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-------------------------- 2761 - BIG BANG - is the theory in crisis?
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- These theories that have lasted the last 100 years since Einstein introduced the Theory of Relativity are suffering too many anomalies. As science gets better and better at diving into the details more inconsistencies surface. There must be some new science there. We just need to learn what it is?
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- A series of powerful observations has made it clear that our universe has expanded for billions of years, emerging from the hot, dense state we call the ‘Big Bang“. Over the past several decades, new types of precise measurements have allowed scientists to scrutinize and refine this account, letting them reconstruct the history of our universe in ever greater detail. The devil is in the details.
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- When we compare the results from different kinds of measurements: the expansion rate of the universe, the temperature patterns in the light released when the first atoms formed, the abundances of various chemical elements, and the distribution of galaxies and other large-scale structures, we find stunning agreement. OK?
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- Each of these lines of evidence supports the conclusion that our universe expanded and evolved in just the way that the Big Bang theory predicts. From this perspective, our universe appears to be remarkably comprehensible.
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- But cosmologists have struggled to understand some essential facts about the universe. We know almost nothing about dark matter and dark energy, which together make up more than 95 percent of the total mass/energy in existence today.
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- We don’t understand how the universe’s protons, electrons, and neutrons could have survived the aftereffects of the Big Bang. In fact, everything we know about the laws of physics tells us that these particles should have been destroyed by antimatter long ago.
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- In order to make sense of the universe as we observe it, cosmologists have been forced to conclude that space, during its earliest moments, must have undergone a brief and spectacular period of hyper fast expansion known as “cosmic inflation“. Yet we know next to nothing about this era of cosmic history.
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- It is possible that these puzzles are little more than loose ends, each of which will be resolved as cosmologists continue to investigate our universe in greater detail. But so far, these problems have proven to be remarkably stubborn and persistent.
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- With the goal of identifying the individual particles that make up dark matter, scientists have designed and built a series of impressive experiments. Yet, ,no such particles have appeared. Even powerful particle accelerators like the “Large Hadron Collider” have revealed nothing that moves us closer to resolving any of these cosmic mysteries.
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- Despite having measured the expansion history and large-scale structure of the universe in ever increasing detail, we have not gained any substantively greater understanding of the nature of dark energy, the force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the cosmos.
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- It is from this perspective that some cosmologists have found themselves asking whether these cosmic mysteries might be symptoms of something more significant than a few loose threads. Perhaps these puzzles are not as unrelated as they might seem, but are instead collectively pointing us toward a very different picture of our universe and its earliest moments.
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- We have learned some things by not discovering dark matter. Dark matter is likely the most celebrated problem facing modern cosmologists. Astronomers have determined that most of the matter in our universe does not consist of atoms or any other known substances, but of something else. Something that does not appreciably radiate, reflect, or absorb light, or any other electromagnetic radiation.
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- Researchers have long recognized that if dark matter particles interact through a force that is approximately as powerful as the weak nuclear force (which governs radioactive decay), then the number of these particles that should have emerged from the Big Bang would roughly match the measured abundance of dark matter found in the universe today. With this in mind, weakly interacting massive particles, WIMPs, became the best guess for dark matter’s nature.
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- Physicists have engaged in an ambitious experimental program to identify these WIMPs and learn how they were forged in the Big Bang. Over the past couple of decades, researchers have deployed a succession of increasingly sensitive dark matter detectors in deep underground laboratories that are capable of detecting individual collisions between a dark matter particle and the atoms that make up the target.
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- These sophisticated experiments performed better than design even anticipated. But no such collisions have been observed. A decade ago, many scientists were optimistic that these experiments would bear fruit. But dark matter has turned out to be very different, and far more elusive, than we had once imagined.
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- Although it’s still possible that dark matter could consist of some form of difficult-to-detect WIMPs, the lack of any signal from underground experiments has led many physicists to shift their focus toward other dark matter candidates.
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- One such contender is a hypothetical ultralight particle known as an “axion“. Axions are predicted according to a theory proposed by particle physicists in 1977. Although scientists are searching for axions in experiments that use powerful magnetic fields to convert them into photons, these investigations have yet to place very strict constraints on the properties of these particles.
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- Another possibility that could explain why dark matter has been so difficult to detect is that the first moments of the universe may have played out much differently than cosmologists have long imagined.
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- Calculations show that the fledgling universe should have produced vast quantities of t
WIMPS. These particles were formed during the first millionth of a second or so after the Big Bang, when they reached a state of equilibrium with the surrounding plasma of quarks, gluons, and other subatomic particles.
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- The number of WIMPs that could have survived these conditions and ultimately contributed to the dark matter found throughout today’s universe depends on how, and how often, they interacted. But when carrying out calculations such as these, scientists generally assume that space expanded steadily during the first fraction of a second, without any unexpected events or transitions. It is entirely plausible that this simply was not the case.
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- Although cosmologists know a great deal about how our universe expanded and evolved over most of its history, they know relatively little about the first seconds that followed the Big Bang and next to nothing about the first trillionth of a second.
