₦airaland Forum

NASA: Dark Energy, Dark Matter

In the early 1990's, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the Universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the Universe had to slow. The Universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the Universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the Universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.

Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a "cosmological constant." Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.


What Is Dark Energy?

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the Universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy. Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the Universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the Universe.


Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual" ) particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong - wrong by a lot. The number came out 10120 times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this "quintessence," after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues.

A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the Universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters. But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be? How could it correctly describe the motion of the bodies in the Solar System, as Einstein's theory is known to do, and still give us the different prediction for the Universe that we need? There are candidate theories, but none are compelling. So the mystery continues.

The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data.



What Is Dark Matter?

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the Universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~68% dark energy, ~27% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the Universe to make up the 27% required by the observations. Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.

However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or "MACHOs". But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

alfaman2: Back to topic. You expertly avoided my question because you have guessed that it may be a trick question. Well, it is. I will get straight to it.

alfaman2: According to big bangers, space is expanding. (please note that I am not disputting this fact) However, observations have shown that galaxies collide. But if space between galaxies are expanding, how come they collide? You already started responding by saying that dm (i think you mean dark energy) takes precedence when matter are farther from each other. Can't you see the absurdity?

alfaman2: Once again, I am not proposing nor joining an alternative theory. All I am doing is pointing out the flaws in the mainstream theory

alfaman2: I will get to the planck probe later. Note just that Planck did not confirm BB. It only validated and put more precision on the data gathered by a previous probe called Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

What else it did was throw more spanners in the wheels of the big bangers because it showed that contrary to what the big bangers have been insisting for years, that the universe is neither uniform nor homogenous thus making a complete mockery of the inflation theory. They are still analysing the data and have now put the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years. SMH.

*Kails*:
[size=38pt]hilarious![/size]

no you did not just say that!!

did you ignore my previous post?
do some research dear...Lincoln did not give a damn.

I repeat!

Paschal007: Interesting. 4 theists on 1 atheists not a fair game.

vedaxcool: Bare faced lies is a disgraceful next time try sugar quoting it, atheist do worst only that muslims manage to organise a sensible section in NL so that people manage to engage in healthy and reasonable discussion! Stop the lies, you christians are deeply hurt when these atheist sh.it on your religion, hence when the pain comes to the surface you start shouting muslims, muslims, sorry to burst your bubbles don't blame us for your problem, we did not impose secularity and pretense on you guys! Whenever you people stop the pretense you can have your own section, but trying to form I don't send when you really do isn't going to heal the wound!

Reyginus: Lovely!
Wiegraf, I'm interested in the question he asked too.

zilon12: Seems my comment affected you, accept my sincere apology

alfaman2: There you go again. It is not what I believe but what the big bangers are actually saying.
Did you read the result of their findings? That star is 14.5 billion years old. The universe is 13.77 billion years old. How do you fit a square peg in a round hole? Mathematically simple: approximated percentage errors. Except percentage errors as every statistician knows, is a double edged sword. Here they put in a percentage error of 800 million years, which if the error has to be the most extreme they can make (note that the most extreme errors in mathematics are the least probable), puts that star at almost the same age as the universe. However, and here is the double edge, it is equally conceivable, if you were to believe their calculations, that that star is 15.3 billion years old.

But for the time being, let us accept that the least probable answer is the correct one and that star is 13.7 billion years old. It means we had 700 million years between the big bang and the birth of that star. This creates another headache for big bangers.

According to recent top university researches, 750 million years after the big bang, stars have not started forming. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/12/the-first-stars-of-the-universe-new-discoveries-announced-by-mit.html

To compound this, it is well known that a first generation of stars formed and died out (exploding or collasping into black holes) and their gases had to cool before the birth of the second generation stars that we see today. Some big bangers would say that HD 140283 was part of the first generation. This is highly unlikely because the first generation stars had ridiculously short life spans ranging from 10 million - 400 million years. But even if the star was first generation, there is still the problem stated previously about the time of formation.

