There’s a new article at Nautilus that asks “Do We Have the Big Bang Theory All Wrong?” It outlines a “radical” new idea that the cosmic microwave background isn’t due to cosmic inflation, but rather to virtual particles in vast emptiness of space. There’s an old saying that if the title of your article is a question, and the answer is no, then you probably shouldn’t write the article. In the article the author chose to portray Hans-Jörg Fahr, the proponent of the idea, as a lone genius who questions the established model of cosmology, and who is definitely not a crackpot. Fahr is compared to Halton Arp, Sir Fred Hoyle, and even Hannes Alfvén (who won a Nobel prize for his work on magnetohydrodynamics, which is central to modern astrophysics). These scientists were all clearly brilliant, and they were definitely not crackpots. They were just wrong.
Dying Light
Photons are massless. We know they are massless because particles with mass can’t move at the speed of light. We know that special relativity works, and the speed of light is the same in all frames of reference, and special relativity only works if photons are massless. Except…
Polar Eyes
Last year, well before the BICEP2 news, it was announced that researchers at the South Pole Telescope had discovered B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background. This was a pretty big deal, but it will take some explaining to understand just why.
Cosmic Rainbow
Recently I wrote about the average color of the universe, as determined by a survey of more than 230,000 galaxies. While knowing the overall color of these galaxies is a fun little factoid, it isn’t particularly useful from a scientific standpoint. However the color was determined by the average spectrum of the galaxies, which is quite scientifically useful. This “cosmic rainbow” tells us about the history of star formation in the universe.
Accentuate the Negative
There’s news on the web that cosmologists have proven the existence of negative mass. The news is based upon an article that recently appeared on the preprint arxiv, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The article in no way proves the existence of negative mass, but rather demonstrates the theoretical possibility of a form of negative mass within general relativity. In other words, it is an interesting “what if” paper rather than applied astrophysics.
Too Quiet
In the big bang model, the universe began about 13.8 billion years ago as a hot, dense state. There’s plenty of observational evidence to support this model. One strong bit of evidence is the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It is the thermal remnant of the primordial fireball, cooled now to a temperature of about 2.7 K. What’s amazing about the CMB is how perfectly it light matches that of a blackbody. It is exactly what you would expect to see from a primordial universe of uniform temperature. But that also raises a bit of a mystery, because the CMB is actually more uniform that it should be.
Have You Heard the One About…
This week I’ve gotten a number of questions about various proposed models in astrophysics, such as the one about how anti-gravity could explain dark matter and dark energy. Or the one where dark matter is a result of quantum interference on a cosmic scale. Or the one where the cosmic microwave background is actually due to thermal turbulence rather than the big bang. There are lots of ideas that show up in the literature and in the press, so how do you judge the quality of a particular idea?
What a Rube
Recently there was an article by Tim Reyes asking if the standard cosmological model is a Rube Goldberg machine. The idea is that so many ill-fitting ideas have been put together that it seems unreasonably complex. I’ve used a similar criticism against certain models through the phrase “tweak theories are weak theories.” Given the latest implications that the Higgs field may contradict inflation, and the BICEP2 results may not hold up, should we really think of standard cosmology more as a tweak theory than a robust model?
A Puff of Logic
There’s been several science headlines recently stating that “Scientists Claim Universe Shouldn’t Exist.” Which I suppose means we should all just vanish in a puff of logic, or (derp) the scientists have said something stupid again. Needless to say, “scientists” have said no such thing, and what has been said is an interesting venture into cutting-edge theoretical physics.