Big Bang Found

NEWSER) – A dizzying scientific achievement: Astronomers have gotten a look back at what one scientist calls "the beginning of time ... the universe at the very beginning." That is, they've detected gravitational waves that could be the first direct evidence that within a fraction of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the cosmos began to, in the New York Times' description, "swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant." Such an event (dubbed "inflation") was theorized in 1979 by physicist Alan Guth, but finding evidence of it "has been a key goal in the study of the universe," the AP reports. The findings must still be confirmed by other experiments, though the lead astronomer says there's only a one in 3.5 million chance the team's results are a fluke

http://www.newser.com/...ts-make-key-big-bang-discovery.html

It's another Higgs Boson moment - science predicts that a thing must exist for a theory to be correct, then the thing is found and everyone slaps themselves on the back.

Now others go away and check that the original discoverers got it right and creationists have to make up a whole new pile of anti-science to make it fit their model(s).

Gravitational waves trigger ripples in space, seen in this illustration.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Edited by Admin, : Minor grammar fix.

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Edited by Tangle, : Picture added

Can you edit to remove the personal reference?

Done, but not sure why it matters........

I'm not sure what you changed, but the reference to another member is still there.

Done again, now that I understand what you were (quite reasonably) objecting to.

Thread copied here from the Big Bang Found thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I am not really a big news junkie so I am sure that there is lots of stuff that I miss but there is something wrong when the greatest discovery in the history of science comes and goes with barely a whimper in the world's press. I had to go looking for the story in my google news aggregator. Do we really live in a world where the shape of Kim Kardashian's ass is more interesting than the shape of the universe?

I read that merging black holes can also cause gravity waves. How do you distinguish the source? Do these waves have a direction?

That is pretty cool. Reminds me of the cosmic background radiation discovery that was made which also confirmed the Big Bang theory.

Apparently, the gravity waves cause polarity in the back ground radiation. This, I think, it is the first time that the effects of gravity waves were observed. We have not yet directly observed gravity waves in the lab.

I am not really a big news junkie so I am sure that there is lots of stuff that I miss but there is something wrong when the greatest discovery in the history of science comes and goes with barely a whimper in the world's press. I had to go looking for the story in my google news aggregator. Do we really live in a world where the shape of Kim Kardashian's ass is more interesting than the shape of the universe?

It's very big news here, it's regarded as one of the most important discoveries ever made.

Good article here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...nflation-science-space#

I think the real story is not "Big Bang Found" but "Predictions of Inflationary Hypothesis Confirmed". We already knew there was a Big Bang, but up until now the Inflationary Hypothesis was just an ad hoc explanation which was appealing because it ad-hoc-explained so many things at once.

The corollary, which is significant for debates about origins, is that the (cosmological) fine-tuning argument now looks like even more of a crock.

This is rather sweet: one of the guys who made the measurement got a cameraman and went round to Andrei Linde's house to surprise him with the news.

Video here.

ProtoTypical writes: Do we really live in a world where the shape of Kim Kardashian's ass is more interesting than the shape of the universe?

Yes, we do. From an evolutionary viewpoint, human reproduction - in all of its various facets - is more important than the shape of the room it's done in.

tangle writes: It's another Higgs Boson moment - science predicts that a thing must exist for a theory to be correct, then the thing is found and everyone slaps themselves on the back. Now others go away and check that the original discoverers got it right and creationists have to make up a whole new pile of anti-science to make it fit their model(s).

Not sure why you conclude "creationists" etc.

I believe in creation and this finding supports the fact that the universe had a beginning, and thus there was some sort of creation.