If you read the article on NASA website that I linked, you will see the magic they did in order to reduce the age to 14.5 million. Infact here it is:



You know what that means, it means they got data from their observation which they didn't like, then they started applying theories, and "Bond's thinking" and lowering the age arbitrarily.

After all these lowerings, they still arrived at 14.5 billion years. Laughable.



Waow! You did good. Refreshing ones knowledge before responding on some topics is a very advisable entreprise. (wink @ logicboy)

But this in itself, while sounding good when scientist proclaim it from their pulpits actually puts them in difficulty when questionned with relation to big bang. The bolded is true to the extent that we are talking of stars in the milky way. All other stars in other galaxies are moving away from us due to expansion of space. Do you agree?

alfaman2: There you go again. It is not what I believe but what the big bangers are actually saying.
Did you read the result of their findings? That star is 14.5 billion years old. The universe is 13.77 billion years old. How do you fit a square peg in a round hole? Mathematically simple: approximated percentage errors. Except percentage errors as every statistician knows, is a double edged sword. Here they put in a percentage error of 800 million years, which if the error has to be the most extreme they can make (note that the most extreme errors in mathematics are the least probable), puts that star at almost the same age as the universe. However, and here is the double edge, it is equally conceivable, if you were to believe their calculations, that that star is 15.3 billion years old.

But for the time being, let us accept that the least probable answer is the correct one and that star is 13.7 billion years old. It means we had 700 million years between the big bang and the birth of that star. This creates another headache for big bangers.

According to recent top university researches, 750 million years after the big bang, stars have not started forming. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/12/the-first-stars-of-the-universe-new-discoveries-announced-by-mit.html

To compound this, it is well known that a first generation of stars formed and died out (exploding or collasping into black holes) and their gases had to cool before the birth of the second generation stars that we see today. Some big bangers would say that HD 140283 was part of the first generation. This is highly unlikely because the first generation stars had ridiculously short life spans ranging from 10 million - 400 million years. But even if the star was first generation, there is still the problem stated previously about the time of formation.

If you read the article on NASA website that I linked, you will see the magic they did in order to reduce the age to 14.5 million. Infact here it is:



You know what that means, it means they got data from their observation which they didn't like, then they started applying theories, and "Bond's thinking" and lowering the age arbitrarily.

After all these lowerings, they still arrived at 14.5 billion years. Laughable.

alfaman2: Waow! You did good. Refreshing ones knowledge before responding on some topics is a very advisable entreprise. (wink @ logicboy)

But this in itself, while sounding good when scientist proclaim it from their pulpits actually puts them in difficulty when questionned with relation to big bang. The bolded is true to the extent that we are talking of stars in the milky way. All other stars in other galaxies are moving away from us due to expansion of space. Do you agree?

striktlymi: Is there something wrong in training a child?

What you think you said:
Though you made some points I agree with but Whargarbl man, just Whargarbl...

What you actually said:
[img]http://1.bp..com/-UqncTV8hs0w/T8mnsIU6plI/AAAAAAAAAYo/v_mPPoFo6yA/s1600/lolcats-funny-picture-lalalalala.jpg[/img]


[img]http://ct.fra.bz/ol/fz/sw/i57/2/12/4/frabz-Keon-lisening-to-Zeta-LALALALALA-9a5ab9.jpg[/img]

alfaman2: Well, I guess we will never agree with each other, (until your scientists tell you otherwise, that is) so let us let these arguments go for now.
Even though you manifest a certain incapacity to understand a few scientific facts, at least you accept the possibility that I might be right, and that is good. You are not yet completely brainwashed.
I would urge anyone following to go through all the previous arguments and make up their mind which one makes more sense.

alfaman2: LOL @ the image of anime last stand hero.

No. I wasn't saving anything. I have a lot of points against the Big Bang. I started this thread so as to argue those points one after the other sort of but as you witnessed, enemies of progress hijacked the thread with their derailings.
It is just another point, like the questions I asked Area Boy which he couldn't answer but rather ran away. You at least, despite your limited critical awareness are making a commendable effort to argue.

