Official AskScience inflation announcement discussion thread : askscience

Watch this video of the co-founder of the theory (and now a probable future Nobel Prize winner) being told the result for the first time. Once he processes the 0.2 figure, he almost falls over.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5ofjn/

I guess what I should have said is that r~0.2 puts it right where the BICEP people were betting it would be. BICEP needed r to be big for it to be detectable by them in any kind of finite time fr...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5l2im/

Another analogy that works for me is that of a balloon which is being blown up with little dots all around its surface . In this analogy, it's easier to visualize the three dimensional aspect of ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5iu69/

How can we even see the CMB? Is the universe closed so that the all light is curved back in forever? Naively I would expect all the original radiation from the big bang to be travelling away from...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5gls9/

Ok, so this is the image of our universe that I am getting. Please tell me if this is a good analogy. But I'm seeing like, a giant wheel of swiss cheese, where everything we have ever known as th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5ewtb/

Something that just hit me and it would be really appreciated if someone could answer. I understand that space is expanding while matter in all its forms remains constant, but is there a reason w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5egvr/

The significance of the r figure is specific to this context and explained in other replies throughout the thread. "5 sigma" is a characterization of the confidence of the measurement. It's sho...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5difr/

But what is it expanding into? That's the part that gets me. If you can imagine an extremely dense and compact early universe that rapidly starts expanding, it seems that the "edges" have to expa...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5cn08/

Followup: Does that mean that the fact that our observable universe is uniform just happenstance based on our location and that we could just as easily be located close enough to one of these inf...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5cimr/

Only way we know of. Objects in the early universe were not massive enough to produce gravitational radiation. (Edit, ok, they weren't massive enough to produce non-negligible gravitational rad...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5aoeo/

> These gravitational waves are the product of what is called > Inflation. Is Inflation the only way to imprint GWs in the CMB?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5am1m/

Eh. I think the author of this blog doesn't quite understand what is going on. Lensing was detected at 2.7 sig. Large angular scale B-modes, something which lensing cannot/does not generate, we...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5a1wk/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg59lnl/

Ethan Siegel wrote a post where he indicates that the statistical significance of the result is only 2.7 sigma. https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/25c5d719187b Basically, he asserts that ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg58xnc/

If it makes you feel any better, I am a math PhD student who has studied this stuff, and the explanation below took me about half an hour to come up with. At the end of the day, I ultimately rely...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg58hxy/

Nice find, adding it to the list of resources.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg58c4a/

That's because you are human :| You are a 3-dimensional being trying to conceptualize 3-d as seen from the 4th dimension. Most science like this is conducted via math and equations that can be ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg583ye/

Video explaining it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzxI5sCXfk

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg570vf/

I was just as confused as you were for a long time because a very common misconception is that the universe is in the shape of a sphere that is expanding. The universe is actually infinite though...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg56pe9/

> What was observed is the effect of gravitational waves emitted at > around 10-34 seconds how do they know it happened at this time?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg565n5/

There is no epicenter of the Big Bang. The expansion of space occurs uniformly throughout all space. It might help to imagine that there is an infinitely large sheet of rubber with some dots dr...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg55v9k/

We can use our knowledge of general relativity, specifically the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric , to project backward what must have happened before-- similar to how if you see a proj...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg55jbp/

Thanks for the reply. I assume this is a problem with the word explosion, as that usually means there is a central point of origin? I'm having trouble conceptualizing it, I guess. I suppose I f...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg55e7e/

Every point in the universe, is the center of the universe. If you can imagine it that way. Any point in the universe, looking out, you will see the CMB. That is why you see the CMB in every dire...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg556bp/

Is there a galaxy that is receding from us at exactly the speed of light? How is that supposed to look like?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg550tj/

Latitude lines aren't actually "straight" lines on the surface of a sphere (except the equator). They're curved. In other words, if you pick two points at the same latitude, the shortest path bet...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg54z3q/

