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The Birth of the Universe: Major Gravitational Wave Discovery


We've all heard of the Big Bang. The theory goes that the universe started at an extremely dense and hot point and rapidly expanded from there and is now still expanding to this day. Here's the thing though: The "Big Bang" occurred over 13 billion years ago. In case you haven't figured out, it's really hard to look this far into the past and that is why it is has been so hard to conclusively say what the universe was like at its birth.

Except maybe not! Physicists are a clever bunch and have found a way to validate the theory of the rapid expansion of the universe at an early age called Inflation (by early age, I'm literally talking about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second….that's seriously early). What many physicists theorized was something called "gravitational waves". These were kind of like ripples that should have been left over from Inflation. If we could detect these, that would prove that Inflation was true. The thing is though that these "ripples" have been travelling through space for billions of years, so they have become incredibly weak and hard to detect. Technology steps up however as ultra sensitive detectors used by the BICEP2 group (the team that discovered this) allowed the gravitational waves to be detected!

And the results…are outstanding! Not only have they verified the Theory of Inflation and the work of countless physicists, the discovery raises some important questions and leads us now in very interesting directions. The findings better predict the moment at which inflation began (a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang), which in turn slightly change our views on how the early universe developed. Also, the discovery brings us a step closer to a 'Theory of Everything". This is something that we've been working towards for a long time - a theory that would bring gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong/weak forces together in one beautiful framework.

Before this, we had a very accurate history of the universe back to abound 380 000 years after the Big Bang. The number is 380 000 because this is when light from the early universe was "released" (meaning we can only see that far in the past). BICEP2 helps bridge what we knew before to the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, It is quite the discovery indeed and we can expect more to come from subsequent research as other groups work hard to verify the findings.

There are still many questions left unanswered, but this is a huge breakthrough for physics. This, my friends, is the cutting edge. We are slowly clipping away at our ignorance and digging deeper and deeper into some of the most profound questions we have to ask. Science is the tool that allows us to do this.

Big shout out to the BICEP2 group that made this incredible discovery and also to several theoretical physicists who have worked on this problem for so many years.

Here is an awesome video of Professor Andrei Linde learning for the first time that his work had been experimentally verified. You can really see the emotion. It's a beautiful video and reminds you of the years of human sacrifice that go into the amazing science that people do every single day.

 

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