From Wired News:
Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.
The discovery—which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation—is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.
It also helps explain how matter eventually clumped together into planets, stars and galaxies in a universe that began as a remarkably smooth, super-hot soup.
Unfortunately, the discovery that it was a super-hot Ha-saa Al-Hamam (traditional Saudi pigeon soup) reportedly has religious leaders from both the Jewish and Christian communities feeling a mite uneasy with the findings.
On the bright side, though, at least it wasn’t vichyssoise. Because imagine how insufferable the French would be then…?
(via Scribal Terror)
This sounds like, you know, the same expansion I get when I follow up a set or two of preacher curls with a set of hammers followed by peaking my biceps with a few concentration curls, to get a nice pump and peak to my biceps, which are now the size of small mountains. The same mountains I saw growing up in Austria. I used to imagine my biceps muscles as these small mountains and used my mental power to pump them to great heights and massive peaks with incredible density and the great cuts.
…growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.
Is that the universe or the junk email in my in-box?
It’s kinda like what you get when you drop mentos into a bottle of diet coke.
Sorta like what happened to my buddy when his bicycle chain broke going up “Humpback Hill”. One minute his nads were the size of marbles, then “poof”, they were so big he couldn’t walk.
Hey, matter sucks.
One has to wonder if at some point history will, um, repeat itself…
Allah got a woody.
TW: And he knows that size matters.
Hey, matter sucks.
Some of us prefer to call this gravity.
What’s it say for Bushite solidarity when we can’t agree on the basics, gahrie? I mean, just go with it, will ya?
tw: Zipper.
Hold on. Time and space are supposed to be two aspects of the same thing, right. Space-time?
So, if all the universe was compacted into the “size” of a marble, then wouldn’t time also have been compacted? If space is supposed to be different, wouldn’t have time also have been different?
How can we measure an event as taking a trillionth-trillionth of a second according to the present scale of space-time?
On it’s own, relativistic time-scale, would this great expansion have been any different, to a contemporary observer, than the way we experience time and space now?
Is it possible that what we now experience as a trillionth-trillionth of a second have taken, according to this theoretical observer, what he would perceive as millions of years?
Horton hears a hoo?
Boil that dust speck!
Thank goodness for Volker and Greenspan.
Well, was it a shooter, steely or agate? I betcha I got one in my bag.
“On the bright side, though, at least it wasn’t vichyssoise. Because imagine how insufferable the French would be then…?”
Link
Phinn,
Thanks for that. Now my head hurts. Guess I had best go find a Jameson and Guinness…
Major, you’ll find that you become better at theoretical physics the more you drink.
I have a universe in my latissimus muscle, my left one, but I need to do some isolation exercise on my right to even dem out for a competition I am entering for bodybuilding.
I wonder if da judges can see the rapid expansion taking place in my latissimus muscles right now.
phinn
This is mainly what keeps me agnostic. I can just about stomach the bit where chemistry turn in to biology, but the bit where nothing turns into eveything is just too much!
I mean one minute, (well not minute because there weren’t any minutes then,or a then then).
Anyway, there was nothing. No space, No time. No energy. Then there’s everything. Of course space was very small and time was very short but it was all there and so was the energy.
(And don’t get me started about the soul. Is anyone seriously suggesting then when I die the whole Universe just disappears? Anyway, I need to know what happens next. If life is like watching Lost, (complete with flashbacks in Korean), I might as well give up now.)
Was “smoking gun” used as a metaphor? Otherwise, someone would hold the gun and pull the trigger, right?
So then it’s not a very good metaphor for “evidence,” as it would lead to the observation that other things were involved in triggering the “rapid expansion” that is described.
And perhaps, while it’s evidence–of something that occurred a long time ago–that’s been uncovered, yet, again, it is merely someone’s theoretical hypothesis developed from the analysis of the microwave radiation–something unlikely to be proven experimentally.
In other words, what has occurred is that someone has proposed additional factors to the theory that helps explain what happened at the earliest origin of the universe.
And it was soup?
Or did I misunderstand the post?
t/w: large–you just can’t make this up!
Cosmology is such fun. You can postulate anything and use whatever tests you want to prove it.
The only thing I know for sure is that observations are only as good as the instruments used to make them and conclusions are fairly near worthless when you have to introduce complex mainpulations of obscure mathematics just to explain what you believe you just measured.
I’m not going to say that the theory is wrong, it just seems we’re going to need about five years to agree on the terminology to discuss it.
And then once it cools just a bit… you get nice little chunks and the formation of hot and sour soup… mmmmmmmm…
Now you’re talking!