Big Bang Breakthrough Team Back-Pedals On Major Result

An anonymous reader writes A few months ago researchers announced they had discovered proof of the big bang. Now they're not so sure. Further research suggests cosmic dust might have skewed the results. "Back in March, the BICEP2 team reported a twisted pattern in the sky, which they attributed to primordial gravitational waves, wrinkles in the fabric of the universe that could have been produced when the baby universe went through an enormous growth spurt. If correct, this would confirm the theory of inflation, which says that the universe expanded exponentially in the first slivers of a second after the big bang – many believe that it continues to expand into an ever-growing multiverse. Doubts about the announcement soon emerged. The BICEP2 team identified the waves based on how they twisted, or polarised, the photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the earliest light emitted in the universe around 380,000 years after the big bang. Other objects, such as the ashes of exploding stars or dust within our galaxy, can polarise light as well."

Backpeddle?

[jythie]

I am not sure "back pedal" is really the right word here. They did some research, published a result, other researchers pointed out potential problems with the conclusions, the original team listened to the criticisms and took them seriously.

Re:Backpeddle?

[Tanktalus]

This.

Real science is always open to upending. If they weren't willing to listen to critics, they'd be called a religion.

Excersise for the reader: are there any other scientists not willing to listen to their critics?

Re:Not the Big Bang

[careysub]

There is tones of evidence against the Big Bang also.

It is one of MANY theories, they group it under the STANDARD THEORY, because that is politically they want to push as fact, when in fact, it is not fact, and they do not teach other theories that are equally as valid. THAT is the problem with academia.

The "tones" - frequencies and modulations in the cosmic medium - support the Big Bang model quite strongly.

The signal-to-noise ratio demonstrating the reality of the Big Bang in scientific data collected over decades is enormously higher than that of the posts appearing here today where numerous ACs spout contentless skepticism and derision, and to the extent they reference facts at all, they get them hilariously wrong.

Any AC who claims lots of evidence against a well-established scientific model, but it unable to cite a single scrap of same it simply polluting Slashdot and wasting everyone's time (including his/her own).

Uh-huh...

[jpellino]

(1) CMB is based on data that can't be explained any other *reasonable* way and fills a gap in an otherwise too-sensible-and-supported-to-be-discarded model, (2) there are not "ideas that cannot be questioned" - in science, any existing model or theory has its chin out like a brash boxer, daring the rest of the data to "go ahead, take your best shot!" and if it does, we have a winner and new champeeen! Much of the problems with public perception of science have to do with the fact that people "know" how gravity and light behave, or the growth of a tree or the flight of a bird from their earliest days observing the world. They have little or no idea of the complexity that is behind any one of those things once you start to analyze them. That discovery is the stuff that most school science should (and now more than ever does) create in students. The sticky part then comes when science tackles something that most people will never observe - black holes, quasars, DNA, The Big Bang, TCP/IP, natural selection in vivo, etc. They then have little else to fall back on than practical experience: "It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes...", "If God had wanted us to fly...", "It's turtles all the way down!" People will sooner cling to a familiar falsehood than an unfamiliar truth. I don't blame them, but I do want to make sure the truth is available.

Right...

[jpellino]

All systems of thought only hold up in reference to their own systems - looking outside their relative window shows them to have flaws. Hume showed us that science as empiricism is only a good tool because the underlying empiricism supports its continued use - so it's technically a circular argument. Practically, it's the best way to stop getting hit by buses and for getting to the moon. So you have a way to discover best-for-now rules. Scientists understand they are building models the same way clothing designers understand they are building dreams. People needing to use science need to know that the gas grill will do amazing things and can also kill you. The nuances of modeling vs. explaining (or dreaming vs. wearing pants) are secondary at that point. And it's not so much "because it is that way" as it is "that's the current reach of our understanding". That first one makes it sound like we are throwing up our hands. The second makes is sound like we are resting for now, prepared to pick up the load again as needed.