I don't know if you had already watched the video I posted. Or if you had figured out if the Big Bang concerns only the observable universe as claimed by Area Boy.

I would urge you to read up on that HD 140283 star. It really shaked the BB community.

alfaman2: My next question is actually scientifically easy to answer but I want to see if you are analytical enough and if I should continue with my other points that make wholesome mockery of the BBT.

Here: How come we can see stars that are 47 billion light years away?

While explaining, please bear in mind the method of calculation that gave the Big Bangers the age of the universe at 13.7 billion.

Segeggs: out of context of OP

me: assuming 'little' things like disasters, disease, plain old natural evil, etc, are meant to test our faith? Why does a good, omnipotent god have to do this?

assume vestigial organs are part of the designs of a perfect, omnipotent god?

Hold up, why does an omniscient god need to test your faith?

striktlymi: Morning wieg,



You mistake my meaning most definitely!

striktlymi: You are entitled to your opinion man but note that I did not and will not rescind what I posted. I have gone through it and it accurately depict what I had in mind, if it did not I would have said so.

striktlymi: More like garnishing insults with questions...that is not my idea of a direct question!

striktlymi: No dispute here!

striktlymi: I disagree with the bold...if an assertion has been proven to be false then one's belief in what is clearly false is no longer faith but something close to foolishness...

It is proven that the Earth is not flat and one comes and tell you that he has faith that the Earth is flat...does this make any sense? When something is demonstrably false then to hold on to that false belief is grossly improper and falls outside the realm of faith...

Faith, in this context, has to do with accepting something that there exist no objective proof for (whether in favour or against)...so it has nothing to do with something that has already been proven to be false.

striktlymi: You miss the point here! The name thingy has nothing to do with what is possible (whether remotely or not) but on what can be proven. If someone says the name exists but cannot prove it and another says the name does not exist and still cannot prove it, then both of them are in the same both until either party has an objective way of proven his position.

striktlymi: Definitely! I can't accuse someone who believes the name does not exist as unreasonable until I can prove objectively that holding such a belief is not appropriate...now with the 'Earth is flat' thingy, anyone who still holds this believe is demonstrably unreasonable cause there exist a proof to the converse.

striktlymi: I wouldn't consider the individual to be foolish but rather funny...the only question that would come up for me would be: how do you know about this tea cup? If the individual goes ahead to demonstrate this by some means that is able to convince me e.g he performs a 'miracle' such that I could see the tea cup then I will definitely take him seriously.

In the same vein, someone else who did not witness this 'miracle' would be justified if he disbelieves this tea cup thingy but if he decides to say: 'this is foolish, there is no way a tea cup will ever be in space' then this individual finds himself caught in the same web the other fella is i.e. making an assertion which he is yet to prove.

striktlymi: I do not agree with the above...how can one separate faith from belief? The belief in God is not just backed up by 'blind faith' there has been a need for God to prove his existence via performing miracles...I know this is something you will not believe even when you see it; so I will press the pause button on this.

striktlymi: God goes beyond what we can see and touch...

striktlymi: Nah men...don't want to go into this argument! It will lead nowhere!

striktlymi: Cause logic is yet to catch up!

striktlymi: ...this means?

striktlymi: The above is not in dispute!

I have addressed this!

striktlymi: I don't think I am the one with the ish man...

striktlymi: I am not an Atheist so I can't speak for them...

alfaman2: I didn't think it possible for an atheist to be as close minded as you.

alfaman2: Until you show me a snake that barks, I still maintain that all natural forces behave according to their nature. Until then, all you are doing is assuming.

alfaman2: You should have explained this image because it makes no sense to me.

alfaman2: Brian green is a big banger. And I don't see how quoting a big banger to support big bang is different from using the bible to validate the bible. I mean come on. And you attributed a quote I didn't make to me which I hope was not done out of malice.

alfaman2: Journalists sensationalist reports are not scientific confirmations. The BBC article you referenced said that: Dark matter accounts for most of the mass in the Universe.

