BellGab.com Archive

Quote from: zeebo on April 04, 2014, 11:04:07 PM
Paging Agent and/or other cosmological gurus .... I'm confused on what's referred to as 4-dimensional space.  Sometimes I hear that "Time is the 4th dimension".  Other times, the 4th dimension is referred to as in the hypercube idea as the true structure of space whose warpings and such are what we feel as gravity. 

So question is:  Is the 4th dimension "time" or is it a higher dimension of "space"?  (Notice:  No "5th Dimension / Age of Aquarius" jokes allowed.)

Time is the fourth component along with three spatial dimensions of space-time, which is involved in general and special relativity.
However, you can also talk about a fourth spatial dimension which would just be a direction perpendicular to the three we're familiar with. String theory is defined in 11 dimensions, 10 of which are spatial (ie, there is one time-like dimension).

Quote from: area51drone on April 04, 2014, 07:21:41 AM
Obviously.. that's why I'm travelling on Sagan's ship of the imagination.    I still don't understand how we could possibly arrive back at the exact same point in space we started at, assuming infinite speeds.   Okay, say we are on the outside of a 4D bubble.  We still exist in 3D space ourselves.   We then travel, at infinite speed, to the *edge* of our known space.   Do we hit a "wall" that automatically rotates our ship  so that it clings to the edge of space, or do we just keep going forever?   This question was brought up in the latest Cosmos - remember the little cupid that kept firing arrows?   The show made it sound like the universe is unbounded, meaning we could keep going in one direction forever.

Even assuming that it is bounded, and it does "turn" our ship as we approach the edge of space, travelling along the outer edge of space would result in you never returning to your point of origin - possibly returning only to the point in which you hit the wall, correct?

Your comments suggest that matter defines space.  If we were standing at the edge of space, let's say we were just there and it's not like we travelled there, then as we walked towards the edge, it would continue to expand?   

What does the math say about what happens at the "edge" of space?

No cosmologist would argue there is an edge to space, but all would definitely agree there are causally disconnected regions you could never reach even traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light (and alternatively, light from those regions would never reach us either). This is especially true in an accelerating universe, so that's really where the rubber meets the road here. The furthest thing we can see in any direction is the cosmic microwave background which defines our cosmological horizon and has a redshift z=1100 or so.

In a closed Universe the idea is if you went off in ANY direction the universe is connected like a sphere you will come back to where you started. There's no edge to the screen of an asteroids game but it works in a similar fashion. This is a consequence of spherical (Riemann) geometry. 

I do apologize if I've only confused the issue!

Quote from: area51drone on April 04, 2014, 07:21:41 AM
Or, back to the original conversation, the big bang and redshift is wrong, and there is no inflation, no dark energy or dark matter.   Who says that the universe has to be defined by math?   I'm not trying to bring the argument back, I'm just saying we don't know what we don't know.

Well it's up to you if you choose to reject all known explanations for cosmic phenomena, I guess. When you say "we don't know what we don't know", what are you referring to? Why math does as well as it does in making predictions about how nature behaves?

This is a deep question, and one I definitely don't have an answer for. It just is.

"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. "
- Eugene Wigner

I got Sirius to listen to Art (sad) and I kept it when he went off the air. I got a good deal on the web service which I split with a friend. My wife and I get a ton of use out of the web service, and it's not perfect with the hour and a half timeouts but I consider it good value for $5/month. I can listen to Stern and a ton of other comedy stuff at work from time to time so I'm happy, and the Classic Vinyl and Liquid Metal stations mean I get what I consider to be my money's worth for it. I'm sure it won't be around for too much longer, but I do think it's a decent service.

I would be super pissed if I had to pay $15/month for it, especially if I got it to listen to Art and then his show vanishes after two months.

Exciting!!

If the universe is a sphere then eventually you come back to where you start. The problem is it would take even light longer than the time the universe has existed to circumnavigate it.

