MetaFilter posts tagged with BigBang

Dark Flow

homunculus — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:28:16 -0800

Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space. "As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered. Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon 'dark flow.' The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude." Here's the paper (subscription required): A Measurement of Large-Scale Peculiar Velocities of Clusters of Galaxies: Results and Cosmological Implications. NASA has preprints you can download: results and implications and technical details (PDFs).

Star Stories and the Nobel Prize

ozomatli — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:27:27 -0800

Star Stories explains the life and death of stars using a multimedia approach that incorporates images, animation, video and text. From the official website of the Nobel Foundation. Don't miss out on the other cool games . One of the games has been posted before, but Star Stories is hot off of the presses.

T-Minus...

chuckdarwin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:51:21 -0800

In a scant few hours, scientists will make the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider. Terrified of nothing, a few deeply misguided morons have sent death threats to the CERN team, probably because of Faith-Based Science. *sigh* Anyway, what follows is the Just Some Of The Cool Shit About The LHC:

When the accelerator is fired up, two parallel beams of particles will be blasted around the underground ring in opposite directions. At four locations on the circuit, superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other in a giant chamber rigged with equipment to record the collisions and their aftermath.

Around 300 computer centres in 50 countries will handle data from the vast atom smasher for the next decade, marking what will be the biggest computing exercise in history. Handing the deluge of data will mark a test for the next generation of computing, called The Grid or "the cloud", and the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989 on the site of the huge machine. The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. The biggest concentration is the 80,000 PCs in a "farm" at the Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, near Geneva. When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually. "If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission. Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

BBC Radio 4 will devote a day of programming to the LHC, including covering first injection of beams live on the Today programme. See the BBC website for programming, background etc. You can try your hand at running the LHC and interpreting collisions on the simulator at www.particledetectives.net Good luck to all involved. Previously

Big Bang Music

dhruva — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:20:57 -0800

The Big Bang in musical form.

Atom

empath — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:41:22 -0800

Atom. -- The Clash of the Titans -- The Key to the Cosmos -- The Illusion of Reality

The Universe is Finite

snsranch — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:52:17 -0800

Remember CERN from The Da Vinci Code? And their mega-project the Large Hadron Collider(previously mentioned here?) This BBC Horizons show, The Six Billion Dollar Experiment, does a good job illustrating why such an experiment is so cool, important and fascinating. Apparently, the universe is finite. (Includes Google Video-last link)

Renegade Physicists!

frobozz — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:41:32 -0800

Renegade physicists! have published the book Endless Universe and talked to NPR's Tom Ashbrook about their alternative theories of the beginning of the universe: 'The Big Bang' is an unfortunate misnomer and was not the beginning of time, but rather the formation of a singularity in the universe. "And what we're seeing is that the Big Bang doesn't have to be the beginning of time. It's perfectly possible that the Big Bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe..."

The Big Hum

zaebiz — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 17:39:22 -0800

The sound of the Universe being born. University of Washington professor calculates the frequencies of sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years by analyzing small differences in sky temperature. More information here and here.

heck of a job, George

edverb — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:28:09 -0800

Updatefilter: George C. Deutsch has resigned. (for NYT links, see BugMeNot)

(T)he young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said. (previously discussed here on MeFi)

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted. [...]

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.

Intelligent Design promoted over Big Bang theory by 24 year old NASA appointee

mk1gti — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 11:58:07 -0800

Religious Nuttery Wins Out over Scientific Fact George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times. The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.

What we need more of is science.

goatdog — Wed, 11 May 2005 10:53:36 -0800

The PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) collaboration hopes to study a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, which they think was present in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. And they have games!

The truth behind the first cheesy special effects

Gyan — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:57:05 -0800

Misconceptions about the Big Bang

The Myth of the Beginning of Time

MzB — Mon, 03 May 2004 10:31:06 -0800

Alright, ruling out the ice caps melting, meteors becoming crashed into us, the ozone layer leaving, and the sun exploding... we're definitely going to ~~blow ourselves up~~ figure out a way to transform ourselves into strings and plunge through a black whole into the next universe.

I can see my house from here

Pretty_Generic — Mon, 03 Mar 2003 09:37:54 -0800

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation gives a map of the curiously unsymmetrical early universe.

The oldest light in the cosmos

ptermit — Tue, 11 Feb 2003 16:30:55 -0800

BAM! The Microwave Anisotropy Probe's long-awaited map of the afterglow of the big bang was released today, and all of a sudden, most of the uncertainty in the concordance model of cosmology has disappeared. We now know, to within 1%, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. We now know that Hubble constant is 71, plus or minus 4. And though the results agreed stunningly well with the weird picture that cosmologists have about the nature of the cosmos, there was one surprise -- the first stars were born way before expected. Great day for science, and a likely future Nobel.

mathis23 — Thu, 25 Apr 2002 13:11:32 -0800

Where Did Everything Come From? Don't say, "the Big Bang." To say that everything came from the Big Bang is like saying babies come from maternity wards—true in a narrow sense, but it hardly goes back far enough. Where did the stuff that went "bang" come from? What was it? Why did it bang?

greyscale — Sun, 01 Jul 2001 10:21:47 -0800

$145 million in a search for evidence of Big Bangs! So far the popular vote indicates most are in favor of the spending--whatever the cnn data is worth. Am I the only one who'd prefer it spent on my undergrad work, or even biosciences research?

tiaka — Mon, 30 Apr 2001 05:29:58 -0800

Oh sure, once again, this "theory" proves nothing. Nothing more than another failed attempt to dismiss God's work. When are these morons, with such an imagination, ever going to admit it, that their theory is nothing more than that. I could ramble on and on like these suppose "scientists" about nothing, and make all these supposed "patterns", milarky, lies, and made up falsehoods on how the universe was just made from some wild explosion. Oh sure, that is how it was made.....just some big bang, then the next thing you know, man walked out of the swamp, got in his Mercedes, and drove away....haha Just keep on believing such crap about this big bang "theory". But just like before, this will fail again and prove that God did create the world, and he has been, is, and always will be the creator, not the "big banger". And that is a FACT, not a "theory".....

Zosia Blue — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 10:56:54 -0800

The Big Re-run? "In the first millionth of a second after the universe’s beginning, the entire cosmos consisted of this ultradense, ultrahot brew, scientists say." And now scientists are trying to re-enact the Big Bang. Too big of a task to take on?