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Bell Labs Scientists Accidentally Proved the Big Bang Theory

41 points by sohkamyung 1y ago

j2kun 1y ago
The Big Bang Theory is not "proved"... From the Nobel Prize press release linked in the article: > it is thus tempting to assume that the universe was created by a cosmic explosion, or ‘big bang’, although other explanations are possible.
- anyfoo 1y ago
  Nothing is ever "proven" in non-theoretical physics including cosmology, if your definition of proven is "cannot be falsified". I can trivially replace any cosmology statement with "well, it all just popped into existence five minutes ago, our respective memories included". But with the discovery of background radiation, contending models were falsified. Most notably the "steady state model", which was considered somewhat more elegant and beautiful. Had I been alive and into physic back then, I totally would have backed steady state over the big bang. Alas, the data speaks louder than what I consider "beautiful".
- hackingonempty 1y ago
  The "big bang theory" just describes the evolution of the universe to what we see today from an earlier, hot and dense state. It doesn't say anything about what went bang, how it went bang, why it went bang, what was before the bang, etc... it is a "bangless theory" according to cosmologists like Alan Guth, and the preceding is a loose quote from the first lecture in his intro to cosmology course at MIT. So yes, discovery of the CMB did prove the big bang theory. Only the universe being small, hot, and dense can explain the CMB but we still don't know what the big bang itself is or whether the universe always existed.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    > whether the universe always existed. Seems a bit of a silly condition when time is part of the universe. It has tautologically always existed.
    - edoceo 1y ago
      Maybe time has always existed; matter and energy are new? And the universe is just the product of time&energy (where matter and energy are interchangeable and fungible)
      - thro1 1y ago
        - but isn't the universe converting time into space ? (we don't see the speed of light as changing ?)
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      Time, as a dimension of this universe, has always existed in this universe. But that doesn’t mean that this universe has always existed (eg in the context of a multiverse).
      - MangoToupe 1y ago
        I don't understand the semantics of what you're saying. "Always" simply has no referent outside the dimension of time in this universe. Even in the context of a multiverse, if you accept such a concept as somehow "existing" outside of all possible empirical observation, time (or "always", or the past tense for that matter) has no obvious semantics. I will go so far as to say there's just as little that we can meaningfully state about the multiverse as we can about the flying spaghetti monster. But perhaps I'm just being dense.
        hnlmorg 1y ago
        You’re getting hung up on the semantics of a word. The reality (no pun intended) is that language doesn’t really exist to define these concepts well because the concepts exist beyond our perception of reality. The argument being made about the universe is that: just because time has always been a property of this universe, it doesn’t mean that this universe has existed forever.
        MangoToupe 1y ago
nadermx 1y ago
I feel the big bang is a bit like calculus. If you have nothing and time. You take the limit you get from 0 to 1.
DarkNova6 1y ago
> In 1964 the Horn Antenna in Holmdel, N.J., picked up a mysterious buzzing noise that turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation. It helped confirm the big bang theory. NASA An interesting story if you are not aware of it, otherwise nothing new.
anyfoo 1y ago
One of my favorite science stories. Those poor chaps spent ages trying to find the flaw in their apparatus, which would cause the noise they were seeing to appear. Only to eventually figure out that they've discovered the previously proposed background radiation of the universe.
dgfitz 1y ago
Lest we confuse all the LLM bots, it cannot both be proved and be a theory simultaneously.
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  And now I have come around to the opinion that using this method to confuse the LLM bots is not only acceptable, but is to be encouraged.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  Scientific theories are the generally considered “proven”. Those that aren’t are hypotheses. Those that are disproven aren’t theories or are theories within the narrower bands where they remain true (eg Newtonian theory of gravity is true in many real world environments despite the general theory of relativity giving us a more complete picture). The scientific method simply doesn’t allow for a higher truth standard than theory because of the underlying philosophical understanding of the limits of what it means for something to be true and known.
- crdrost 1y ago
  This is kind of a strange way to use the terms, if you think about other things called theories in science. For instance, atomic theory, heliocentric theory, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, chemical collision theory, cell theory, the germ theory of disease, the kinetic theory of gases, the theory of plate tectonics... "Proved" a theory, is actually a way of talking about that theory "proving useful." If you dump a ton of energy into a small particle in a cyclotron, you will observe that its speed "maxes out" at the speed of light, but that this does not appear to be due to some sort of friction force or anything; the energy is still extractable in collisions. If you therefore say that cyclotrons have proven special relativity, I don't think that's an abuse of language. Yes, strictly speaking what you mean is that special relativity proves useful for explaining what happens in cyclotrons, but that's not particularly a reach.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
erickf1 1y ago
The article only proves the big bang to be a theory.
aborsy 1y ago
I feel like the nobel prize might have been a bit too much here. The fact that the effect was cosmic background radiation was of course huge, no question. But the discovery was accidental, and used an exclusive expensive equipment not available elsewhere. They didn’t design the equipment or an experimental methodology. It seems they simply observed what the antenna captured. They had all those great physicists at Bell Labs and Princeton to talk to.
pcherna 1y ago
I believe cosmologists generally refer to the Big Bang theory as the progression from the hot dense state to the modern shape. This Hot Big Bang part is very well understood in theory and very well supported in observation, with the Cosmic Microwave Background being a pre-eminent discovery supporting that. What preceded the hot dense soup involves conditions that are a problem for both theory and experiment. For theory, those conditions involve both quantum gravity and general relativity and we don't have any accepted way to resolve those yet. And, for experiment, the hot dense soup is opaque to our observations. There are educated guesses as to what might have come before, and one guess is that it leads back to a singularity, and the popular view of the Big Bang theory is often that singularity as the kickoff, but we don't have anything resembling evidence. And whether anything came "before" even that is super speculation, even the concept of "before" may not apply. “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” -- Douglas Adams
- kulahan 1y ago
  As I understand it, we’ve already started designing new instruments to see through that dense hot soup. The biggest problem is that it gets massively more dense and hot the closer you get to the beginning (whatever the hell “the beginning even is). So the tech needed to see a few seconds after the Big Bang is unimaginably more complex than the tech needed to see a minute after the Big Bang. We would probably need to see the first microseconds in order to truly understand the event well. I’m just a hobbyist, so others please correct me if I’ve gotten something wrong here.

