Comments on: Everything I know about the universe I did not learn from newspaper headlines

By: Unsolicited Advice, Part Six: Talking to the Media | Cosmic Variance

Unsolicited Advice, Part Six: Talking to the Media | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:26:26 +0000

[…] that the truth occasionally gets compromised, and in my view that should never be acceptable. The WMAP headlines we wrote about some time back are a great example. Both scientists and journalists worked hard to […]

By: Arbitrary Chronological Signifiers | Cosmic Variance

Arbitrary Chronological Signifiers | Cosmic Variance — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:28:25 +0000

[…] Everything I Know About the Universe I Did Not Learn From Newspaper Headlines […]

By: Future cosmology Nobels | Cosmic Variance

Future cosmology Nobels | Cosmic Variance — Wed, 24 May 2006 20:36:04 +0000

[…] I was asked the other day whether Alan Guth should expect to win the Nobel Prize for inflation, now that WMAP has found tentative evidence for a slight “tilt” in the primordial perturbations, just as we might expect from inflation. At the moment I’m leaning toward “not yet,” but it started me thinking about which cosmology discoveries have yet to be honored by Nobels but should be at some point. (After the 2004 prize for asymptotic freedom, there aren’t really any completely obvious particle-physics prizes lurking out there, although prizes for color, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and CP violation would be quite warranted.) […]

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:17:34 +0000

If anyone has a peripheral interest in the CMB, one should view Hiranya Peiris’s (u of Chicago) excellent talk at the Space Telescope Institute (spring 2006 series). She presented the CMB with the appropriate digestible mix of scale and depth. K C Cole (comment #21) implied that Michael Turner ( u of Chicago) mis-stepped by over-referencing “smoking guns” as “inflationary features” embedded in the WMAP data. However, Hiranya Peivis - as a fellow constituent at the U of Chicago - makes up nicely for any assumed pitfalls in Michael Turner’s media relations.

By: John Branch

John Branch — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 18:31:56 +0000

I’m even more of a layperson than the “obvious layperson” who commented above, but I got a lot out of Sean’s post, and I thank him for it. Having worked in journalism for a while, as one who was presumed to have more exertise in a certain area (the arts) than my average reader, I’m aware of the difficulties in explaining complex matters in a short space, and, however he came by it, I think Sean is too.

That reminds me of something else. Elsewhere in the blogosphere I’ve been reading lately about a controversy in the New York theater world; compared to some of that, the discussions I see here, when I have time to drop in, are models of civility.

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:21:44 +0000

Sean, thanks for your generosity in clearing-up my faulty reasoning regarding the blackbody of the CMB. Phrased succinctly, the perturbations of the primordial plasma - not the deviations from the blackbody - are correlated with the inhomogeneities/anisotropies of the CMB. Let me share the convoluted pathway of my faulty reasoning: when Kenneth Ford in his popular text “The Quantum World” characterized blackholes as the most perfect blackbodies in Nature, my faulty reasoning linked the “more perfect” blackbody of a blackhole to the “less perfect” blackbody of the CMB. I further faultered by linking the “less perfect” blackbody of the CMB to the inhomogeneities/anisotropies of the CMB. A superb example of bad science on my part: perhaps the Bush administration would be eager to appoint me as a new addition to their illustrious science team?

By: spaceman

spaceman — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 05:42:44 +0000

Although most of the newspaper headlines regarding the recent WMAP results arguably exaggerated the importance of the new results, I think there is another school of thought regarding recent advances in cosmology which is equally if not more frustrating to witness. This is the “cosmology will never be a science” or “anti-Big Bang” school of thought. These people criticize the fact that many cosmologists are calling the standard 6-parameter cosmological model simple. They reason that a model with 6-parameters is complicated and unaesthetic. They say that cosmology will never be a science but then, in a contradictory manner, offer scientific evidence for their own cosmology theories.

I certainly think peer review and skepticism of new results are crucial aspects of the scientific process; however, I don’t know why some people seem so unwilling to accept the notion that we may actually be getting somewhere in terms of understanding the sweep of cosmic evolution. I don’t think cosmology is solved, but I would like to believe (and I think the currrent evidence is bearing this out) that we are finally at the point where we can claim to have a good understanding of cosmic evolution even if we don’t know all of the details. Just because something is big doesn’t necessarily mean that it is harder to understand. Unlike archeologists, cosmologists and astronomers can directly observe past objects of study.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:16:18 +0000

Cynthia, yes, it is deviations from perfect smoothness of the primordial plasma that grow into galaxies and clusters today. (Not really “deviations from a blackbody” — the CMB is very close to a blackbody at every point, although the temperature fluctuates from place to place.) If it weren’t for primordial perturbations, structures would have developed *much* more slowly, although there would always be some perturbations, if only because of thermal/quantum fluctuations. However, since there is a cosmolgical constant that can suppress structure growth at late times, we can certainly imagine that if the perturbations were substantially smaller, essentially no structures would ever have formed.

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:06:45 +0000

Question: if the CMB was an absolute perfect black body, would not the universe have forever remained in a permanent Dark Age, in effect, succumbed to an eternal heat death devoid of any repolarization/reionization signature? If the answer to this question is roughly in the affirmative, can one safely argue that the primary reason the universe travels an evolutionary course be fundamentally linked to the imperfections(as opposed to the perfections) of the CMB? Furthermore, if the answer to this question is somewhat yes, would the “smoking gun” of the universe’s evolutionary pathway be embedded in the “imperfect parameters” involving the inhomogeneities/anisotrpies of the CMB- in contrast to the “perfect parameters” involving the homogeneities/isotropies of the CMB? Therefore, assuming this “broad-in-scope” line of reasoning is vaguely valid, then in order to uncover the origins of the universe, one must uncover the origins of the imperfections ( the inhomogeneities/anisotropies) of the CMB minus the random noise of the perfections (the homogeneities/isotropies) of the CMB. PLease respond gently, I am an obvious layperson.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:13:22 +0000

Sean,

Thanks.