inflation
esiegel | November 9, 2013"One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today." -Dale Carnegie
Our new Ask Ethan segment has been really popular, and the questions and suggestions keep pouring in. It's your Universe too, and if there's something you want to know about it, you should ask! (So keep it up!) This week's question is one of the biggest of them all, and it comes courtesy of John L. Ferri, who asks,
I have a difficult time…
esiegel | April 19, 2013"Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang." -Alan Guth
So you finally understand it. The Big Bang tells us that the Universe was hotter, denser, and expanding at a faster rate in the past.
Image credit: original source unknown.
The farther back we go, the closer together everything was, the higher in temperature (and shorter in wavelength) all the radiation was, and -- of course -- the younger the Universe was.
Image credit: Ned Wright (possibly Will Kinney, too), via http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu…
esiegel | April 12, 2013"Orbiting Earth in spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase beauty, not destroy it!" -Yuri Gagarin
Fifty-two years ago today, the first human being left Earth, and we began our journey into outer space. But back in 1961, we didn't really know how far outer space stretched, or where all the matter and energy in the Universe came from.
Image credit: NASA, 1962.
That all changed with the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (by Penzias and Wilson, with the Horn Antenna, above), and subsequent measurements that led us to the Big Bang picture of…
esiegel | March 20, 2013"Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view." -Max Planck
Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite -- the most powerful satellite ever to measure the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- will finally unveil its results about the origin and composition of the Universe.
Image credit: ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia.
They've figured out how to subtract the…
esiegel | February 1, 2013“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious.” -Stephen Hawking
One of the most existential questions humanity has ever asked is the question of our origins: where do I come from? Inspired by Ben Kilminster's writings, here's the entire history of the Universe -- that's led up to the existence of you -- in just 10 sentences*.
Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://www.livingligo.org/.
1.) At some point in the distant past**, the…
esiegel | October 31, 2012"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we've learned that normal matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons and the like -- make up only 4% of the total energy in the Universe.
Image credit: Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) simulation; Vanderbilt.
The galaxies and clusters of galaxies lighting up…
esiegel | October 15, 2012“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht
One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe -- as a cosmologist -- isn't quite about the Big Bang in and of itself.
The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image source unknown.
The Big Bang is a remarkable idea, of course, that says that, based on the observations that the Universe is expanding and cooling today, it was hotter, denser, and physically smaller in the past. This gets particularly exciting when we extrapolate very far back in the history of…
eklemetti | April 8, 2010The eruption at Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls continues on - the explosive spatter and bomb eruptions at the new central vent (on the second fissure) were impressive all night, making the hikers/cars/aircraft look like mites in comparison. This eruption has, so far, followed the pattern of Hawaiian-style volcanism quite well, so I thought it could be a good time to talk about what exactly Hawaiian-style volcanism is. There is a sequence of events that leads up to and follows the start of an Hawaiian-style eruption - although this sequence can stop at any point along the way - but it is…
eklemetti | April 2, 2010Sunny and 80 here in Ohio today. That could mean only one thing that is likely on everyone's mind. (I suppose there is also this other bit of news that we've been following, too.)
The low, broad shield of Hawai`i's Mauna Loa volcano.
The USGS announced yesterday that inflation at Hawai`i's Mauna Loa appears to have ceased. This prompted the decision to move the alert status at Mauna Loa from "Advisory" to "Normal". This would signify the end of any current activity on the big island's largest volcano - the inflation that had been slowing since 2006 (since 2003 really) finally stopped in…
sastyk | February 11, 2010
In _Depletion and Abundance_ I write about the difficulty of committing to a lifestyle change in a world where you always seem to have more time, where defining events are always on the horizon but never present. I use the phrase "time to pick up your hat" which I take from a short story by Robert Heinlein, as a way of thinking both about how difficult it is to change and how necessary.
On the one hand, the story is a typical 1950s nuclear era tale of apocalypse - in it, the main character, a bartender, is dealing drinks when two scientists walk into his bar. Both are terribly, terribly…
mikethemadbiologist | September 28, 2009Last week, you might have read about the stagnation of wages. If you didn't, here's Felix Salmon:
There's no good news in today's data from the Census bureau. Unless you're the kind of person who worries about inflation, that is: in that case you're probably reassured that real median household income fell 3.6% between 2007 and 2008, from $52,163 to $50,303. That's a drop of over $1,800: real money.
David Leonhardt puts this in a broader context:
The typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.
To me, that's the big news from the…
esiegel | April 24, 2008Warning: Crazy talk ahead. Some of you may remember that I wrote about inflation and why its alternatives fail awhile back. Apparently, Louise Riofrio didn't get the memo. When there's misinformation about cosmology out there, it's up to me to set the record straight. (And I am not alone.) Let me first remind you about one of the alternatives to inflation I debunked last month:
Add defects and vary the Speed of Light. This one’s out. Why? Because we would see defects in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and we don’t. The constancy of the speed of light is highly supported by experiments, but…
esiegel | April 23, 2008Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. - C. M. Burns
There's no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell you this story, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to just before the big bang.
The big bang was when the Universe was hot, dense, full of energy, and expanding very quickly. The Universe was also spatially flat and the same temperature everywhere, and full of both matter and…
esiegel | April 17, 2008Nothing gets past you, does it? A scientific paper came out earlier this week, and I took a look at it, sighed, and Jamie asked me, "What?" And I said to her, "When I see bad science, it just makes me a little bit frustrated and sad." Of course, I had no intention to write about it.
But then Starts With A Bang reader Matt emailed me, and writes the following about this press release that he had seen:
You have two explanations for these gravitational waves now and that much I understand. But they make it sound as if symmetry breaking and inflation are competing theories. They aren't, right? Do…
esiegel | April 3, 2008Two summers ago, I was in Les Houches, France, for a summer school that turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. Seriously, we'd wake up every day and this was the view from the school:
Well, the University/Institution that ran the school sends periodic updates to me. And they linked me to this release. Here's the interesting and (if it's true) sensational claim that the release makes:
Recently, a team of theorists ... performed a new analysis of all available CMB and LSS data including the WMAP and Sloan data and favor an inflation model where exist primordial gravitational…
esiegel | March 13, 2008This month's issue of Physics Today has an interesting article by Robert Brandenberger of McGill University, entitled Alternatives to Cosmological Inflation. As a refresher, cosmological inflation is the theory that sets up the Big Bang: it takes whatever was in the Universe prior to inflation and expands it away, leaving you with a Universe that has roughly (to a few parts in 100,000) the same properties everywhere, and is spatially flat.
There are many models of inflation which give a Universe like ours, although we have to fine-tune the parameters of it. For instance, if we treat…
esiegel | February 26, 2008startswithabang.com reader Andy has a great follow-up to his question on the Age & Size of the Universe, and asks:
why does the CBR “appear” to come from a light sphere that “appears” NOW to be larger than the universe WAS when it first set off in a straight line on its 13.4 billion year trip???
The "CBR" stands for "Cosmic Background Radiation," and it refers to the (presently) microwave background. Here's why Andy's question is actually profound, and was known for about 20 years as either the homogeneity problem or the horizon problem. The problem is that, when we look up at the sky,…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2007By way of archcrone (via skippy), I came across this McClatchy article which discusses the massive inflation in food prices:
The Labor Department's most recent inflation data showed that U.S. food prices rose by 4.1 percent for the 12 months ending in June, but a deeper look at the numbers reveals that the price of milk, eggs and other essentials in the American diet are actually rising by double digits.
Already stung by a two-year rise in gasoline prices, American consumers now face sharply higher prices for foods they can't do without. This little-known fact may go a long way to explaining…