

Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang - tux1968
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/confirmed-the-last-great-prediction-of-the-big-bang-68ab6f4a5475

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Touche
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.

~~~
rubidium
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.

~~~
hga
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-
Physics/dp/048624895X)). 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.

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xlm1717
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.

~~~
ante_annum
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.

~~~
hga
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Big_Bang)

~~~
michaelsbradley
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9-Joseph_Mercier)

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](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_...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232491640_Review_of_Les_origines_de_la_psychologie_contemporaine)

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bpicolo
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!

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

~~~
ctdonath
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.

~~~
jessriedel
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](http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4738)

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dice
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

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

0: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03966](http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03966)

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

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

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jacinda
"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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe)

~~~
Gladdyu
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](http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins/inflation_zero.php)

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

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poelzi
WTF. I can only suggest this summery:

[http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf](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.

~~~
skiffydiffy56
[http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005/05/alternative...](http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005/05/alternative-
cosmologies.html)

~~~
poelzi
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...

