Big fscking announcement for tomorrow - Physics department
There is supposed to be a major announcement scheduled for tomorrow.
Rumors are that Gravity Waves have finally been detected.
From
Sean Carroll:
Gravitational Waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background
Major announcement coming! That much is clear, from this press release: on Monday at noon Eastern time, astronomers will �announce a major discovery.� No evidence from that page what the discovery actually is. But if you�re friends with a lot of cosmologists on Facebook/Twitter (or if you just read the Guardian), you�ve heard the rumor: the BICEP2 experiment has purportedly detected signs of gravitational waves in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. If it�s true (and the result holds up), it will be an enormously important clue about what happened at the very earliest moments of the Big Bang. Normally I wouldn�t be spreading rumors, but once it�s in the newspapers, I figure why not? And in the meantime we can think about what such a discovery would mean, regardless of what the announcement actually turns out to be (and whether the result holds up). See also Richard Easther, R�sonaances, Sesh Nadathur, Philip Gibbs, Shaun Hotchkiss, and Peter Coles. At a slightly more technical level, Daniel Baumann has a slide-show review.
Punchline: other than finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, I can�t think of any other plausible near-term astrophysical discovery more important than this one for improving our understanding of the universe. It would be the biggest thing since dark energy. (And I might owe Max Tegmark $100 � at least, if Planck confirms the result. I will joyfully pay up.) Note that the big news here isn�t that gravitational waves exist � of course they do. The big news is that we have experimental evidence of something that was happening right when our universe was being born.
This is major -- we have been able to detect the background radiation from the Big Bang as a form of microwave 'hum' since the early 1960's (
here and
here) but to get tangible evidence from that time period... This is really a fun time to be alive!
Posted by DaveH at March 16, 2014 9:14 PM