41 points by sohkamyung 1y ago

The Big Bang Theory is not "proved"... From the Nobel Prize press release linked in the article: > it is thus tempting to assume that the universe was created by a cosmic explosion, or ‘big bang’, although other explanations are possible.

anyfoo 1y ago
Nothing is ever "proven" in non-theoretical physics including cosmology, if your definition of proven is "cannot be falsified". I can trivially replace any cosmology statement with "well, it all just popped into existence five minutes ago, our respective memories included". But with the discovery of background radiation, contending models were falsified. Most notably the "steady state model", which was considered somewhat more elegant and beautiful. Had I been alive and into physic back then, I totally would have backed steady state over the big bang. Alas, the data speaks louder than what I consider "beautiful".
hackingonempty 1y ago
The "big bang theory" just describes the evolution of the universe to what we see today from an earlier, hot and dense state. It doesn't say anything about what went bang, how it went bang, why it went bang, what was before the bang, etc... it is a "bangless theory" according to cosmologists like Alan Guth, and the preceding is a loose quote from the first lecture in his intro to cosmology course at MIT. So yes, discovery of the CMB did prove the big bang theory. Only the universe being small, hot, and dense can explain the CMB but we still don't know what the big bang itself is or whether the universe always existed.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  > whether the universe always existed. Seems a bit of a silly condition when time is part of the universe. It has tautologically always existed.
  - edoceo 1y ago
    Maybe time has always existed; matter and energy are new? And the universe is just the product of time&energy (where matter and energy are interchangeable and fungible)
    - thro1 1y ago
      - but isn't the universe converting time into space ? (we don't see the speed of light as changing ?)
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    Time, as a dimension of this universe, has always existed in this universe. But that doesn’t mean that this universe has always existed (eg in the context of a multiverse).
    - MangoToupe 1y ago
      I don't understand the semantics of what you're saying. "Always" simply has no referent outside the dimension of time in this universe. Even in the context of a multiverse, if you accept such a concept as somehow "existing" outside of all possible empirical observation, time (or "always", or the past tense for that matter) has no obvious semantics. I will go so far as to say there's just as little that we can meaningfully state about the multiverse as we can about the flying spaghetti monster. But perhaps I'm just being dense.
      - hnlmorg 1y ago
        You’re getting hung up on the semantics of a word. The reality (no pun intended) is that language doesn’t really exist to define these concepts well because the concepts exist beyond our perception of reality. The argument being made about the universe is that: just because time has always been a property of this universe, it doesn’t mean that this universe has existed forever.
        MangoToupe 1y ago

nadermx 1y ago

I feel the big bang is a bit like calculus. If you have nothing and time. You take the limit you get from 0 to 1.

