We had reports from two Soylents concerning evidence that earlier reports of the possible detection of primordial gravity waves may be explained by dust:
Gravity Wave Evidence Disappears into Dust
Earlier this year, researchers who used a telescope based at the South Pole called BICEP2 announced that they obtained evidence for gravity waves caused by the Big Bang itself. The results would provide direct evidence that a model of the Universe's origin called inflation had left its mark on the present-day Universe.
But in reporting on the results, our own Matthew Francis suggested that the discovery was not as definitive as it might be, writing "the story of BICEP2, inflation, and primordial gravitational radiation is just beginning." And since then, it became clear that there was a complicating factor—dusty material in our own galaxy—and that the BICEP2 team's way of controlling for it left a little something to be desired (it involved using processed data obtained from a PDF used in a conference presentation).
Yesterday, the team that put the PDF together in the first place released its own analysis. And they've determined that BICEP2 was probably staring at dust, rather than the earliest moments of the Universe.
[Astract]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5738
[Paper] PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.5738v1
BAO Could Turn Out To Be Just Dust
We have had several articles on Primordial Gravity Waves From the Big Bang, but now it seems it could just be dust.
A new analysis of data from the Planck space telescope has concluded that the tiny silicate and carbonate particles spewed into interstellar space by dying stars could account for as much as 100 percent of the signal detected by the BICEP2 telescope and announced to great fanfare this spring.
The Planck analysis is “relatively definitive in that we can’t exclude that the entirety of our signal is from dust,” said Brian Keating, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the BICEP2 collaboration.
And I just waxed my "Big Bang Gun" gravitational surfboard!
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Tuesday September 23 2014, @05:44PM
ah - you got the Ars one from me too. so now the count is three.
yeah. i didnt see it in the queue, as it had already been approved.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DrMag on Tuesday September 23 2014, @06:23PM
It seems any time a scientist is eager to mass-publicize their results, it turns out they've missed something vital.
That's yet another reasons for the recent article here about people's trust issues in scientists [soylentnews.org]. I recall in this particular case, Stanford produced a video [youtube.com] of one of the scientists involved telling a pioneer in the field about his results. His actual statement to the guy is completely meaningless to any non-scientist, and not very helpful to any scientist who isn't directly involved: "It's five-sigma at point two!!" (?!?!) And that phrase almost brings the people being videoed to tears...
It's hard enough to understand what scientists say sometimes, and it doesn't help when they demand attention and accolades only to be shown to be wrong.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Blackmoore on Tuesday September 23 2014, @08:23PM
Well, if you read the article; the team who were working on the data didn't have access to the information on microwave research about the interstellar dust.
once they did; and looked again at the data they found that they could not rule out interstellar dust; and are currently trying to find a mathematical way to remove that from the original set of data.
It doesn't disprove it; it just means they have to back and see what you can do to get rid of the flotsam from the data.
and then another group give us
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140922091250.htm [sciencedaily.com]
The new model proposes that a star that oscillates at the same frequency as a gravitational wave will absorb energy from that wave and brighten, an overlooked prediction of Einstein's 1916 theory of general relativity.
so at some point we'll have a model - but right now we're still looking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @08:30PM
Well, not really in this case. In this case they published extraordinary results - evidence for gravity waves. Now others looked at same data and questioned their results. Suddenly, the so called evidence that can only be explained by gravity waves, can be explained by other things too that original researchers did not think of or discounted as immaterial. So, back to square 1 with gravity waves.
This has nothing to do with trust for scientists. It has more to do with trust to the 24h news cycle, where uninformed journalists publish rubbish. Sure, the article about gravity waves was published prominently in scientific circles, but so was the so called "faster than light neutrino" signal. It's someone's extraordinary claims that they cannot readily explain otherwise. But after careful examination, these claims do not hold much water. That's how science works, and always will.
If you want something more solid from science, you have to listen to scientific consensus. If something is generally accepted by the scientific community, then report that. If someone thinks they found something extraordinary, then wait a year or two or three and check back if that claim is still viewed as valid. "Cure for cancer found?" wait a few years to see if it actually works in people. It's very easy these days to cure cancer. It's little more tricky if you can't kill the patient. So, want some things that scientists agree are correct? Here's five,
1. Evolution (this is actually a *fact*, like Sun is hotter than Earth, not just a scientific theory*** like others)
2. Anthopogenic Global Warming
3. Standard Theory of subatomic particles
4. Quantum Theory
5. Special and General Relativity
*** - and don't confuse scientific theory with colloquial, dictionary definition of the word. In Science, a theory is an experimentally demonstrated model that's been shown to produce valid predictions that were not previously known to exist. An idea that fits all known observation but does not make testable predictions is quite useless and discarded by science as gibberish.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Tuesday September 23 2014, @11:13PM
Because the public, unlike journalists, gets all their information directly from the source. You know, maybe this does have something to do with trust for scientists after all.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:45AM
More to the point, increasing accuracy of measurement will not necessarily throw support one way or the other, the theory is in fact unfalsifiable, which is a bad thing for science (and a good thing for religion and herbal supplements).
From the Quanta article:
To critics of the inflation idea, the heightened sensitivity of these experiments may be of little consolation. The theory is flexible enough to survive even if no primordial B-modes are found, making it virtually impossible to falsify.
A theory that flexible, according to Quine, is no theory at all. So the "inflation" theory is dead? Or "not quite dead, I'm thinking of going for a walk" dead?
(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:10PM
That's not much of a complaint. It's not like a legislative law, where one can interpret it one way for a particular judge and then a completely different and contradictory way for another judge. If these experiments constrain cosmic inflation theory in a useful way, then that is a stepping stone to a falsification test since that constraint continues to exist for any future experiment to exploit.
Further, why should any given experiment be expected to be the only falsification test possible? Just because a theory has a bit of ambiguity which prevents it from being falsified with the current generation of experiments doesn't mean that will always be the case forever on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:33AM
but that just sweeps probems under the rug. Science shouldn't be performed by press release, and if you're going to put out a revised version of your paper *one day* after you've told the world -- with breathtaking hyperbole -- that you've "discovered the smoking gun for inflation", and if your analysis is so lacklustre it doesn't even take into account possible systematics including in your dust model, then you've done it extremely poorly. Everyone involved in releasing the BICEP2 paper earlier this year should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. It's obvious it was released significantly before analysis was complete, and in an unwarranted burst of publicity probably more aimed at making headlines and demonstrating to funders that their money was worth it than in maintaining integrity. The BICEP2 paper was flawed -- very flawed -- and the lead scientists themselves have to saddle a lot of the blame for the media frenzy. Unfortunately we haven't seen heads rolling amongst the PIs but we should have done. The same holds for the FTL neutrinos, and for claims of direct detections of gravitational waves that turned out to be tremors or passing trucks, and any other claim released breathlessly to the media in a press release before it's even had the most cursory examination by other members of the scientific community, and in many cases, before the analysis is actually complete.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @08:01PM
This actual proof of deity meddling, brought to you by the noodly appendage of the spaghetti monster. The closer we try to look at his answers, the more he messes with our instruments.