The Search for Realization Began in Violence: The Sceintific View

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Published in The New York Times today:

 

Astronomers Find the Earliest Signs Yet of a Violent Baby Universe

 

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: March 17, 2006

 

Using data from a new map of the baby universe, astronomers said

yesterday that they had seen deep into the Big Bang, and had gotten

their first detailed hint of what was going on less than a trillionth

of a second after time began.

 

The results, they said, validated a key prediction of the speculative

but popular cosmic theory known as inflation about the distribution

of matter and energy in the Big Bang. The theory holds that during

its first moments, the universe, fueled by an antigravitational

field, underwent a violent growth spurt, ballooning from

submicroscopic to astronomical size in the blink of an eye.

 

" It amazes me that we can say anything about the universe in the

first trillionth of a second, " said Charles L. Bennett, a professor

at the Johns Hopkins University and the leader of the group that

reported the results yesterday. " It appears that the infant universe

had the kind of growth spurt that would alarm any mom or dad. " The

map was produced by a NASA satellite known as the Wilkinson Microwave

Anisotropy Probe that has been circling the Earth at a point on the

other side of the Moon since 2001, recording faint emanations of

microwaves thought to be the remnants of the Big Bang.

 

The microwaves paint a portrait of the 13.7-billion-year-old universe

when it was only 380,000 years old, astronomers say. But in the

details of that portrait are clues to processes that occurred when it

was much younger.

 

Using the map, the Wilkinson team has been able to revise an earlier

estimate of the time at which the first stars began to form and shine

through the primordial murk that followed the cooling of the Big

Bang. Those stars appeared when the universe was about 400 million

years old, they said yesterday.

 

The previous estimate of 200 million years, based on earlier

Wilkinson data, had been seen as surprisingly early by many

cosmologists, and the new date is comfortably in line with mainstream

theories.

 

Inflation theory, which was invented by Alan H. Guth of the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been the workhorse of Big

Bang cosmology for the last 25 years. But astronomers and physicists

admit that they still have no idea what caused inflation. As a

result, there are a welter of models describing how it might have

worked.

 

Although inflation is not yet conclusively confirmed, it is now in

better shape than ever, many astronomers said, and many models can be

eliminated.

 

" We've crossed a threshold, " said David N. Spergel of Princeton

University, a member of the research team. " We can now start to say

something interesting about the physics of inflation. "

 

Others not involved in the project tended to agree.

 

" If this holds up to the test of time, it's a real landmark, " said

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T.

 

Dr. Guth, who is at a conference in the Caribbean, was said to be

walking around with a big smile.

 

The new map has been eagerly awaited by astronomers, who last heard

from the Wilkinson group in 2003 when it released its first map. That

map showed the cosmos speckled with faint hot and cool spots, the

seeds of structures like galaxies.

 

Three years is a long time to go between baby pictures.

 

Dr. Bennett and his colleagues have spent the time taking a much more

difficult measurement, in effect using spacecraft antennas to measure

the polarization of the Big Bang microwaves. To make these

measurements, which required 100 times the sensitivity of the

previous heat measurements, the astronomers essentially had to

recalibrate their entire spacecraft and the way they looked at the

data.

 

" We had to rewrite the whole software pipeline — twice, " Dr. Spergel

said. The light waves from the Big Bang, they found, do not vibrate

randomly in different directions as they travel from the distant past

to us. Rather, they have a slight preference to line up in one plane.

 

Lyman Page, a Princeton physicist, compared it to the glare of

sunlight bouncing off the hood of a car. The reflection causes the

light waves to oscillate in a horizontal direction. In the case of

the car, a person would wear sunglasses to eliminate the glare. In

the case of the Big Bang microwaves, he said, " We measure the glare. "

 

What plays the role of the hood of the car in this story, Dr. Page

said, is a fog of electrons floating in space between the Earth and

the Big Bang. This fog was produced, so the story goes, by radiation

from the first stars ripping apart atoms in space and liberating

their electrons.

 

Measuring the polarization more accurately allowed the Wilkinson team

to refine its previous estimate of when the stars first turned on.

 

In turn, by correcting for the effects of this electron fog, the

astronomers were able to measure fluctuations in the microwaves more

accurately than they had before.

 

Whoa! Wait a 1/60th of a trillionth of a minute here!...bob