Neglecting changes in the cosmological constant, the universe is a constant curvature, which is determined by the matter density within it. The matter density tells you how much gravity there is to pull on distant matter and work against the expansion. Too much matter (omega>1) means that the universe is destined to halt expansion at some point in the future and recollapse, the gravity of matter overcomes the expansion of space at some point. An omega>1 universe has the shape of a 4D sphere, which is known as a Riemann geometry. This means there are certain geometrical properties space must have. Large triangles always have the sum of angles within them adding to > 180 degrees (think of two people on the equator sending laser beams north which cross at the north pole) and lines which start out parallel will always converge and cross one another eventually. Too little matter (omega<1) means the expansion will win out and the universe will expand at ever greater speeds, and the universe has a geometry which is called Lobachevsky geometry. In Lobachevsky geometry triangles always have less than 180 degrees in the sum of their internal angles and parallel lines diverge from one another. A flat universe has omega=1 exactly and this is a universe with Euclidean geometry. Large triangles have exactly 180 degrees within them and parallel lines always stay parallel. Things are more complicated when there's a cosmological constant (dark energy) involved which plays a role in the expansion. In that case the future behavior of the universe and it's geometry are disconnected from one another so you can get spherical universes which never recollapse, for example.   

The energy density omega can be measured from observations of the cosmic microwave background and we know that it is to within high accuracy very close to the critical value so the universe is very accurately described by a flat universe (omega=1). This is not mysterious in the context of inflation but without that key idea there's no reason why there should be a universe perched at the critical value and omega=1 becomes a mystery of why the universe must be so "fine-tuned". Inflation does away with that problem by explaining that any universe which inflates (as it now seems that ours did) should have an energy density that is exactly the critical value. The data from the Planck satellite also tell us that we must have a cosmological constant acting in our own universe which accounts for something like 68% the total energy density in the universe itself. So there is a significant fraction of that omega=1 which is what we call dark energy.

Quote from: area51drone on April 02, 2014, 07:41:39 PM
I don't want to talk about ants on a balloon.  I want to really understand what is happening.   Let's save part of this discussion for later and just discuss the 3D space that we are all familiar with.

I understand fully what it means to see a "flat" horizon when you're standing on the surface of the earth looking out over the ocean.   But clearly, on even our scale, the observable universe is NOT flat in 3D space.  Explain why I can look north and see stars, and look south and see stars.   Let's pretend we have an imaginary space ship that can travel with local time at infinite speeds, without warping space.   I hop on said space ship, pick a direction and press the GO button.   If I hit a planet, a sun, or a black hole, let's just assume that I can travel through it in the same direction I was headed in in the first place.  Where will I end up, back home eventually?

When you look at the problem, are you able to "see" in your mind what is happening, or are you just solving equations?

The universe is flat - geometrically flat - such that parallel lines never cross, and even large triangles have the sum of all angles equal to 180 degrees. This kind of space is like the balloon surface + 1 extra dimension. That's why the balloon example is just an analogy but one which is good for visualizing this, it's surface is only 2D instead of 3D. But all of the geometrical tests the ants could do on such a surface are the same kinds of tests we could do in our universe and we would come to the conclusion that it's geometrically flat globally. Hope that helps.

"Seeing" these ideas in your mind is the same as solving equations. No one can really visualize the fourth dimension except through analogy, the closest and most pure way there is to "see" means that you must solve equations. Which is why describing it with no math only gets you so far.

Escher wrestled with the concepts of geometry in his artwork in an attempt to express the mathematics visually.

Quote from: Unscreened Caller on March 11, 2014, 09:54:45 PM
Pray for Goatsy.

Never forget

This "announcement" has sadly left me flat. I feel like I spent all of my excitement over this last September.

Quote from: area51drone on April 02, 2014, 06:29:30 AM
Hmm... I'm still not following.   Why use the balloon analogy if it's wrong to think about it that way? 

It's an analogy that illustrates the point well enough, but it's not the full description because otherwise it becomes a mathematical discussion. The real picture is in four dimensions, but it's not at all intuitive to think that way (but four dimensional equations can be solved just fine). So it's easier to talk about lower dimensional analogies sometimes.

Quote from: area51drone on April 02, 2014, 06:29:30 AM
I understand what you're saying in regards to a horizon on a balloon.  But I don't see how that equates to 3D space.   In the analogy, is the volume of the balloon time?   Are you saying that "looking up" from the balloon's surface would be equivalent to looking into the future?

