I can give some historical context on this because this is very close to the topic i studied in my thesis in Uni which was on BAO's...that would have been around 2015-2016 or so. None of this is new. We already had the Planck data and it was not surprising even back then. The cosmic inflation model was pretty well established as the prevailing theory and backed by solid evidence for years. The models had basically predicted exactly what we were seeing. All we were doing is improving the accuracy. I'm not sure why they are publishing articles with sensationalist titles like this ten years later when there is no new information in the article, but whatever. It's good for this stuff to enter into the broader general knowledge.
I don't necessarily agree with the framing that this is about what happened "before" the Big Bang. That's not how we ever talked about inflation. We always just viewed it as a phase of the "Big Bang" process. Unfortunately one of the properties of inflation is that it essentially erases the evidence of any history before, so there's a good possibility that it may be just as physically impossible to gather data on what came before as it is to gather data outside of the current cosmic horizon. In that sense this article is a bit of a bait and switch.
I wish articles like this delved more into some discoveries made in the last ten years, but sadly there just hasn't been all that much since Higgs and LIGO, both of which happened when i was still in university. I sort of get the impression that western science is stagnating a little bit outside of the computing field and maybe biomedicine. At the moment i think China's JUNO detector experiment shows the most promise for a real breakthrough advancement in physics.
13
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ - 3mon
It's not my area of expertise by any means, but I was a bit confused regarding the inflation being framed in this way. My understanding was that the accepted view was that inflation happened in the early stages right after the big bang. Good to have that validated. I also recall reading how JWST has been producing some interesting results where the early universe doesn't look the way the models predict. The galaxies appear to be forming too quickly, there are stars that look older than they should be, etc. Have you been following that at all, what's your thoughts there?
5
cfgaussian - 3mon
My understanding was that the accepted view was that inflation happened in the early stages right after the big bang.
You could say that. It's mostly semantics. Some people use "Big Bang" to refer to the entire process of early universe expansion. Others use it to refer to the hypothetical backwards-extrapolated "origin point" (in time) of that expansion, which may or may not be a singularity (probably not because singularities are un-physical). "Big Bang" is mostly a colloquial term anyway so some people are a bit more loose with how they use it.
The galaxies appear to be forming too quickly, there are stars that look older than they should be, etc. Have you been following that at all, what's your thoughts there?
Yep, incongruities of that sort were also acknowledged in my uni days. Probably has something to do with us not yet really having a correct understanding of early galaxy formation, which goes back to the perennial problem of Dark Matter which is insufficiently understood. There is also an infamous and growing discrepancy between what the Cosmic Microwave Background indicates about the Hubble constant (which is related to the curvature and expansion rate of the universe) and what observations via Type 1a Supernovae would seem to imply.
Initially this was thought to be a problem of inaccurate measurements, but as the error bars have been shrunk by better data it seems that there is a deeper underlying error in the model. My guess would be that the CMB data is correct and the Supernovae are wrong, because observing and analyzing the CMB is pretty straightforward whereas calibrating distance measurements for distant galaxies and stars is complex and requires multiple intermediate steps each with their own calibration.
There must be something wrong with our understanding of gravity on the largest scales in the universe, very likely related to the aforementioned problem of Dark Matter and the even more dubious Dark Energy. This in turn may or may not have something to do with the big elephant in every particle physicist's room that is the whole Quantum Gravity dilemma. There needs to be something beyond the Standard Model, we need a paradigm shift in modern physics. I'm hopeful that JUNO's observations on Neutrino mass may give some hints as to what that could be.
7
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ - 3mon
The whole idea of a singularity always did seem like a crutch to me. And logically, the greater universe must be infinite in every sense, so any universe that has a lifecycle to it, necessarily has to be a repeating pattern of the greater whole. I'm partial to the idea of viewing the universe as an information system myself. I've seen a few ideas trying to frame it as a type of a fractal structure for example.
The whole dark matter/dark energy business also very much smells like a us just trying to balance the numbers without having any actual basis for these things to exist. It's entirely possible that gravity behaves differently at large scales for example. It'll be interesting to see if JUNO does give us some more breadcrumbs to follow.
4
cfgaussian - 3mon
And logically, the greater universe must be infinite in every sense, so any universe that has a lifecycle to it, necessarily has to be a repeating pattern of the greater whole.
That's getting a little too speculative and philosophical for me. I'll stick to what we can prove with evidence.
The whole dark matter/dark energy business also very much smells like a us just trying to balance the numbers
It's an ad hoc correction but it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. There could be some underlying mechanism which explains why those terms have to appear in those equations.
