Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

No, i actually think you have an issue here, a fear or dislike of knowledge, a certain 'shyness 2 know'. Like your different uses of the word "know" in philosophic vs. normal language indicate your own thinking that you really cannot know, and that others cannot know either.

You are ambivalent re. knowledge.

'Ambivalent', as having several, incompatible definitions of what it is. In the "day to day life" you can know, but not in philosophy. That's ambivalent.

Do you suppose that scientists arrived at the Standard Model via some esoteric revelation from a "45% god-ILF-of the gaps"?

...Can you distinguish ciphertext there from random text ... especially when you know nothing about the 'plaintext of the aliens' (if exists) and about their encryption system and communication channels ... and the facilities to encrypt the light (if they use light channels at all, and not some channels in the dark energy, for example)?

The greatest philosophers who have ever lived (I am not one of them) have undoubtedly used words like "know" differently in different contexts.

I may not KNOW if the world is the manifestation that naive realists consider to be reality...but I do live in that manifestation. I do not walk in front of tractor trailers because I suggest they may be an illusion.

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The greatest philosophers who have ever lived (I am not one of them) have undoubtedly used words like "know" differently in different contexts.

Like who?

I may not KNOW if the world is the manifestation that naive realists consider to be reality...but I do live in that manifestation. I do not walk in front of tractor trailers because I suggest they may be an illusion.

I have no idea - therefore aliens

What I personally know about the details of the physics is irrelevant.

What I do know is that you're pointing out the already well-known incompleteness of the Standard Model

... in an effort to try to justify inserting your "personal 45% god/ILF" in there somewhere.

Textbook example of the god-of-the-gaps fallacy.

Show us some positive evidence for your mysterious, invisible alien-god-thing.

FBM wrote:

What I personally know about the details of the physics is irrelevant.

     Hence you know nothing.

What I do know is that you're pointing out the already well-known incompleteness of the Standard Model

What about the Big-Bang-of-the gaps fallacy.

     I am not inserting anything anywhere - these are plausible hypothesis, and unless you disprove them, they should have some belief assigned to them.

Planck Upholds Standard Cosmology
By: Camille M. Carlisle | February 10, 2015

The Planck team has finally released its full-mission data, revealing a remarkably detailed view of our universe and our galaxy.

The moment I’ve been waiting months for is finally here: the full-mission data from ESA’s Planck satellite are public. Scientists presented the results at a Planck conference in Ferrara, Italy, in December, but the official analysis papers are only now coming out. Most were posted on the Planck Publications website on February 5th, with a few stragglers still in the wings.

Planck polarization and temperature maps
Planck's full-mission data, released in February 2015, provide a breathtakingly precise map of the polarization (top) and temperature (bottom, with scale in kelvin) patterns in the cosmic microwave background.
Credit: Planck Collaboration
Planck launched in 2009 to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation from the universe’s birth. Density fluctuations in the universe’s earliest moment spawned the splotchy pattern we see in the CMB and, in turn, served as seeds for the growth of cosmic structure. Understanding why the CMB looks the way it does therefore helps us understand the entire universe (more on that later).

Observing in nine frequencies spanning 30 to 857 GHz, Planck mapped the CMB’s temperature and (in seven frequencies) polarization, with angular resolutions between 33 and 5 arcminutes, depending on the frequency. It shut down on schedule four years later in 2013.

The team released the temperature observations from the mission’s first 15 months in 2013. These data were mostly in beautiful agreement with the predictions of the standard cosmological model. Since then, the team has been working fiendishly to analyze the full, four-year data set.

How Astronomers Find the Universe in the CMB

Planck power spectrum
The strength of temperature variations (vertical) is plotted against their angular sizes (horizontal, approximate). The red line is the standard cosmological model, the blue dots are Planck data.
Credit: Planck Collaboration
This endeavor is a challenging one, explains Planck team member Charles Lawrence (JPL). Cosmologists start with the splotchy CMB pattern. From that they calculate what’s called the power spectrum, which reveals the strength of the CMB’s fluctuations at different angular scales. (The power spectrum is the wiggly graph at right.) The power spectrum is the cornerstone of the whole effort: it’s this statistical map that cosmologists base their CMB analysis on.

The cosmologists then make some assumptions about what kind of universe they’re dealing with — in astrospeak, they assume the standard lambda-CDM model, which includes (1) a particular solution to the general relativistic equations of gravity, (2) a universe that looks basically the same on large scales and is expanding, (3) an early period of stupendous expansion called inflation, and (4) quantum fluctuations that seeded today’s large-scale matter distribution.

From there, they start tweaking the assumptions, like a dressmaker tucking and letting out a dress pattern until it fits right. They could even chuck any assumption that proves to be bad. Eventually, they find the pattern that most successfully fits the CMB.

