“We’ve Pinpointed It” – Emergence of the ‘Modern’ Cosmos

The neutral hydrogen gas that filled the universe during the first few hundred million years after the Big Seed tended to absorb ambient light, leading to what cosmologists and science fiction authors poetically call the universe’s “dark ages.” Although the cosmos was filled with a diffuse ambient light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the so-called afterglow of the Big Seed — this neutral gas absorbed it at specific wavelengths.

• https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/04/weve-pinpointed-it-emergence-of-the-modern-cosmos/

During reionization, when the universe transitioned out of the ‘dark ages’, the space between galaxies was filled with a plasma of ionized hydrogen with a temperature of about 10,000˚C. This is puzzling because fifty million years after the big Seed, the universe was cold and dark. It contained gas with temperatures only a few degrees above absolute zero, and no luminous stars and galaxies. How is it then that today, about 13.6 billion years later, the universe is bathed in light from stars in a variety of galaxies, and the gas is a thousand times hotter?

Answering this question has been an important goal of cosmological research over the last two decades. The conclusions of the new study suggest that reionization occurred 1.1 billion years after the big Seed (or 12.7 billion years ago), quite a bit later than previously thought.

Large differences in the ‘fogginess’ of the early universe were caused by islands of cold gas left behind when the universe heated up after the big Seed, according to an international team of astronomers. The results, reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, have enabled astronomers to zero in on the time when reionization ended and the universe emerged from a cold and dark state to become what it is today: full of hot and ionized hydrogen gas permeating the space between luminous galaxies.

Hydrogen gas dims light from distant galaxies much like streetlights are dimmed by fog on a winter morning. By observing this dimming in the spectra of a special type of bright galaxies, called quasars, astronomers can study conditions in the early universe.

In the last few years, observations of this specific dimming pattern (called the Lyman-alpha Forest) suggested that the fogginess of the universe varies significantly from one part of the universe to another, but the reason behind these variations was unknown.

“We expected the light from quasars to vary from place to place at most by a factor of two at this time, but it is seen to vary by a factor of about 500,” said lead author Girish Kulkarni, who completed the research while a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. “Some hypotheses were put forward for why this is so, but none were satisfactory.”

The new study concludes that these variations result from large regions full of cold hydrogen gas present in the universe when it was just one billion years old, a result which enables researchers to pinpoint when reionization ended.

The team of researchers from India, the UK, Canada, Germany, and France drew their conclusions with the help of state-of-the-art computer simulations performed on supercomputers based at the Universities of Cambridge, Durham, and Paris, funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).

“When the universe was 1.1 billion years old there were still large pockets of the cosmos where the gas between galaxies was still cold and it is these neutral islands of cold gas that explain the puzzling observations,” said Martin Haehnelt of the University of Cambridge, who led the group that conducted this research, supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC).

“This finally allows us to pinpoint the end of reionization much more accurately than before,” said Laura Keating of the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics.

The new study suggests that the universe was reionized by light from young stars in the first galaxies to form. “Late reionization is also good news for future experiments that aim to detect the neutral hydrogen from the early universe,” said Kulkarni, who is now based at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India. “The later the reionization, the easier it will be for these experiments to succeed.”

One such experiment is the ten-nation Square Kilometer Array (SKA) of which Canada, France, India, and the UK are members.

Could All Our Scientific Knowledge Come Tumbling Down Like A House Of Cards?

Could All Our Scientific Knowledge Come Tumbling Down Like A House Of Cards?

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/04/12/could-all-our-scientific-knowledge-come-tumbling-down-like-a-house-of-cards/#1154a5577346

Scientific revolutions in science are real, and when they occur, they cause us to rethink many things — and perhaps even everything — that we'd previously assumed to be true. There are all sorts of foundational components to our knowledge that we rarely question, but perhaps we ought to. As far as revolutionary existential thoughts go, this is the ultimate question: how confident are we in the tower of science that we’ve built for ourselves?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that we're very confident in the entire body of scientific knowledge that we've built up. That will remain true, of course, up to a very specific point: until a single robust result comes along that conflicts with it.

Science is both:

1. A body of knowledge that encompasses everything we’ve learned from observing, measuring, and experimenting on the Universe.

2. A process of constantly questioning our assumptions, trying to poke holes in our best understanding of reality, looking for logical loopholes and inconsistencies, and testing the limits of our knowledge in novel, fundamental ways.

We cannot cherry-pick the results or pieces of evidence that agree with our preferred conclusions; we need to confront our ideas with every piece of good data that exists. In order to do good science, we need to collect that data, put those pieces together into a self-consistent framework, and then continually challenge that framework in every way we can imagine.

