Universe started with hiss, not bang

[alexsok]

No idea if it's a scoop, seeing as it's dated to the 4th of June, but nevertheless, i haven't spotted it elsewhere around here (perhaps didn't bother looking hard enough ) and thought it was worth bringing up:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995092

The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars.

Cosmologists do not usually think in terms of sound, but this aural picture is a good way to think about the Universe's beginnings, says astronomer Mark Whittle of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Whittle has reconstructed the cosmic cacophony from data teased out over the past couple of years from the high-resolution mapping by NASA's WMAP spacecraft of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the hot early Universe.

The variations in the cosmic background radiation expose the relative clumpiness of the early cosmos at a variety of different scales. These density variations began as quantum fluctuations in the moments after the big bang, and then propagated out as sonic waves. The denser regions became the seeds of galaxies and stars, which is why astronomers are so interested in them.


The sound of the big bang
Translating the observed frequency spectrum directly to sound yields tones far too low for ears to hear - some 50 octaves below middle A - but transpose the score up all those octaves and you can listen to it.

As for volume, the intensity of the variations corresponds to about 110 decibels, as loud as a rock concert. Whittle has also used the best available cosmological models to map the way the vibrations evolved over time, showing how the chords of the big bang changed over the Universe's first million years or so.


Majestic cords
You can listen to the sound from the first million years after the big bang here (0.5 Mb .wav file). The sound has been compressed to five seconds, with the volume held constant.

Whittle played the soundtrack at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Denver last week. Contrary to its name, the big bang began in absolute silence. But the sound soon built up into a roar whose broad-peaked notes corresponded, in musical terms, to a "majestic" major third chord, evolving slowly into a "sadder" minor third, Whittle explained.

For those worried that you cannot have sounds in space, that is true today, but it was not so in the Universe's infancy. For perhaps its first million years, the Universe was small and dense enough that sound waves could indeed travel through it - so efficiently, in fact, that they moved at about half the speed of light.

The new sonic reconstructions do not involve any new science, Whittle says, but like a good diagram or 3D visualisation, they may help astronomers teach complex ideas, and maybe understand the observations a bit more clearly themselves.

"Everyone was fascinated," said Steve Maran, the society's press officer, who added that even he had "learned from this, that the big bang actually was silent, then things got louder and louder".

So what do you guys think? perhaps another glammering feature to append to the increasing testbed of string theory?

 

[NeutronStar]

So what do you guys think? perhaps another glammering feature to append to the increasing testbed of string theory?

May I ask what this has to do with string theory? Just sounds like inflationary cosmology to me. Inflationary cosmology doesn't automatically imply anything about string theory does it?

Perhaps you could explain the connection?

 

[alexsok]

May I ask what this has to do with string theory? Just sounds like inflationary cosmology to me. Inflationary cosmology doesn't automatically imply anything about string theory does it?

Perhaps you could explain the connection?

Well, conventional wisdom, in form of the various theories dispersed throughout the high-energy physics community, postulates that the primordial universe, at it's birth, was "infested" with a bath of strings and certain theories (Ekpyrotic scenario for instance) posit that this flurry of strings were precisely the reason why three of the putative six or more dimensions were enlarged and seeded the roots of our universe.

This theory originated from certain distinct formulations of string theory, has relations with the big bang, and thus, the "hissing" scoop was definately something i deemed as informative, seeing as it could shed some light as to the true origin of our universe.

 

[NeutronStar]

{snip} - postulates that the primordial universe, at it's birth, was "infested" with a bath of strings - {snip}

All theories begin with similar postulates. We have to start with some postulate. The idea that the universe began as a bath of fundamental quons is a given in any particle physics theory. So I don't see how any experimental evidence to support such a postulate would favor any particular theory on what constitutes the nature of the fundamental particles.

I'm not trying to be difficult. I believe that string theory has merit too. But to suggest that a hiss before the inflation of the big bang supports one theory over any another is a bit of a stretch for me.

I personaly have never believed in the concept of point particles. I have always believe in an idea that particles are actually vibrations of some sort and that their vibrations determine their physical attributes. In other words, I have basically believed in something simliar to string theory all of my life, (Even before string theory was born). Unlike string theory though, I have always evisioned space being made up of pixels with multi-dimension shapes (something similar to Calabi-Yau cavities). I evisioned the vibrations moving from one pixel to another. So rather than having strings floating around in a space that is "beyond" space. I envision the vibrations moving from pixel to pixel much like an animation on a computer screen (only in three dimensions). My pixels, of course, would have more than three dimension just like strings supposely have. Only my extra dimensions aren't spatial.

In any case, I postulate that my early universe began as a bath of vibrating pixels too - Hissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

So I could use the early hiss to support my theory just as easily.

Do you see how an early hiss doesn't really point to string theory any more than it points to many other theories?

Just about any theory on particle physics has to begin with a postulate of the existence of it's elementary constitutents. They could all hiss.

I just think it would be pretty lame for any theory to grab onto an early hiss as an indication that it might be more correct than some other theory. To do that you'd have to show that other theories don't postulate a bath of their elementary constitutents. But I think that most theories of elementary particles would need to postulate this.