Read more to find out how the 80 richest individual people in the world ( a number that could easily fit onto two busses [not one as claimed]) control more wealth than 3.5 billion of their fellow humans…and what this means. Why is this so? Does it help to know that this year, more than half of the people in our Congress are millionaires? Hmmm.
Those were just seven words out of close to 7,000 that President Barack Obama spoke during his State of the Union address. He was addressing both houses of Congress, which are controlled by his bitter foes. Most importantly, though, he was addressing the country. Obama employed characteristically soaring rhetoric to deliver his message of bipartisanship. “The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong,” he assured us.
From whose lives has the shadow of crisis passed? And for whom is this Union strong?
“Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?” Obama asked. “Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?”
Oxfam, the international anti-poverty organization, weighed in on the question, releasing a report the day before the speech called “Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More.” Oxfam analyzed data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014 and the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires to determine some shocking facts about global inequality.
First, it found that, as of 2014, the 80 richest individuals in the world are wealthier than the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population. This bears repeating: The 80 wealthiest people, a group that could fit on a bus, control more wealth than 3.5 billion people. The wealthy are not only accumulating more wealth, but they are getting it faster. Between 2009 and 2014, Oxfam reports, the wealth of those 80 richest people in the world doubled. This, while the rest of the world was mired in the Great Recession, with rampant unemployment and people’s life savings wiped out. If current trends continue, Oxfam notes, by 2016 the richest 1 percent of the world’s population will control more wealth than the bottom 99 percent.
One way the wealthy manage to increase their wealth, Oxfam reports, is through lobbying. The report identifies two industries, finance/insurance and pharmaceutical/health care, as major sources of wealth for the richest, and as principal founts of political contributions. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by these industries annually to shape public policy and safeguard profits.
“For far too long, lobbyists have rigged the tax code with loopholes that let some corporations pay nothing while others pay full freight,” President Obama said in his State of the Union. “They’ve riddled it with giveaways the super-rich don’t need, denying a break to middle-class families who do.”
Obama has proposed increasing taxes on the very rich: “Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top 1 percent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston is an expert on taxes. We spoke to him on the “Democracy Now!” news hour soon after the State of the Union. “The idea that we shouldn’t adjust the tax rates for people at the top and doing so is somehow class warfare is absurd,” he said. “The president is proposing that for those people in the top one-half of 1 percent—and almost all the money would be paid by the top tenth of 1 percent, people who make over $2 million—that their capital-gains tax rate be at the Ronald Reagan rate of 28 percent,” Johnston summarized. “And Republicans are saying that that’s outrageous. Well, I’m sorry, they’re always telling us Ronald Reagan is a saint.”
What would these taxes pay for? Among other things, Obama pledged to make child care more affordable. He promised free community-college education. These are genuine, good ideas. After his address, Republicans repeatedly said he was for the “redistribution of wealth,” code for socialism. But wealth IS being redistributed by the government—upward, from the poor to the rich—through policies promoted by both major parties, from tax loopholes to “free trade” deals that protect corporate profits over workers’ rights.
And who is promulgating these laws? The Center for Responsive Politics, a political contribution watchdog group, reports that, for the first time ever, more than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. The group states that this “represents a watershed moment at a time when lawmakers are debating issues like unemployment benefits, food stamps and the minimum wage, which affect people with far fewer resources, as well as considering an overhaul of the tax code.”
As President Obama said in his State of the Union, “To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it.”
Growing economic inequality not only hurts the poor, and the working and middle class, but destabilizes society overall. Yes, we must “imagine if we did something different.” Everyone must have a stake in the state of the union.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
Boils down to money in politics I fear. Greed too. And look at what the message is from Ferguson, MO as of last night–from the bottom end of the 90% economically and those who feel disenfranchised or ignored or persecuted because of their color/race. The amount of evident hate is scary and discouraging, especially so when the governing class will “little note nor long remember…” after the glass is swept up and the tear gas smoke clears. Nothing to celebrate in Ferguson this Thanksgiving.
The Real Reason Behind the Democrats’ Big Midterm Losses
The President blames himself for the Democrat’s big losses Election Day.