As someone that doesn't have the knowledge base to understand the finer details of this situation, that quote is both informative and thrilling.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg54u3w/

This may be an absurdly simple question, but why doesn't it matter which way you look? I assume the way I am picturing it is just hilariously flawed, but it seems to me that looking at the CMB wo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg54tu5/

If we can only see back 13.8 billion years then how are we able to estimate the actual age of the universe?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg54tsk/

I believe it. I went to my department's viewing of the press conference this morning, and one of the people there with more expertise than I have said this project was so far out there that they'...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg54dn8/

> We will never receive the light that they are emitting now, but we > will still keep receiving the light that is on their way towards us > for some time. And so si...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg54a7k/

Also, is it a monumental coincidence that our inflation lasted about 10-34 seconds, but other "bubbles" will have had billions of years of inflation? Will they notice a difference?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5460q/

Sean Carrol's article (posted before the results were released, it's in the OP here too) seemed to imply that we were expecting a much lower r, thanks to previous data - something like 0 to 0.05 ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg5400q/

Is eternal inflation also confirmed by today's result?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg53xi6/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg53nnt/

Lines of Latitude on a sphere are not "straight" lines, as far as they are not the shortest distance between two points. If you pick any two pair of points on the surface of a sphere and connect ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg53l2f/

Is there any possibility that what we think of as dark energy might actually be extremely tiny randomly distributed pockets of still rapidly inflating universe? Most space of these inflating tiny...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg53ehn/

I've got a few questions, I hope this doesn't get buried. In what way do gravitational waves polarize light? It seems, naively, that gravity should only be able to change the path, not polariza...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg52z06/

I've heard this before but it doesn't make sense. On a globe, we have latitude and longitude. Latitude lines are parallel and never converge. Longitude lines are also apparently parallel, but d...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg52m62/

I'd say inflation is exponential expansion. Expansion doesn't necessarily have to be exponential, and in fact it hasn't been since the end of inflation. But due to the existence of dark energy, i...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg52lou/

Ah, I was not aware of that distinction. Thanks. I'll edit my post when I get home.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg52lk8/

Also a layman but let me just correct you slightly. A GUT would unify the three forces, electromagnetism, strong, and weak, while a Theory of Everything (TOE) would include gravity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg52gcf/

Scientists have measured the EFFECTS of a specific type of gravitational wave in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These gravitational waves produce very specific distortions within the CM...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg529fq/

I would never be this pedantic outside of an /r/askscience thread, but what you're describing would technically be a "TOE" (Theory of Everything) as opposed to a GUT (which describes only the st...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg524ng/

No, it's that we don't know exactly what started inflation and what exactly the conditions are to produce it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg51rog/

So, remember, when you are looking at a distant object, you are looking back in time. The CMB is the first light that was released, 380,000 years after the big bang. This energy filled the entire...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg51ro4/

Man this is so fascinating, thanks for taking the time to explain. Its amazing to get all this back story to what was up until now just a bullet point on the news.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg51o88/

Actually, even though space is expanding, the contents expands with it. So we would see the light from our own earth, with this hypothetical telescope, but the light would be considerably redshif...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg51i3v/

In order for such an explanation to make sense wouldn't we need to assume a pre-existing distribution of the probabilities of r values? Sorry if this is completely off base, my stat background is...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg50yne/

This talk by Laurence Krauss titled "A Universe From Nothing" also explains a lot about the universe we live in (flat) and how its curvature was actually determined.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg50mhi/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg50jqx/

I bet my daughter her last girl scout cookie I can make a triangle that was a total of 270 degrees. I took out a ball and said it was earth. on top is the north pole and two people were standing ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg50hwr/

There's definitely a chance that we just can't measure the deviation from flatness. The flatness problem is that general relativity tells us that however much curvature we have now, the univers...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg50dg7/

Just to add a bit of maths, the three possible curvatures /u/RelativisticMechanic lists here describe three different type of geometries. Number 2 - "flat" - is Euclidean Geometry , which is s...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg504iz/