The amazing thing is, this method works. It works really well. That’s because back when the universe cooled down enough to become transparent to the CMB’s radiation (about 380,000 after the Big Bang), the universe was simple. By simple, I mean the universe was basically a hot, bland soup of particles and dark matter and there weren’t any chemical reactions going on. So scientists can actually figure out, to very high precision, the exact setup that would create the CMB we observe.

The Punchline: Planck’s Cosmology Results

Milky Way Galaxy
This composite map of the Milky Way Galaxy from the Planck mission combines several types of emission: synchrotron (from charged particles corkscrewing in magnetic fields), free-free (from electrons scattering off ions), spinning dust, and warm dust. Planck scientists must subtract out all galactic emission in order to see the cosmic microwave background.
Credit: Planck Collaboration
For those of us who have been impatiently squirming for the Planck team to finish this herculean task, the new data deluge justifies the wait. These data are gorgeous. Like, disgustingly gorgeous. Even the foreground maps, which include things that sullied Planck’s view of the CMB (such as our galaxy’s dusty disk), are exquisite.

The 2015 release upholds that of 2013, with only slight tweaks to various cosmological parameters. It still overwhelmingly favors an early universe defined entirely by six parameters, no matter how many ways the team pushed and prodded the data. These parameters are

The density of baryonic matter (a.k.a. normal, like you and me) in the first few minutes of the universe
The density of cold dark matter at that same time
How far sound waves had traveled when the CMB photons were released — also known as the “sound horizon” or the size of baryon acoustic oscillations
The fraction of CMB photons over the universe’s history that have scattered off particles set free by radiation from stars/quasars ionizing the neutral hydrogen filling the cosmos
How the strength of the density fluctuations on various scales at the end of inflation changes with scale
The slope of #5 when plotted as a spectrum
From these, the team can calculate just about anything you please, such as the universe’s age and its expansion rate. The exact values depend on which data subsets you want to include, but here are some notable ones from the team’s overview paper:

Age of universe: 13.799 +/- 0.038 billion years (note: that means we know the age of the universe to within 38 million years. Just think about that for a second)
Hubble parameter: 67.8 +/- 0.9 km/s/megaparsec (this is the universe’s rate of expansion, more on this in a minute)
Fraction of universe’s content that is “dark energy”: 69.2 +/- 1.2%
The So What

The latest Planck data say some interesting things about the universe. For one, the universe’s expansion rate, called the Hubble parameter, is still lower than what astronomers previously calculated using supernovae (about 73 km/s/Mpc). That was a surprise in the 2013 release, and it’s still odd. Several other measurements have also been pushing the Hubble constant down, so it looks like a lower expansion rate is here to stay. Maybe there’s some new physical ingredient at work, but we don’t know yet.

In the discussion of what dark matter is, one idea is that it’s its own antiparticle and so if two of its particles collide, they’ll go poof. There’s no sign of dark matter annihilation in the physics needed to explain the CMB observations, although Planck does leave the door open for the level of annihilation suggested as an explanation for diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Milky Way’s center. And it looks like there are definitely only 3 flavors of neutrino (in case you were still holding out hope).

There’s still the strange problem of the missing galaxy clusters. The Planck team finds a certain lumpiness in the CMB, which should match up with the lumps in the distribution of matter in the universe (a.k.a. cosmic structure, which is made up of galaxy clusters). But Planck predicts about 2.5 times more clusters than are actually observed. This could be due to error in the estimates from either side, or due to new physics.

One neat result is that the era of reionization — basically, when the universe’s galaxies really started lighting up with stars — is later than estimated using data from Planck’s predecessor, WMAP. WMAP had favored reionization at a redshift of 10 (470 million years after the Big Bang), but Planck pegs it at 8.8 (560 million years after the Big Bang).

“For many cosmologists, I would say that it is a relief,” says David Spergel (Princeton), who worked on the WMAP team. Scientists studying early star formation had a hard time explaining the earlier start time from WMAP, so a slightly later start is a good thing.

Then there are the implications for inflation. No. 5 in the list of parameters (how the strength of the density fluctuations changes with angular scale), is called ns, or the scalar spectral index. It’s important because it describes the state of affairs at the end of inflation, and the fluctuations it measures are the ones that started sound waves sloshing in the universe’s primordial plasma and ultimately led to the CMB we see. Planck finds a value of 0.968, which means that the strength of the fluctuations is slightly larger on larger scales—predicted by most inflation models. This offset has a slight effect on galaxies’ formation rate over time.

The Planck team also did its own analysis of how big any gravitational waves triggered by inflation would be in their data, an analysis separate from (but including the data of) the joint analysis done with the BICEP2/Keck Array folks. The team found an upper limit on the ratio of gravitational waves’ strength to the density fluctuations’ strength of 0.08, slightly lower than the one from the joint analysis (0.12) and the Planck 2013 analysis (0.11).