Roughly, yes. Just as the ants are on the 2D surface of the 3D balloon you can think of us on the 3D surface of a 4D universe but even that's not exactly right. I just don't think I really have the words to say it any better. 

Quote from: area51drone on April 02, 2014, 06:29:30 AM
In real life, what is the 3D shape of the universe assumed to be?

The geometry has been measured to be flat, and the universe is driven to be this way naturally because of inflation at early times which gives a beautiful description of why it must be. On the *largest* scales (larger than the observable universe) the 3D "space" part of space-time is more like a sphere. Since we live in a very large universe that extends out beyond our local horizon (which is bounded by the CMB), our patch of universe and any other patch you could observe from will always appear locally flat.

But this is exactly what  the ants on a very large balloon would also think. Any sphere (including the Earth) looks flat when you look on sufficiently small scales.

Even this is just an analogy though maybe we've gone a bit beyond the ants on the balloon. But you can't REALLY talk about chopping up space and time in that way except for a few limiting cases. They are tied up with one another and when you start trying to break them apart it becomes a bit touchy.

There is no center of the universe because all of space and time is wrapped up in the big bang, it's not like a conventional explosion into something that existed before it. This means that every point in the universe is the center because all points overlapped at the first instant. Think of it like this: right now I am in the milky way galaxy and I can look out, I see a horizon around my position and measure the temperature of the CMB to be 2.74 kelvins, and measure the local matter density and the Hubble constant and a number of other such values. Then lets say I go somewhere else - it doesn't matter where - and repeat my observations. I could go to the Andromeda galaxy or I could go to a distant quasar and repeat my observations. I would measure the same cosmological parameters I could see here. Every point has a local horizon around it, which is determined by the speed of light and the expansion of the universe.

A simpler way of putting it is to think of a person constrained to move on the surface of a sphere, or an ant on a balloon that's inflating. This observer can walk around the surface of the balloon but can't move in the third dimension. Anywhere this ant stands on the surface of the balloon it will look to them like they are at the center - there is always more balloon that forms their horizon no matter where they are. There's no edge or boundary to the balloon. To someone on the surface it looks like all the points on the surface of the balloon are the same and that there is no center. The surface is two-dimensional, mind you, while the entire balloon is three dimensional and in 3D we can always step back and say that the perspective of the ant is limited because they are not seeing the full picture.

This analogy fails for the actual universe because the balloon is expanding into a pre-existing space, and that's what makes the big bang different. Everything came from the big bang, including all of space and time.

Sorry again I have not been posting much, it's been one of those times for me. Hopefully things will lighten up soon and I can start poking around here a bit more.

Another show I'm going to have to catch after the fact. But I'm looking forward to it even more after Tarbaby's interesting post up there.

Wow so cool, ESO found an asteroid with rings around it!
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/
It's not Rama, but it's still very cool and exciting, not just that such a thing exists (I never imagined such a small body could have a ring system) but also awesome they were able to detect it at all.

And one more neat one for the day: Could there be a 10 Earth-mass planet lurking in the inner Oort cloud?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7493/full/nature13156.html

Between a ringed asteroid and waves on Titan's lakes my mind has been blown to all the stuff that we have sufficiently sensitive instruments to detect, and also at how much there is still to learn in our own backyard.

Long rant on the amazing gravity wave observations from last week and what it means for inflation incoming... for now back to work

Hey all

I've been so busy it's crazy, so I haven't been on the board for a week. However, I had to show up briefly just to post this!!

http://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann14021/

From the announcement:

"An international team of astronomers, led by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), has used telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, to make a surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.

This unexpected result raises several unanswered questions and is expected to provoke much debate. A press conference will be held in Brazil to present the new results and allow opportunities for questions. "

That sounds mysterious... this is exactly how Rendezvous with Rama started.
Wish Art were still doing shows, this is the kind of mystery he would jump at.

We'll find out this afternoon what the big to do is all about...

http://youtu.be/ZlfIVEy_YOA

My god that Gary Clark Jr song is awesome!!

So I'm sure everyone heard about it by now but for completeness...

http://www.nature.com/news/b-mode-1.14884#/News

Cheers!!

