Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang | Hacker News Reader

Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang

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106 pointstux196830 comments

It's interesting to me how many scientific breakthroughs we've seen in the past few years. I wonder if hard science hasn't been slowing down; but rather waiting on technological advances that would give them the data they needed to make the leaps. With technological catching up these leaps are now happening.

> but rather waiting on technological advances that would give them the data they needed to make the leaps

This has always been the case in science with theory and proof. Higgs Boson is a prime recent example, thought up years ago and only recently prove-able.

The pace of scientific "leaps" would be very hard to quantify, and it's certainly not my impression that it's "speeding up".

Rather, it's my impression that there's been a pretty consistent pace of scientific discoveries for the past 80 years. Advancing technology certainly helps, but technology has been advancing rapidly for quite some time.

The last 20 years hasn't been a big difference from the 20 before it on the hardware end of things.

Recent science has seen an increase in discoveries added by "big data" science (CERN, astronomy) but that's just one more tool in the researchers toolbelt.

I perhaps quibble with the dates, but I think it's hard to underestimate how revolutionary and groundbreaking the preceding "30 Years That Shook Physics" were (http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/048...). Perhaps 35, from Plank's late 1900 "there's quanta out there" to Yukawa's 1935 explication of the strong nuclear force, and don't forget Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in-between, it's still the best we have for gravity.

Since then, even with earth shattering developments like the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and what followed from that, things have been quite a bit slower in physics. Biology, though, certainly took up a lot of slack, we only really started getting a handle on its foundations in my lifetime.

I wonder why the author says that Gamow made the great leap backwards, when Gamow was in fact developing a theory first proposed by Georges Lemaitre a decade earlier than what the author states for Gamow.

I also wondered how this differed from Lemaitre's prediction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

Backwards in terms of "fore"-casting backwards in time to the beginning of the universe, rather than forwards in time.

I frequently find this used by people who don't want to discuss that the Big Bang was originally theorized by a priest. It doesn't fit their narrative.

Per Wikpedia, he "was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".

It would seem this guy, who got his Ph.D. at MIT, was erased from history due to anti-religious bigotry, "Let there be light" maps too well into the Big Bang, as the Pope recognized (but took too far). Fred Hoyle was one such figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Bi...

Of interesting historical note: Fr. Lemaître's studies of Einstein's theories were prompted by the encouragement of another churchman, Cardinal Mercier of Belgium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9-Joseph_Mercie...

Here is an English translation of the Cardinal's most important book, published in 1897:

The origins of contemporary psychology

https://archive.org/details/originsofcontemp00merciala

And the abstract for a review of the book, written in 1970:

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232491640_Review_of_...

I absolutely love reading articles like this. Though I'm not passionate enough about the mathematics of physics enough to pursue it, the theories/science being done is absolutely amazing and I enjoy hearing and reading about it immensely. Thanks!

I was under the impression that direct detection of cosmic neutrinos would be a lot more informative than this indirect method. Anyone know more?

The article notes that we have enough trouble directly detecting neutrinos in the mega-eV range, while the ones we need to measure for this purpose are in the micro-eV range. Yes it would be more informative, but so hard that we assume direct measurement is practically impossible ... but the article describes an alternative method (phase-shift) of deducing temperature from other consequences of that value.

Yes I understand all that, but direct detection is definitely not impossible. The PTOLEMY experiment at Princeton is attempting to do just that, although it's very very hard. Might still be decades away.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4738

There are people who are trying hard to find ways to see the CNB. The primary approach is to try to do something called 'coherent neutrino scattering'. If you can find the right material/metamaterial, you're off to the races.

The number of CNB neutrinos passing through your body right now is considerable.

Direct detection would be a lot more informative. It's also hard.

There are a lot of systematic effects (foregrounds, etc.) that can matter to CMB measurements.

Any indirect glimpse is still quite valuable, as deviations from the standard plan might be apparent. Any measurement of the neutrino temperature at decoupling is interesting.

(Edit: I'd also note that the last great prediction of the Big Bang is 'inflation', something about which we know next to nothing.)

OK, so indirect gets us neutrino temperature at decoupling, and direct gets us current neutrino temperature and (I guess) feeds into neutrino mass measurements and the PMNS matrix. Anything else?

If we could get a "picture" of the CNB in all directions, it could give us hints to the structure of the Universe at two seconds after the big bang, just as the CMB gives us hints to the structure of the universe at 379,000 years after the big bang.

Any new handle on the number of neutrino-like species is interesting to dark matter searches...

If you could actually image the CNB, the implications would be comparable to the CNB. Even just a measurement of the magnitude of the dipole would be compelling.

I was super excited when I started reading this article, I thought they were talking about a direct measurement of the CNB.

Right now, the CMB is as far back as we can see in time. That radiation originates from a time when the Universe was around 380,000 years old. The CNB originates from when the Universe was two seconds old. A direct measurement of it would be an astounding achievement and would give us many new insights into how the Universe formed.

Yeah, such a measurement is extraordinarily unlikely. Neutrinos are extremely hard to detect, but the thing is there are different temperatures of neutrinos, and their detectability scales extremely non-linearly with temperature. Even with extremely high energy/temperature neutrinos from supernovae or stellar fusion we still only detect the faintest fraction of the vast quantity that flows through the detectors. The CNB is at a temperature of only a few Kelvin, and is made of extremely low energy neutrinos that are effectively impossible for us to detect, let alone study with current technology.

It is something being worked on, though [0]. Extremely difficult does not equate to impossible :)

0: http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03966

That's why I said "effectively" impossible. There are so many orders of magnitude between what we can detect and what would be needed to study the CNB. It's hard to have hope that we'll ever be able to overcome that, though it'd be awesome if we could.

Sounds like this isn't quite finished until we get the temperature confirmation.

"Each one of these predictions, like a uniformly expanding Universe whose expansion rate was faster in the past..."

I thought that the universe's expansion was accelerating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe

The 'greater rate in the past' would correspond with the supposed inflationary model of the universe (a very fast expansion just after the big bang), only the wording here is a bit confusing.

For more info: http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins/inflation_zero.php

"Two degrees above absolute zero was never so hot.":)

WTF. I can only suggest this summery:

http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf

If your model is correct, it must explain everything, not just some or most of it. Money Quote:

Each of these sets of problems could be, and in fact often are, dismissed as mere “anomalies” in an otherwise well-supported theory. But taken collectively they contradict all the predictions of the theory, leaving no support at all. The response of supporters of the Big Bang theory has been to continually add “parameters” to the theory to account for new discordant data.

For me, this hole theory is as logical as the flat earth theory. Compressing the hole universe, which is so huge (see hubble deep field) into a single point is just absurd.

http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005/05/alternative...

He does not go into detail to the referenced articles. Those are peer reviewed observations that do NOT fit. For example the huge Quasar cluster found in the 90s where many astronomers clearly state: this thing is old, very old, 50 to 100 billion years old. How does this fit 13 billion years timeframe ? The Brightness Surface does not match the distance: pleas explain that. The Li concentration does not fit the age of the stars,... The list goes on. He does not explain any of the phenomena, just attacking unsubstantial. If the Redshift is a comsological phenomena, and the Background temperature a signature of the Zero Point Energy (exists an QM as well), absolutely nothing speaks for the Big Bang Theory anymore.

I found BSM-SG the most logical model I have seen so far, so, I stumbled about nothing that does not fit into this model. We have a 2 major errors in our physical model that made the whole standard theory so utterly complex, non logical understandable (mathematical logic != classical logic) (common view under Theoretical physicists) and hardly explaining edge cases. From my experience nearly nobody sees it, because they work in a very narrow field...

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