It cannot be seen directly with telescopes, but astronomers know it to be out there because of the gravitational effects it has on the matter we can see.

Galaxies, for example, could not rotate the way they do and hold their shape without the presence of dark matter.

What a falacious statement to make. If you bring that paper to scientists (including big bangers), they will laugh you out of the room. Like I said before, let's stay with facts or at least factual hypothesis.

alfaman2: Maybe you missed my previous quote from a link before. Here is is again.

I will repeat it just in case: [size=14pt]the big bang theory has made absolutely no single quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation.[/size]

alfaman2: There you go again misreading my post. I know it matters little here,but for clarity purposes especially for others following the discussion, I believe highlighting the distinction is appropriate. But I do understand what you mean.

alfaman2: Because that's what happens to big bangers everytime a mystery is expalined and they realise they were wrong.

alfaman2: No, I have problems with people accepting a flawed theory be it reasonable or not and unwilling to question this theory even as new evidence of its flaws are discovered almost daily.

alfaman2: This is one of the reasons why I wanted us to differentiate between dark energy and dark matter. The universe is apparently made up of 68% dark energy. If we add the 27% dark matter, we are now talking of 95% DARK force that in the early start of big bang did not influence the universe. Or did the reverse and subsequently changed its nature. It is all suppositions that don't make sense. Let's leave it at that. OK?

alfaman2: You misunderstand again. I do have a problem with that scenario. I was only praising the manner in which you structured your argument, not the substance of the argument.

alfaman2: Not me. These are scientist and university professors complainning of lack of funding for any project that might further reveal the flaws of the big bang.

alfaman2: Let me tell you a story.

In 2000, some scientists decided to measure the age of an intriguing star called HD 140283. This star is very near our galaxy, mind you. So they measured and remeasured and remeasured, and the data kept coming up. After everthing, they had no other option than to publish their finding: The star is 16 billion years old.

What?! Panic amongst the big bangers. That cannot be true, they said. So the big bangers decided to measure it themselves. They measured and measured but refused to publish their results, talking about anomalies.

Last year, NASA sponsored team of astronomers decided to measure it again but we have to await till last month before they could release the results. You know what else happenned last month? They told us they made a calculation in the age of the universe by 80 million years. Now you start putting two and two together.

Well the result of the latest measurement came out and guess what, our dear star is 14.5 billion years old. I guess those astronomers didn't want to put their reputation in line by saying it is younger than the big bang but they have a cop-out. Listen to this:

"Put all of those ingredients together and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star's age compatible with the age of the universe," said Bond. "This is the best star in the sky to do precision age calculations by virtue of its closeness and brightness."

Chei! See deer in a headlamp grammer.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/hd140283.html

There are quantrillions of visible stars in space and the only one that can give them the precise calculations of age is telling them that it born before their big bang happenned. They refused to believe him and kept spending trillions to somehow arrive at such a stupid conclusion that it is indeed older than but could also be the same age as the universe with a residual uncertainty. And that, after increasing their supposed age of the universe.
This is what you have faith in? It's laughable.

striktlymi: Good evening wieg,

Nice to see that you are back to the 'you' I converse with...

striktlymi: I doubt it...yet to notice any other Atheist that does a good job at facing the facts though musky too is in this very small 'loop' but sometimes I don't know what you guys smoke

striktlymi: I refused to address your previous post cause you were being something else apart from the 'you' I converse with...now that you seem rather calm, I can now address your questions...

striktlymi: The bold is empty! As for endorsing the OP I have made my position clear in a number of posts to you I believe; what is left is for you to either accept it or reject it.

striktlymi: I am struggling to understand why you asked the question above...anyways, I have made my position on the above matter known in a number of threads (may be not directly to you) but since you asked, then my position again is this:

I believe that the concept of God defies the very foundation of logic...I might mistake your meaning of "logically sound"
but the truth is, Logic as we know it today is approached scientifically and when something crosses from the natural to the supernatural then that item necessarily goes beyond the scope of logic, unless somethings are revealed in the future which might make all these ish fall within the scope of science.

