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Articles: Devotion | Quest for Infinity - 08
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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Science always progresses this way, in fits and starts. First there is a problem; then there is a fix, and things seem, fine; but soon it turns out that things are not all that hunky dory because when one looks at the fine print, there are problems again. So back to the drawing board; a new model, and relief once again; but closer scrutiny and bugs again! This, however, does not dishearten physicists because there is always work to do, exciting work! That is why Feynman once said that when a theory works, physicists then become busy demolishing that theory by finding faults! What I am driving at is that Guth’s model also has problems of its own! But that is a different story.
The 2006 Nobel Awards for Physics
Let me now cut to Stockholm, October 2006. That is when the Nobel Awards are announced, and the announcement was made that the Physics awards went to two people associated with the exploration of CMB. They are: John Mather of NASA and George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley Campus. Using the COBE [COsmic Background Explorer] satellite, they got a fantastic mapping of the CMB all across the sky. Their results were path breaking. On the one hand, they showed how uniform the radiation was all over; and yet, when see with a “microscope”, there were small but very significant variations that tell their own tale.
One can understand all this in the following manner. Let us say you are in a spacecraft and coming towards the Earth from outer space. As you approach, the first thing you would notice is that the planet is spherical. As you draw closer to the Earth, you would see the surface divide into continents and oceans. You would then begin to see that the Earth's surface is not absolutely smooth but has ups and downs, connected with the presence of mountains, cities, forests and deserts that cover the continents. It has been the same way with the study of CMB over the years. When astrophysicists first looked at the microwave sky, thirty years ago, they noticed it was nearly uniform. As observations improved, they began to detect various features associated with CMB. Finally, in 1992, the COBE satellite made the first detection analogous to seeing 'mountains on the surface of the Earth': it detected cosmological fluctuations in the microwave background temperature, as they existed when the Universe was about 380,000 years old. This thus represents data going back a very long time, to a time much earlier than possible from earlier experiments.
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