4
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ - 3mon
Yeah fair, science ultimately ends at the limit of things we can measure, so any speculation about the nature of why there is anything at all rather than nothing is purely in the philosophical realm at this time. :)
And yeah, we're obviously seeing that things aren't behaving at large scales the way our model suggests they should, so there is some phenomenon at play here. Either our model needs rethinking, or there is some mass and force out there that we cannot observe directly.
yogthos in space
The strongest evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/evidence-universe-before-big-bang/I can give some historical context on this because this is very close to the topic i studied in my thesis in Uni which was on BAO's...that would have been around 2015-2016 or so. None of this is new. We already had the Planck data and it was not surprising even back then. The cosmic inflation model was pretty well established as the prevailing theory and backed by solid evidence for years. The models had basically predicted exactly what we were seeing. All we were doing is improving the accuracy. I'm not sure why they are publishing articles with sensationalist titles like this ten years later when there is no new information in the article, but whatever. It's good for this stuff to enter into the broader general knowledge.
I don't necessarily agree with the framing that this is about what happened "before" the Big Bang. That's not how we ever talked about inflation. We always just viewed it as a phase of the "Big Bang" process. Unfortunately one of the properties of inflation is that it essentially erases the evidence of any history before, so there's a good possibility that it may be just as physically impossible to gather data on what came before as it is to gather data outside of the current cosmic horizon. In that sense this article is a bit of a bait and switch.
I wish articles like this delved more into some discoveries made in the last ten years, but sadly there just hasn't been all that much since Higgs and LIGO, both of which happened when i was still in university. I sort of get the impression that western science is stagnating a little bit outside of the computing field and maybe biomedicine. At the moment i think China's JUNO detector experiment shows the most promise for a real breakthrough advancement in physics.
It's not my area of expertise by any means, but I was a bit confused regarding the inflation being framed in this way. My understanding was that the accepted view was that inflation happened in the early stages right after the big bang. Good to have that validated. I also recall reading how JWST has been producing some interesting results where the early universe doesn't look the way the models predict. The galaxies appear to be forming too quickly, there are stars that look older than they should be, etc. Have you been following that at all, what's your thoughts there?
You could say that. It's mostly semantics. Some people use "Big Bang" to refer to the entire process of early universe expansion. Others use it to refer to the hypothetical backwards-extrapolated "origin point" (in time) of that expansion, which may or may not be a singularity (probably not because singularities are un-physical). "Big Bang" is mostly a colloquial term anyway so some people are a bit more loose with how they use it.
Yep, incongruities of that sort were also acknowledged in my uni days. Probably has something to do with us not yet really having a correct understanding of early galaxy formation, which goes back to the perennial problem of Dark Matter which is insufficiently understood. There is also an infamous and growing discrepancy between what the Cosmic Microwave Background indicates about the Hubble constant (which is related to the curvature and expansion rate of the universe) and what observations via Type 1a Supernovae would seem to imply.
Initially this was thought to be a problem of inaccurate measurements, but as the error bars have been shrunk by better data it seems that there is a deeper underlying error in the model. My guess would be that the CMB data is correct and the Supernovae are wrong, because observing and analyzing the CMB is pretty straightforward whereas calibrating distance measurements for distant galaxies and stars is complex and requires multiple intermediate steps each with their own calibration.
There must be something wrong with our understanding of gravity on the largest scales in the universe, very likely related to the aforementioned problem of Dark Matter and the even more dubious Dark Energy. This in turn may or may not have something to do with the big elephant in every particle physicist's room that is the whole Quantum Gravity dilemma. There needs to be something beyond the Standard Model, we need a paradigm shift in modern physics. I'm hopeful that JUNO's observations on Neutrino mass may give some hints as to what that could be.
The whole idea of a singularity always did seem like a crutch to me. And logically, the greater universe must be infinite in every sense, so any universe that has a lifecycle to it, necessarily has to be a repeating pattern of the greater whole. I'm partial to the idea of viewing the universe as an information system myself. I've seen a few ideas trying to frame it as a type of a fractal structure for example.
The whole dark matter/dark energy business also very much smells like a us just trying to balance the numbers without having any actual basis for these things to exist. It's entirely possible that gravity behaves differently at large scales for example. It'll be interesting to see if JUNO does give us some more breadcrumbs to follow.
That's getting a little too speculative and philosophical for me. I'll stick to what we can prove with evidence.
It's an ad hoc correction but it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. There could be some underlying mechanism which explains why those terms have to appear in those equations.
Yeah fair, science ultimately ends at the limit of things we can measure, so any speculation about the nature of why there is anything at all rather than nothing is purely in the philosophical realm at this time. :)
And yeah, we're obviously seeing that things aren't behaving at large scales the way our model suggests they should, so there is some phenomenon at play here. Either our model needs rethinking, or there is some mass and force out there that we cannot observe directly.