“We have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we’re trying to do and why this is the right direction,” he said Sunday.
In other words, he didn’t sufficiently tout the Administration’s accomplishments.
I respectfully disagree.
If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it’s this: Median household income continues to drop.
This is the first “recovery” in memory when this has happened.
Jobs are coming back but wages aren’t.
Every month the job numbers grow but the wage numbers go nowhere.
Most new jobs are in part-time or low-paying positions. They pay less than the jobs lost in the Great Recession.
This wageless recovery has been made all the worse because pay is less predictable than ever.
Most Americans don’t know what they’ll be earning next year or even next month. Two-thirdsare now living paycheck to paycheck.
So why is this called a “recovery” at all? Because, technically, the economy is growing.
But almost all the gains from that growth are going to a small minority at the top.
In fact, 100 percentof the gains have gone to the best-off 10 percent. Ninety-five percent have gone to the top 1 percent.
The stock market has boomed. Corporate profits are through the roof. CEO pay, in the stratosphere.
Yet most Americans feel like they’re still in a recession.
And they’re convinced the game is rigged against them.
Fifty years ago, just 29 percent of voters believed government is “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”
According to Pew, the percentage of Americans who believe most people who want to get ahead can do so through hard work has plummeted 14 pointssince 2000.
What the President and other Democrats failed to communicate wasn’t their accomplishments.
It was their understanding that the economy is failing most Americans and big money is overrunning our democracy.
And they failed to convey their commitment to an economy and a democracy that serve the vast majority rather than a minority at the top.
Some Democrats even ran on not being Barack Obama.
That’s no way to win. Americans want someone fighting for them, not running away from the President.
The midterm elections should have been about jobs and wages, and how to reform a system where nearly all the gains go to the top.
It was an opportunity for Democrats to shine. Instead, they hid.
Consider that in four “red” states — South Dakota, Arkansas, Alaska, and Nebraska — the same voters who sent Republicans to the Senate voted by wide margins to raisetheir state’s minimum wage.
Democratic candidates in these states barely mentioned the minimum wage.
So what now?
Republicans, soon to be in charge of Congress, will push their same old supply-side, trickle-down, austerity economics.
They’ll want policies that further enrich those who are already rich.
That lower taxes on big corporations and deliver trade agreements written in secret by big corporations.
That further water down Wall Street regulations so the big banks can become even bigger – too big to fail, or jail, or curtail.
They’ll exploit the public’s prevailing cynicism by delivering just what the cynics expect.
And the Democrats? They have a choice.
They can refill their campaign coffers for 2016 by trying to raise even more money from big corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals.
And hold their tongues about the economic slide of the majority, and the drowning of our democracy.
Or they can come out swinging. Not just for a higher minimum wage but also for better schools, paid family and medical leave, and child care for working families.
For resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act and limiting the size of Wall Street banks.
For saving Social Security by lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes.
For rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, and ports.
For increasing taxes on corporations with high ratios of CEO pay to the pay of average workers.
And for getting big money out of politics, and thereby saving our democracy.
Here are some books I’m reading currently that you might enjoy. Lots of different styles and choices, but they all kept me entertained and traveling mentally in another world. Have fun and Happy Thanksgiving.
Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (from the point of view of a scientist–edifying)
Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose (novels, brilliantly crafted)
Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilization (Conquest of the middle east–last century and a half)
Daniel Yergin, The Prize (quest for oil, power, money)
Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage (Lewis and Clark)
Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood (religion and the history of violence)
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (WW II fiction, prize-winning)
Proust, Swann’s Way (persistence and nature of memory–slow going , thick, detailed, try little doses)
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle (autobiographical, rich detail,7 volumes, riveting, easy to identify with his life)
Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and In Shadow, Refiner’s Fire, and A Soldier of the Great War (well-executed novels, like eating dessert)
Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat (narrative non-fiction about the quest for olympic gold in rowing 1936)
Mark Strand, Blizzard of One (poetryPulitzer Prize)
John Irving, The Water-Method Man (novel)
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (selections, meditational, confessional)
Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (scholarly explanation how the church reframed the nature of Jesus)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God (autobiographical, for the seeker)
I find this more than a little disquieting–I mean, after all, I am really important to me, at least, because I am all I really have and know. Ponder this today, fellow humans.
