Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Wastrel, Fri Mar 14 2014, 08:02PM

dropd beef pi on refectree flor intaz phottyshop click rmve glaxic dist in noise ninja and i haz diskovered gravy waves.

n. MoLesworTH.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Ash Small, Mon Mar 17 2014, 01:12PM

"The announcement will be made on Monday at 4pm GMT."

Does anyone know where this afternoon's announcement will be made? (URL?, TV channel?)

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Proud Mary, Mon Mar 17 2014, 05:33PM

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Proud Mary, Mon Mar 17 2014, 06:05PM

Big Bang echo: scientists find 'signal from dawn of time' - Telegraph

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Proud Mary, Mon Mar 17 2014, 06:12PM

Legacy of the Big Bang? A century after Albert Einstein's predictions, scientists discover gravitational waves in 'one of the most important goals in cosmology' - The Independent

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Uspring, Tue Mar 18 2014, 10:49AM

Intriguing stuff! The big news isn't the discovery of gravitational waves. These have been confirmed before indirectly but quantitatively by the energy loss of closely rotating dual star systems.
Novel is the confirmation of cosmic inflation and a first glimpse on an interaction between gravity and quantum physics, which seems to have been nesessary to cause the detected ripples.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Conundrum, Tue Mar 18 2014, 07:01PM

Also mentioned in the BBC news article is that it suggests a possible route towards a theory of quantum gravity as well as supporting the multiple universe model.



Also see

-A
"Bother!" said Pooh, as his spark igniter caught fire...

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Ash Small, Tue Mar 18 2014, 07:08PM

"Pinning down inflation may shed some light on the end of the universe, too. Guth and his colleagues favour a theory called eternal inflation, which says that the universe is constantly giving birth to smaller "pocket" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse. We live in one of these pockets, and our cosmos will continue expanding forever until everything is diffuse, dark and cold."

So does this conclusively prove the 'Big Bang theory', or is the 'Oscillating Universe theory' still plausible?

Is there a 'Big Bang' everytime a 'pocket universe' is created, or was the Big Bang the start of the 'Multiverse'?

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
BigBad, Tue Mar 18 2014, 08:49PM

At the moment the oscillating universe model seems to be dead on multiple grounds.

Pretty sure there would be a big bang for each of the pocket universes; although the cause of inflation is not well understood, so there's that.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Finn Hammer, Tue Mar 18 2014, 10:23PM

Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making that we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of mind. Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dark well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.
“Where do you come from?” asked the frog in the well.
“From the great ocean,” he replied.
“How big is your ocean?”
“It’s gigantic.”
“You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?”
“Bigger.”
“Bigger? You mean half as big?”
“No, even bigger.”
“Is it . . . as big as this well?”
“There’s no comparison.”
“That’s impossible! I’ve got to see this for myself.”
They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces.
------------------------------------------ -------
Something similar may happen to humans, if the true nature of the universe is revealed.

Cheers, Finn Hammer

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Shrad, Wed Mar 19 2014, 08:20AM

one should read Vellum and Ink, the two volumes of The Book of All Hours from Hal Duncan

this is a bit related, I think, and many of you would love the style and verve of the author...

beware, though, as it is one of the most complex things to read I ever saw in terms of complexity and subtlety...

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Conundrum, Fri Apr 25 2014, 08:26AM

Interesting,
Here's hoping someone invents a gravity wave detector that isn't fifty miles in diameter.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Proud Mary, Fri Apr 25 2014, 11:53AM

I have thought for some time that we are quite blind to the likely existence of Super Low Frequency waves - waves of less than 300 mHz.

It is not hard to imagine some colossal stellar galactic process whereby a ribbon of gas plasma 3 million km long - rotating gas spirals perhaps - is excited to resonance and thereby sets up a train of 100 mHz waves, but how could we detect them?

Our minds are perhaps trapped within the scale of our own frame of reference, so that we would consider a 100 mHz wave to be 'slowly varying DC' and therefor not think about the information that such waves might carry about the nature and structure of vast astronomical phenomena that might generate waves at such a frequency.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Ash Small, Fri Apr 25 2014, 01:39PM

There's something I'm not clear about here. The gravitational waves supposedly detected are electromagnetic by nature, yet gravity isn't electromagnetic by nature, as I understand it. What does this electromagnetic radiation have to do with gravity? how are they 'caused' by gravity? I understand that gravity supposedly 'bends' space, thus 'focussing' EM radiation, but the article suggests that these waves are 'caused' by gravity.

What am I missing here?

