Professor Andrei Linde, one of the earliest proponents of the Big Bang Theory and a founder of Inflation Theory, being told his life's work was worth it:




    And here's a really simple, elegant explanation of what we now know about gravitational waves and the Big Bang:



    Time to celebrate! Another exciting step toward comprehension of the universe.
    Last edited by tigeraid; March 20th, 2014 at 06:25 PM.

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