Posted on 03/17/2006 4:25:59 AM PST by Neville72
By the faint cosmic glow of the oldest known light, physicists say they have found evidence that the universe grew to astounding proportions in less than the blink of an eye.
In that trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space through a process they call inflation. At the same time, the seeds were planted for the formation of stars, galaxies, planets and every other object in the universe.
“It's giving us our first clues about how inflation took place,” said Michael Turner, assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation. “This is absolutely amazing.”
Researchers found this long-sought “smoking gun” evidence by looking at the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the universe. The light was produced when the universe was about 300,000 years old — a long time ago, but still hundreds of millennia after inflation had done its work.
Even so, the pattern of light in the cosmic microwave background offers clues about what came before it, just as a fossil tells a paleontologist about long-extinct life. Of special interest to physicists are subtle brightness variations that give images of the microwave background a lumpy appearance.
Physicists presented new measurements of those variations during a news conference Thursday at Princeton University. The measurements were made by a spaceborne instrument called the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, or WMAP, launched by NASA in 2001.
“It amazes me that we can say anything at all about what transpired in the first trillionth of a second of the universe,” said Charles Bennett, a Johns Hopkins University physicist who presented the research along with Lyman Page and David Spergel, both of Princeton.
Earlier studies of WMAP data have determined that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few hundred thousand years. They have also measured variations in the cosmic microwave background so huge that they stretch across the entire sky. Those earlier observations are strong indicators of inflation, but no smoking gun, said Dr. Turner, who was not involved in the research. They represent tiny inhomogeneities — dense spots in the superhot primordial soup that was the universe in the first stages of inflation — blown up to hundreds of light-years in size by the subsequent expansion of the universe.
The new analysis was able to characterize variations in the microwave background over smaller patches of sky — only billions of light-years across compared to hundreds of billions. Due to some weird aspects of quantum physics, those smaller lumps popped into existence during the middle and end of the inflationary process as tiny subatomic particles.
Then they would have expanded with the space they occupied to become of today's stars and galaxies. Slightly denser than their surroundings, they would have pulled additional material in by gravity, building up into the massive galaxies and superclusters observable today.
“Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky,” said Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist.
The measurements are scheduled to be published in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
And God said "let there be light" Indeed.
God does not play at dice. Marbles are his game.
I understand about the God part and the finger-snapping, but why was the universe the size of a marble? Why did it have to have any size at all and what was it doing while small? Was it lying around with other pre-universes and if so...where?
Exactly -- Any Hebrew translater who might have been on the spot at the time would have heard it -- "Let There Be Light!"
Very cool!!
More precisely "And God said e^(i*pi)+1=0, and there was light"
The Hebrew is a little scrambled, but that's to be expected 20 Billion years after the fact.
CD
It doesn't take millions of years to make and bury fossils and now they admit it doesn't take billions of years to make the entire universe.
And still they complain and sniff at the notion of 6 days. On this scale they'll probably soon complain that 6 days is too long.
If evolutionists don't have the time, they don't have a premise.
Love your post! Your tagline, too!
I was wondering that myself. In a trillionth of a second light would travel what, about a hundredth of a inch?
My son recently told me that there is some thought that Einstein did screw up! This would seem to validate that idea.
"..what happened to the speed of light barrier?? "
"I was wondering that myself. In a trillionth of a second light would travel what, about a hundredth of a inch?"
Hence, the astonishing, mind-boggling import of these findings.
I've long failed to understand the speed of light as an absolute speed limit. For starters, it requires light to know the relative motion of its emitter. And that in turn requires some common static, zero point of reference for the entire universe.
Now if Genesis said, "Let there be inflation" I would really be impressed.
Einstein's theory continues to be confirmed nearly 100 years later. The theory is incomplete, and Einstein knew that. Nobody has been able to come up with a more complete theory in all that time. I would hardly call that screwing up.
This writer is exagerating quite a bit. The speed of light barrier still holds, that's why the universe is billions of years old. God does not work on a human scale, and He does not work to our time frame.
Obviously God was a lib in the beginning. First acquire property, then rules.
"The speed of light barrier still holds,"
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.........
not if this inflation theory is correct.
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