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- When it comes to how our universe may have evolved, or to the events that may have taken place during these earliest moments, we have essentially no direct observations on which to rely. This era is hidden from view, buried beneath impenetrable layers of energy, distance, and time.
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- Our understanding of this period of cosmic history is, in many respects, little more than an informed guess based on inference and extrapolation. Look far enough back in time, and almost everything we know about our universe could have been different.
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- Matter and energy existed in different forms than they do today, and they may have experienced forces that have not yet been discovered. Key events and transitions may have taken place that science has yet to illuminate. Matter likely interacted in ways that it no longer does, and space and time themselves may have behaved differently than they do in the world we know.
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- With this in mind, many cosmologists have begun to consider the possibility that our failure to detect the particles that make up dark matter might be telling us not only about the nature of dark matter itself, but also about the era in which it was created. By studying dark matter, scientists are learning about the first moments after the Big Bang.
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- It all started with how fast space is expanding? In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distances. This provided the first clear evidence that our universe is expanding. Ever since, the current rate of this expansion, called the “Hubble constant of Expansion“, has been one of the key properties of our universe that cosmologists study.
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- Hubble’s original determination of this constant expansion was plagued with systematic errors that led him to overestimate the expansion rate by a factor of 7. As recently as the 1990s, textbooks often quoted values ranging from as low as 50 to as high as 100 kilometers per second for every million parsecs (Mpc) separating two points in space.
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- (One megaparsec [Mpc] equals 3.26 million light-years.)
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- Although the precision of these measurements has improved considerably over the past two decades, no consensus yet exists regarding the correct value for this quantity. In fact, as these measurements have improved, the results from different methods seem to disagree with one another even more.
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- One way to determine the Hubble constant is to directly measure how fast objects are moving away from us, just as Hubble did in 1929. For his measurements, Hubble used a special class of pulsating stars known as Cepheid variables, whose intrinsic luminosities track nicely with the periods over which they brighten and fade.
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- Modern cosmologists continue to use Cepheids for this purpose, but they also employ other classes of objects, including type 1a supernovae, which are exploding white dwarfs that all have the same approximate luminosity.
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- When researchers combine the latest data, they find that the universe is currently expanding at a rate of about 72 to 76 km/s/Mpc.
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- Cosmologists also can infer the value of the Hubble constant by studying the primordial light released when the first atoms formed some 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The detailed temperature patterns of this light, known as the “cosmic microwave background“, serve as a map that shows how matter was distributed throughout the universe at that time.
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- When scrutinized, this map reveals many details about our young universe, including how much matter and other forms of energy were present, as well as how fast space was expanding. It also tells us that the Hubble constant is about 67 km/s/Mpc, a significantly smaller value than cosmologists have found through more direct measurements.
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- What does this mismatch mean for our universe? Assuming that these studies have correctly accounted for all the systematic uncertainties inherent in the observations, these two ways of determining the Hubble constant appear to be incompatible.
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- To make these discrepant results mutually consistent, astronomers would be forced to change how we think the cosmos expanded and evolved, or to reconsider the forms of matter and energy in the universe during the first few hundred thousand years following the Big Bang.
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- According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the rate at which space expands depends on the density of matter and other forms of energy it contains. When cosmologists infer the value of the Hubble Constant from the cosmic microwave background, they have to make assumptions about the amounts of dark matter, neutrinos, and other substances that were present.
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- Perhaps the simplest way to explain the tension between the different measurements of the Hubble constant would be to hypothesize that the cosmos contained more energy than expected during the first hundred thousand years or so following the Big Bang. The energy causing expansion might have taken the form of an exotic species of light and feebly interacting particles, or of some kind of dark energy associated with the vacuum of space itself that has long since disappeared from the universe.
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- Or, perhaps, there is something else we don’t understand about this era of cosmic history. We simply do not yet know how to resolve this intriguing mystery.
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- Despite decades of effort, the nature of dark matter remains unknown, and the problem of dark energy seems nearly intractable. We do not know how the particles that make up the atoms in our universe managed to survive the first moments of the Big Bang, and we still know little about cosmic inflation, how it played out, or how it came to an end.
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- We might be on a significant precipice of scientific history, similar to what we experienced in 1904. At that time, physics had never before seemed to be on such solid footing. For more than two centuries, the principles of Newtonian physics had been applied successfully to problem after problem.
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- Although physicists expanded their knowledge into areas such as electricity, magnetism, and heat, these aspects of the world were really not so different from those Newton had described hundreds of years earlier. To the physicists of 1904, the world seemed well understood. There was little reason to expect a revolution.
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- Similar to the situation cosmologists confront today, however, the physicists of 1904 had not yet been able to address a few challenges. The medium through which they believed light traveled, called the luminiferous ether, should have induced variations in the speed of light, and yet light always moves through space at the same rate.
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- Astronomers observed the orbit of Mercury to be slightly different from what Newtonian physics predicted, leading some to suggest that an unknown planet, dubbed Vulcan, might be perturbing Mercury’s trajectory.
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- Physicists in 1904 had no idea what powered the Sun. No known chemical or mechanical process could possibly generate so much energy over such a long time. Scientists knew various chemical elements emitted and absorbed light with specific patterns, none of which physicists had the slightest idea how to explain. In other words, the inner workings of the atom remained a total and utter mystery.