Now, the above is not to say that everything about religion falls outside the sphere of logic and reason...there are some things in religion which are better explained by making recourse to logic and reason. To be in religion one needs faith and this is something I am not ashamed of. I have faith and my faith is strong!

striktlymi: Direct question!!! Good!!! The direct answer is that you do not need faith to make the statement above.

striktlymi: ...and you honestly think I do not know the difference?

musKeeto: There's no proof because God remains an idea. The moment you claim God's real (as proclaimed by most religious texts), then proof can be provided based on that. The question as to the existence of a creator/uncaused cause still remains open though.


EDIT: I can see in my mind's eye a horse with blue head and red legs... it's using a smartphone too..

alfaman2: No. NO. No!
Nooooooooooooo!
You are worse than a christian. You wriggle and twist words left and right. You change what I said into something else.

alfaman2: The nature of gravity is the same all the time. Yes it behaves the same way all the time. The strenght may vary but the characteristics (behaviour) remains the same. Even the link you provided validated my stance with the example of a small magnet holding a pin against the gravitational pull of the earth. The fact that the magnet holds the pin does not mean that the gravitational force has changed. It is still there. It is still PULLING. But is not strong enough.

brian green: In a cosmological context, this occurred when the whole of the known universe fit within a Planck-sized nugget, yielding a density so great that it strains one's ability to find a fitting metaphor or an enlightening analogy: the density of the universe at the Planck time was simply colossal. At such energies and densities gravity and quantum mechanics can no longer be treated as two separate entities as they are in point-particle quantum field theory.

alfaman2: Like all Big Bangers have done each time they are cornered, propposing another force is all they come up with, as you are suggesting here. If you have done even the basic algebra, you would understand the limits of this approach in solving the problem of big bang. You can't just keep adding variables to balance an equation.

BBC: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) surveys the sky for high-energy particles, or cosmic rays.

It has seen evidence for what could be dark matter colliding with itself in a process known as "annihilation".

But scientists stress that a precise description of this enigmatic cosmic constituent is still some way off.

"It could take a few more years," said AMS deputy spokesman Roberto Battiston, a professor of physics at Trento University, Italy.

"But the accuracy that AMS is displaying is far greater than past experiments, so we're getting closer to unveiling the cause of the particle events we're detecting," he told BBC News.

brian green: By looking out into the universe with their most powerful telescopes, astronomers can see light that was emitted from galaxies and quasars just a few billion years after the big bang. This allows them to verify the expansion of the universe predicted by the big bang theory back to this early phase of the universe, and everything checks out to a "T."

brian green: In fact, physicists as far back as George Gamow and his students Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann in the 1950s, and Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles in the mid-1960s, realized that the present-day universe should be permeated by an almost uniform bath of these primordial photons, which, through the last 15 billion years of cosmic expansion, have cooled to a mere handful of degrees above absolute zero. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey accidently made one of the most important discoveries of our age when they detected this afterglow of the big bang while working on an antenna intended for use with communication satellites. Subsequent research has refined both theory and experiment, culminating in measurements taken by NASA’s COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite in the early 1990s. With these data, physicists and astronomers have confirmed to high precision that the universe is filled with microwave radiation (if our eyes were sensitive to microwaves, we would see a diffuse glow in the world around us) whose temperature is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, exactly in keeping with the expectation of the big bang theory.

alfaman2: Can we push further in our tests of the big bang theory to even earlier times? We can. By using standard principles of nuclear theory and thermodynamics, physicists can make definite predictions about the relative abundance of the light elements produced during the period of primordial nucleosynthesis, between a hundredth of a second and a few minutes ATB. According to theory, for example, about 23 percent of the universe should be composed of helium. By measuring the helium abundance in stars and nebulae, astronomers have amassed impressive support that, indeed, this prediction is right on the mark. Perhaps even more impressive is the prediction and confirmation regarding deuterium abundance, since there is essentially no astrophysical process, other than the big bang, that can account for its small but definite presence throughout the cosmos.

