The Koyal Group Info Mag Scientists got it

wrong on gravitational waves

It was announced in headlines worldwide as one of the biggest scientific discoveries for
decades, sure to garner Nobel prizes. But now it looks likely that the alleged evidence of
both gravitational waves and ultra-fast expansion of the universe in the big bang (called
inflation) has literally turned to dust.

Last March, a team using a telescope called Bicep2 at the South Pole claimed to have read
the signatures of these two elusive phenomena in the twisting patterns of the cosmic
microwave background radiation: the afterglow of the big bang. But this week, results from
an international consortium using a space telescope called Planck show that Bicep2s data is
likely to have come not from the microwave background but from dust scattered through
our own galaxy.

Some will regard this as a huge embarrassment, not only for the Bicep2 team but for science
itself. Already some researchers have criticised the team for making a premature
announcement to the press before their work had been properly peer reviewed.

But theres no shame here. On the contrary, this episode is good for science. This sequence
of excitement followed by deflation, debate and controversy is perfectly normal its just
that in the past it would have happened out of the public gaze. Only when the dust had
settled would a sober and sanitised version of events have been reported, if indeed there
was anything left to report.

That has been the standard model of science ever since the media first acknowledged it. A
hundred years ago, headlines in the New York Times had all the gravitas of a papal edict:
Men of science convene and so forth. They were authoritative, decorous and totally
contrived.

That image started to unravel after James Watson published The Double Helix, his racy
behind-the-scenes account of the pursuit of the structure of DNA. But even now, some
scientists would prefer the mask to remain, insisting that results are announced only after
they have passed peer review, ie been checked by experts and published in a reputable
journal.

There are many reasons why this will no longer wash. Those days of deference to patrician
authority are over, and probably for the better. We no longer take on trust what we are told
by politicians, experts and authorities. There are hazards to such scepticism, but good
motivations too. Few regret that the old spoonfeeding of facts to the ignorant masses has
been replaced with attempts to engage and include the public.

But science itself has changed too. Information and communications technologies mean
that not only is it all but impossible to keep hot findings under wraps, but few even try. In
physics in particular, researchers put their papers on publicly accessible pre-print servers
before formal publication so that they can be seen and discussed, while specialist bloggers
give new claims an informal but often penetrating analysis. This enriches the scientific
process and means that problems that peer reviewers for journals might not notice can be
spotted and debated. Peer review is imperfect anyway a valuable check but far from
infallible, and notoriously conservative.

Because of these new models of dissemination, we were all able to enjoy the debate in 2011
about particles called neutrinos that were alleged to travel faster than light, in defiance of
the theory of special relativity. Those findings were announced, disputed and finally
rejected, all without any papers being formally published. The arguments were heated but
never bitter, and the public got a glimpse of science at its most vibrant: astonishing claims
mixed with careful deliberation, leading ultimately to a clear consensus. How much more
informative it was than the tidy fictions that published papers often become.

Arent some premature announcements just perfidious attempts to grab priority, and thus
fame and prizes? Probably. But its time we stopped awarding special status to people who,
having more resources or leverage with editors, or just plain luck, are first past a post that
everyone else is stampeding towards. Who cares? Rewards in science should be for
sustained creative thinking, insight and experimental ingenuity, not for being in the right
place at the right time. A bottle of bubbly will suffice for that.

What, then, of gravitational waves? If, as it seems, Bicep2 never saw them bouncing from
the repercussions of the big bang, then were back to looking for them the hard way, by
trying to detect the incredibly tiny distortions they should introduce in spacetime as they
ripple past. Now the Bicep2 and Planck teams are pooling their data to see if anything can be
salvaged. Good on them. Debate, discussion, deliberation: science happening just as it
should.