NASA Reaffirms Big Bang Theory 313
Peretz writes "NASA has found evidence reinforcing a theory of what took place post-Big Bang and time expansion. They claim: 'Over the course of millions of years, gravity exploited the density differences to create the structure of the universe---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.'"
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference between the headline and the first line is pretty vast, although the headline is clearly trying to hint at the truth rather than mislead, by using the word "a" intead of "the."
What the first line says is that a theory about how certain events played out after the big bang had been "confirmed." What the headline sounds like is "the Big Bang has finally been proved!" But note that it says "a Big Bang theory." Here's the writer of the headline trying to give himself an out. I cut him some slack; I'm sure he's working with a limited 80 column field or so. In other words, technically what he said was that "a theory about the Big Bang has been confirmed," but he made it just a little too sensationalistic, which is probably going to lead to a whole string of, "See? NASA has confirmed the creationists are _wrong_!" posts that have nothing to do with this. But since everyone likes to see a good tussle between the creationists and the more evolutionary-minded here on slashdot, I'm not even sure that's a bad thing.
Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth (although I'm not adamant about it and easily accept that I might be misunderstanding things), and even I accept that the "Big Bang" is probably a pretty good model for what happened. (I just think the timescale may be way off, and that we have a long way to go before we truly understand.) So for anyone who did misread the headline and thought you finally had complete triumph over all the creationist wackos, I hate to burst your bubble. :)
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' (Score:5, Interesting)
How do we gaze back to the infant universe? The cosmic microwave background is a fossilized record of what occurred way back when. Embedded in this light are subtle patterns that point to very specific conditions about the early universe.
So...subtle patterns from something that happened long ago that may or may not have been affected by external forces on the way towards us. Patterns for which we are extrapolating initial conditions on the basis of what is equivalent to a very, very small number of observations in the grand timeline, and for which we only have a single location (this solar system) to sample from.
All this to describe an event whose happening we don't really understand and which we have no way to either predict or test. What can we really do now that we couldn't before?
We can see into space with a higher degree of accuracy, and finally, perhaps, test a few of the theories that we couldn't before (which are based on other theories that we still can't yet test). Don't get it wrong, though:
Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.
Inflation (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, the important question: Why is inflationary theory is correct? So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why? We still don't have any idea do we?
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:3, Interesting)
No, in layman's terms, they've proven the theory. In scientific terms, they have new data that agrees with old data and theories. The problem is that non-technical language doesn't distinguish between "theory" and "hypothesis," nor between "sufficient evidence to accept" and "proof."
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:4, Interesting)
Which timescale? The astronomers', or the Bibles? I think this new data is actually a beautiful confirmation of the Big Bang. The theory makes some very specifc predictions about what one should see when using a partuclar kind of microwave receiver - predictions that have now been confirmed. At this point, the idea of the Big Bang is as solidly supported by real-world evidence as almost any other theory - including gravity, relativity, QED, or even the theory of evolution. That theory makes very specific claims about the age of the Universe. Pretty cool, eh? What supporting evidence does the Genesis story have? What predictions does it make - and can they be falsified?
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:1, Interesting)
Among other things, that snakes will all live on the ground and crawl on their bellies in the dust for all time. Naturally, they live in the sea, rivers, and some arborial species spend their whole lives in trees. At that point the Creationists start talking about how the serpent was a metaphor. Yeah, it's some kind of "faith" that needs to proped up with delusion and (poorly) manufactured "evidence."
Re:You heard it here first... (Score:3, Interesting)
*whether the universe exists or not notwithstanding, of course.
Re:You heard it here first... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.
Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?
There's lots more. All it takes is a little reading and thinking to find lots more problems with a universe that's always been here.
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree completely. However, if you're going to take things down to laymans terms, you need to explain what you're talking about. Saying "the theory is proven" is not correct, even in laymans terms. Saying "the theory is effectively proven, with a vanishing small chance for error" better conveys the reality.