alfaman2: Another thing to avoid confusion especially for people with little knowledge on this topic (cue logicboy and reyginus) Dark Matter is completely different from Dark Energy. So let us not confuse both. They are both nonetheless unproven hypothesis.

alfaman2: See above. Don't confuse those two. Solving the "conundrum" as you termed it, would not address any issued but keep adding more headaches to the big bangers.

alfaman2: It might have. It might not have. God might exist. God might not exist. JeSoul might be gay. JeSoul might not be gay.
Let us stay with what we know.

alfaman2: I give you this one. It will make some sense if this were true. But then if it were true, then the whole Big Bang theory falls on its head, the laws of motion in space becomes useless, all laws of thermodynamics thrown out of the window and physics would have to be rethought all over again.
But I concede it was a fine argument.

alfaman2: Science today, is going the way of religion in that dissenting voices are silenced to maintain the status quo. A lot of high stake interests are at stake. NASA's budget is bigger than that off all of Africa. One accepted error could throw trillions down the drain, so they refuse to accept.

striktlymi: Good evening Plaetton,

Don't you think your post is rather vague? I do appreciate it when I am quoted directly instead of making assumptions that in the end will amount to NOTHING!!!

striktlymi: You need faith to believe that Santa does not exist!

striktlymi: This is empty and undeserving of a response!

brian green: Putting the Big Bang to the Test

By looking out into the universe with their most powerful telescopes, astronomers can see light that was emitted from galaxies and quasars just a few billion years after the big bang. This allows them to verify the expansion of the universe predicted by the big bang theory back to this early phase of the universe, and everything checks out to a "T." To test the theory to yet earlier times, physicists and astronomers must make use of more indirect methods. One of the most refined approaches involves something known as cosmic background radiation.

If you've ever felt a bicycle tire after vigorously pumping it full of air, you know that it is warm to the touch. This is because when things are compressed they heat up—this is the principle, for example, behind pressure cookers, in which air is tightly compressed within a sealed pot in order for unusually high cooking temperatures to be readily achieved. The reverse is also true: When pressure is released and things are allowed to expand, they cool. If you remove the lid on a pressure cooker—or, more spectacularly, should it blow off—the air it contains will expand to its ordinary density while cooling to standard room temperature. This is the science underlying the phrase "blow off steam," a familiar approach to "cool down" a heated situation. It turns out that these simple terrestrial observations have a profound incarnation within the cosmos.

We saw above that after electrons and nuclei join together to form atoms, photons are free to travel unimpeded through the universe, much like atoms of air in a hot but otherwise empty pressure cooker. And just as air in the pressure cooker cools down when the lid is removed and it is allowed to expand, the same is true for the "gas" of photons streaming through the universe as it expands. In fact, physicists as far back as George Gamow and his students Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann in the 1950s, and Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles in the mid-1960s, realized that the present-day universe should be permeated by an almost uniform bath of these primordial photons, which, through the last 15 billion years of cosmic expansion, have cooled to a mere handful of degrees above absolute zero.127 In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey accidently made one of the most important discoveries of our age when they detected this afterglow of the big bang while working on an antenna intended for use with communication satellites. Subsequent research has refined both theory and experiment, culminating in measurements taken by NASA’s COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite in the early 1990s. With these data, physicists and astronomers have confirmed to high precision that the universe is filled with microwave radiation (if our eyes were sensitive to microwaves, we would see a diffuse glow in the world around us) whose temperature is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, exactly in keeping with the expectation of the big bang theory. In concrete terms, in every cubic meter of the universe—including the one you now occupy—there are, on average, about 400 million photons that collectively compose the vast cosmic sea of microwave radiation, an echo of creation. A percentage of the "snow" you see on your television screen when you disconnect the cable feed and tune to a station that has ceased its scheduled broadcasts is, in fact, due to this dim aftermath of the big bang. This match between theory and experiment confirms the big bang picture of cosmology as far back as the time that photons first moved freely through the universe, about a few hundred thousand years after the bang (ATB).

