Ambitwistor, I hadn’t seen the patent. I’ll just have to make my millions some other way.

The articles on society et. al. are interesting enough, but this is very valuable stuff for me. It strikes a middle ground between struggling through technical papers on arxiv and sighing at the handwaving meathead analysis of the pop sci press.

So my comment is: thanks for the article, and thanks very much to everyone who has posted in comments. I feel my brain expanding as I read: my favorite sensation.

The length of time (in years) just shows how difficult the task at hand must have been for all those involved in WMAP, and initally the COBE team. WMAP is rightly so, a fantastic success and will remain, one of the amazing achievements of Astronomical experiments, a minor miracle if ever there was one !

How far did you want to take this in terms of empirical views? Or, be left with insulting comments about the way in which we look at the cosmos from the very beginning?

In cosmology, the early Universe was crossed by real acoustic waves generated soon after Big Bang. Such vibrations left their imprints 300 000 years later as tiny density fluctuations in the primordial plasma. Hot and cold spots in the present-day 2.7 K CMB radiation reveal those density fluctuations. Thus the CMB temperature fluctuations look like Chaldni patterns resulting from a complicated three-dimensional drumhead that

Not a soccer ball? Yet some would paint a Platonic image and give monte carlo demonstrations.

BICEP’s main goal? That group’s Antarctica wintover finishes next week, so maybe (after a well-deserved holiday and after they’ve had time to reduce their data), you can update us on their results …

At least someone understands the “Aristotlean” view?:)

I still think we have to be “introspective” about these calculations or you wouldn’t have any evidence in whch to compare?

You had to look for asymmetrical breaking values from “reductionistic attitudes” in order to discern the value of any universe created?

The so called “axis of evil” is indeed very intriguing but there is definitely no consensus yet that we have throw away the concept of statistical isotropy of the universe because of these results. The beauty of science is that there *can* be a debate about these things and people are coming up with novel and interesting ways to test this very important concept.

Paul, I thought this was widely known, but the entirety of the WMAP data *is* public, from the raw timestream from the satellite down to the parameter analysis statistics. *Anyone* can download and reanalyze our data, and indeed have done so. Mostly the reanalyses come to very similar conclusions to the WMAP team, and some make very nice improvements to our analysis which the team have then adopted in their own analysis. There is a degree of openness about the whole procedure which I am not sure is found even in the particle physics experimental community.

:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias

the long awaited publication of the data, invoked a hornets nest of suppositions:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=246#comments

Sean posted a number of threads dealing with WMAP:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/03/16/wmap-results-cosmology-makes-sense/#comments

I admire the WMAP team ability to make something out of the immense amount of data they had, and the recent nobel prize award further justifies the need for experimental status for cosmology in the whole.

But, It would have been more useful if the data was independantly analyzed by a number of groups, similaineously?

With the discovery of sound waves in the CMB, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology in which we can begin to talk with certainty about the origin of structure and the content of matter and energy in the universe.
Wayne Hu

http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/intermediate/intermediate.html