> But how do you define the "surface" of the Universe? We wouldn't do it in the surface of the universe, we do it in the universe. Notice that when we're talking about triangles on the...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zz9i/

that's one of the possibilities, yeah. I don't know where my beliefs fall in general. Mostly just waiting til we know more.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zxj5/

What's that? Is it the very low entropy problem?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zxcx/

Yep. Though, you can do CMB work in Antarctica at places other than the south pole. BICEP2 is at the south pole station, but for example, a new telescope looking at the same thing is being built ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zt8a/

So wait our "universe" actually only exists inside of the multiverse because of this inflation? Which is to say that the inflation caused our universe to bubble off of the multiverse itself?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zst9/

Is it clear that eternal inflation is actually implied/confirmed by this observational result? Or should that aspect still be considered unproven?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zeqa/

No, the big bang theory has been effectively known to be true for a long time, with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background being a solid last nail in the coffin. This discovery suppor...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zd76/

Ok, can you ELI4?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4zca9/

1) We've been able to see the polarization for decades. But not the specific part that is the "imprint" of inflation, which is a much smaller signal. BICEP2 is the first experiment to detect the ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4z9mf/

How can we continue to see them if they're expanding away from us faster than the light travels? Was there a point where the expansion was slower, or does is have to do with the light reducing th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4z8mt/

Yep - this wiki page describes a few of them

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4z4a3/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4z2fu/

> have to be in one of three places: You can do decent CMB science from other places too (like Manu Kae and Cedar Flat), but as you state South Pole and Atacama are by far the 2 best on ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4z1mr/

Can someone help explain the physical process of a gravitational waves? I'm having a hard time understanding whats happening in this picture . If we had a binary star system whose axis of rotat...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yzu1/

Non-uniform inflation seems to counterintuitive the paradigm that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic. What could have caused, or is causing inflation, and how does it affect our understand...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yypi/

If I recall correctly due to the rate of expansion of the Universe being greater than C(speed of light) the light from our own Galaxy in a curved Universe could never come back around to reach ou...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yxz5/

> This sudden, powerful expansion of space would produce a stochastic > gravitational wave background in the Universe. These gravitational > waves would distort the pattern...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yxce/

The "fabric" of space-time isn't subject to any speed limit of which we're aware. Nothing can be accelerated from < c to c to travel through space-time, but space-time itself can expand such that...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ywsw/

So until now we didn't know whether the big bang theory was true, but now we do? Because this is what ITV News just said on their 5:30pm broadcast.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yt0s/

This discovery doesn't really change anything about what we think the fate of the universe will be. Ever since it was discovered int he 80s that the rate of expansion of the universe is acceler...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yrb6/

Well you're a "3-D creature" right? what would a 2-D universe look like that was infating? Well imagine you have a grid paper that is huge, maybe even infinite in size. But the grid points are li...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4yous/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ynte/

short answer is no. The universe does not expand on scales the size of clusters of galaxy or smaller. http://www.reddit.com/r/sciencefaqs/comments/135cd1/does_gravity_stretch_forever_is_the_big...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ygh1/

it's a bit hard to explain because it gets pretty math-y pretty fast. It's what we call the "tensor to scalar ratio." In simple terms, the "scalar field" is just the temperature of the cosmic mic...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ydzl/

> In a similar way, cosmologists have made measurements of things like > the microwave background and found that the results are consistent > with flatness up to our ab...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ybmb/

I've been meaning to ask /r/askscience this for some time. So universe is expanding. Got it. It's expanding at an extremely fast rate as evident by the red shift of the far off galaxies bein...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4y8ej/

Thanks. I'm still trying to piece this together from all the comments. So is our observable universe really just a small piece of the "entire" universe, which stopped inflating, and now just sl...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4y7b7/