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Proud Mary, Fri Apr 25 2014, 02:11PM


I should have made myself clearer, Ash. I didn't mean to suggest that gravity waves (about which I know very little) were identical with EM waves, but tried to show how our scale of reference could interfere with our understanding and interpretation of natural phenomena.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Ash Small, Fri Apr 25 2014, 03:15PM

It's not just what you said, PM, BICEP measures polarization of microwaves, from what I can make out

"BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) is an experiment designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to unprecedented precision, and in turn answer crucial questions about the beginnings of the Universe. BICEP operates at 100 GHz and 150 GHz at angular resolutions of 1.0° and 0.7°, respectively, with an array of 98 polarization-sensitive detectors, mapping a large region of the sky around the South Celestial Pole."

I'm just wondering how polarization of microwaves (EM radiation) can be interpreted as 'proof' (or evidence) of gravitational waves, which presumably aren't electromagnetic by nature. I assume the polarization must have something to do with space being 'bent' by gravity, either that, or the source of the EM radiation is affected by gravitational waves. None of the sources quoted above seem to mention any of the suspected mechanism involved.

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Proud Mary, Fri Apr 25 2014, 05:08PM

I don't know anythying about it, Ash, and so haven't really got anything to contribute, thought I did find this on the UK STFC website, which touched upon my ideas about scale:

"Detection of a second polarisation mode, B-mode, is now a high priority. The interest stems from the possibility of using the entire universe as a gravity wave detector. Gravity waves present in the universe at the time of decoupling of radiation from matter will have left an imprint in the CMB. This imprint would be in the form of B-mode polarisation, a distinctive pattern of polarisation vectors on the sky with magnetic field-like negative parity.

"The candidate sources of gravity waves in the early universe are events such as breaking of fundamental symmetries (e.g. electroweak, GUT), processes that spawn distortions in space-time known as 'topological defects', or violent cosmological events such as inflation and reheating. Detecting any of these cosmological gravity waves would have a very high scientific impact and is one of the 'holy grails' of gravitational wave experiments. The CMB polarisation signal is expected to be strongest on the largest angular scales. Therefore the gravity waves probed correspond to wave periods on the order of the Hubble time. These frequencies are much lower and the distance scales much larger than those probed by gravity wave interferometers such as LIGO and LISA (km scales). CMB polarisation experiments are the only known way to detect these phenomena. An additional advantage is that there are, by definition, no events in the post-recombination universe that can generate gravity waves on the scales probed by the CMB, so any detected signal has to be of primordial origin."

Re: Gravitational waves: have US scientists heard echoes of the big bang?
Andy, Sat Apr 26 2014, 03:35AM

I'm just wondering how polarization of microwaves (EM radiation) can be interpreted as 'proof' (or evidence) of gravitational waves, which presumably aren't electromagnetic by nature. I assume the polarization must have something to do with space being 'bent' by gravity, either that, or the source of the EM radiation is affected by gravitational waves. None of the sources quoted above seem to mention any of the suspected mechanism involved.

I think its not so much that EM waves are gravity, but that you can use EM fields to workout the area that objects occupied in space, less area they occupied with the ratio not changing much from mass from atoms down, like 100 fold, compared to million> fold for area, that objects that occupied smaller areas in space are EM sources(electrons/protons/neutrons(in a around about way have EM, as we know the mass/size/speed in areas etc)), more squashed they become more gravity distortion happens, and more amplification of EM.
Atoms of hydrogen and lead would occupier the same area in space at the default levels, changing so hydrogen takes up less room in space will allow other hydrogen atoms to move closer increasing the gravity, to allow hydrogen to have a smaller area you need EM sources, say to speed up the electron orbit, but keep other variables the same, like mass,distance eg, but it doesn't need to be a circle orbit as a straight line is just a larger circle, so particle accelerators would lower the space that what it fired to occupied.
Gravity isn't so much mass, as hydrogen in a small space can be heavier than lead, and isn't really speed ether.
The volume that some thing has like atoms or the sun, occupier pretty much the same area in space, even thought the sun is larger than a atom, the area is about the same, unless the sun can change the structure of atoms, to allow the individual parts to get closer and smaller area then the gravity of the sun, and gravity of a electron, the electron would have more gravity/per volume, if you got the same number of electrons as atoms in the sun and put the electrons into the same volume the electron sun would have more gravity, if you keeped the same number, but squashed the volume, it would still have the same gravity, but if the electrons then took up less area in space, the gravity would increase and random chances the electron sun would have some of it as smaller area occupied, if that makes sense

Just a opinion,how i think it works.