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Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang


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NY Times

DENNIS OVERBYE

MARCH 17, 2014

 

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Alan Guth was one of the first physicists to hypothesize the existence of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Credit Rick Friedman for The New York Times

 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a years appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

 

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.

 

If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.

 

SPECTACULAR REALIZATION, Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it.

 

On Monday, Dr. Guths starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

 

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New Big Bang evidence supports Biblical creation, says Orthodox physicist
Counters nonreligious professor: The Genesis account of the formation of the heavens and the earth has nothing to do with science

David Shamah

March 19 2014

 

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The announcement Monday that researchers had discovered further evidence of the “Big Bang” theory “isn’t going to make anyone who wasn’t a believer in God into one, or vice versa,” Professor Nathan Aviezer of Bar-Ilan University told the Times of Israel. “But one thing the announcement does do is make it clear that the universe had a definite starting point — a creation — as described in the Book of Genesis,” said Aviezer. “To deny this now is to deny scientific fact.”

Today – even before Monday’s revelations – you’d be hard-pressed to find a scientist who disputed the Big Bang theory; it’s the only one that makes scientific sense, said Professor Tsvi Piran, Schwartzmann University Chair at Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics. Whether the Big Bang verifies the Biblical story of creation is another issue. “The Bible and the Big Bang theory are not related,” he said. “They speak to different audiences and describe different things.
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For believing Jews, the story of the Big Bang resonates perfectly with the story of creation told in Genesis, Aviezer said. “Without addressing who or what caused it, the mechanics of the creation process in the Big Bang match the Genesis story perfectly. If I had to make up a theory to match the first passages in Genesis, the Big Bang theory would be it,” said Aviezer.

 

According to Genesis, the universe was created from a ball of energy and light that appeared suddenly from nothingness — exactly the same ball of energy and light described in the Big Bang theory. Throughout the centuries, creation ex nihilo was considered impossible, but today it is taken as scientific fact, said Aviezer.

 

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