Thanks, another followup: When they talk about inflation ending at around 10-34 seconds post-big-bang, what motivates that 10-34 seconds figure? If we were in a region in which the inflaton fie...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4y6f4/

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4y53d/

Roger Penrose has been pushing his conformal cyclic cosmology model of a cyclic universe recently, to a muted reception. He proposed that gravitational waves from mergers of supermassive black h...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4y1ux/

The gravity waves leave a very subtle imprint on the photons (light) from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is kind of like a light echo from the big bang. The gravity waves in the e...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4y0lu/

Yes this is basically correct. Allow me a few slight corrections though: BICEP and other CMB telescopes looking for this same measurement don't measure gravitational waves. They measure the co...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xzom/

I assume you mean 1980s and not 1908s, unless there are a bunch of 1908s I haven't heard of.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xz9x/

Had never heard that one before, that's very helpful. Can you explain a bit more about the CMB? How can we see it at all? Shouldn't it be so far away, at the edge of the universe, past anything...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xyxg/

As others have pointed out, space can expand faster than light and this is even happening today. Some galaxies we can see in our current universe are expanding away from us at a rate faster than ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xym1/

I completely understand your 2 dimension analogies.... but the universe we live it is 3 dimensions. I'm not exactly following these analogies when applied to a 3D environment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xxi1/

The GUT regime happens at high energies. In the early universe the energy density was thought to have been high enough for this to happen, now we have empirical evidence of such high energy densi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xtn0/

I'm just a layman myself so someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Basically, there are currently four fundamental interactions between particles that we (science) define: gravitation, electro...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xq4f/

Yeah.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xpku/

http://bicepkeck.org/b2_respap_arxiv_v1.pdf

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xojx/

Basically, the universe was a hot dense plasma instead of a diffuse cold gas, so the light would interact with the free protons and electrons instead of following a mostly straight line.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xo15/

So what is now the main objection to inflation? Is it still the "initial conditions" problem?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xnws/

Couple random questions that I haven't seen asked; 1) why has this just been discovered now? Are the waves so small that we missed them before, or were we looking in the wrong place, or are the...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xnuu/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xflw/

We perform, for example, statistical analysis of fluctuations in the microwave background, in order to set values for parameters like the density of normal matter, dark matter, and dark energy, t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xf0k/

Two questions: where does the 10e-34 number come from? Why couldn't the inflation have happened earlier or later? And, is the force causing the inflation the same as dark energy?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xd1i/

I hadn't thought about intrinsic vs extrinsic curvatures. So, since we can't really pick a "point" in 3D space (at least not in the way someone on a globe can), what experiments can we do to ch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4xagk/

Yeah, "multiverse" is used for all kinds of things. It can be the different pockets of non-inflating space in eternal inflation, or it can be the different worlds of the many-worlds interpretatio...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x7wj/

Pretty much. Except that the third point should read "recent observations of the effects of gravitational waves". They gravity waves themselves weren't observed directly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x4g5/

Presumably one or more scalar fields in the Early Universe. What triggers them or why it started is unknown. Coincidentally, the "Higgs" particle measured at the LHC is the first known scalar f...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x3ni/

> This sudden, powerful expansion of space would produce a stochastic > gravitational wave background in the Universe. Sorry if I'm doing this wrong - subscribed for a while but ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x3i9/

Transition-edge Sensing (TES) superconduction bolometers WITH polarization sensitivity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x28u/

> If I boil a pot of water on earth and boil it 100 million light > years away, I would expect the same results A better analogy would be that on a planet 13.8 billion lig...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x1f1/

I think the root problem is a failure to define "universe" universally among scientists. I would count all these little "bubbles of causally connected regions" and the space-like connections betw...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x1du/

So, perhaps not totally related, but since we're dealing with the first fractions of a second of the universe I've always wanted to ask: What would the big bang "look like" to a 4 dimensional cre...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x0v1/

> Don't you need an extra dimension for the flatness of space to > manifest itself? No. One difficulty of dealing with curvature problems is that you're using a brain that evolved ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4x05p/

5σ means they are stating their result with a 99.9999426697% confidence interval . r is a variable in the model related to something called the tensor/scalar ratio, but I don't think I can expla...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wz86/

Can anyone post a full study about this, or a technical briefing? Right now seems like the media machine of Harvard and MIT are at it again. Sort of reminding me of that "arsenic based life" NASA...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wv0i/

> What is this? 

