Reflectorites
Here are a couple of Yahoo stories which claim that the universe is "flat".
and growing apart at an increasing rate.
My understanding is that is against the original predictions of cosmic
inflation (on which many anti-design multiple universe theories depend).
This also means also that this is the one and only expansion phase of this
universe and any lingering hopes that it would expand and contract in an
eternal cycle (and thus rule out creation) are therefore further dashed.
Steve
============================================================
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000426/sc/universe_images_1.html
Yahoo!
[...]
Wednesday April 26 8:18 PM ET
NASA Shows New Images of Infant Universe
Reuters Photo
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists unveiled the first detailed pictures of the
infant universe on Wednesday, showing it to be tiny, hot and cosmically "flat."
Looking back in time to just 300,000 years after the theoretical Big Bang that
started it all, the images show a blotchy pattern of hot and cold spots over a small
segment of the sky.
Each blotch looks about as big as the full moon might, but most are trillions of
miles across. What they show is nothing less than a breakthrough to understanding
just what happened shortly after a massive explosion some 15 billion years ago.
"These are literally snapshots of what the universe looked like when it was just a
few hundred thousand years old, an epoch when it was fully a thousand times
smaller and hotter than it is today," Andrew Lange, an astrophysicist from the
California Institute of Technology, said at a NASA briefing releasing the images.
The images were captured two years ago by an international experiment known as
BOOMERANG, or Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation
and Geophysics. Essentially, scientists sent a helium balloon circling high over
Antarctica with a highly sensitive telescope in tow.
[...]
The telescope aimed to improve on early images made in 1991 of the heat left over
from the Big Bang. Hot spots left over from this monstrous cosmic blast gave
scientists clues about the development of the universe.
The BOOMERANG images are far more precise, and give support to the theory of
a "flat" universe, rather than a "curved" one, astrophysicist Paolo deBernardis said
at the briefing.
While hard to visualize, the notion that the universe is cosmically "flat" simply
means that rays of light that start out parallel will stay that way, going on forever
without intersecting or veering away from each other, deBernardis said.
This has bearing on what the universe is made of. DeBernardis and others at the
briefing said the BOOMERANG findings indicate the universe is composed of
about 35 percent matter -- only 5 percent regular matter and 30 percent mysterious
dark matter -- and 65 percent dark energy.
This dark energy is thought to be a force pushing the galaxies apart and speeding
up the expansion of the universe.
E-mail this story
[...]
Copyright (c) 2000 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
[...]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000426/sc/science_universe_1.html
Yahoo!
[...]
Wednesday April 26 2:11 PM ET
Scientists Say Universe Is Flat But Growing
LONDON (Reuters) - Intrepid sailors long ago proved the earth was round, but
now Italian cosmologists say it is the ever-expanding universe that is as flat as a
pancake.
By measuring variations in ancient radiation from the Big Bang with a microwave
telescope carried high above Antarctica by a balloon, the researchers said their
"temperature map" was "consistent with a flat, Euclidean Universe."
[...]
Detailing their findings in the latest issue of Nature, Professor P de Bernardis of
the Rome University and his international team tracked the blizzard of photons
created when the cosmos emerged 10 to 20 billion years ago.
The photons -- formed with atomic hydrogen as the cosmos heated and then
released to travel freely as it cooled -- still abound as cosmic microwave
background (CMB), the source of about one percent of the noise on television
sets.
Commenting on the article, Wayne Hu of the Institute for Advanced Studies,
School of Natural Sciences in New Jersey said "temperature maps of the CMB
form a snapshot image of the Universe when it was extremely young."
"The...result supports a flat universe, which means that the total mass and energy
density of the universe is equal to the so-called critical density," Wu wrote.
"A perfectly flat universe will remain at the critical density and keep on expanding
forever, because there is not enough matter to make it recollapse in a 'big crunch'."
E-mail this story
[...]
Copyright (c) 2000 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
[...]
============================================================
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The ability of species to adapt by changing one base pair at a time on any
gene, and to do so with comparative rapidity if selective advantages are
reasonably large, explains the fine details of the matching of many species
to their environment. It was from the careful observation of such matchings
by naturalists in the mid-nineteenth century that the Darwinian theory
arose. Because the observations were made with extreme care, it was
highly probable that immediate inferences drawn from them would prove to
be correct, as the work of Chapters 3 to 6 shows to be the case. What was
in no way guaranteed by the evidence, however, was that evolutionary
inferences correctly made in the small for species and their varieties could
be extrapolated to broader taxonomic categories, to kingdoms, divisions,
classes, and orders. Yet this is what the Darwinian theory did, and it was
by going far outside its guaranteed range of validity that the theory ran into
controversies and difficulties which have never been cleared up over more
than a century." (Hoyle F., "Mathematics of Evolution," [1987], Acorn
Enterprises: Memphis TN, 1999, p.137).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 27 2000 - 19:17:13 EDT