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Last week one of the most meaningful hypotheses in regards
to relativity and astrophysics was confirmed by researchers at Harvard
University. For the first time, "ripples" in space time have been directly
quantified by an instrument intended for just that purpose. If you're not
already shaking with nervous energy, I don't know how else to excite you.
 Of course I joke; not about this discovery's importance, but
about its reception. This truly is staggering
news. I refrained from writing about it last week because it hadn't been
officially announced by the time of my composition. Yet I was just another
example of this discovery's minimal and underserved media presence. Most news
stories recited a few sentences of dialogue, had a local university professor
say something along the lines of "Einstein was right!," and then cut to footage
of drunk people wearing green since it was St. Patrick's Day.
It's honestly hard to explain the perceived
antipathy. In the Age of Information, access to the information before it's
official seems to be more prized than the information itself. Perhaps a
gravitational wave feature-length film is what we need. Or maybe we need a Lady
Gaga song about it.
According to the researchers themselves, they had a small
team of analysts--about 20, who mutually agreed that they wouldn't tell anyone
until the group had decided too. In fact, the result--the hard discovery of
primordial B-modes--has been kicking around amongst the team for over a year.
They regularly changed passwords, created new email lists, and relied on hard
documents to limit the chance that their discovery would be leaked, that rival
scientists could hijack their findings, or that their conclusions could be
maligned by the news. So, in this regards they have been quite successful.
 But part of the indifference to the discovery could be how
the non-physicists of the world interpreted the results. Little was done to
thoroughly explain the magnitude of what this discovery means. Perhaps now is
the time to shed some light on the subject.
Since 2006, these researchers have been minding the results
of BICEP, which stands for background imaging of cosmic extragalactic
polarization. This instrument was meant to measure the polarization of the
cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is light energy that was released from
the Big Bang and still exists in our universe, but is only identifiable with a
radio telescope. When this light energy is measured the results are fairly
uniform in any direction we observe, meaning that all of this light was at one
point in very close existence. But when the age of the universe is calculated
in a linear way, this light would be together at a point before where evidence suggests the universe began, which is before
13.7 billion years-give or take 40 million years or so, no big deal. Either
we've been wrong about the age of the universe for a while, or the universe
unexpectedly accelerated in expansion for a time between the Big Bang and
present day.
 The CMB exists as two types of polarization, E-modes and
B-modes, and B-modes are produced by gravitational waves from cosmic inflation.
Cosmic inflation is the hypothesis for this period where the universe expanded rapidly,
before returning to a slower, more stable rate of growth. BICEP 2 (pictured right) began running
its tests in 2010 and concluded in 2012. This instrument was able to detect
temperature changes of particles to the 10 millionth of a degree. As the data
was reviewed, the researchers began to try to debunk their own findings--evidence
of B-modes existed from the beginning of BICEP 2--but \ the team thought it
couldn't be this easy. After a year of internal deliberation, the team came
forward.
Finding B-modes also tidies up two other physics problems. First,
the flatness problem which questions the physical shape of our universe based
on given parameters. (Turns out it's nearly flat.) Second would be the magnetic
monopole problem, which concludes that if all matter was so dense during the
universe's infancy, it would produce very stable particles called magnetic
monopoles which would have only type of charge, positive or negative. They
would also be so very abundant. Yet not a single monopole has ever been
observed, and cosmic inflation would imply that they're out there, but so rare
and far apart that they're insanely difficult to find.
In a sense, the major hole in the S.S. Relativity has been
plugged with the discovery of B-modes, and in-turn gravitational waves. So for
now, the Einstein's ship would remain afloat, but if it sprung a
leak-information or composition-wise-it might get a lot more attention.
Resources
Harvard-Smithsonian - First Direct Evidence...
Wired - How the Biggest Science Secret...; That Signal From the...
Wikipedia - BICEP and Keck Array; Flatness problem; Magnetic monopole
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