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wulx/

r=.2 is explained by me here . Sigma = 5 is a way of saying that if we performed ~5 million experiments that produced the same results as this work, only one of those results would be a false pos...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wtsw/

Okay, just thinking on this scale is making my brain hurt, but let me try to ask this... So if space is curved, and we had a telescope powerful enough to see infinitely out into space, we could...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wqi8/

Nobels are limited to 3 recipients, so in my opinion Guth and Linde should get it for the theory, and someone from BICEP2 should get it for the discovery. The trouble with Nobel's will is that fo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4woux/

So the speed limit of c, the speed of light, is with respect to space itself. Nothing can move in space faster than c. However, space has no problem being the thing do the moving, and there are n...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wnzv/

Don't you need an extra dimension for the flatness of space to manifest itself? Is that time by any chance? It kind of seems like the map projection problem, where you simply cannot project a s...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wla2/

> This is probably just poor understanding but what if the > measurements are simply not "large" enough in the same sense that we > could easily confuse the earth for�...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wjrg/

It is the ratio of Gravitational Waves to Density Waves responsible for the polarisation observed. With respect to the size, there's this quote: > "This has been like looking for a ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wijg/

The New York Times article specifically says that the universe expanded faster than C for a short time and it confused me as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4whjp/

> That is what happens when we observe unique 1 degree portions of the > CMB, the temperatures are same within 1 part in 100 000, but they > haven't had time for he...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wfuh/

Vacuum energy .

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wfl8/

First, the spectral slope of something tells you about how it varies over a range of scales. A large spectral slope means as you go to smaller scales, the value increases, with larger slopes lead...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wf16/

Okay, but if the universe expanded from a single point, there have to be edges, right? Maybe so far away that we can't see them, but in order for there to be expansion there needs to be someplace...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4weys/

In addition to the triangle explanation, another helpful way of thinking about spatial curvature is parallel lines. In a flat universe, parallel lines will continue on forever, staying parallel. ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wecu/

People keep saying this is Nobel prize worthy. For whom? Is it Guth and Linde who appear to be the "inventors" of inflation? Or for the team who did the finding? How many people are involved in a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wci6/

This is probably just poor understanding but what if the measurements are simply not "large" enough in the same sense that we could easily confuse the earth for being flat if we look too closely....

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wcds/

> For a curved universe, if you head in any direction and go far > enough, you'll eventually come back to where you were before. This is only for a special kind of curvatu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wbu1/

I see the word used to refer to both all the time. Also commonly used to describe the many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4wabz/

The act of boiling should be pretty similar, but there are minor differences. Think of it a little like boiling water at sea level vs in Denver. The air pressure is lower in Denver so water boils...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4w5nm/

1) Multiple other telescopes have detected the polarization of the CMB, and most polarization is not from gravitational waves but interactions with matter on its way here. The specific type of po...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4w3xj/

I saw an explanation for this in another thread a few days ago and I'm not sure I can find it again , so just a disclaimer - this may not be correct (in which case, someone correct me). From what...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4w2tv/

You need a very specific type of signal to cause b-modes in the CMB (quadrupole anisotropy). Wayne Hu does a good job explaning this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4w2fm/

Can someone explain the significance of the power r=0.2 figure? I know it's a much clearer signal than anyone had hoped for, but I'd like to understand it better.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4w1co/

To summarize, and to test whether I understand this correctly: We have observations about the current state of the universe that that the linear expansion we observe today cannot fully explain ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4w02w/

