And I thought the UNIVERSE was big.

Nope. It is really, really big

Supplementary question to lorax,

If the universe is, say, 13.7 Blion years old, and the universe expands relative to each point, does this mean there is no such thing "as the edge of the universe" and everyone anywhere can only "see" 13.7 Billion light years? So that structure is Hugh.

And what are the thoughs on "quantum foam"?
As the universe expands what happens to it?

And...and...

Guido.

It's too far from my area of expertise to say anything about the claims in the paper; there's nothing obviously wrong with it, but it's also not an obvious slam-dunk either. I'll say it's plausible.

You're right that there's no 'edge' to the universe, and in fact the currently favored theory to explain why the universe is so homogenous on the scales that we can observe (the claims in the findings you link to are just-barely on the edge of what's acceptable) is that it got 'smoothed out' by inflation early on, so that the universe that was formed in the Big Bang is much larger than the visible universe, the part of it that's causally connected (i.e. close enough to us that light can have reached us since the Big Bang).

I don't know much of anything about quantum foam, I'm afraid.

As the universe expands, structures that aren't gravitationally bound get farther and farther apart - things that are gravitationally bound don't expand, so the Earth isn't getting farther away from the Sun due to the expansion of the universe, and the Milky Way isn't getting any bigger either. One of the most surprising and exciting results in cosmology of the last 15 years was the finding that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down due to the gravitational attraction of all the matter in it, as most had previously thought, but actually accelerating - it is now expanding faster than it was billions of years ago. This in turn means that in a few hundred billion years, we won't be able to see anything that isn't gravitationally bound to us (anything outside the local supercluster) - it will be receding faster than the speed of light. (This poses no problems for relativity; relativity restricts how fast things can move through the universe, and places no such limitations on the expansion of spacetime itself. In fact the inflationary "smoothing out" I mentioned earlier requires expansion much faster than the speed of light. One way to envision this is to think of two ants on the surface of a balloon - obviously how fast the ants can walk away from each other doesn't limit how fast they may be moving apart from each other due to the balloon being blown up.)

Thanks lorax,

And an Aussi did win a Nobel Prize for that "...expansion is accelerating...".
I wonder if he is the first Astronomer to win a Physics prize?

Onto a few more questions about "Science" rather than what I call Science SF ie. topics such as "string theory, dark matter/energy".

Since those topics are SO extreme, do you know of any experiments which could verify/disprove these
"paper models"? I was pleased that the "Higgs" is getting there. But Dark matter...? Strings...?
Quantum foam...?

How do we measure them when even (as far as I know) gravitation waves have not yet been observed after years of searching.

PS. I did always think that initial "inflation" of the universe had to be "faster than the speed of light".
Just didn't understand it.

PPS. I thought the original COBE results showed some "minor" asymmetries, and the next studies (when released?) will study it/them 10 times in more detail.

Well, an Aussie shared that one with two Americans. They weren't the first astronomers to win a Physics Nobel, but it's not common. Penzias & Wilson got one for discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation, the scientists behind COBE got one for finding that the CMB was a blackbody (the most perfect blackbody ever measured, incidentally) and finding the fluctuations, and one for the "binary pulsar".

Since I'm on the subject of the CMB anisotropy, one thing to remember is that the fluctuations - the deviations from a perfect blackbody - are very, very small. (There are some good illustrations, including the newer WMAP data, here. These are pretty remarkable data, and a lot of what we know about the fundamental parameters of the universe come from these. The angular power spectrum - the characteristic size scales of the fluctuations - tell us a lot about fundamental cosmology, but this was never my field and we're skating perilously close to the edges of my understanding. I can't really do much better than pop science here; some very smart people show plots of the power spectrum versus their models of things like inflation and the fraction of matter in the universe that's ordinary baryonic matter versus dark matter, and they get interesting results, but I couldn't begin to tell you how those models actually work.

Now back to dealing with your post more or less in order.

I've never even heard of "paper models", so I'm afraid I can't help you there. There's a lot of work going on on dark matter, of course, since it's a slam-dunk Nobel for whoever actually finds it, but it's by its nature hard - by definition the stuff doesn't interact much if at all with normal matter, and so the people hoping for direct detection are relying on the non-interaction only being true most of the time instead of all of the time. We know a fair bit about how it behaves gravitationally, and we're certain it exists, but it may in fact never be possible to actually detect the stuff. String "theory" is a morass of nondisprovable hypotheses that are referred to as science only because the perpetrators have PhDs in physics. Again, I know nothing about quantum foam - I was never a cosmologist.

Nobody's actually started searching for gravitational waves yet in any meaningful way. It's a technically very challenging project. LIGO is more a technical proof of principle than an actual attempt at detection; its limits are very high, and the sort of events it would be capable of detecting rare. People hoping to study gravitational waves had pinned their hopes on its planned successor, LISA, which would have been an orbiting version and even more of a technical challenge; it was defunded last year, however, so AFAIK there isn't anything on the horizon that's actually likely to detect gravitational waves.

String "theory" is a morass of nondisprovable hypotheses that are referred to as science only because the perpetrators have PhDs in physics.

That's a bit harsh I think. Coming up with hypothesis is still science as long as everyone understands that they're just hypothesis. And I believe that they're lookign for ways to test it. I believe some of the varieties of string theory have been disproven by CERN.

I believe some of the varieties of string theory have been disproven by CERN.

This is correct, though those were not varieties that were ever considered particularly likely. We're certain gravity is consistent with quantum mechanics, and string theory is one of the few viable frameworks compatible with this certainty. It is based on perfectly reasonable hypotheses, the observational consequences of which everyone agrees are challenging (and may in fact never be possible) to detect directly. Much the same could be said of dark energy and dark matter (in fact I copied and pasted some of this paragraph from #5); the difference is one of degree rather than principle. String theory has also proven useful in understanding pretty much all areas of physics that involve strong interactions.

I certainly don't work on string theory, and know relatively little about its technical details, but I definitely consider it scientific. In fact, I work on different approaches to understanding strongly-coupled systems, so you can consider this a statement "from the competition".

It is based on perfectly reasonable hypotheses, the observational consequences of which everyone agrees are challenging (and may in fact never be possible) to detect directly.

The difference between string theory and dark matter or dark energy is that we have excellent observational evidence that dark matter and dark energy exist, and something about their properties. Even if we can't direct them directly, we can infer a great deal about their nature and behavior. Last I heard, that wasn't true of most of string theory; the portions that I'm dismissive of make no testable predictions, or none that are testable short of "build a particle accelerator the size of the moon", which more or less relegates them to the realm of philosophy as far as I'm concerned.

However you're closer to this subject than I am and I'll defer to your expertise - if there are portions that do make plausibly-testable predictions those are undeniably scientific.

"Build a particle accelerator the size of the moon" - a peaceful use for the Death Star!

The decision is not to build the Death Star for now.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking

What happened to anonymous "scientists" in white lab coats with absolutely no sense of humour?

I want my cliche's restored.

Although that time Bohr corrected Einstein, was funny...

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

"build a particle accelerator the size of the moon" sounds like a mere engineering problem to me :)