Stephen Hawking claims victory in gravitational wave bet Cosmologist says he has won the wager with a Canadian physicist about what happened in first moments after big bang; Stephen Hawking has claimed victory in a bet with a fellow scientist over the discovery of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the structure of space-time from the birth of the universe. The Cambridge cosmologist bet Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, that gravitational waves from the first fleeting moments after the big bang would be detected. Speaking on BBC Radio 4s Today programme, Hawking said the discovery of gravitational waves, announced on Monday by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, disproves Turoks theory that the universe cycles endlessly from one big bang to another. If confirmed by other groups, the discovery would count as the strongest evidence yet for cosmic inflation, a theory which says that the universe went through a period of extremely rapid expansion soon after the big bang. The theory explains why the universe looks almost the same in every direction. It is another confirmation of inflation, Hawking told the Today programme. It also means I win a bet with Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, for cyclic universe theory predicts no gravitational waves from the early universe. But Turok was not ready to concede just yet. He told the programme that the bet rested on results from the European Space Agencys Planck space telescope, which last year failed to spot any signs of gravitational waves. In 2001, I gave a talk proposing a new theory of the big bang according to which the big bang was just the latest in an infinite series of big bangs, and the universe would be a cyclic universe, Turok said. Stephen, in typical fashion, at the end of a talk, said I bet you that the Planck satellite will discover the gravitational wave signal of inflation, which would immediately disprove your theory, because our prediction from our theory was that there would be no gravitational wave signal.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 19:58:15 +0000
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