Maybe I'm misunderstanding inflation, but doesn't it suggest that at some point expansion was faster than the speed of light? Can someone explain how that is possible?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vxbo/

Followup: That article describes the various pockets of stopped inflation as a multiverse. I had thought that in multiverse theories universes were separated by higher dimensions, such as in Br...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vwgv/

Does this discovery have any impact on our understanding or theories of the fate of the universe ? Does it make any of the proposed theories more or less likely?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vvgf/

This is interesting for a few reasons: It is further validation of the inflation hypothesis. It is further validation of gravitational waves, which are yet to be directly detected. What I'm cur...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vsv3/

> it seems to me (although I am not a scholar on the subject) that an > infinite universe isn't possible as it would entail an infinite > amount of mass. It would, wh...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vs5q/

What does r =.2 at Sigma = 5 mean?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vr8m/

Where would this sudden inflation come from?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vqqb/

Can you ELI5 what this question thread is about? I've heard of the GUT before but what about it that's got to do with this and how does it contribute to GUT?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vpou/

Yep! That's exactly what they're saying. This is known as eternal inflation .

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vpmz/

> The BICEP telescope measures the polarization of the Cosmic > Microwave Background (CMB). Sidenote for other materials physics/CMP people: the way they did this is really cool! I k...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vndb/

> The light all having the same energy suggests that it it was all at > once in causal contact. This is the point that I've never been 100% happy with. Could you expand (hah!) ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vmyf/

That totally blew my mind. Thank you for your response, it makes a lot more sense now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vlpt/

This is an indirect detection; the first indirect detection was in the 1970s based on decaying pulsar orbits. A new generation of direct detectors is coming online, so maybe they'll find somethin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vlop/

If my understanding is: Gravity waves stemming from the end of inflation (at 10-34 seconds) affected the polarization of the radiation from the Cosmic Microwave Background event (at 380K years), ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vl58/

The relationship between gravitons and gravitational waves is the same as between photons and electromagnetic waves.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vl3n/

No, and it can be really hard to visualize why. I'll do my best though. Think about raisin bread, and just for simplicity let's say the raisins are uniformly spaced. When it's dough, the raisin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vkqx/

> the primordial gravitational waves were not scattered by the plasma > of the universe like light was, so this early information remained > unsullied and was able to l...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vkqg/

I thought that it wasn't truly infinite? I know that the steady state universe theory isn't true but it seems to me (although I am not a scholar on the subject) that an infinite universe isn't po...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vj3s/

Could we generate our own gravitational waves or make use of existing ones? If so, what practical uses would there be?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vi7w/

What is the r in that btw? And how big is 0.2 in this case?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vhsa/

In this context, flat means "not curved" rather than "much smaller in one direction than in another". It's easiest to get the distinction by thinking in two-dimensions rather than in three. Bas...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4vhhb/

The analogy that works best for me are dots on an inflating baloon (transposed one dimension up).

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ve37/

I have heard that gravity is theoretically directed by "gravitons". How is this theory related to gravity waves?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v8kc/

is this the first time anyone has ever detected gravitational waves? how does one go about detecting them in the first place?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v8bc/

I'm trying to buy beer tickets, but short answer: -Expansion refers to the general trend of things in the universe to move apart from each other because of the universe getting larger. This has...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v7xk/

Our best guess right now is C: the universe is truly infinite and you will never loop back. (edit: though that appearance could be a result of the inflation we just detected ("the flatness proble...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v7xc/

Could you explain a little more about the flatness problem? I don't really understand how the universe we observe today is relatively flat geometrically.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v7sv/

During the inflationary epoch the universe grew by a factor of 1078 in the span of just 10-36 to 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang. As it expands today the universe takes about 11 billion years to...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v4zb/

I've trying to wrap my head around this and there are a million different things I could say, but I here goes go. If I were to get in a ship that travels at infinitely fast and can go through sta...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4v46y/

