I was just about to write my section on the discovery of the echo of inflation found in the CMB by BICEP 2 and so I googled it again just to check some of my facts. In doing this, I found the majority of the results were articles and blogs explaining how the results from BICEP 2 were not accurate and that an even more recent set of data from the Planck satellite had shown that the ‘echo’ had not actually been discovered yet. Therefore, I have had to remove this from my final product.
2nd February 2015
I have pretty much just been writing my final product and working on my presentation lately… Today I was writing about the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs boson 🙂
24th January 2015: Presentation and stuff
I’ve been speaking to my supervisor about when I should do the presentation and we’ve agreed that after our college mock week will probably be best. I have started making notes on my powerpoint about the research process but also the general gist of my final product (which is still going well). I will start the successes, failures and solutions just as soon as I’ve done everything else.
5th January 2015
Happy New Year! So I am still writing my final product bit by bit but realised that I had left out some really important headings… I am now adding ‘The Anthropic Principle’ and ‘The Fine Tuning of the Universe’ to the line up (not sure how I missed them really).
I will also be starting to make my presentation this week so that I can do that as soon as possible.
30th December 2014: A quick update
Now that Christmas is over I have started to put pen to paper and using the structure on my last post I am working on the bones of the essay which I will pad out once I have my basic ideas down.
12th December 2014: Planning
Having had the meeting yesterday, I decided that I needed to come up with a more coherent plan (which may not look particularly coherent but it works in my head – it’s more of a prompt for me really)
- Religion vs. Science?
- Naturalism/Materialism
- Mechanism vs. Agency
- The problem with science
- Aunt Matilda and Henry Ford
- In the Beginning
- The Bible – Genesis 1:1, John 1:1-3
- General Theory of Relativity
- Red Shift
- Universe expanding
- Sagan’s Oscillating Model (not sure)
- The Standard Model
- The Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs Boson
- Fluctuations in the Quantum Vacuum
- BICEP2
- The Multiverse
- Dawkins
- Other most plausible multiverse – Daughter and infinite
- But what about First Cause?
- The Creator
- Why is it OK to believe that God doesn’t need a cause but the universe does?
- The Cosmological Argument
12th December 2014: Presentation meeting
So yesterday we had a meeting about our presentations and were basically told what kinds of things should be in it. There should be an overview of the main aims of the project and a summary of the product. Steph highlighted how important it is to use non-specialist language because the audience will not be made up of specialists in the subject. She also stressed how we need to give evidence of our successes, failures, why they were unsuccessful and how we overcame the problems. This is obviously a very brief summary of the meeting so I will attach the PowerPoint here:
11th December 2014: A Quick Note
I know I haven’t posted much for a while as I have the joy that is coursework at the moment! So I had a meeting with my supervisor last week to discuss what I should do next. I feel confident in the research I have conducted so far but will post more about the debate/planning when I get a chance. I also have a meeting today to discuss my presentation and I will probably start drafting soon…
2nd November 2014: Seeing Red and Organising research
https://keychests.com/item.php?v=arrooiijjmo
Notes on ‘Seeing Red’:
- ‘The Big Bang has, in reality, been toppled’ page ii of the preface
- if the cause of the redshifts is not understood properly, distances can be wrong by factors of 10 to 100
- it has been assumed that redshifts only mean ‘recession velocity’ (moving away from each other, expanding universe)
- His conclusion is that the universe is not expanding…
- distance between galaxies is great and light takes a considerable amount of time to get to us
- so we see the galaxy as it was when the light left it (younger)
- universe can be indefinitely large and will unfold itself from many points within itself
- Friedmann solution, 1922 — page 249
- assumption that particle masses are constant forever
- led to expanding, curved space-time in which all redshifts are due to increased recession velocity with increasing distance
- which then led to an observational contradiction which required extragalactic redshifts to be mostly age related, not velocity
- Machian physics
- simple solution that redshifts are proportional to particle masses and hence to their age since their creation.
- leads to a predicted Hubble constant which depends on only one parameter, the inverse of the age of our galaxy – this agrees with the observations much better than the Big Bang theory does.