This is perhaps the most surprising map of all. Think about yourself for a moment. You’re a pretty big deal, right? The things that happen to you feel very consequential, don’t they? And for you, and your family, and your friends, they are. But this is a map of our corner of the universe. It’s called Laniakea and it’s got more than 100,000 galaxies and stretches more than 500 million light years across. You can’t even see earth in it, much less your city, much less your house. “It’s hard to wrap one’s head around how enormous this is,” writes Brad Plumer. “Each of those points of light is an individual galaxy. Each galaxy contains millions, billlions, or even trillions of stars. Oh, and this all is just our little local corner of an even broader universe. There are many other galaxy superclusters out there.” You can see more in this videofrom Nature. It kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
Today I saw this chart in THE WEEK on the internet. Many economic forecasters have been describing and alerting us to this phenomenon for years, but to see it displayed graphically makes me heartsick–not only for me, but for the remainder of the 90% represented by the blue bars below. Of that 90%, I am pretty comfortable comparatively–I have a roof over my head, regular meals, can get medical attention when I need it, and can afford basic cable. There are many many Americans who are not so fortunate and can’t afford the basics of food and housing.
My own situation, however, is not entirely stable–as the stock market grows and corporate profits hit record levels, the tide is actually going out rather than raising all ships in the harbor. My economic stasis or decline is exacerbated by my inability as a 78 year old retiree (on a basically fixed income) to increase my income or asset base in any meaningful or legal way. My dentist doesn’t understand or care about this (fees go up markedly each visit), neither does my land lord (rent for the next 12 months will rise 10%), nor my super market, nor Walgreens (purveyor of prescription drugs), nor Humana (prescription insurance), nor the folks at Exxon Mobil. My cost of living just continues to go up faster than my income–with no change in my lifestyle, material possessions, security, or peace of mind.
Unequal distribution of income in America, with a minority accruing spendable income of unspeakable amounts and at outrageous rates, is rapidly creating a situation (or already has)where the only recourse will be for the 90% to take to the streets and forcibly redistribute the wealth. There may be no alternative because history tells us that we cannot count on our wealthy brethren to self- police or self-regulate. Big money right now virtually controls the electoral process, so the democratic option of changing the system by voting is rapidly fading from sight. Greed and “living fat” are simply too much fun and too easy to justify in a country where everything is for sale and material values, for most folks, have long ago replaced anything remotely resembling ethical considerations with a spiritual or altruistic/idealistic foundation and focus. When you’re really enjoying yourself, it’s very hard to see, really see, the suffering around you.
I don’t think that the Founders had this sort of outcome in mind when they established our Nation.
The question that remains is: what shape or form will the “correction” will eventually take, and how long will it be before people decide that the system is so badly broken that they have no choice but to act to fix it on their own?
How the rich devoured the American economy, in one chart
In America, a rising economic tide lifts all boats, right? Not anymore. Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, plotted the distribution of income growth between the bottom 90 percent and the top 10 percent during economic expansions in the United States. The red bars are the richest 10 percent of people, the blue bars are everyone else:
Now, this is only economic expansions, which explains the wonky interval choices at the bottom — 1974 is missing, for example, because that whole year was taken up by recession. Those recessions would also probably claw back some of the rich’s income gains, since they get a lot of income from financial assets which crash in price during recessions (see p. 8 here).
But the trend here is undeniable. Economic expansions are supposed to be when the American economy distributes the fruits of growth to everyone. And that used to be true! But slowly and steadily the rich have gained on everyone else. They advance almost regardless of which party is in control of government — Reagan speeds it up, while Clinton slows it down, but not by very much.
Most staggering of all, during our current economic expansion, the bottom 90 percent is suffering declining incomes. Not only is the rising tide not lifting everyone equally, it’s actually submerging nine out of ten people.