Why is it that the presence of "gravitational waves" automatically supports inflation in the first trillionth of a second of the universe? Could there be no other cause for these waves?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uzzw/

Expansion is a long-term steady thing, inflation refers to a rapid brief effect in the very early universe.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uzs1/

What was observed is the effect of gravitational waves emitted at around 10-34 seconds on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, which itself was indeed emitted around 380,000 years...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uz62/

This is strong evidence to support Inflation as being a correct and accurate theory. Inflation is an addition to the original Big Bang cosmological model. The CMB is light that was released ~...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uz1p/

As someone who doesn't know the field, would someone mind explaining the difference?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uy6s/

You can monitor a system in which you can clearly see the time dependence, such as PSR B1913+16

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uxwj/

The telescope itself didn't measure gravitational waves. It measured the distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background left my gravitational waves. It's a very important difference. This is NOT ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uxsk/

Quick run down for those not in the field: The BICEP telescope measures the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is light that was released ~380,000 years after the Bi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ux3b/

This is more than just hard evidence of the Big Bang. The existence of the CMB is hard evidence of the Big Bang. This is a confirmation of the refinement of the theory that was introduced in the ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uvto/

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn25235/dn25235-1_1200.jpg?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uvao/

Yes, or rather. This tells us (empirically) at what energy density that can occur.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4us9a/

AskScienceModerator says that this discovery is capable of > providing direct information on the state of the universe when it > was only 10-34 seconds old If I understand corr...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uqrd/

Does this evidence falsify any specific theory about the origin of the universe?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4umqu/

Alan Guth and Andrei Linde just said at the press conference that the inflaton field decays randomly and non-uniformly, and that as it decays, there remain regions of the universe where it hasn't...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4umlk/

Oh, I see. So it allows for electromagnetism and strong and weak interactions to be merged.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uldb/

Our current understanding of physics and mathematics breaks down when the universe begins to become close to infinitely small/dense. We have trouble saying what was actually going on at that poin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ul1a/

> if you don't know the field. Physics has no shortage of those problems and for this specific reason.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ujbr/

Can someone ELI18 how the telescope was able to detect gravitational waves?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uiu6/

Okay I'll do it.. someone please ELI5

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4uhv8/

It's a nomenclature problem: "expansion" and "inflation" sound the same if you don't know the field.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ugjr/

No, in our current understanding of the universe there is no center or anything like a center. /u/RelativisticMechanic wrote this great conceptual explanation of what an infinite universe look...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ug85/

The center is by definition everywhere. Every point in space that currently exists was inside the "center" at t=0. This means that every point in space is the "center" of the Universe. It is a ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ufet/

More a question about gravity waves. How can we tell the difference between a Gravity Wave, traveling at some finite speed, or instantaneous changes in Gravity/Spacetime/Whatever that is oscillat...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ufcm/

It is the first experimental value of the energy density required to be in the GUT-regime.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4udd6/

Not exactly related to the announcement, but news stories I've been reading have got me thinking. (Note: I grew up in a christian school and don't know just about anything about the Big Bang exce...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4ubn4/

No, it's more a confirmation of the specific details of what was going on during that period. The expansion on the universe is based on other evidence such as the recession of supernovae.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4u64b/

More importantly is the fact that this is basically smoking-gun level evidence. r=0.2 at 5 sigma is as good as it gets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4u38v/

Okay, I just posted this question elsewhere, but what are the implications of this discovery for the Grand Unified Theory? I've read a few articles that mention that it brings us a step closer,...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4u36x/

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4tyz4/

I think one of the biggest things to point out here is that red-shifting evidence supports continued and accelerated expansion, but that this paper provides evidence for very, very early expansio...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/cg4tx6a/

Today it was announced that the BICEP2 cosmic microwave background telescope at the south pole has detected the first evidence of gravitational waves caused by cosmic inflation. This is one o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/20n0zn/official_askscience_inflation_announcement/