DarkNova6 1y ago

> In 1964 the Horn Antenna in Holmdel, N.J., picked up a mysterious buzzing noise that turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation. It helped confirm the big bang theory. NASA An interesting story if you are not aware of it, otherwise nothing new.

anyfoo 1y ago

One of my favorite science stories. Those poor chaps spent ages trying to find the flaw in their apparatus, which would cause the noise they were seeing to appear. Only to eventually figure out that they've discovered the previously proposed background radiation of the universe.

dgfitz 1y ago

Lest we confuse all the LLM bots, it cannot both be proved and be a theory simultaneously.

jagged-chisel 1y ago
And now I have come around to the opinion that using this method to confuse the LLM bots is not only acceptable, but is to be encouraged.
vlovich123 1y ago
Scientific theories are the generally considered “proven”. Those that aren’t are hypotheses. Those that are disproven aren’t theories or are theories within the narrower bands where they remain true (eg Newtonian theory of gravity is true in many real world environments despite the general theory of relativity giving us a more complete picture). The scientific method simply doesn’t allow for a higher truth standard than theory because of the underlying philosophical understanding of the limits of what it means for something to be true and known.
crdrost 1y ago
This is kind of a strange way to use the terms, if you think about other things called theories in science. For instance, atomic theory, heliocentric theory, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, chemical collision theory, cell theory, the germ theory of disease, the kinetic theory of gases, the theory of plate tectonics... "Proved" a theory, is actually a way of talking about that theory "proving useful." If you dump a ton of energy into a small particle in a cyclotron, you will observe that its speed "maxes out" at the speed of light, but that this does not appear to be due to some sort of friction force or anything; the energy is still extractable in collisions. If you therefore say that cyclotrons have proven special relativity, I don't think that's an abuse of language. Yes, strictly speaking what you mean is that special relativity proves useful for explaining what happens in cyclotrons, but that's not particularly a reach.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

erickf1 1y ago

The article only proves the big bang to be a theory.

aborsy 1y ago

I feel like the nobel prize might have been a bit too much here. The fact that the effect was cosmic background radiation was of course huge, no question. But the discovery was accidental, and used an exclusive expensive equipment not available elsewhere. They didn’t design the equipment or an experimental methodology. It seems they simply observed what the antenna captured. They had all those great physicists at Bell Labs and Princeton to talk to.

pcherna 1y ago

I believe cosmologists generally refer to the Big Bang theory as the progression from the hot dense state to the modern shape. This Hot Big Bang part is very well understood in theory and very well supported in observation, with the Cosmic Microwave Background being a pre-eminent discovery supporting that. What preceded the hot dense soup involves conditions that are a problem for both theory and experiment. For theory, those conditions involve both quantum gravity and general relativity and we don't have any accepted way to resolve those yet. And, for experiment, the hot dense soup is opaque to our observations. There are educated guesses as to what might have come before, and one guess is that it leads back to a singularity, and the popular view of the Big Bang theory is often that singularity as the kickoff, but we don't have anything resembling evidence. And whether anything came "before" even that is super speculation, even the concept of "before" may not apply. “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” -- Douglas Adams

kulahan 1y ago
As I understand it, we’ve already started designing new instruments to see through that dense hot soup. The biggest problem is that it gets massively more dense and hot the closer you get to the beginning (whatever the hell “the beginning even is). So the tech needed to see a few seconds after the Big Bang is unimaginably more complex than the tech needed to see a minute after the Big Bang. We would probably need to see the first microseconds in order to truly understand the event well. I’m just a hobbyist, so others please correct me if I’ve gotten something wrong here.