by Chris Bodenner
A reader tees up the viral video:
Professor Andrei Lindi receives news that his decades-long life’s work has proven fruitful: observations confirm gravity waves consistent with a rapid inflationary period in the first moments of the universe. It’s being hailed as one of the most important physics results in decades, on par with experimental observation of the Higgs Boson by the LHC. (Maybe it’s not a Face of the Day, as that’s a photo feature, but just watch the video – Lindi about passes out. It’s pretty touching.)
Here’s a video from Nature explaining the basics. For me, here’s the highlight: We often talk about the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) as “the echo of the big bang.” While it’s the (highly redshifted) light of the first photons able to escape the primordial cosmic soup, they date it to about 379,000 years after the Big Bang. So while it’s less than 1/10,000 of the universe’s age, it’s still a long time after the initial moment in human terms.
The BICEP2 results are a direct observation of an event that took place when the universe was 10^-34 seconds old. I just tried to write that out as a decimal, but a decimal point followed by 33 zeroes is just, well – the second time I lost count, so I gave up. That’s 47 orders of magnitude earlier than our previous view. It’s a truly mindboggling result. Talk about a Nobel slam dunk!
The Dish 