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A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

BALTIMORE — Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air. They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand. That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus. A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in...

Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory. The background patterns of space could help us focus on quantum problems.NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics...

A telescope on the far side of the moon could probe the "dark ages" of the universe while blocking out the radio-wavelength noise of Earth civilizations. Up to one hundred thousand antennas would form the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer (DALI), the largest telescope ever built, and allow astronomers to hear faint whispering signals from a time when no stars even existed. "This will look at one of the most fundamental questions ever conceived, back when the universe was made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — no stars, no galaxies," said Kurt Weiler, senior astronomer at the U.S. Naval...

The quasar OJ287 contains two black holes (this slightly dated illustration lists the larger black hole's mass as 17 billion Suns, though researchers now estimate it is 18 billion Suns). The smaller black hole crashes through a disc of material around the larger one twice every orbit, creating bright outbursts (Illustration: VISPA) The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein's theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever...

Mysterious Explosion Detected In The Distant Past, Halfway Back To Big BangNobody knows how the short gamma-ray burst GRB 070714B was triggered, but a leading possibility is the in-spiral and merger of two neutron stars, depicted in this artist rendition. (Credit: NASA/Dana Berry) ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang....

The history of cosmology – the study of the Universe – for the last five hundred years is often portrayed as a clash between science on the one hand, and the cold hand of religious dogma on the other. Part of this is rooted in fact – the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation for instance was suspicious of intellectual innovation and experiment, with its harsher elements longing for the certainties of the age before Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The desire to make the Universe fit into a pre-ordained and orderly scheme that needed no correction reached its infamous,...

Creation Cosmologies Solve Spacecraft Mystery by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.* A groundbreaking new technical paper1 shows that several creationist cosmologies can explain the "Pioneer anomaly," a decades-old mystery about distant spacecraft. Big Bang theorists cannot use this solution, yet they have found no alternative explanation they can agree upon. Thus the Pioneer data are evidence against the Big Bang and for a biblical, young universe....

Abstract Background Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of...

To the ancients, exploding stars were bad news. To astronomer Adam Riess, poring over data from a telescope in Chile, it looked like supernovas were still cursed. He and his colleagues were measuring the brightness and distance of supernovas in order to figure out the little matter of whether the universe would end in fire or in ice. Would it halt its expansion and collapse back on itself in a gnab gib (that's the reverse of the big bang, and passes for humor among astronomers) or expand forever, its light and warmth fading into eternal cold and darkness? But when...

In the opening of any book today that involves origins, dinosaurs, ECT. you can always expect to see the term billions of years as they know for a fact. Like some one was there to record this event. Well here is another fine example of the evolutionist religious belief. From the book Natural Wonders of the World, by P.J. Banyard, Page 6 Once there was nothing. There was no space and there was no time. (Now you will have to understand this if there is nothing the laws of conservation of energy state you can not create or destroy matter,...

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. - Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the "Big Bang" theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, has died. He was 86. Alpher died Aug. 12 in Austin, Texas. He had been honored by President Bush with a National Medal of Science in July, but was unable to attend the ceremony because of his failing health, Union College in Schenectady said in announcing his death. He had been on the Union faculty. The "Big Bang" theory holds that the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of...

Take one part unidentified goop. Add three parts mysterious energy. Throw in a dash of ordinary atoms. Mix. Compress. Explode. Let expand for 13.7 billion years. It's an absurd recipe, but it's one that makes cosmologists drool. Ten years ago, no one could agree on what the universe is made of, how it is shaped, or what its ultimate fate will be. But less than five years later, long-awaited measurements and one stunning discovery forever transformed our picture of the universe. The resulting model, often called the concordance model, holds that 22 percent of the universe is composed of dark...

Last night, nearly 3,000 people received a mini lesson on the origin of the universe from perhaps the world’s most famous cosmologist, Stephen Hawking. Hawking spoke to a packed audience in Zellerbach Hall about how Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory explained the creation of the universe. ... His lecture, which touched upon subjects such as black holes and spacetime, was peppered with quips that drew laughs from the audience. “If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,” Hawking said. “What was God doing before He made...

We exist, therefore we question. Or at least, that paraphrases (poorly) an old quote from an old scholar... We know the masses and general composition of the four inner (rocky) planets in our solar system, and from basic chemistry, we know the number of atoms in a gram of any material. Multiplying Avogadro's number x the mass of these four planets, dividing by a weighted average atomic weight for the materials in each planet, we get about 3 x 10^ 50 heavy nuclei produced since creation/the big bang. Take your pick, that's the number of atomic nuclei we have to...

