Big news in science today.

Reminds me of the Family joke about "Cosmos....edited for rednecks"....

LINK

pretty amazing how accurate the mathematical models have been. Just imagine what will happen when quantum computers are used for modeling. Will be scary.

Another good article on it LINK



"Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago."


:mindblown:

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"Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago."

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I don't know what to make of that since it started out infinitesimal. I can't figure out what 100 trillion trillion times infinitesimal. It made my calculator throw up

String theory is such a mindfrick in every way.

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"Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago."
I don't know what to make of that since it started out infinitesimal. I can't figure out what 100 trillion trillion times infinitesimal. It made my calculator throw up

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It's amazing how much happened theoretically in less than a second after the big bang - mind boggling if true.


wikipedia

I believe it broke on its maiden voyage.

Here's physicist Brian Greene's take on the discovery (he makes physics easier to understand):

Exciting news. The rumors have proved to be correct.

Here is a quick summary of what the excitement is all about:

The dominant scientific approach to cosmology, called the 'inflationary theory,' predicts that that just after the birth of the universe, space experienced a tremendous burst of expansion, causing it to swell from far smaller than the size of an atom to perhaps even farther than we can now see with our most powerful telescopes, all within a minuscule fraction of a second.

Tiny variations in the original space would have been stretched out in the expansion?and much as a pulled piece of spandex reveals the pattern of its weave, these stretched "quantum jitters" would be imprinted on the residual heat from the universe's earliest moments, and would be detectable as a pattern of subtle temperature variations in the night sky. We've been finding and mapping these variations?a specific pattern of hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation -- with ever-greater precision since the early 1990s, a triumph of modern cosmology.

Today, researchers at Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, leading a team of researchers using a facility at the South Pole, say they've found, for the first time, a long-predicted second kind of fluctuation: ripples in the fabric of space itself, set down in the universe's earliest moments. Believed also to be generated by quantum processes, these spatial vibrations are inferred from a delicate twist they impart to the cosmic background radiation.

If the results stand, they are a landmark discovery. They provide our first look into energy scales that are perhaps a million million times larger than that of the Large Hadron Collider, and will greatly sharpen our theoretical understanding of events that happened perhaps a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. The results also affirm, once again, the astounding power of mathematical analysis to lead the way into the most remote corners of creation.

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What has that colider thing over in Europe been up too? Have heard much about it in a while. It was supposed to frick some shite up and show us a few things I believe.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was designed and built at a cost of $10 billion with the explicit goal of finding the Higgs boson. The Higgs Field uses it to assign mass to particles.

The LHC discovered the Higgs boson last year. It is being repurposed now for other research. Also, a new collider is in the planning stages that will be 10 times the size of the LHC.

Profound discoveries in physics are coming at a dizzying pace. It's a great time to be alive.

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That was a few years ago though. It should be pissed, whipping arse, creating black holes and stuff by now. Last I remember it found that little particle it was looking for but haven't heard much since.

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I'm not crazy. it did break. because a bird dropped bread.