Another Proof the Universe Had a Beginning

“If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.” ~ George Smoot, announcing his COBE’s findings in 1992, and Nobel Prize in Physics Winner

“The significance of this [discovery] cannot be overstated. They have found the Holy Grail of Cosmology.” ~ Michael Turner, University of Chicago Astrophysicist

“…the most important discover of the century, if not of all time.” ~ Stephen Hawking, Cambridge Astronomer

What were these men talking about?
George Smoot’s findings.

After finding the predicted expanding universe and radiation afterglow, scientists turned their attention to another prediction that would confirm the Big Bang. If the Big Bang actually occurred, scientists believed that we should see slight variations (or ripples) in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation that Penzias and Wilson had discovered. These temperature ripples enabled matter to congregate by gravitational attraction into galaxies. If found, they would comprise the fourth line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning.

In 1989 the search for these ripples intensified when NASA launched the $200 million satellite aptly called COBE for Cosmic Background Explorer. Carrying extremely sensitive instruments, COBE was able to see whether or not these ripples actually existed in the background radiation and how precise they were.

COBE not only found the ripples, but scientists were amazed at their precision. The ripples show t hat the explosion and expansion of the universe was precisely tweaked to cause just enough matter to congregate to allow galaxy formation, but not enough to cause the universe to collapse back on itself. Any slight variation one away or the other and none of us would be here to tell about it. In fact, the ripples were so exact that Smoot called them the “machining marks from the creation of the universe” and the “fingerprints of the maker.”

~The above from
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist

On May 1, 1992, at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Smoot made an announcement that essentially silenced all the scientific critics of the Big Bang theory and helped change the course of future investigations into the origin and evolution of the universe.  Smoot and his research team, after analyzing hundreds of millions of precision measurements in the data they’d gathered from an experiment aboard NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, had produced maps of the entire sky which showed “hot” and “cold” regions with temperature differences of a hundred-thousandth of a degree.  These temperature fluctuations, produced when the universe was smaller than  a single proton, were consistent with Big Bang predictions and are believed to be the primordial seeds from which grew our present universe.

“At the time captured in our images, the currently observable universe was smaller than the smallest dot on your TV screen,”Smoot said, “and less time had passed than it takes for light to cross that dot.”

Theorists had been predicting temperature variations in the ancient universe since the Big Bang theory on the origin of the universe was first developed in the 1940s.  However, until Smoot and his team announced their discovery, the cosmic background radiation, microwaves left over from the Big Bang that have taken some 15 billion years to reach Earth, had appeared to be persistently uniform.  Without temperature variations there would be no ripples in the fabric of space that gravity, working over the great expanse of time, could magnify into the universe we observe today.

Since Smoot’s announcement in 1992, subsequent cosmic microwave background experiments, including data from the MAXIMA and BOOMERANG balloon flights and the WMAP satellite, have confirmed and refined the original maps. Because of the massive amounts of data involved, almost all of the experiments have used supercomputers at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center to analyze the MAXIMA and BOOMERANG data and produce more detailed maps. With the results of his team’s discovery, based on the measurements they made using Differential Microwave Radiometers (DMR) which they designed and built, Smoot provided the strongest evidence yet that the Big Bang theory is correct.

As Smoot has explained, “The tiny temperature variations  we discovered are the imprints of tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time put there by the primeval explosion process. Over billions of years, the smaller of these ripples have grown into galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the great voids in space.”

COBE Website» HERE