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- Although few saw it coming, in hindsight, it’s clear that these problems were heralds of a revolution in physics. And in 1905, the revolution arrived, ushered in by a young Albert Einstein and his new theory of relativity.
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- We now know that the luminiferous ether does not exist and that there is no planet Vulcan. Instead, these fictions were symptoms of the underlying failure of Newtonian physics. Relativity beautifully solved and explained each of these mysteries without any need for new substances or planets.
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- When scientists combined relativity with the new theory of quantum physics, it became possible to explain the Sun’s longevity, as well as the inner workings of atoms. These new theories even opened doors to new and previously unimagined lines of inquiry, including that of cosmology itself.
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- There is no question that we have made incredible progress in understanding our universe, its history, and its origin. But it is also undeniable that we are profoundly puzzled, especially when it comes to the earliest moments of cosmic history.
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- When you go beyond the realm of established theory, particle physicists are ready to move heaven and earth, and, even giant magnets. In 2013, researchers packed up a circular magnet the width of a basketball court and sent it on a 3,200-mile trip from New York to Illinois.
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- Over the course of 35 days, the 15-ton magnet sailed down the East Coast, rounded the tip of Florida, floated up the Mississippi, and rode on the back of a truck to Fermilab, where it now serves as the central element of the revamped Muon g-2 experiment. Particle physicists went through this colossal effort to investigate a 3-parts-per-billion disagreement between theory and experiment over the value of the muon’s magnetic moment.
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- Although it may seem small, this discrepancy is one of the longest-standing anomalies in particle physics. Here, “anomaly” means a statistically significant experimental divergence from theoretical prediction.
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- The theory in this case is the “standard model of particle physics” for all the known particles and forces besides gravity. The muon anomaly is not alone in contesting the standard model: other anomalies concern bottom quarks, neutrinos, and kaons.
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- In recent years, these anomalies have taken on a new level of importance as possible routes to “new physics,” an umbrella term for phenomena unexplained by the standard model.
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- There are more conspicuous paths to new physics, such as discovering a dark matter particle or unifying gravity with quantum physics. But these big problems have remained stubbornly out of reach, so many particle physicists are looking for inspiration from smaller problems.
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- Anomalies are a good driver of scientific creativity. It’s like a paradox that you have to resolve. Anomalies force experimentalists to find ways of reducing systematic uncertainties, analyzing their data, and conducting more precise searches.
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- Theorists, meanwhile, must grapple with anomalous results by building models that often assume new particles, such as a cousin to the Z boson, a relative to the Higgs boson, or even a hybrid between the two types of matter particles (leptons and quarks).
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- So far, none of these proposed additions has been observed. But with more data coming in from experiments. Researchers are waiting to see if any anomalies become discoveries.
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- When gambling, it’s wise to remember that the house always wins. The same could be said for betting on anomalies. Over the past few decades, just about every experimental result in conflict with the standard model’s predictions has disappeared over time, becoming less and less of a discrepancy as more data are taken.
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- What usually happens with an anomaly is that it goes away because it’s a statistical fluctuation, or it’s an experimental error.
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- Anomalies are discrepancies significant to 3 sigma, which corresponds to a fluke that would occur in one-in-740 runs of the experiment. Results below 3 sigma are frequently overturned.
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- Most anomalies never make it to 5 sigma (equivalent to a one-in-3.5-million-chance fluke), which is required to claim a discovery. In 2011, the OPERA experiment infamously reported seeing neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Their observation was significant to more than 6 sigma but turned out to be an experimental error.
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- A few years later, an excess of two-photon events at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN seemed to suggest the existence of a new particle with a mass of 750 GeV. Theorists conjectured that such a particle could be evidence of supersymmetry, a mathematically elegant theory for new physics that many have long hoped to be true.
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- The excitement led to over 500 papers being published on this anomaly. But eventually, it too disappeared. There was no experimental error, but the 3.5-sigma result faded as further data showed that it was no more than a statistical fluctuation.
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- Anomalies are as much the product of theoretical predictions as they are of experimental measurements. The experimental value for the muon’s magnetic moment has remained essentially unchanged since 2001, when it was last measured. But the anomaly has gotten stronger. now reaching 3.3 sigma, as theoretical calculations of the muon’s magnetic interactions have improved.
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- Anomalies may be regarded with skepticism, but they often open the door for theorists to play. Many theorists attempt to link anomalies together in models. The best models, according to theorists, are those that fit the data naturally, without too much finagling.
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- There is no easy way to clarify the status or confidence physicists have in anomalies.
Since the Higgs was discovered in 2012, anomalies have gained currency as some of the only breadcrumbs available for particle physicists to follow on the path toward new physics.
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- Coming up with models that explain minute discrepancies in the data may lack some of the grandeur of trying to solve quantum gravity. But for the time being, anomalies offer fresh challenges to the standard model.
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- Particle physicists will continue hunting down blips in the data and proposing new models to explain the discrepancies, even though the future is uncertain. These are the paths science must follow to reach new discoveries.
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- June 14, 2020 2761
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