Can we push further in our tests of the big bang theory to even earlier times? We can. By using standard principles of nuclear theory and thermodynamics, physicists can make definite predictions about the relative abundance of the light elements produced during the period of primordial nucleosynthesis, between a hundredth of a second and a few minutes ATB. According to theory, for example, about 23 percent of the universe should be composed of helium. By measuring the helium abundance in stars and nebulae, astronomers have amassed impressive support that, indeed, this prediction is right on the mark. Perhaps even more impressive is the prediction and confirmation regarding deuterium abundance, since there is essentially no astrophysical process, other than the big bang, that can account for its small but definite presence throughout the cosmos. The confirmation of these (*More precisely, the universe should be filled with photons conforming to the radiation thermally emitted by a perfectly absorbent body—a "black-body" in the language of thermodynamics—with the stated temperature range. This is the same radiation spectrum emitted quantum mechanically by black holes, as explained by Hawking, and by a hot oven, as explained by Planck.) abundances, and more recently that of lithium, is a sensitive test of our understanding of early universe physics back to the time of their primordial synthesis.

This is impressive almost to the point of hubris. All the data we possess confirm a theory of cosmology capable of describing the universe from about a hundredth of a second ATB to the present, some 15 billion years later. Nevertheless, one should not lose sight of the fact that the newborn universe evolved with phenomenal haste. Tiny fractions of a second—fractions much smaller than a hundredth of a second—form cosmic epochs during which long-lasting features of the world were first imprinted. And so, physicists have continued to push onward, trying to explain the universe at ever earlier times. Since the universe gets ever smaller, hotter, and denser as we push back, an accurate quantum-mechanical description of matter and the forces becomes increasingly important. As we have seen from other viewpoints in earlier chapters, point-particle quantum field theory works until typical particle energies are around the Planck energy. In a cosmological context, this occurred when the whole of the known universe fit within a Planck-sized nugget, yielding a density so great that it strains one's ability to find a fitting metaphor or an enlightening analogy: the density of the universe at the Planck time was simply colossal. At such energies and densities gravity and quantum mechanics can no longer be treated as two separate entities as they are in point-particle quantum field theory. Instead, the central message of this book is that at and beyond these enormous energies we must invoke string theory. In temporal terms, we encounter these energies and densities when we probe earlier than the Planck time of 10-41 seconds ATB, and hence this earliest epoch is the cosmological arena of string theory.

alfaman2: Yes, but it doesn't change its nature. Gravity cannot suddenly stop pulling and do 180 degrees and start repelling things. The strength can change but its nature remains the same. This is true of all forces.

wiki: The electromagnetic and weak interactions were modeled together as the electroweak interaction, inferred to operate only at such high temperatures as soon after the presumed Big Bang, although as the early universe cooled, the electroweak interaction split into electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Perhaps the electroweak and strong interactions unify as well at an extremely high temperature, thus the quest to develop a Grand Unified Theory.

alfaman2: What you are now insinuating is that this DARK force of yours, after expanding with the universe initially, somehow decided that laws of motion can be dispensed with, and start decelerating on its own. Think hard man. Think hard.

alfaman2: Even if you are not a scientist, this should be logically clear to you. Even the most ardent proponents of dark energy have never insinuated that it has the ability to change its nature.