Quote from: area51drone on March 17, 2014, 09:12:21 AM
No, it's definitely a good point.   Obviously not all black holes are still sucking stuff up.   So let me get this straight then - a  black hole is not really a single point in which mass/energy cannot escape (except with maybe Hawking radiation)?   Is that correct?   So if that's true, then the mass of the black hole is actually smeared around the cone, and the black hole actually has a real dimension?

Classically a black hole is a single point of infinite density - all of the mass of the black hole (which is a finite amount) is located at the center. But the problem with this picture, the picture that general relativity gives us, is that you can't make things arbitrarily small without quantum effects becoming important. It's thought those effects will smear the matter out over an area (related to the uncertainty principle). So our best picture - which is incomplete - says that the mass is located at a point. But no one thinks that's really the whole story. We don't know the exact details that quantum gravity requires but we have a vague notion of what we think it will be like and must rely on these (hand waving) arguments.

Quote from: area51drone on March 17, 2014, 09:12:21 AM
I always thought that the mass of a (non rotating) black hole was actually at the singularity, and the event horizon was just a "point of no escape" and not necessarily a "boundary of matter."   Meaning, let's say the event horizon of a very old non accreting SMBH is 10 light years wide (and I'm just throwing this number out for the purpose of this example).   Is the actual matter inside the black hole itself smeared throughout say 9 light years, and anything sucked up in the future would be at 9.001 light years, 9.002 etc etc?

You're quite right when you say the event horizon is a point of no escape and not a boundary of matter. All matter lives inside the black hole presumably near the center. But strange things start to happen at the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. Observers far away from the black hole (ie not affected by it) will see light from stuff that's thrown in get more and more red, and time will appear to run slower and slower for that object. Eventually it's frozen image will just fade away, too redshifted to see. But to the guy falling in feet first carrying a beacon, nothing will seem to happen as he crosses the event horizon and will notice nothing out of the ordinary until the difference in gravity between his feet and head increases so much that he's torn to ribbons. In fact, inside an event horizon the distinction between time and space can be thought of as flipping with respect to one another- so for anyone that crosses the horizon the singularity lies in your future instead of right ahead of you and escape is as impossible as traveling backward in time. 

The event horizon (the Schwarzschild radius) is itself a function of mass so as the mass inside the black hole grows so does the event horizon. This is an important reelationship that's used heavily in arguments about black hole entropy.

Quote from: area51drone on March 17, 2014, 03:28:51 AM
And everything else it's sucked up, right?

There's no black hole that's been found with an infinite mass, they're all finite, event the supermassive ones at the center of quasars can be inferred to have masses like a billion times the mass of the Sun. Black holes are not necessarily accreting matter continuously. An infinite mass would mean the event horizon is infinitely large.

Maybe a subtle point but an important distinction.

Quote from: area51drone on March 16, 2014, 10:30:21 PM
I'm trying to lead myself down a road here.    So there really is no physical dimension of all the mass that makes up the center of a black hole?   In other words, the center of a black hole is dimension-less?   And that point in space could contain all the mass/energy of the entire universe inside of it?

No, a black hole has the mass of the star that formed it, not an infinite mass.

Quote from: area51drone on March 16, 2014, 10:30:21 PM
As you surmised where I might be going with this, how does the big bang theory (or black holes themselves) jive with quantum mechanic's rules about particles fitting into spaces smaller than their wavelength?

I don't know, something just seems wrong to me about the big bang theory.   It's not that I can't wrap my head around the idea, I understand why the scientific community believes the theory (in laymen terms anyway).   But no one can theorize what actually created the "bang" that released the energy in the first place, or have they?    If a black hole can suck in infinite mass/energy into a single, dimensionless point and not explode itself into its own crazy big bang universe,  I have to ask myself, W. T.  F....

Black holes and the big bang are two separate phenomena which are very different from one another. Both are similar in that they have infinite density in *classical* theories. But that doesn't mean much since it's probably true that quantum mechanics prevent singularities from forming at all in nature. As you say (and I mentioned earlier) the picture becomes more complicated when quantum mechanics is brought into the discussion. The best we can say is that classical theories break down when they predict singularities and that there is something that happens to them that comes about from quantum mechanics in a more complete picture. There is a whole body of work out there where people apply QM to black holes or other aspects of general relativity, which makes predictions like Hawking radiation and the Unruh effect for example. And there are a bunch of ideas about the nature of the big bang itself as well but none have conclusive evidence yet to back them up, meaning they're still a lot of speculation.

