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