Brian Greene: The Standard Model of Cosmology

The modern theory of cosmic origins dates from the decade and a half after Einstein's completion of general relativity. Although Einstein refused to take his own theory at face value and accept that it implies that the universe is neither eternal nor static, Alexander Friedmann did. And as we discussed in Chapter 3, Friedmann found what is now known as the big bang solution to Einstein's equations—a solution that declares that the universe violently emerged from a state of infinite compression, and is currently in the expanding aftermath of that primeval explosion. So certain was Einstein that such time-varying solutions were not a result of his theory that he published a short article claiming to have found a fatal flaw in Friedmann's work. Some eight months later, however, Friedmann succeeded in convincing Einstein that there was, in fact, no flaw; Einstein publicly but curtly retracted his objection. Nevertheless, it is clear that Einstein did not think Friedmann's results had any relevance to the universe. But about five years later, Hubble's detailed observations of a few dozen galaxies with the hundred-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory confirmed that, indeed, the universe is expanding. Friedmann's work, refashioned in a more systematic and efficient form by the physicists Howard Robertson and Arthur Walker, still forms the foundation of modern cosmology.

In a little more detail, the modern theory of cosmic origins goes like this. Some 15 billion or so years ago, the universe erupted from an enormously energetic, singular event, which spewed forth all of space and all of matter. (You don't have to search far to locate where the big bang occurred, for it took place where you are now as well as everywhere else; in the beginning, all locations we now see as separate were the same location.) The temperature of the universe a mere 10-43 seconds after the bang, the so-called Planck time, is calculated to have been about 1032 Kelvin, some 10 trillion trillion times hotter than the deep interior of the sun. As time passed, the universe expanded and cooled, and as it did, the initial homogeneous, roiling hot, primordial cosmic plasma began to form eddies and clumps. At about a hundred-thousandth of a second after the bang, things had cooled sufficiently (to about 10 trillion Kelvin—about a million times hotter than the sun's interior) for quarks to clump together in groups of three, forming protons and neutrons. About a hundredth of a second later, conditions were right for the nuclei of some of the lightest elements in the periodic table to start congealing out of the cooling plasma of particles. For the next three minutes, as the simmering universe cooled to about a billion degrees, the predominant nuclei that emerged were those of hydrogen and helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium ("heavy" hydrogen) and lithium. This is known as the period of primordial nucleosynthesis.

Not a whole lot happened for the next few hundred thousand years, other than further expansion and cooling. But then, when the temperature had dropped to a few thousand degrees, wildly streaming electrons slowed down to the point where atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium, could capture them, forming the first electrically neutral atoms. This was a pivotal moment: from this point forward the universe, by and large, became transparent. Prior to the era of electron capture, the universe was filled with a dense plasma of electrically charged particles—some with positive charges like nuclei and others with negative charges, like electrons. Photons, which interact only with electrically charged objects, were bumped and jostled incessantly by the thick bath of charged particles, traversing hardly any distance before being deflected or absorbed. The charged-particle barrier to the free motion of photons would have made the universe appear almost completely opaque, much like what you may have experienced in a dense morning fog or a blinding, gusty snowstorm. But when negatively charged electrons were brought into orbit around positively charged nuclei, yielding electrically neutral atoms, the charged obstructions disappeared and the dense fog lifted. From that time onward, photons from the big bang have traveled unhindered and the full expanse of the universe gradually came into view.

About a billion years later, with the universe having substantially calmed down from its frenetic beginnings, galaxies, stars, and ultimately planets began to emerge as gravitationally bound clumps of the primordial elements. Today, some 15 billion or so years after the bang, we can marvel at both the magnificence of the cosmos and at our collective ability to have pieced together a reasonable and experimentally testable theory of cosmic origin.

But how much faith should we really have in the big bang theory?

musKeeto:
Where? When?

Proffdada: My bad,it was meant for wiegraf ur boss

striktlymi: I believe I gave you enough time to correct your post but may be you choose to attribute comments made by someone else to me.

striktlymi: I never said this:

striktlymi: Good evening Tobe,

I don't think you need bother whether anyone agrees with you or not...it is only too glaring that anyone who says there is no God is professing his/her own act of faith.

op: Why cant atheist agree that their belief/ disbelief is based on faith?

striktlymi: I would have answered the question if it is vaguely related to my post...

striktlymi: so I don't know your rationale for attributing that to me.

striktlymi: It's clear that your post:



was a direct response to this:

the bold shows clearly what my thoughts are...I still ask how that is bad logic?