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Posted on 3/18/14 at 9:21 am to Crimson G
some immediate effects of this announcement:
Scientists will be unravelling the consequences of this discovery for years. But some major implications are already clear:
Albert Einstein predicted 'gravitational waves' nearly 100 years ago, but he also calculated that they would be extremely feeble, so much so that he thought they would never be detected. BICEP2's findings are the most convincing evidence — short of direct detection — that gravitational waves actually exist.
The waves are the confirmation of a cornerstone theory of the standard picture of cosmology. This theory, called inflation, says that during the first moments of its existence, the Universe underwent a brief period of exponential expansion.
During inflation, the Universe's temperature — and thus the energies reached by elementary particles — were trillions of times higher than can be achieved in any laboratory, even in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
Because inflation is a quantum phenomenon and gravitational waves are part of classical physics, gravitational waves establish a link between the two, and could be the first evidence that gravity has a quantum nature just like the other forces of nature
LINK
Scientists will be unravelling the consequences of this discovery for years. But some major implications are already clear:
Albert Einstein predicted 'gravitational waves' nearly 100 years ago, but he also calculated that they would be extremely feeble, so much so that he thought they would never be detected. BICEP2's findings are the most convincing evidence — short of direct detection — that gravitational waves actually exist.
The waves are the confirmation of a cornerstone theory of the standard picture of cosmology. This theory, called inflation, says that during the first moments of its existence, the Universe underwent a brief period of exponential expansion.
During inflation, the Universe's temperature — and thus the energies reached by elementary particles — were trillions of times higher than can be achieved in any laboratory, even in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
Because inflation is a quantum phenomenon and gravitational waves are part of classical physics, gravitational waves establish a link between the two, and could be the first evidence that gravity has a quantum nature just like the other forces of nature
LINK
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