The conversation may be significantly more interesting tomorrow morning.

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on March 16, 2014, 03:18:47 AM
So are you at McGill as well?

Nope. But I know a few people there.

Quote from: area51drone on March 16, 2014, 10:05:10 AM
Agent, please answer this.  Is there a limit to the density of a gravitational singularity?   Does such a singularity, assuming it is not rotating, have any dimension?

Quote from: zeebo on March 16, 2014, 08:53:21 PM
That's a great question.  I've wondered myself, if the singularity is like a point in geometry which is there but does not take up any actual space.

That's an interesting question. Singularities are points where some function becomes infinite, like f(r)=1/r. In this simple example you have problems at r=0 which gives an infinite answer, but r+e is fine, where e is a number that can be as small as you want. So a singularity really is just like a point where some function (which could be mass or charge density) becomes infinite. Sometimes these singularities can be fixed by just changing your coordinate system. In general relativity at least there's a way of telling if a situation like the one above is a "real" singularity or just a "coordinate" singularity. All of the nasty ones (like the center of a black hole) are real singularities (ie curvature becomes infinite there). The easier ones to deal with (like the event horizon for a non-rotating black hole) can be taken out by a clever choice of coordinates and they're not real singularities (think of the north pole - the coordinates there are singular but theres nothing weird that happens to the actual Earth at that point). Once you start bringing in quantum mechanics these things become much more complicated. So I hope my simple answer helped you both!

Hope you feel better soon!

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on March 15, 2014, 11:07:03 PM
Agent: Orange, could you give us your thoughts on this next week please:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep

"Discovery of gravitational waves by Bicep telescope at south pole could give scientists insights into how universe was born"

"Rumours have been rife in the physics community about an announcement due on Monday from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. If there is evidence for gravitational waves, it would be a landmark discovery that would change the face of cosmology and particle physics."

There are a number of big problems in cosmology that have no easy solutions in the standard big bang model. Let me go through them here, and then give an explanation of why this story could be so significant.

What I'll call the "classic big bang" picture makes problems for astronomers and cosmologists in the following ways. First, we can point our telescopes out and observe the cosmic microwave background, the so-called "surface of last scattering" that marks when the density of cosmic matter dropped sufficiently for light to travel long distances without scattering. This radiation is a marker for the exact time that the universe transitioned from being opaque to transparent to electromagnetic radiation. The radiation is spread out over the whole sky. The afterglow of the big bang is still travelling through the universe and we can observe it. In fact, when you observe this radiation from one part of the sky and then turn your telescope in the exact opposite direction, the radiation you see has the same spectrum. This means the temperatures on both sides of the sky are identical to within a very small amount.

But the problem with this is that these patches of sky are too far apart to have interacted with one another since the speed of light is finite. They are just too far apart. These two opposite parts of the sky should never had enough time in contact with one another to thermalize. If the universe began to expand at the rate we see today as soon as it came into being then we would expect the matter within it to be lumpy and so the cosmic microwave background should be a mishmash of different temperatures over the whole sky. But it isn't. Why? This is called the horizon problem.

The second big problem is that the universe must have started in a very uniform state for clustering and structures to grow under the effect of gravity. It seems unnatural for this to be so. Why wouldn't the universe tend to start in a chaotic state, or at least something with more features to it? When I say very uniform I mean variations in the density from point to point that are minute with respect to the background so that the universe would produce a cosmic microwave background with such a uniform temperature. When we make measurements of the cosmic microwave background we find that the mass within the universe must add up to nearly the critical value to balance the expansion with the pull of gravity. This means the universe must have started out as geometrically very close to being flat. So why would the distribution of matter in the early universe be smoother than a cueball? This is called the flatness problem.

The modern big bang, which is now called "The Standard Model" of cosmology solves both of these problems in an ingenious way. This solution is called inflation.

