[watsisname]

The part of the article that makes me awe is this one:

In the early 1990s, the COBE satellite gave us the first precision, all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background, down to a resolution of about 7 degrees. About a decade ago, WMAP managed to get that down to about half-a-degree resolution.

But Planck? Planck is so sensitive that the limits to what it can see aren’t set by instruments, but by the fundamental astrophysics of the Universe itself! In other words, it will be impossible to ever take better pictures of this stage of the Universe than Planck has already taken.

So we've reached an endgame scenario regarding these images?

In terms of the angular power spectrum, probably yes -- higher resolution observations will not result in more meaningful data.  However this might not be the case for polarization or other things.  I would hesitate to say that we've reached an endgame in terms of knowledge we can gain from the CMB.


edit:  By the way, Battuta, I would like it if we could be a little less perfunctory with our responses here.  If someone has trouble comprehending something, and asks about it, try to help them to understand it.  (I'd try to explain it myself, but things like false-vacuum decay are way outside of my comfort zone.)

[perihelion]

I'm not sure what Lorric is thinking, but my perspective is that even if the expansion of the universe is sufficient that parts of it could outrun a VME bubble, that expansion itself is going to eventually make all life as we understand it in the universe impossible anyway either via a Big Rip or Heat Death depending on how exactly various cosmological constants (are they really constant?) turn out.

Either way, this universe does not appear to be built to last indefinitely.  That is troubling on a fundamental level.  It means that everything ever accomplished by any life anywhere in the universe will eventually reach a point beyond which there can be no memory, nor even evidence that it even occurred.  It will be like it all never happened.

I suppose either of those outcomes are better than a VME, though, in that they are in the distant cosmological future.  A VME could have already occurred, and we wouldn't even know it is rushing in to wipe us out.

Also, I skimmed through the article I believe you referenced earlier.  (Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay, Coleman and De Luccia?)  The math goes way over my head, but if I'm understanding the paper correctly, they did analyze the case where we are living in a "post-apocalyptic" universe in which a decay from false vacuum already occurred.  They don't really talk about that one as much as they do the one where we currently living in a false vacuum, and their talk on it towards the end is so brief I'm not taking away much.  But what I do see is that, in that case, the universe inside the bubble is not subject to unstable gravitational collapse like the one in which we're currently in a pre-apocalyptic false vacuum.  So, I'm not seeing anything just yet that states categorically that we cannot be living inside a universe that has already gone through a VME.

But I'm very much just an interested layman researching for fun in his spare (HA!) time.  I'd be interested in everyone else's thoughts.

[The E]

The latest delusions from our pet Kardashian have been split out.

[Lorric]

Nope

Helpful one, aren't you.

Alright, one more try.

Is the point that this event could potentially end our lives, while the other ones won't? If so, it's just one of a million things that could end my life. It's the eternal end that's the big worry, so it makes no difference whether it happens now or an unfathomable length of time into the future. At least I won't see it coming or know anything about it if it does happen.

[General Battuta]

Stop making this thread about Lorric, start talking about cool **** again.

Interestingly, recent developments on the Higgs boson seem to put it in a mass range that boosts the probability we're living in a false vacuum. I suggest we build a super sick accelerator to poke the false vacuum.

[The E]

I've split out the nonsense I was responsible for.

[perihelion]

All this stuff makes me wish I had time to go back to school and take some classes on physics and cosmology so I could get at all of this from the mathematical side.  As it sits, I just don't have the background.  The deepest into QED I ever got was statistical mechanics, specifically as it deals with thermo and spectroscopy, and I was dumped into that without having all the primer courses I needed.

Dadgum all this having to go to work and get paid!  [shakes fist at sky]

Is there any conjecture as to what properties of the universe could be implied from CMB polarization data, if we had it?

[watsisname]

We do have it, it's just still being analyzed.  It will give us more insight on the nature of inflation, for one thing.

Here's a reasonably good primer on the topic if you're interested.

[perihelion]

Very much interested!  Thanks for the link.

[Mika]

Apparently, it took 10 years to develop the low frequency detector with a custom process, the waveguides between the back end and the front end amplifiers are something like half a meter long! I haven't talked about this yet with a certain colleague of mine who was in the group building that receiver, but I'll hopefully hear some good stuff from the horse's mouth, at least the company newsletter had some brief mentions of the thing being extremely sensitive - so sensitive that it was extraordinarily difficult to test it with not much more information added to it... Apparently, that receiver is the most sensitive device ever built for that purpose!

But yes, it is the best picture we can get using these frequencies, and there is no way to improve it due to limits from Physics itself. Ever (ooh, this is such a deliciously dangerous word to be used here). Staggering, isn't it?

But I'm glad that the Planck mission is a success, with both scientific and technological terms. For me, the biggest thing appears to be the non-uniformity of the background noise and apparently it has now been confirmed that this HAS to be taken into account.

Shame that it's just such a long time since I have last read General Relativity that I have already forgotten most of it!