Just signed up to donate a new design of soccer ball for kids to use anywhere. What a great invention and idea. Worth supporting. Make a real difference in the lives of kids with no access to regulation soccer balls or playing fields. It occurs to me that diverting the testosterone-fuelled energies of young men around the world into competitive sports is not a bad strategy for peacemakers.
The problems in the Middle East are not new. The causes continue to be rooted in outside influences and interventions that have as their primary goal self-aggrantizement. Maybe the peoples of the area will now do violently for themselves what Lawrence tried to do peacefully almost 100 years ago.
This link leads to a < 5 minute explanation–with implications for all of us today.
I’m glad to see that some brainpower is being devoted to something other than video games and manufacturing artisanal booze. Here’s something that can really make a difference. Wonderful”feel good”presentation.
On Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journalruns an op-ed by one of the best-known mega-donors, Charles Koch, who with his brother backs Americans for Prosperity, which spent $122 million leading up to the 2012 campaign and has already spent more than $30 million in the past six months attacking Obamacare and Democratic senators up for reelection this fall. In the op-ed, Koch explains his heavy spending by warning of the “collectivists” threatening to take over the country. “The fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government,” he writes.
* * * * * * * * * *
HMJ observes– America appears to be transforming itself from a democracy to a plutocracy. Plutocracy, the dictionary defines as, “a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.” The most recent ruling of the Supreme Court in expandingCitizens Unitedwith its newest decision in McCutcheon makes it possible for those with mega bucks to influence elections and national and state policy-making in ways the founding father would have never anticipated or thought possible. And these decisions are based on supporting Constitutional guarantees of free speech. Use of money in contributing to a campaign has somehow come to equal speech just like the corporation now has come to have the same legal rights as a person. (Dartmouth, Citizens). The Atlantic continues that: “As the Court confidently declared, “We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” And for skeptics who thought otherwise, the Court provided this additional assurance: “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Oh dear. and I thought I was naive. Most citizens are not surprised to learn that millionaires spend huge amounts of money to help candidates get elected because the donors expect a quid pro quo, something in return, to be rewarded by the winners in some way–a job, an appointment, favorable legislation, or elimination of regulations that limit exploitation of people or the environment, protection against immigrants or people whose views oppose or support certain “religiously based” ethical positions (abortion, capital punishment, welfare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, early education,) etc., etc).
The following article from the The Atlantic hits on attitudes and circumstances in America that I deplore. Maybe it’s because I’m an old guy and feel increasingly helpless as to do anything about the situation. I am not encouraged when I look around me for solutions among the’ best and the brightest’ in the next generations who ought to have the time and energy to pursue the remediation of these abuses. Many of them seem to me to be focused on other irrelevant (lightweight) or purely selfish pursuits: texting, or “gaming” or hacking one system or another, clubbing, job-jumping, or trying “to do deals” that will help them to become part of (as movers and shakers) the very system that needs fixing.
I am coming to believe that Chris Hedges is more than a little right when he says that the American democratic and economic system–as it is–will not and cannot self-correct, and that real change will come about only when the abuses become so egregious that a full scale revolution will be the only answer. As the realities of their circumstances continue to pound on the 99%, Hedges’ revolution may not be too far in the future.
2. On Monday, a Senate subcommittee releases a report on the tax avoidance used by Caterpillar, the giant Peoria, Ill.-based heavy equipment manufacturer, which cut its tax bill by $2.4 billion over the past 13 years by allotting $8 billion in revenues from its parts division to a subsidiary in Switzerland, where only 65 of the division’s 8,500 employees work. In an email exchange about whether this was appropriate, a managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which was paid $55 million to concoct this arrangement, said: “What the heck, we’ll all be retired when this audit comes up on audit…Baby boomers have their fun, and leave it to the kids to pay for it.”
3. On Tuesday, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan releases the latest version of the famous Ryan budget. To make up for tax reductions for the wealthy, the budget calls for very deep cuts in spending on Medicaid, food stamps and discretionary spending, which includes research and development, transportation and infrastructure. Amtrak would lose its $1 billion in already-meager annual subsidies and have to rely entirely on fare-box revenue.
4. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court releases a 5-4 ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, eliminating caps on how much total money ultra-rich donors can give to candidates, parties and PACs in a given election cycle. Where donors had previously been limited to giving $123,200 to candidates and parties in a given cycle, they can now give as much as $3.6 million. Chief Justice John Roberts writes: “Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corruption.” Celebrating the ruling, House Speaker John Boehnersays, “I’m all for freedom, congratulations.”
5. On Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journalruns an op-ed by one of the best-known mega-donors, Charles Koch, who with his brother backs Americans for Prosperity, which spent $122 million leading up to the 2012 campaign and has already spent more than $30 million in the past six months attacking Obamacare and Democratic senators up for reelection this fall. In the op-ed, Koch explains his heavy spending by warning of the “collectivists” threatening to take over the country. “The fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government,” he writes.
6. Later on Thursday morning, between 9 and 10 a.m., part of the overhead electric line that powers the Acela train comes down onto the tracks near Bowie, Maryland, between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Virtually all train traffic between Baltimore and Washington shuts down for hours as undermanned crews struggle to repair the line, thereby severely hampering traffic in the Washington to Boston Northeast corridor that carries 750,000 passengers on 2,000 trains per day and also spelling panic for the Thursday afternoon rail commuters heading north out of Washington.
A southbound commuter train from Baltimore to Washington on Thursday morning that was caught just behind the downed lines and a stalled Acela takes four hours and 20 minutes to make the 40 mile journey, one that normally takes an hour. German tourists on the train sit bewildered about what could possibly be happening. Passengers have the consolation of listening to several proudly Republican lawyer/lobbyists on board loudly voicing their opinions on the delay. One declares it is the fault of President Obama, who is “in way over his head.” Another declares that the lack of credible information from the conductor is “just like Benghazi.”
One passenger is left thinking that this country could use some more spending on infrastructure, transportation and the general commonweal. Yes, that risks being “collectivist” and would be opposed by a casino magnate with vast holdings in Macau and would leave less for top-bracket tax cuts in the Ryan budget. But heck, it would also mean some more business for Caterpillar, which might even be prevailed upon to keep some of its income stateside, thus helping pay for said investment in the future of the greatest nation on earth.
Alan Guth was one of the first physicists to hypothesize the existence of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.
He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.
If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.
“SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it.
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.
If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
Astronomers have found evidence to support the theory of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
THE UNIVERSE is just under 14 billion years old. From our position in the Milky Way galaxy, we can observe a sphere — the visible universe — extending 14 billion light-years in every direction. But there’s a mystery. Wherever we look, the universe has an even temperature.
NOT ENOUGH TIME The universe isn’t old enough for light to travel the 28 billion light-years from one side of the universe to the other, and there hasn’t been enough time for scattered patches of hot and cold to mix into an even temperature.
DISTANT COFFEE At a smaller scale, imagine using a telescope to look a mile in one direction. You see a coffee cup, and from the amount of steam you can estimate its temperature and how much it has cooled.
COFFEE EVERYWHERE Now turn around and look a mile in the other direction. You see the same coffee cup, at exactly the same temperature. Coincidence? Maybe. But if you see the same cup in every direction, you might want to look for another explanation.
STILL NOT ENOUGH TIME There hasn’t been enough time to carry coffee cups a mile in all directions before they get cold. But if all the coffee cups were somehow filled from a single coffee pot, all at the same time, that might explain their even temperature.
INFLATION solves this problem. The theory proposes that, less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. Tiny ripples in the violently expanding mass eventually grew into the large-scale structures of the universe.
FLUCTUATION Astronomers have now detected evidence of these ancient fluctuations in swirls of polarized light in the cosmic background radiation, which is energy left over from the early universe. These are gravitational waves predicted by Einstein.
EXPANSION Returning to our coffee, imagine a single, central pot expanding faster than light and cooling to an even temperature as it expands. That’s something like inflation. And the structure of the universe mirrors the froth and foam of the original pot.
By LARRY BUCHANAN and JONATHAN CORUM
Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.
In our own universe, it would serve as a window into the forces operating at energies forever beyond the reach of particle accelerators on Earth and yield new insights into gravity itself. Dr. Kovac’s ripples would be the first direct observation of gravitational waves, which, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should ruffle space-time.
According to inflation theory, the waves are the hypothetical quantum particles, known as gravitons, that carry gravity, magnified by the expansion of the universe to extragalactic size.
“You can see how the sky is being distorted by gravitational waves,” said Andrei Linde, a prominent inflation theorist at Stanford. “We are using our universe as a big microscope. The sky is a photographic plate.”
Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, “This is huge, as big as it gets.”
“Although I might not fully understand it,” Dr. Kamionkowski said, “this is a signal from the very earliest universe, sending a telegram encoded in gravitational waves.”
The ripples manifested themselves as faint spiral patterns in a bath of microwave radiation that permeates space and preserves a picture of the universe when it was 380,000 years old and as hot as the surface of the Sun.
Dr. Kovac and his collaborators, working in an experiment known as Bicep, for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, reported their results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics here on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
Dr. Kovac said the chance that the results were a fluke was only one in 3.5 million — a gold standard of discovery called five-sigma.
Dr. Guth pronounced himself “bowled over,” saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime.
“With nature, you have to be lucky,” he said. “Apparently we have been lucky.”
The results are the closely guarded distillation of three years’ worth of observations and analysis. Eschewing email for fear of a leak, Dr. Kovac personally delivered drafts of his work to a select few, meeting with Dr. Guth, who is now a professor at M.I.T. (as is his son, Larry, who was sleeping that night in 1979), in his office last week.
“It was a very special moment, and one we took very seriously as scientists,” said Dr. Kovac, who chooses his words as carefully as he tends his radio telescopes.
Dr. Linde, who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983, was about to go on vacation in the Caribbean last week when Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford colleague and a member of Dr. Kovac’s team, knocked on his door with a bottle of Champagne to tell him the news.
Confused, Dr. Linde called out to his wife, asking if she had ordered Champagne.
“And then I told him that in the beginning we thought that this was a delivery but we did not think that we ordered anything, but I simply forgot that actually I did order it, 30 years ago,” Dr. Linde wrote in an email.
Calling from Bonaire, the Dutch Caribbean island, Dr. Linde said he was still hyperventilating. “Having news like this is the best way of spoiling a vacation,” he said.
By last weekend, as social media was buzzing with rumors that inflation had been seen and news spread, astrophysicists responded with a mixture of jubilation and caution.
Abraham Loeb, a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer who was not part of the team, said: “It looks like inflation really took place. Since 1980, this was really speculative physics.”
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T., wrote in an email, “I think that if this stays true, it will go down as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.” He added, “It’s a sensational breakthrough involving not only our cosmic origins, but also the nature of space.”
Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, hailed it as the kind of discovery that could lead eventually to resolving riddles like dark matter and dark energy, writing in an email, “I am starting to feel like a 20-something-year-old postdoc!”
Lawrence M. Krauss of Arizona State and others also emphasized the need for confirmation, noting that the new results exceeded earlier estimates based on temperature maps of the cosmic background by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite and other assumptions about the universe.
“So we will need to wait and see before we jump up and down,” Dr. Krauss said.
Corroboration might not be long in coming. The Planck spacecraft, which has been making exquisite measurements of the Big Bang microwaves, will be reporting its own findings this year. At least a dozen other teams are attempting similar measurements from balloons, mountaintops and space.
Photo
The Bicep2 telescope, in the foreground, was used to detect the faint spiraling gravity patterns — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart at its birth.CreditSteffen Richter/Associated Press
SPIRALS IN THE SKY
Gravity waves are the latest and deepest secret yet pried out of the cosmic microwaves, which were discovered accidentally by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both then at Bell Labs, 50 years ago. They got the Nobel Prize.
Dr. Kovac has spent his whole career trying to read the secrets of these waves. He is one of four leaders of Bicep, which has operated a series of increasingly sensitive radio telescopes at the South Pole, where the air — thin, cold and dry — creates ideal observing conditions. The others are Clement Pryke of the University of Minnesota, Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology and Dr. Kuo of Stanford.
“The South Pole is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground,” Dr. Kovac said. He has been there 23 times, he said, wintering over in 1994. “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he said.
In 2002, he was part of a team that discovered that the microwave radiation was polarized, meaning the light waves had a slight preference to vibrate in one direction rather than another.
This was a step toward the ultimate goal of detecting the gravitational waves from inflation. Such waves, squeezing space in one direction and stretching it in another as they go by, would twist the direction of polarization of the microwaves, theorists said. As a result, maps of the polarization in the sky should have little arrows going in spirals.
Detecting those spirals required measuring infinitesimally small differences in the temperature of the microwaves. The group’s telescope, Bicep2, is basically a giant superconducting thermometer.
“We had no expectations what we would see,” Dr. Kovac said. The earlier Planck study had concluded that a parameter r, which is a measure of the swirliness of the polarization, could not be higher than 0.11, which would have knocked many popular versions of inflation. But it was not a direct measurement, as the Bicep team was attempting.
The Bicep measurement of r clocked in at nearly twice that, 0.20, putting the most favored models back into contention.
The strength of the signal surprised the researchers, and they spent a year burning up time on a Harvard supercomputer, making sure they had things right and worrying that competitors might beat them to the breakthrough.
A SPECIAL TIME
The data traced the onset of inflation to a time in cosmic history that physicists like Dr. Guth, staying up late in his Palo Alto house 35 years ago, suspected was a special break point in the evolution of the universe.
Physicists recognize four forces at work in the world today: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But they have long suspected that those are simply different manifestations of a single unified force that ruled the universe in its earliest, hottest moments.
As the universe cooled, according to this theory, there was a fall from grace, not unlike some old folk mythology of gods or brothers falling out with each other. The laws of physics evolved, with one force after another “freezing out,” or splitting away.
That was where Dr. Guth came in.
Under some circumstances, a glass of water can stay liquid as the temperature falls below 32 degrees, until it is disturbed, at which point it will rapidly freeze, releasing latent heat in the process.
Similarly, the universe could “supercool” and stay in a unified state too long. In that case, space itself would become temporarily imbued with a mysterious kind of latent heat, or energy.
Inserted into Einstein’s equations, the latent energy would act as a kind of antigravity, and the universe would blow itself up. Since it was space itself supplying the repulsive force, the more space was created, the harder it pushed apart. In a runaway explosion, what would become our observable universe mushroomed in size at least a trillion trillionfold — from a submicroscopic speck of primordial energy to the size of a grapefruit — in less than a cosmic eye-blink.
Almost as quickly, this energy would decay into ordinary particles and radiation that were already in sync, despite how far apart they wound up, because they had all sprung from such a tiny primordial point, as if the galaxies had gotten together in the locker room to make a plan before going out. All of normal cosmic history was still ahead, resulting in today’s observable universe, a patch of sky and stars 14 billion light-years across.
“It’s often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” Dr. Guth likes to say, “but the universe might be the ultimate free lunch.”
Make that free lunches. Most of the hundred or so models that have been spawned by Dr. Guth’s original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion with atoms, stars and planets, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles here and there endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.
The Bicep data does not reveal what this magical-sounding inflating energy is. Antigravity might sound crazy, but it was Einstein who first raised the possibility of its permeating space in the form of a fudge factor called the cosmological constant, which he later abandoned as a blunder. It was revived with the discovery 15 years ago that something called dark energy is giving a boost to the expansion of the universe, albeit far more gently than inflation did.
So the future of the cosmos is perhaps bright and fecund, but do not bother asking about going any deeper into the past.
As Dr. Guth will be the first to say, we might never know what happened before inflation, at the very beginning, because inflation erases everything that came before it. All the chaos and randomness of the primordial moment are swept away, forever out of our view.
“If you trace your cosmic roots,” Dr. Loeb said, “you wind up at inflation.”