LONDON (AFP) - As the guitar power in the legendary British rock band Queen, Brian May conquered most of the planet -- and now he has his sights set on mastering the universe. The star musician, who wrote hits like "We Will Rock You", "The Show Must Go On" and "Flash", has switched his plectrum for a pen and co-authored a book with two leading British astronomers, telling the story of the big bang and how the universe has evolved since. Brian May addresses the media during a photocall to launch a book entitled "Bang! The Complete History of the...

The latest interview was with an Independent Scientist called Ron Pearson. Ron spent much of his life a University lecturer in Thermodynamics and Fluid mechanics. He was the inventor of the Gas Wave Turbine and in his retirement he studied the Physics and Mathematics found in Quantum Theory and Relativity. Because of this unique background Ron was able to see huge flaws in the Big Bang Theory and in the theories of Relativity. He has therefore spent the last 16 years developing a new theory on the creation of the Universe that did away with the previous inconsistencies as well...

FOURTEEN years ago, when a Berkeley astronomer named George F. Smoot declared that he and his satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, had detected the astrophysical equivalent of the fingerprints of God, his euphoria was easy to understand. For a few happy years, one of the last big pieces of the cosmological puzzle seemed to be in place — an explanation why the universe has blossomed into such an interesting place to live. Had it not been for the whorls and dimples Dr. Smoot and his NASA collaborator, John C. Mather, found in the background radiation — the afterimage...

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence on the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday. The astronomers, John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George F. Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million. Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians behind the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite launched in 1989. Its mission was...

In the 1970s, when the big-bang model for the origins of the universe at last seemed firmly established, Christian, Jewish and even some Muslim preachers and exegetes took heart. Hadn't modern cosmology at long last proved what scripture always claimed? The universe emerged in a single indefinable instant. Creation out of nothing stood confirmed. Genesis had been vindicated. The troublesome fact that big-bang cosmology offers a model of how the cosmos came into being from a dimensionless point of infinite density but says nothing about what - or who - precipitated that primordial explosion (whose effects still determine our world,...

MOON DAILYBig Bang Afterglow Fails An Intergalactic Shadow Test Because it is seen coming from every direction in nearly uniform power and frequency, cosmologists theorized that the microwave background is afterglow radiation left over by the Big Bang that created the universe. by Staff Writers Huntsville AL (SPX) Sep 03, 2006 The apparent absence of shadows where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a "Big Bang." In a finding sure to cause controversy, scientists at The University of Alabama in...

The apparent absence of shadows where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a "Big Bang." In a finding sure to cause controversy, scientists at UAH found a lack of evidence of shadows from "nearby" clusters of galaxies using new, highly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background. A team of UAH scientists led by Dr. Richard Lieu, a professor of physics, used data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to scan the cosmic microwave background for shadows caused by...

Nuclear war starting in 10 days? Such was the conclusion reached in the U.S. Russian generals and political scientists disagree only about its exact starting date. Our world is on the brink of another world war. It will originate August 22nd in the Middle East. The prediction was presented not by Vagna or Nostradamus but by an American political scientist Bernard Lewis in the acclaimed publication of Wall Street Journal. He is a man with close ties to the Bush administration as well as to the non-conservatives pushing for the radical solution of the “Iranian Threat.” Lewis believes it will...

The question of what happened before the Big Bang long has frustrated cosmologists, both amateur and professional. Though Einstein's theory of general relativity does an excellent job of describing the universe almost back to its beginning, near the Big Bang matter becomes so dense that relativity breaks down, says Penn State physicist Abhay Ashtekar. "Beyond that point, we need to apply quantum tools that were not available to Einstein." Now Ashtekar and two of his post-doctoral researchers, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parmpreet Singh, have done just that. Using a theory called loop quantum gravity, they have developed a mathematical model that...

A handful of researchers posit an alternative theory of origin — the universe has no beginning Many, if not most, people assume that certain aspects of nature’s workings are absolutely known. Outside of intelligent design circles, no modern biologist doubts the theory of evolution by natural selection; it is too well established by harmonious data across a multiplicity of fields. No credible doctor questions the germ theory of disease. And, one might think, no serious cosmologist disagrees with the standard cosmological model. The SCM is the official designation of what is informally called “the big bang�: that relatively recent but...

NEWS ADVISORY, June 20 /Christian Newswire/-- Britain’s renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told a recent Hong Kong news conference the human race must “spread out into space for the survival of the species.“ He cited “sudden global warming, nuclear war, or a genetically engineered virus� as threats that could wipe out humanity at any time. “As dire as Hawking’s concerns may be, humanity’s plight is actually worse,� says astronomer Hugh Ross, founder and president of the science/faith think tank Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org). “But,� he adds, “that is not to say the human race is without hope.�  Ross explains, “It’s important to...

