More Matt Strassler (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 00:51 (3903 days ago) @ David Turell

His latest post continues to explain the finding from the elescope at the South Pole. You will not follow every last nuance of the expert physics, I don't, but a very large portion is understanable.:-http://profmattstrassler.com/-"But in this post, I'm going to assume assume assume that BICEP2′s results are correct, or essentially correct, and are being correctly interpreted. Let's assume that [here's a primer on yesterday's result that defines these terms]
 â- they really have detected "B-mode polarization" in the "CMB" [Cosmic Microwave Background, the photons (particles of light) that are the ancient, cool glow leftover from the Hot Big Bang]
 â- that this B-mode polarization really is a sign of gravitational waves generated during a brief but dramatic period of cosmic inflation that immediately preceded the Hot Big Bang,-"A puzzle that bothered scientists for decades, as to how the observable patch of the universe (i.e. the part that we can actually observe today; the universe may be much, much larger than this — see here) could be so uniform, would indeed be firmly solved, by a period of cosmic inflation. The extremely flat geometry of the universe would also now be firmly explained.
 
"We would also have confirmation about how the universe became hot — about how the Hot Big Bang got started. The picture would be this: a large amount of dark energy first makes the universe big, via inflation, and then the dark energy turns into energetic particles, making the universe hot (and still expanding, albeit more and more slowly [until relatively recently]). Some people like to say that inflation puts the "Bang" in "Big Bang", but remember that it also makes the universe flat and uniform and huge (typically much larger than the observable patch) before it heats it up.
 
"The existence of cosmic inflation would itself be another feather in the cap of Einstein's theory of gravity — since it is Einstein's theory that predicts that the presence of a positive cosmological "constant" [not necessarily constant], also known as "dark `energy' " [not really energy, but energy density and negative pressure in just the right combination] actually causes the universe to expand, rather than (as we'd naively expect from gravity) contract."