Reimagining the Origins of the Universe

Today’s stories include Who gets the first peek at the secrets of the universe? to Richard Feynman: “Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities.”

Reimagining the origins of the universe, Harvard's Avi Loeb questions cosmic inflation. "The cosmic inflation hypothesis is needed for the Big Bang model to work, but in its current form, it remains a mere hypothesis, unable to be falsified. A new proposal for how it could be put to the test could result in overthrowing the Big Bang model altogether, opening up new possibilities regarding the origins of the universe."

NPR: Asks Who gets the first peek at the secrets of the universe? "The idea is, if its data was available much more quickly, astronomers would be better able to make use of it," says NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce. That might speed up the pace of scientific discoveries and open up the data to a much wider set of researchers.

Are Astronomers on the Cusp of a Revolutionary Cosmological Discovery? asks Inverse. These astronomers have the next 50 years all planned out.

How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities--Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, and what it means, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta. "As far as physicists can tell, it precisely predicts the behavior of any quantum system — an electron, a light ray or even a black hole. The path integral has racked up so many successes that many physicists believe it to be a direct window into the heart of reality."

The galaxy cluster that broke modified gravity--19 years ago, the Bullet Cluster provided an empirical proof for dark matter. Even today, modified gravity still can't explain it, reports Ethan Siegel for Big Think.

NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory to finally answer the epic question: “Are we alone?” NASA has finally chosen which flagship mission, like Hubble and JWST, will launch in ~2040. Detecting alien life is now a reachable goal, reports Big Think.

Astronomers are getting closer to finding sources of continuous gravitational waves--Thanks to observations of Scorpius X-2, a neutron star accreting matter from a low-mass binary companion, reports Space.com.

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