Acclaimed British physicist Stephen Hawking has said that humanity is finally getting close to understanding the origin of the universe. Speaking at a lecture in Hong Kong, Hawking said that despite some theoretical advances in the past years, there are still mysteries as to how the universe began. "Despite having had some great successes, not everything is solved. We do not yet have good theoretical understanding of the observation of the expansion of the universe," he told an audience of 2,500 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Thursday. "Without such understanding, we cannot be sure of the...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.” The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due. Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the...

NEWS ADVISORY, April 7 /Christian Wire Service/-- “It blows my mind that we can now distinguish between different versions of what happened in the first trillionth of a second of the universe,” said Dr. Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins in describing the latest WMAP findings. What happened is called ‘inflation’ and, according to NASA researcher Dr. Gary Hinshaw, “now we can support it [inflation] with real observations.” The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe) recorded three years’ continuous observations of the “afterglow” from the cosmic origin event. That glow indicates the universe grew almost immediately and instantaneously from subatomic size to...

New NASA space-probe observations of the oldest light in the cosmos are the most direct evidence yet that the universe expanded extremely quickly immediately after the big bang, physicists say. Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, led the team overseeing NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). He and colleagues announced the new results Thursday in a teleconference. Picture: Map of the early universe, just after the big bang Previous experiments—including WMAP results released in 2003—had provided strong evidence for the rapid-expansion theory, called inflation, that was first proposed by physicist Alan Guth in 1980. In the trillion-trillionth...

Among many cultures, the moment of creation is described as light coming out of the darkness. Yesterday scientists reported they had seen the first light of the cosmos, emitted a trillion-trillionth of a second after the beginning of space and time.  To spy the oldest light in the universe, the team used the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a minivan-size NASA satellite located nearly a million miles out in space, to study patterns in energy waves. The scientists built on earlier data, using a new measurement technique that separated out ancient glare from the afterglow of creation to gain clues about...

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...

SEARCH RESULTS Evidence for Universe Expansion FoundEvidence for Universe Expansion FoundScientists: Find explains how universe formedCold War gamma-ray mystery solved in a flashU.S. spacecraft set to study cosmic bursts Front page March 17, 2006, 12:51AMOldest light shows universe grew fast, researchers sayFirst stars arose 400 million years after big bang, not 200 million years, as once thought By DENNIS O'BRIEN Baltimore Sun Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars.Light from...

Things most guys can have around the house: baseballs, basketballs, footballs, softballs. Things guys most definitely shouldn't have around the house: cannonballs. A collector in McKinney, Texas, kept an antique cannonball that he'd bought from the trunk of a man's car at a gun show in his apartment as a decoration, according to The Dallas Morning News. Responding to an anonymous tip, police seized the man's 45-pound, cast-iron cannonball on Monday and the weapons collector allowed officials to detonate it in a field close by behind McKinney High School. "It was a live cannonball," Plano police Detective Bryan Wood, a...

Neanderthals At It Again H.L. Mencken’s final report from the famous Scopes trial in Dayton Tennessee comes roaring down to us after 80 years as sharply edged as ever: "Let no one mistake [the trial] for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details.  It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.  Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock...

Intelligent Design is once again making headlines in the United States. But what is the attraction? Daniel Dennett spoke with SPIEGEL about the attraction of creationism, how religion itself succumbs to Darwinian ideas, and the social irresponsibility of the religious right in America SPIEGEL: Professor Dennett, more than 120 million Americans believe that God created Adam our of mud some 10,000 years ago and made Eve from his rib. Do you personally know any of these 120 million? Dennett: Yes. But people who are creationists are usually not interested in talking about it. Those who are actually enthusiastic about Intelligent...

Dr. Henry “Fritz” Schaefer, the Graham Perdue professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia, gave a presentation Tuesday night about the convergence of science and Christianity. Schaefer is a five-time Nobel Prize nominee, according to The U.S. News and World Report. He is the sixth most-cited scientist in the world, and he is the author of more than 1,000 scientific publications. He lectured on the Big Bang Theory, Stephen Hawking and God to a crowd of nearly 800 people at the Seretean Center Concert Hall.

My "Swirl Theory"We hear of string theory, the Big Bang and many other ideas.I have come up with this idea over the past several days. Katrina and Rita has turned my attention towards this as I have discovered a new theory as of late that black holes may be present at the center of each galaxy.Using the theory that a black hole could have possibly been created in space by gases which collapsed into itself churning and sucking gasses and space debris around it into a swirling vortex. This swirling vortex of gas eventually condensed into planets and solar systems.Here...