Inflation says that before expansion began, the universe loitered in a hot dense state for long enough to thermalize, and then underwent a burst of extremely rapid expansion. This is very early on in the evolution (at a time much less than the first second of it's existence, something like 10^-32 second in fact). This burst of expansion blows the universe up to something like the size of a grapefruit from the size of a proton. Then the inflation stops and the normal expansion picks up from there. This small burst of superexpansion is enough to solve both cosmological problems. First, the horizon problem is solved because all parts of the universe are in causal contact which means information can be exchanged allowing the matter within to thermalize.

Then after it is blown up, the universe must have been extremely flat just by virtue of the inflationary expansion, just like an ant crawling on a balloon being blown up. The inflated balloon looks very flat to an ant because the radius of curvature becomes much larger than the scale of the ant. So regardless of how it starts out, inflation will *drive* the universe to be flat.

Both of these problems are solved naturally by inflation. This scenario is so satisfying and effective at solving these problems that most folks who study this stuff generally agree some form of early universe inflation must have occurred.

So far no conclusive traces of inflation have been found. However...

Inflation is known to magnify gravitational waves, and it's thought that these waves should have been running around the universe at very early times (less than 10^-32 so before inflation). During this time, the infant spacetime should have been ringing like a gong. In fact, the presence of these vibrations of spacetime should have left signs of their interactions in the cosmic microwave background.

Then inflation occurred, and the effects of these gravitational waves should be "frozen in" to the cosmic microwave background. This amounts to creating patterns in the background, which can be detected if you look at the polarization of the radiation. In the standard picture there are radial types of patterns which should be formed called E-modes and also a pattern that looks like a spiral called a B-mode.

These polarization modes have been observed. E-modes were first measured in 2003
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6917/abs/nature01269.html
and the B-modes detected last year.
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.141301

But Inflation says there should also be another kind of B-mode, a more rare and elusive type called a primordial B-mode. This polarization pattern is directly correlated to what space-time was doing all the way back to the moment of creation.

The announcement on Monday is rumored to be the detection of these primordial B-modes.

This would mean that some kind of inflation really did occur, and that our picture of the early universe is essentially complete, that at least we have the basics of the story right. It also proves that there are primordial gravitational waves such that a new window into the early universe is opened: we can only get electromagnetic radiation to the time the cosmic microwave background was released, when the universe was only about 300,000 years old. There is no similar restriction on gravitational waves, which can propagate from the origin of the universe on.

That's what's riding on Monday.

Quote from: Camazotz Automat on March 15, 2014, 07:57:02 PM
I was ignorant of Neil's personal encounter with Sagan and the inspiration it gave. As Zeebo said, I'm happy the Sagan information was presented in the first episode - because those few well timed moments were as unto the launching of a rocket.

I wasn't aware of his connection to Sagan either, and that sealed it for me.

I enjoyed the hell out of the first episode and look forward to the next. The last few minutes put all doubt about the torch being handed to Tyson to rest. After seeing the end of the show there was no doubt left in my mind that he was the right - and perhaps, the only - man for the job.

God bless the LA Beast.

Quote from: West of the Rockies on March 15, 2014, 11:26:36 AM
Yes, but your source is somewhat more credible than C2C!

haha
well, I meant on dark matter as in, "about" dark matter. Not on dark matter the Art Bell show.
I sent a heads up to Art at the time because I thought it would have been a neat piece of news to follow up on, but he never went for it. Maybe for the best

http://youtu.be/H2FEjGB0ZVU

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but it's been a busy week.

Haribo Sugarless Gummy Bear Challenge (Warning: Intestinal Exorcism Guaranteed)

Cheers

Quote from: West of the Rockies on March 15, 2014, 09:14:53 AM
Fascinating news!  I envy you your knowledge and career path, AO... I wish I had double-majored in science and composition.

This thread got started because of a potential announcement like this one on dark matter that did not pan out, so let's see what happens with this one!
All just rumors until Monday...

Another potentially huge announcement may be coming on Monday...

"Gravitational waves: Have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?"
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep

If this is true, this team will get a nobel prize. But there had better be damn good evidence for such a huge claim! Still, exciting because if this is indeed the effect that has been detected it changes everything and opens a window to the very origin of the universe, right back to the first instants of our universe. This one is all about gravitational waves and the potentially observable signatures of a process called inflation.