The Big Bang and Cosmology

Advertisement: Those who believe themselves aware about sciences, scientific theories, geocentrism, etc. based on tales and myths should not read the following lines.

In no way I will enter into discussion with people who even ignore what went on since more than a Century ago.

The intent of these lines is to provide dates and names for further reference to Gather members who would like to do their own research on the matter.

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Since 1884, Ludwig Boltzmann issued the "Law of the Black Body" a law which has been confirmed in 1964 by Wilson and Penzias

Paul Ehrenfest was the pupil of Boltzmann and the best friend of Einstein. He was highly reputated as mathematician and had a pupil, Alexander Friedmann who was a gift mathematician who published at 17 y.o. already (1906) an article accepted by the "Annales de mathematiques" the year he was admitted in the Russian University of St Petersburg.

There he met Ehrenfest. 15 years later, Friedmann STARTS conceiving the Big Bang theory (1921). Obviously at that time this is more a hypothesis than a proved and acknowledged theory.

Friedmann remained in USSR as an non disputed communist professor. In 1922 he discovers for the very first time the Einstein theory and spend days and nights trying to understand what the theory means in what we call nowadays cosmology. As a matter of fact, Einstein has introduced into the equations a “cosmologic constant” which would mean that the Universe would be fix, still, motionless!

In June 1922 Friedmann publicize an article in the various serious “Zeitschrift fur Physik” and then his only book in 1923 : The Universe as Space and Time.

Both slapped the scientific world: It is a mathematical proof that Universe had an ORIGIN billions years ago. Worse! At that time it was smaller than a point with a volume equal to ZERO ! And this point was increasing since then.

Einstein got very angry and tried to harm Friedmann. Finally, after a long meeting, when the Nobel prize distribution took place in May 1923, Einstein finally agreed with Friedmann (who was not present) in front of Hendrik Lorentz and Youri Krutkov. Friedmann passed away already in September 1925 due to a flue due to a balloon flight made without protection, neither oxygen, at some 21,000 ft.

In 1926, as a student of the MIT, Lemaitre – unaware of Friedmann works – come through another mathematical way to the same conclusion: the Universe cannot be motionless and states that Universe is in constant expansion and imagine the idea of a “primitive atom”.

In the early 1920’s, Edwin Hubble, the famous astronomer of the Mount Wilson (CA) – met Milton Lasell Humason who used to help building the observatory. He was just carrying stuff as he left school when he was already 14. However, in 1929 Lasell was so much knowledgeable about astronomy that George Ellery Hale, the President, nominated him as main astronomer.

In 1924 Edwin, with Lasell help, discovers that our galaxy was not the only one in the whole Universe. Up to then everyone thought that the Milky Way was the sole and unique galaxy being itself the whole Universe. In 1929, Hubble always with the help of Humason, explains the Universe expansion thanks to the nebulae with tons of pictures and computations. Nebulae are driving away at very high speeds and each second contribute to enlarge the Universe. First time evident facts confirm the Big Bang theory.

Friedmann, Lemaitre were right despite Einstein! He met Hubble in 1931 on Mount Wilson and surrended to the proof that Universe is in expansion and therefore it remains hard to refuse to support that space, time and matter saw light simultaneously! There is indeed a “beginning”.

Worse even! One of the Christian Church founders, Saint Augustine, in 354 of our era already, bishop of “Hippone” stated: Universe didn’t see light with time but within the time itself.

In 1933, George Gamow and his spouse, finally succeed to get out of USSR after two unsuccessful attempts of crossing the Black Sea and then the Baltic one on a small kayak. They were authorized to attend the meeting of Solvay in Belgium. They never returned to the Stalinian country, ending in the George Washington University.

He has been the very first one to popularize the Big Bang theory and also about what could be preceding the Big Bang, calling it the “Saint Augustine Era” (1944). In 1948, together with two alumni, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman) he supports the, then still idea and not theory, that the initial blast which created the Universe obviously has left some marks and traces: a very cold radiation, some few degrees above the absolute zero as an echo to the initial very high temperature. This is the fossil radiation recently pictured.

The publication is known as the “Alpha, Beta, Gamma” of the cosmology. Such a name because it has been signed by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow. But Alpher remains, most probably, even as alumni of Gamow, the main writer. Alpher and Gamow has been working on it since the early 40’s, Gamow not being member of the Manhattan projet (Los Alamos) for having been an official in the Red Army. No one took into consideration that he tried to escape twice.

Alpher was a student at the MIT but one day, by inadvertence, stated that he was the son of a Jewish refugee and the MIT closed his doors to him. Therefore he went to George Washington University and met Gamow and another immigrant named Robert Herman.

In October 1948, they publish an article in Nature showing through mathematics that first light should have been produced 300,000 years after the Big Bang when temperature was not exceeding 3000 K⁰ . In 1990, 42 years later, this computation has been confirmed by the COBE satellite and the FIRAS, the Far InfraRed Absolute Spectrophotometer which settled this temperature to 2725 K^o with a precision of more or less: 0.001 K^o!

Since 1949 the 3 friends, Alpher, Gamow and Herman had to face the “coalition” of the scientists, even communist, and Christians as the Pope Pio XII misinterpreted the ideas of them. David Bohm, the communist, linked the Big Bang idea to the Catholic church, while Arthur Eddington, one of the main astronomers of early last century, was stating that such idea of an expanding Universe was repugnant, absurd, unbelievable. Sir Fred Hoyle the famous astronomer of Cambridge (UK) was sharing his views, as well. How to conceive that all the Earth, the world, houses, trains, the matter, etc. could have been created by a simple mini spot floating where was just nothing?

