New Views of the Big Bang -A Holy Grail of Science

from:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/12/new-views-of-th.html


There simply isn't a bigger question: wrapping up "Why are we here?", "Why is everything the way it is?" and "What if I don't believe a gigantic invisible skybeard did it?" -it's a Holy Grail of science. The theoreticians want to explain it, the experimenters want to detect it and - unlike 99% of all research - the public will actually care about the answer for a few minutes. We report on five ways scientists have have studied the beginning of everything and, in mockery of all you might think possible, made the question even cooler.

1. There's a hole in the sky

A piece of the universe is broken - or at least defective. That's the current thinking of scientists from the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA) and the University of Cambridge after observing data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP). The idea is that as the universe condensed into the state we recognize from the quite insanely high temperatures and densities of the big bang, defects can be created in the same way flaws and opaque spots form as water freezes into ice. While that analogy might give any astrophysicist an aneurysm, and is honestly enough to give you a nosebleed if you try to picture both situations at the same time, it's as good as any you can get without a graduate course in cosmology.

This discovery could revolutionize our understanding of the universe, as well as making people feel better about crashing our computers (after all, if empty vacuum itself can break what chance do we have with the complicated things?) And after fourteen billion years (or so) we might have the answer within our lifetime. Professor Turok took a break from examining the Big Bang (and possibly hunting dinosaurs) to announce that these results are extremely testable, they are even now extremely testing them, and we should know within ten years.

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