At some point, you’re inevitably going to find something that doesn’t jibe with the prevailing wisdom. You’re going to find something that conflicts with what you expected. You’re going to get a result that contradicts your old, pre-existing theory. And when that happens — if you can verify the contradiction, if it holds up to scrutiny and shows itself to be really, really real — you’re going to get to do something wonderful: have a scientific revolution.

A scientific revolution, though, involves more than simply stating, “this old thing is wrong!” That's simply the very first step. It may be a necessary part of a revolution, but it's woefully insufficient on its own. We’ve got to go beyond simply noticing where and how our old idea fails us. In order to progress science forward, we have to find the critical flaw in our prior thinking, and revise it until we get it right.

This requires us to clear not just one, but three major hurdles in our efforts to improve our understanding of the Universe. There are three ingredients that go into a revolutionary scientific theory:

1. It has to reproduce all the successes of the previously existing theory.

2. It has to explain the new results that contradicted the old theory.

3. It needs to make new, testable predictions that have not been tested before, and that can either be confirmed and validated or refuted.

This is an incredibly tall order, and it happens only rarely. But when it does, the rewards are unlike anything else.

• https://transudationism.blogspot.com/p/it-is-respectfully-suggested-that.html

This notion extends even to our thoughts concerning the origin of the Universe itself.

Our leading theories of today aren't wrong, they're just incomplete. It's only by replacing them with something that succeeds where the present theory both works and doesn't work that science advances in any meaningful way.

Police brace for pro-White gathering in Turku, Finland

A white nationalist conference is scheduled to take place at an unspecified location in Turku over the weekend.

• https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_brace_for_far_right_gathering_in_turku/10726159

Police in the Turku region in southwest Finland say they are bracing for the presence of right-wing extremists over the weekend.

Sources online indicate that an international white nationalist conference called Awakening II is being held somewhere in the region either on Saturday or overnight from Saturday to Sunday. No exact location has been publicly specified. The first openly fascist Awakening event was held in April 2018.

The aim of the event is said to be to provide an opportunity for Finnish and other European nationalists groups and individuals to network.

Police say they are prepared to safeguard voter rights against possible harassment during advance voting for the parliamentary elections, which continues through to 9 April. Election day proper is 14 April nationwide.

Police tight-lipped about event, preps

Chief inspector Mika Peltola from the South-West Finland police had little to say on the details of the gathering, the possibility of right-wing agitation, or the number of officers to be mobilised.

"Police are aware that this event is being organised. We have used this information and are prepared for the weekend," Peltola said.

Peltola said that no reports of harassment have surfaced since advance voting began on Wednesday.

"Police will monitor voting locations to make sure people can freely cast their votes. We are adequately prepared."

The neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (PVL) most recently staged a march in downtown Turku on 16 March. The Supreme Court placed a temporary ban on the activities of the neo-Nazi organisation in late March, after a Pirkanmaa district court previously ruled that it should be proscribed.

It also granted the group the right to appeal lower court ruling and said it will issue a final judgment later on permanently outlawing the group.

Pro-White parties kick off campaigns for Europe election

Among the leaders of the effort to "unite the right" are France's Marine Le Pen and Italy's Matteo Salvin

• Pro-White parties kick off campaigns for Europe election

Many fear the May 26 vote will be a wake-up call for Brussels on the reality that Europe's anti-immigration and blood-and-soil patriotic forces have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. Once considered outsiders, they could now end up with one fifth or more of the seats, allowing them to shift the tone of political discourse and make a claim for legitimacy.

Key players are Marine Le Pen's National Rally (NR) in France and the Italian League of Matteo Salvini, who is hosting a meeting of like-minded right-wing groups in Milan on Monday.

In the EU's top economy, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the biggest opposition party by railing against Chancellor Angela Merkel and her 2015 decision to allow a mass influx of asylum seekers. On Saturday the AfD will gather in the city of Offenburg to present its election programme, which calls for "a Europe of fatherlands" and opposes the EU's immigration, financial and climate policies.

On Monday in Milan, Italian deputy PM Salvini will follow up and gather allies from across Europe to try to lay the foundations for a future hard-right grouping in the now 751-member European Parliament.

Salvini and Le Pen also agreed to call another meeting in May, after they met in Paris on Friday, a NR source said.

"The leaders are considering a common manifesto to close the electoral campaign and announce the start of a new Europe," said a spokesman for Salvini.

International of nationalists?

So far, Europe's right-wing nationalists have been divided into three blocs and a tangled web of alliances in the legislature that moves between seats in Brussels and the French city of Strasbourg. They are the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group, which includes the RN and League, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD).