A team with a telescope (BICEP2) at the South Pole
announced March 17 that they have detected the
imprint of primordial gravitational waves on the
cosmic microwave background radiation.
http://www.nature.com/news/telescope-captures-view-
of-gravitational-waves-1.14876
http://www.nature.com/news/gravitational-wave-finding-causes-spring-cleaning-in-physics-1.14910
If this finding is confirmed it will have huge
implications. According to (my reading of) the
summaries put up by Nature, this would:
1. Come close to confirming inflation theory, and
give evidence for a multiverse.
2. Come close to disproving the cyclical (oscillating
universe) and ekpyrotic (colliding branes) theories.
3. Demonstrate that gravity is a quantized phenomenon
and potentially provide insight into quantum gravity.
4. Tell cosmologists when inflation started, when it
ended, how long it took, how fast the universe
inflated, how the rate of inflation varied over time,
and at what energy level it happened.
5. Start pruning models from the inflation theory hedge,
and possibly from string theory and axion theory.
First Higgs bosons, and now gravitational waves. I'm
excited!
Now we just need to turn this new data into a way to
travel faster than light ;)
~ E.S.
___
http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com