• Question: This week on it was announced that gravity waves and ripples in space-time were spotted by the Bicep2 telescope at the Amundsen-Scott Polar base and this provides evidence for the big bang theory. Is this evidence significant enough to help humans learn about how our universe began?

    Asked by to Anna, Jane, Iain, Nick on 19 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nick Goldman

      Nick Goldman answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      This is not my subject area, but all the reports I heard on BBC suggested that what this means is that the existing theories about the Big Bang were right. So we didn’t get a NEW idea from this, but we got confirmation of our old theories.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      This is pretty neat and definitely another piece of evidence supporting the Big Bang theory of how the universe began. The reason a lot of people believe that the Big Bang theory is accurate is because physicists can predict (using very clever maths) what patterns they should see in stars, gravity, etc. Then when we observe data that matches those predictions it tells us that the theory is likely to be right.

    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Hi Tara1d
      This is so topical at the moment, great question! I’ve just been reading about this on the BBC website this morning. The reporting of this does suggest that the findings are really significant and support the Big Bang Theory as the explanation to how our universe began. I find this very exciting research.

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Absolutely. This is one of the most exciting scientific discoveries of our time, and I was up until two in the morning last night reading up on it even though it isn’t my area of science! This research tells us all sorts of things about the way our universe works and the events that happened a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang happened. The theory behind it, called inflation, isn’t new and has been around for over 30 years, before I was born. This is the idea that the universe hasn’t been growing at a regular pace ever since the big bang, and instead there was a period of massive expansion right at the very beginning. There had been some earlier evidence suggesting that this theory was correct, but that evidence could also be explained by other theories. What makes this discovery so exciting is that it is almost impossible to explain the BICEP2 results any other way, which means that this is very very strong evidence for inflation.

Comments