MARCH 17, 2014 A Scientific Breakthrough Lets Us See To The Beginning Of Time Posted By Lawrence Krauss At rare moments in scientific history, a new window on the universe opens up tha t changes everything. Today was quite possibly such a day. At a press conference on Monday morning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of scientists operating a sensitive microwave telescope at the South Pole announce d the discovery of polarization distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background R adiation, which is the observable afterglow of the Big Bang. The distortions app ear to be due to the presence of gravitational waves, which would date back to a lmost the beginning of time. This observation, made possible by the fact that gravitational waves can travel unimpeded through the universe, takes us to 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang. By comparison, the Cosmic Microwave Background which, until today, was the earliest direct signal we had of the Big Bang was created when the universe was already thr ee hundred thousand years old. If the discovery announced this morning holds up, it will allow us to peer back to the very beginning of time a million billion billion billion billion billion ti mes closer to the Big Bang than any previous direct observation and will allow us to explore the fundamental forces of nature on a scale ten thousand billion time s smaller than can be probed at the Large Hadron Collider, the world s largest par ticle accelerator. Moreover, it will allow us to test some of the most ambitious theoretical speculations about the origin of our observed universe that have ev er been made by humans speculations that may first appear to verge on metaphysics. It might seem like an esoteric finding, so far removed from everyday life as to be of almost no interest. But, if confirmed, it will have increased our empiric al window on the origins of the universe by a margin comparable to the amount it has grown in all of the rest of human history. Where this may lead, no one know s, but it should be cause for great excitement. Even for someone who has been thinking about these possibilities for the past th irty-five years, the truth can sometimes seem stranger than fiction. In 1979, a young particle physicist named Alan Guth proposed what seemed like an outrageous possibility, which he called Inflation: that new physics, involving a large ext rapolation from what could then be observed, might imply that the universe expan ded in size by over thirty orders of magnitude in a tiny fraction of a second af ter the Big Bang, increasing in size by a greater amount in that instance than i t has in the fourteen billion years since. Guth s work was designed to address what were then seemingly irreconcilable proble ms with the standard Big Bang model, which did not offer any explanation for why the observable universe is so incredibly uniform on large scales, and how it ha s continued to expand for so long without collapsing once again. Inflation, crud ely put, explains how the universe is likely to have grown shortly after the Big Bang, to bridge the gap between our hypothesis about the origins of the univers e and the universe we observe today. But the hallmark of great theory is its ability to predict future discoveries, n ot merely explain previous ones. Within a few years, Guth and a host of others d emonstrated that quantum-mechanical effects during this very early period immedi ately after the Big Bang could have generated primordial variations in matter an d radiation that resulted, owing to gravity, in the formation of all observed co smic structures, including our earth, our galaxy, and all observable galaxies. M oreover, the special characteristics of these primordial lumps produced when the siz e of the universe was smaller than a single atom might be tested if we were able t o probe out to the farthest reaches of the known universe.In 1992, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite reported observations o f the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation the afterglow of the Big Ban g generated when the universe was only three hundred thousand years old that allow ed just such measurements to be performed. Evidence of primordial lumps was disc overed leading to a Nobel Prize and the stage was set for subsequent experiments, wh ich verified that Guth s Inflation theory was at least consistent with observation . However, consistency is not enough in science. After all, different models of In flation could have produced results consistent with many different observations. So one needed a much more robust and unambiguous prediction to really confirm t hese ideas. Remarkably, one such prediction arose. If gravity is also subject to quantum mec hanics, then it was shown that, during Inflation, quantum fluctuations in gravit y would be produced, and would appear today as gravitational waves ripples in the fabric of space and time. Gravitational waves are incredibly difficult to detect directly: we have built huge detectors, here on Earth, that are so sensitive th at they can detect a force that changes the length of a two-mile-long detector b y an amount smaller than a single proton. So far, however, no signal has been ob served. But the universe is a far bigger detector. The same Cosmic Microwave Background that gave us an image of primordial structures might also be distorted by gravit ational waves with wavelengths as large as the size of the observable universe. In 1992, right after the COBE discovery, a student of mine and I were sufficient ly excited to claim that if Inflation occurred at an energy scale only slightly larger than where we think three of the four forces of nature might be unified the so-called Grand Unified Scale gravitational waves might even have produced the en tire observed COBE signal. This turned out not to be the case. But on Monday, nature may have revealed a mo re exciting possibility. A more sensitive probe of the microwave background one th at measures how the light generated at the time the C.M.B. was created might be p olarized, as space is alternatively compressed and stretched by gravitational wav es apparently sees precisely the signal expected from Inflation. Moreover, the amp litude of the effect is indeed more or less expected if the scale of Inflation i s the scale expected for Grand Unification. If it turns out to be confirmed by other experiments, think about what this disc overy implies for our ability to explore the universe (besides the other remarka ble implications for physics): when we use light to look out at the distant univ erse, we can only see back as far as three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled sufficiently to become transparent to light. But gravitational waves interact so weakly that even waves produced less than 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang can move through space unimpeded, giving us a window on the universe at essentially the beginning of time. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the current result is i n some tension with earlier claimed upper limits from other experiments, so we w ill need to wait for the results of a host of other experiments currently operat ing that can check this result. For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday s announcement h eralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such cosmic existential q uestions are becoming accessible to experiment.Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and director of the Origins Projec t at Arizona State University. His most recent book is A Universe From Nothing: W hy There is Something Rather than Nothing. bmroth11 day ago The smallest and most powerful particle in the universe is the letter Yud... Yud created the universe, our science and the crazy words we use to describe creati on scientifically is just our feeble attempt to explain what can not fit into ou r small brains, its sooo funny how the more humans think they learn the more com plicated their explanations become,..you can continue to be frustrated by trying to understand and explain the unexplainable or just surrender your will and bec ome a happy human....either way G^d, the creator, the almighty, Hashem, Allah, J esus, Yeshua, whatever it is you want to call whatever creates all of this will continue to do so whether you understand it or not and regardless of whether or not you believe it, your belief is not a prerequisite for G^ds existence. Rosbif1 day ago @bmroth1 I think the article (and physics in general) implies that your G^d is n ot a prerequisite for the existence of the universe. DFontes12 hours ago @bmroth1 Believing in G^d and questing for scientific knowledge are not mutuall y exclusive, neither are they prerequisites for becoming a happy human. Ghostwriter16 hours ago @DFontes @bmroth1 Still, believing in something in void of any evidence equates to affirming wild hypothesis without the scientific method--in other words, hea rsay, speculation, etc. Fr8rDan1 day ago Krauss' gratuitous potshot at deists undermines his attempt to explain this new discovery's importance, which has nothing to do with G^ds or theology. No, simply explain the science in a logical, orderly and plain way. Deists will accept these new details, just as they have accepted the solar-centric view and the truth of Darwinian evolution. The Big Bang and Inflation are completely in s ync with a creator who called forth the universe from nothing: "Let there be lig ht"......"And saw that it was good". G^ds always exist just beyond the margins of the known world. Whatever was befor e the BigBang and whatever lies beyond Event Horizons may always be totally unkn owable, beyond time, physics and human perception. There reside the G^ds of the future. FlagShare1LikeReply cdobbs72 days ago A lot of people lament the dearth of good scientific reporting. People seem to think that science wouldn't have such a bad rap in the US if we could only find some way to present science accurately. That is, people seem to think that scie nce is mistrusted and maligned in the US because people don't have a good unders tanding of the scientific method or peer review. That's not the problem with scientific reporting. The problem with scientific r eporting is that it's full of jargon, like the article above. What on Earth is an "afterglow of the Big Bang?" What does it mean for the universe to become "t ransparent to light?" And how, exactly, is this not some esoteric finding far r emoved from what non-physicists care about? The author says this borders on met aphysics, but even Heidegger managed to define his terms better than this.The reason people mistrust science is because articles like these are written an d concluded with some brief jab at people's worldview. I'm all for challenging worldviews, but if you're going to do that you have to make an argument, and if you're going to make an argument you have to speak clearly. machi4velli1 day ago @cdobbs7 Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is jargon, "afterglow of the Big Bang" is not -- in fact, it's explaining the jargon! It's a problem if we're so unaware of science that this is considered jargon in the US. I think it's fair t o assume Americans know what the Big Bang is (although some reject it), at least the New Yorker's target demographic, and afterglow is not being used in a techn ical sense, it's entirely colloquial here. FlagShare4LikeReply Richard4421 hours ago @machi4velli @cdobbs7 It is also amusing how cdobbs7 managed to turn the articl e into a fight or dispute about scientific writing, attacking the author rather than dealing with the significance of the discovery. He must be a budding magici an in his spare time, to attempt such misdirection. Shame it didn't work. cdobbs711 hours ago @machi4velli @cdobbs7 I'm glad "afterglow of the Big Bang" has some explanatory power for you, but it doesn't for me. It's one thing to use supplement your ex planation of a concept with analogies and it's another thing to use analogies ex clusively. This article is more like the latter than the former. If we're goin g to talk about a thing that's supposed to have both huge physical and metaphysi cal implications, then we should talk about it in clear terms. The New Yorker i s written for the general public, not a professional set, and it should go out o f its way to define its terms. It's both a more honest and a more critical way to present information. Kraus and other scientific writers should feel free to illustrate their discoveries with pretty-sounding metaphors, but if they don't e ventually say what they mean then how am I supposed to tell when they make unrel ated or hyperbolic conclusions? PatrickMcEvoyHalston2 days ago For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying.I doubt it. It'll just be interpreted as further hemming G^d in, which doesn't g et rid of Him, but inflates the needs of acolytes to clear Him some room.G^d suits an emotional need, born out of the kind of care we received as childre n. He likes you, so long as you masochistically subject yourself to Him. If you had more loving parents, the sky is cleared of G^ds, and while you'll thrill at further learning how the universe was born, the truth is it could accidentally b e revealed to have at its core some awful Demon or bizarro G^d, and, as long as now tamed, might not instruct how we go about our life all that much. Better hea lth coverage might be a bigger deal, as well that artists get the funding to int roduce new things in the universe for us to get excited about. New things, built out of our current matrix, and thus most especially relevant to us, our current desires/needs, not one which way predates a conditionally loving G^d, child-sac rificing neolithics, barely empathic first mammals, dumb ridiculous-sized reptil es, clumps of cells with no cognation, bare planets, heat, waves and dust.