A WALLOP FOR THE BIG BANG,
according to reports in BBC News and ScienceShots 19 June 2014. The recently
announced proof of the Big Bang theory may disappear in a cloud of galactic
dust. In March this year a group of researchers working with BICEP2, a telescope
at the South Pole, claimed they had evidence for an aspect of the Big Bang
theory that claims the universe went through a period of massive expansion,
called “inflation”, in the first split second after it started to form.
According to this theory such rapid expansion of the early universe would have
left a distinctive pattern in the cosmic microwave background (low level of
radiation seen throughout the universe). The BICEP2 scientists claimed to have
found that pattern, but are now conceding that the signal they detected could be
from dust in our own galaxy. It seems that dust grains in the Galaxy could
imprint a similar polarisation pattern in the CMB as gravitational waves can,
and new data from another telescope, the Planck, indicates there is more dust
than BICEP2 scientists estimated using models of the dust signals. One of the
researchers, Clem Pryke, of University of Minnesota, explained: “Real data from
Planck are indicating that our dust models are underestimates. So the prior
knowledge on the level of dust at these latitudes, in our field, has gone up;
and so the confidence that there is a gravitational wave component has gone
down. Quantifying that is a very hard thing to do. But data trumps
models”.
Links:
BBC, ScienceShots
ED.
COM. Pryke is correct – real observations matter more than models, i.e. pretend
universes. However, we would remind Pryke and other Big Bang believers that real
data not only includes observations made in the present, but should also include
recorded observations actually seen in the past which those of us in the present
cannot observe.
The
beginning of the universe, along with the origin of all things, living and
non-living, is history. Interpreting present data to ‘make up a history’ leads
to dusty problems like the one above. To understand what happened in the past we
do need the record of one who was there and we have that record, left us by the
Creator, and we ignore it at our peril. Not just because we need his revealed
framework to understand what we see in the present, but because the One who
controlled the beginning also controls the future. (Ref. cosmology, physics,
astronomy, space) SEE
BARRY SETTERFIELD’S comments on Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. PDF
article here.
