Friday 12 February 2016

Making Waves


Yesterday's announcement of 'the discovery of gravitational waves' was a prime example of a stupid mainstream media not understanding reality.

Although the LIGO crew have indeed found gravitational waves relating to a collision between two Black Holes eons ago, the first discovery of gravitational waves was made public on March 17th 2014.

John Kovac and his fellow scientists from the BICEP2 experiment reported that via three years of microwave measurements from the South Pole, they had detected colossal gravitational waves close to a billion light-years long.

The LIGO discovery relates to a cataclysmic collision of two Black Holes squeezing more than our Sun's mass into a volume smaller than Glasgow.

Max Tegmark: "What could possibly have created the vast waves BICEP2 saw, given that our Universe seems to contain no objects large enough to make them? In my opinion, the only compelling explanation for these waves is that inflation made them, by violently doubling the size of space in about a hundredth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth (10 to the power of minus 38) of a second and repeating it at least eighty times.

"So how seriously should we take inflation? It had emerged as the most successful and popular theory for what happened early on even before BICEP2, as experiments gradually confirmed one of its predictions: that our Universe should be large, expanding and approximately homogenous, isotropic and flat, with tiny fluctuations in the cosmic baby pictures that were roughly scale invariant, adiabatic and Gaussian."