I have now started to organise my research to fit my argument…
How this has disproved the Creationist view…
- Various versions of the multiverse
- Parallel universes colliding
- Infinite universes using all possible laws of physics to find a combination that works
- Fluctuations in a quantum vacuum – I know this is a reason for the BB but am unsure as to why it is the most accepted
- http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/quantum-fluctuations-and-their-energy/
- http://www.icr.org/article/universe-from-nothing/
- Quantum Fluctuations are subatomic particles ‘popping’ randomly into existence and the greater the energy, the shorter the time is exists before disappearing
- If this is how the universe came into being, we would expect there to be a huge amount of energy so it should disappear almost instantaneously
- difficult to see how our universe came from such a fluctuation
- If the total energy of the universe id exactly zero, it can work so cosmological constant is thought to be zero
- Dawkins daughter universes
- Remove the idea of the chance of fine tuning
- Universes ‘evolve’ so it’s not chance
- The Anthropic principle
How it hasn’t disproved anything…
- The idea of a beginning
- Hubble Telescope and Red Shift – expanding universe, inflation = beginning
- also add the other side of the red shift
- In the 1960s, there was uproar at the idea that the universe may have a beginning.
- Every relevant scripture in the Bible states that the universe began
- Creationism has been postulating this for centuries and it is only now that scientific evidence has emerged that science has caught up with the idea of a beginning
- BICEP2 and the Smoking Gun – inflation still proves beginning
- Hubble Telescope and Red Shift – expanding universe, inflation = beginning
- Mechanism not agency (Einstein’s theory based on mechanism)
- Aunt Matilda
- Henry Ford
- Multiverse – still doesn’t explain the First Cause (various versions only push back the point of creation)
- Cosmological Argument
- addresses the idea of a logical way to explain the universe’s existence with a Creator
- The Anthropic principle (works for both sides)- very difficult to believe that the incredible fine-tuning is not because it was created by an all-powerful designer
2nd November 2014: Filling the gaps/organising research
I realised I haven’t posted anything for a while – I thought I had already posted this but apparently not! I’ve compiled a list of the discoveries I’ve been looking into to help me organise my research but also to find any gaps that I may need to research further (text in green is discoveries I have added).
1915: Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity
1929: Hubble Telescope, universe is expanding
1929: Red Shift, universe is expanding
1940s: estimated that background radiation should be a few degrees above absolute zero
1965: Background radiation measured at about 3.7°
1960s: suggested that universe had a beginning, BB proposed
Discovering how light elements are formed – need furnace like the BB
*1970s: Standard Model developed
- 12 different matter particles and 4 forces
- 6 quarks (make up protons and neutrons) and 6 leptons (make up electrons and neutral charged counterparts)
- Gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak (forces)
- Can’t fit gravity in yet
- Predicted existence of Higgs boson
- http://science.howstuffworks.com/higgs-boson1.htm
*2012: Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs Boson
- Each force has a carrier particle, called a boson, that acts on matter
- Higgs boson may have a similar function that transmits mass itself
- What is matter doesn’t inherently have mass but gains mass by passing through a field (Higgs field)
- Acts on particles differently
- Photons pass through
- Some bosons get mass
- Everything that has mass gets it by passing through the Higgs field
- Higgs carrier particle can affect other particles hence this can happen
- Found a particle that behaves like the Higgs boson should
2014: BICEP2, discovery of gravitational ripples that could only be there if inflation happened
So, I tried contacting the experts from Reboot but neither of them got back to me which was a shame. Instead, I went to AllExperts and asked the question to Professor James Gort ‘where did the energy needed for quantum fluctuations come from?’ He replied very quickly and here is his response…
I’m afraid science doesn’t have an answer to the origin of the energy contained (and then released) in the quantum fluctuations. Nor does science have a good explanation of what “energy” actually is. Most of the equations (even in quantum field theory) start off with the Lagrangian (or Hamiltonian), which are just ways of writing potential and kinetic energy. But the concept of “energy” is unexplained.
From your question, I assume you are adopting the “classic” view of Big Bang cosmology – which is still argumentative. It is ‘generally’ assumed that the Big Bang occurred some 13.7 billion years ago. Although this idea is believed to be valid by the majority of cosmologists, it is by no means universally accepted. The “Big Bang”, based on Hubble’s velocity-distance relation and the microwave background radiation, is very much still a theory, and there are alternative theories. Some observations do not support an expanding universe or the Big Bang. There are several references concerning this, but perhaps the most authoritative person is Halton Arp, a leading astronomer and researcher on galaxies, who wrote “Seeing Red“. That book is highly recommended to get an alternative view. Or read “A Different Approach to Cosmology” by Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar. That’s another great book which gives a scientific view on how the universe has always been in a steady state. I’ve attached a few references from Amazon.co.uk. If you’re interested, pick up one or more of these books. And please have an open mind. That’s the way science progresses.
This was extremely useful to me and has prompted me to look into ‘Seeing Red’ as suggested (the underlined sections show the parts I found particularly useful).
One EPQ to rule them all 