Creationism, Christianity, and Common Sense September 26, 2005 by Alan Burkhart Here we go again. According to a Washington Post article from 09/25/05, a group called “Answers in Genesis – USA” is building a museum in Cincinnati dedicated to the proposition that the universe was created exactly as stated in the Bible. In other words, God created the universe in six days, and He did it only about six thousand years ago. The group’s president, Kenneth Ham, is quoted in the Post as saying, "This is a battle cry to recognize the science in the revealed truth of God." Science...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers said on Monday they have detected a cosmic explosion at the very edge of the visible universe, a 13-billion-year-old blast that could help them learn more about the earliest stars. The brilliant blast -- known as a gamma ray burst -- was probably caused by the death of a massive star soon after the Big Bang, but was glimpsed on September 4 by NASA's new Swift satellite and later by ground-based telescopes. The explosion occurred soon after the first stars and galaxies formed, perhaps 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang explosion that...

In what is widely regarded as the most important scientific discovery of 1998, researchers turned their telescopes to measure the rate at which cosmic expansion was decelerating and instead saw that it was accelerating. They have been gripping the steering wheel very tightly ever since. As deeply mysterious as acceleration is, if you just accept it without trying to fathom its cause, it solves all kinds of problems. Before 1998, cosmologists had been troubled by discrepancies in the age, density and clumpiness of the universe. Acceleration made everything click together. It is one of the conceptual keys, along with other...

A new analysis of 'cool' spots in the cosmic microwave background may cast new doubts on a key piece of evidence supporting the big bang theory of how the universe was formed. Two scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) looked for but couldn't find evidence of gravitational "lensing" where you might expect to find it, in the most distant light source in the universe -- the cosmic microwave background. Results of this research by Dr. Richard Lieu, a UAH physics professor, and Dr. Jonathan Mittaz, a UAH research associate, were published Monday in the "Astrophysical Journal." In...

The sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima seems to be shaping up as a subdued affair--though not for any lack of significance. A survey of news editors in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, first among the top one hundred stories of the twentieth century. And any thoughtful list of controversies in American history would place it near the top again. It was not always so. In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war. They further believed that...

Getting a Bang Out of Gamow By Professor Eamon Harper In August 1934 there appeared on the GW campus a 6-foot-3-inch, 30-year-old, flaxen-haired, Ukrainian émigré scientist. His startlingly blue eyes twinkled myopically behind lenses that resembled the bottoms of cider bottles. He conversed with a cosmopolitan circle of friends in a variety of European languages, with a fractured but poetic delivery that was animated and usually high-pitched. His name: George Gamow [pronounced GAM-off]. The young Ukrainian had a straightforward, no-nonsense way of doing theoretical physics. His approach was strongly intuitive and he lost little time on florid mathematical formalism. That...

Physicists have created the state of matter thought to have filled the Universe just a few microseconds after the big bang and found it to be different from what they were expecting. Instead of a gas, it is more like a liquid. Understanding why it is a liquid should take physicists a step closer to explaining the earliest moments of our Universe. Not just any old liquid, either. Its collective movement is rather like the way a school of fish swims 'as one' and is a sign that the fluid possesses an extremely low viscosity, making it what physicists call...

Few e-mails have ever stopped me as cold as the one I am about to describe. In it, the author, a former university professor who wishes to remain anonymous, claims to know the actual mechanism behind intelligent design. That is the mechanism by which God created the universe, our world and all biological life within it. This is especially intriguing as Darwin's theory of evolution is now hotly contested by arguments of intelligent design. One weakness of ID is its failure to offer a mechanism to counter evolution's bogus explanation of diversity through macro-mutation. As a result, ID has failed...

Big Bang - Big Scam, Or Sometimes Evolutionists Need To Be Smacked Upside The Head With A Board From Noah's Ark \In the Great Debate that has the Public Fool System fighting any challenge to the Theory Of Evolution, we must remember that many jobs - especially in Universities - would be at risk for the profs and their underlings - who must defend the THEORY, or find a more honest occupation elsewhere. An Intelligent Designer (why not just say God?) advocate on the college campus is scoffed at as a latter day Ptolemy, who believed that the earth was...

Am I the only one who marvels at the futility of Man as he tries to explain the origin of the universe? The time and effort expended upon this pursuit could be far better spent upon issues that actually lack an answer. Trying to find a new explanation for the cosmos via science is like trying to reinvent the wheel. For the sake of argument let’s assume that the universe happened by accident just as many so-called scientists claim. With this as a starting point we can make the assumption that there was a source of crude matter from which...