These results home in on some of the simpler types of inflation. (Take a look at the number of inflation models out there.) These involve an inflation spawned by the decay of a single energy field, a field that decreased slowly compared to the universe’s expansion rate. (Given that the observable universe expanded at least 5 billion trillion times in 10 nano-nano-nano-nanoseconds, that’s not that slow.) The energy scale implied for inflation is less than 2 x 1016 gigaelectron volts, on par with the level expected for the merger of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces into one (called the Grand Unified Theory). Physicists think these forces were united in the first mini-moment of the universe, then broke apart. Their breakup might somehow be connected to inflation.

Like many. In fact, YOU probably use the word "know"...and other words, like "ambivalent" differently in different contexts.

What if the universe had no beginning?
Reports of the death of the Big Bang have been greatly exaggerated. Big Bang theory is alive and well. At the same time, our universe may not have a beginning or end.

Most of us understand the Big Bang as the idea that our entire universe came from a single point, what astrophysicists call a “singularity.” But we might not need a singularity to have a Big Bang, according to a new study.

Are you seeing the stories this week suggesting that the Big Bang didn’t happen? According to astrophysicist Brian Koberlein – a great science communicator at Rochester Institute of Technology with a popular page on G+ – that’s not quite what the new research (published in early February 2015 Physics Letters B, has suggested. The new study isn’t suggesting there was no Big Bang, Koberlein says. It’s suggesting that the Big Bang did not start with a singularity – a point in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole. How can this be? Koberlein explains on his website:

The catch is that by eliminating the singularity, the model predicts that the universe had no beginning. It existed forever as a kind of quantum potential before ‘collapsing’ into the hot dense state we call the Big Bang. Unfortunately many articles confuse ‘no singularity’ with ‘no big bang.’

The new model – in which our universe has no beginning and no end – comes from Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University in Egypt and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Their paper looks at a result derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity known as the Raychaudhuri equation. Koberlein says:

Basically his equation describes how a volume of matter changes over time, so its a great way of finding where physical singularities exist in your model. But rather than using the classical Raychaudhuri equation, the authors use a variation with a few quantum tweaks. This approach is often called semi-classical …

The upshot is that this work eliminates the need for an initial singularity of the Big Bang. That is, it eliminates the need for a single infinitely dense point from which our universe sprang some 13.8 billion years ago. The Big Bang itself, however, can still have happened, according to this model. Koberlein says:

The Big Bang is often presented as some kind of explosion from an initial point, but actually the Big Bang model simply posits that the universe was extremely hot and dense when the universe was young. The model makes certain predictions, such as the existence of a thermal cosmic background, that the universe is expanding, the abundance of elements, etc. All of these have matched observation with great precision. The Big Bang is a robust scientific theory that isn’t going away, and this new paper does nothing to question its legitimacy.

One appealing feature of the new paper is that it also predicts a cosmological constant, a concept originally introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917. Einstein added a cosmological constant to his theory of general relativity keep the universe static, rather than expanding, but he later abandoned the concept as his “greatest blunder” after Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that all galaxies outside our Local Group are moving away from each other. The idea of a cosmological constant was discarded for some decades, but, since the 1990s, developments in cosmology have revived the idea that we need one to explain the universe as we observe it. In Ali and Das’ new model, a cosmological constant provides a proposed mechanism for the mysterious dark energy known to pervade space and cause an observed acceleration in the expansion of the universe.

So Big Bang theory is alive and well. And, Koberlein says:

While this is an interesting model, it should be noted that it’s very basic. More of a proof of concept than anything else. It should also be noted that replacing the Big Bang singularity with an eternal history isn’t a new idea. Many inflation models, for example, make similar predictions.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this model ignites interest among cosmologists and ultimately contributes to altering our thinking about a Big Bang singularity, which has been a fact of most of our lives since we were born. Big ideas like this do change, and it’ll be fun to see if this one does!

Bottom line: Most of us understand the Big Bang as the idea that our entire universe came from a single point, what astrophysicists call a “singularity.” But we might not need a singularity to have a Big Bang, according to a new study by Ahmed Farag Ali in Egypt and coauthor Saurya Das in Canada. The catch – according to astrophysicist Brian Koberlein – is that, without the singularity, this model predicts that the universe had no beginning. It existed forever as a kind of quantum potential before collapsing into the hot dense state we call the Big Bang.

Via Phys.org and astrophysicist Brian Koberlein.

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Like many. In fact, YOU probably use the word "know"...and other words, like "ambivalent" differently in different contexts.

These are vague and unverifiable allegations.

Unlike you who tortures words for the fun of it, philosophers tend to use a vocabulary that is precise and consistent.

Keep not throwing yourself in front of buses, Frank. Just trust me on this. That side of you that says 'the bus may be an illusion' is just the idiot side of you.

This seems to vindicate my perception that the big bang singularity is more of a limit (in the math sense of a value that a function can get very close to but never reach) than an actual event.