News (2014/09/23)

Hey guys,

Not a lot of news to announce regarding the blog, no work has gone into the next post since my last news post about a month ago. I've been spending most of my time working on preparing for the GRE and doing some personal quantum field theory study for shits and giggles, along with various and sundry odd-jobs.

The real reason for this news post is that there's real news to report, that is to say, news in the outside world of physics. The Planck Collaboration have published on arXiv their intermediate results regarding polarised dust emissions. Those of you who remember the BICEP2 Collaboration's results regarding their measurement of primordial light polarisation, which implied gravitational waves evidencing cosmic inflation (which I've written about in previous news posts here, here and here) will recall that many people were choosing to be somewhat cautious until independent confirmation could be made by Planck. Well, the news is in and it isn't good.

As before I'll leave the explanation to someone better qualified but to put it simply, at the moment it seems to be the case that there's a lot more galactic dust in the region of the sky that BICEP2 was looking at than they thought and the majority of the signal they were looking at was in fact not primordial light polarisation but light polarisation due to interactions with galactic dust.

No doubt there's still lots still yet to come from this but for the moment I think it's safe to say that the jury is still out on the details of inflation and we're back to where we were before the BICEP2 announcement in March. Alas, sometimes science is messy and that's just how it goes. Even still, it also means that there's still much more work to be done in this area (which is a good thing!), and hopefully the next results that come in will stand up better under scrutiny.