Hoyle even was referring to Aristotle and supports the idea that galaxies are indeed driving away from each others but within a constant matter creation. The anti-Big Bang coalition is so harsh that scientists quit investigating it in 1953. Gamow quit the Physics, Alpher the University and Herman finds a job within the car industry.

For some 10 years othing will go on as far sa the Big Bang is concerned. Everyone forgot it up to 1964 in Holmdale, NJ.

2 young American engineers keep meeting there every morning with a radio transistor tight to an old heavy antenna built in 1959.

Both are engineers hired by Bell Telephone. The younger is Robert Wilson, from Dallas (TX) and is an electronic specialist, highly gifted in this field. Bell sent him to Holmdale in order to perform radio research. The other is Arno Penzias, born in Munich (Germany). The Gestapo arrested his family and sent them in a sealed wagon to a concentration camp in Poland. Arno was then 5 y.o.

However, it seems that the Penzias were quite lucky: the border closed just before the train could cross it and it returned to Germany. How the family managed to stay alive? I ignore, but in1939, another lucky day, they managed to quit Germany, landing in London and then in New York, where they find a home in the Bronx. Arno, born in 1933 got then his Doctorate in Science at Columbia University whe he was already 18 (1961) and was, as well, hired by Bell as a radio-astronomer.

Their job: to revive an old satellite antenna with not too many interferences, as Bell is widely invested in communication satellites. No one of them ever heard of Lemaitre, Gamow, Friedmann; worse, Robert was the pupil of Hoyle who never stopped – at the least before then – criticizing openly the Big Bang idea.

Both engineers, while working on reviving the old antenna, decide to try to improve it to the point it becomes , with the Bell authorization, a radio-telescope as well. The latter is useful for measuring the several radiation of our galaxy. Robert use this to improve his own thesis presentation to be done; while Arno tries to find Hydrogene within the near nebulae.

In May 1964, their duty is to find a way to define the interferences sent by the Milky Way which keep bothering the ECHO satellite. This radiation is everywhere, whichever is the antenna orientation. It has always the same properties, remains about 100 times louder than anything else.

Arno cannot figure out how come such a radiation is so different from any other known. It is a steady one, constant and covers the whole galaxy. Its temperature is just about 3 K^o above the Absolute Zero.

Both the engineers will spend about a full year, cleaning the antenna, updating it, replacing each bolt, renewing the computations, etc. Nothing helps. Then, in April 1965, Penzias going to Boston for a conference on astronomy, meets another radio-astronomer, Bernie Burke. He tells Arno that he heard about Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles who “should” have manufactured a device aimed to discover very low micro-waves (the Radiometer). They don’t speak too much about it because it seems that there is some funny radiation, a very cold one, which could be a fossil one.

Some days later Dicke, Wilkinson and Roll pay a visit to Penzias and Wilson, stay with them less than 1 hour and on the return acknowledge that the 2 young engineers had already discover what they were working on! Dicke and his team went to Bell Laboratories and ended saying that Wilson and Penzias had very specific and accurate computations made. Princeton the was compelled to acknowledge that both Arno and Robert had found the fossil radiation previewed by Gamow, in 1948.

A huge storm of photons took place 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Arno and Robert will receive the Nobel prize in 1978.

Since then, despite skeptical people such outstanding discovery of the so-called Big Bang, the very hot storm initiated by the primitive energy has been confirmed at several instances by:

George Smoot and John Mather with the COBE satellite (1989)

Charles L. Bennett with the WMAP satellite (2001)

Jean-Loup Puger and Jean-Michel Lamarre with the PLANCK satellite (2009)

and by the CERN experiments as reported today November 8, 2010.

Therefore the question which remains opened is: what went on BEFORE the Big Bang storm?

Any one of us can read the Holy Books discarding just the myths, the tales but not the fundamental idea. However no one can imagine God, sit on an arm-chair providing relief to each human being as a good old father.

Maybe the question would be solved one day but what remains amazing is the absolute accuracy of our actual tools and computations; the absolute and invariable constants driving the Universe. The NASA states that the “Black Energy” equals to 95% of the Universe, while matter is only 5%.

As we saw Hydrogen and Helium has been created less than 5 seconds after the original storm and nowadays, 13.7 billion years later, thanks to our tools, we have been able to determine the exact light constant speed: 327,857,018.8 yards/sec (299,792,458 m/sec) as well as other constants as the gravitation, the electro-magnetism, the weak force which is the solar radioactivity (it creates the sun light) and the strong force which bounds the particles inside the atom’s nucleus.

If the strong force equals 1 (the reference force), then electro-magnetic is 137 times smaller, the weak is 1 million times smaller while the gravitation is … : 1,000 times of trillions of trillions of trillions (39 zeros) smaller!

But all this ends in something that some people refuse to believe – due to obvious psychological problems: every and each living cell on Earth have the very same genetic and molecular structure and function. All of them are made of the same nucleic acids and the very same proteins: the very same DNA with just different shapes, same genetic codes, same enzymes.

References:

Arno Penzias: Cosmos, Bios and Theos Open Court, 1992

American Scientific Affiliation Astronomy/Cosmology : http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1994/PSCF9-94/Bergman.html

http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/ica07/PAPERS/TPPB13.PDF

CERN completes transition to lead-ion running at the LHC (11/8/2010) and this means it has been able to reproduce a tiny Big Bang!!!!!!!!