In any case, most people have pointed out that the story is misleading anyway. While this is evidence for a big bang type event, it is more interesting because it provides evidence for an inflationary universe; something that has had far less evidence to back it before now.
Theistic implications of big-bang theory (Score:3, Interesting)
But people got over it.
Re:I sure agree (Score:2, Interesting)
You've got several errors in your assumptions.
First off, the "Event" that caused the photons in the CMB isn't actually the singularity->universe transition at time zero, it's what happened thousands of years later, after charged particles formed neutral complexes and allowed photons to travel more than a fraction of a meter without being reabsorbed.
Secondly, although nothing travels faster than light *through space*, there is nothing saying that the expansion of *space itself* can't push two objects away from each other at speeds faster than light. This is a vital part of inflation theory.
So, at time zero, everywhere was 'here'. The Big Bang proper happened, making a slightly larger universe, so that 'here' and 'there' were separated by an infintessimal amount. In the first fractions of a second, space then expanded superluminally ("Inflation"), throwing 'here' and 'almost here' to widely different ends of the universe. Particles which just a second ago were light-nanoseconds apart now found themselves 15 billion light years apart. The Universe continued to be uniform, hot, and boring, slowly cooling for another several thousand years, untill protons and electrons bonded, turning the primordial plasma into a primordial gas, allowing the cosmic background radiation to pass through the gas unimpeded. Those photons kept moving practically unimpeded for 15+ billion years, slowly stretched and cooled by the subluminal cosmic expansion (Hubble/Doppler/Red shifting) to microwave frequencies, untill they hit a detector on a sattelite orbiting earth.
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a professional physicist, and I've seen the evidence for the Earth being more than 6000 years old with my own eyes, and calculated the age of things with pen and paper (and a mass spectrometer) myself. I'm sorry, but you are just wrong about the age of the Earth.
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm now convinced that the creation vs. evolution controversy (with intelligent design) is really, well, a bunch of hype that serves to draw people away from religion and science. Let me first make it clear that evolution is fact; no "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s about it.
This controversy pulls people away from religion and Christianity because they see christians arguing a naive, scientifically untenable, point, and they come to associate that with Christianity. In essence, creationism becomes a stumbling block. Also, it pulls people, mainly christians, away from science because it forces a stark choice between believing in the Bible and believing what scientists say. Since the stakes involved in not believing in the Bible (i.e. going to Hell for eternity) are much greater than those in not believing scientists (i.e. sounding like a fool in front of others), they tend to draw towards creationism and away from common science. Unfortunately, that also discourages any sort of deep study into who authored Genesis, when, why, etc.. (i.e. the only answer I've heard from fundamentalists is that Moses wrote it, as if he or anyone else was there witness it). The only way out, that I see, is an earnest effort to understand the rationale behind sciences like evolution and astronomy. The motivation is the fact that you can't learn science through creationism.
Re:Ok, somebody explain how this works. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, you can't see all the way back to the Big Bang - for the first 100 K years or so the universe was opaque, though every bit of it was glowing brightly (the same amount of matter in a much smaller universe meant the entire univers was effectively an opaque liquid for quite some time). The cosmic microwave background radiation that is being studied here is a snapshot of the moment (called Recombination) when that changed, and the universe became transparant.
The rapid inflation of the universe (so the theory goes) happened long before Recombination, so the universe was already pretty large at that time. Nevertheless, light could have circled a universe that size many times in the age of the current universe. It doesn't work out that way, however, as the universe has been steadily expanding.
Imagine the universe as a balloon, with stars as marks on the balloon and light as an ant crawling away from one of the marks. If the baloon is inflated rapidly it could take quite a long time indeed for the ant to make a circle, as the distance remaining in the circle is growing nearly as fast as the ant could walk. We don't think that any of the light we see has actually been around even one full "circle", but this model does explain why we see very old things in every direction.