Speck of Interstellar Dust Obscures Glimpse of Big Bang

Ten bucks says sooner or later the Big Bang Theory goes up on a shelf in the same closet where they now keep the Piltdown Man.

What is Bicep doing that Planck isn't? Planck created a polarization map of the entire sky in nine frequencies, while Bicep used only one frequency, so why did the Bicep people think that they'd found something when Planck hadn't? Does Bicep have some kind of capability that Planck doesn't?

So, all we know for now is that when star dust gets in your eyes, you start seeing things.

This is a response to Michael Turner's comment at the end of the article that, “Inflation is the most important idea in cosmology since the hot Big Bang,” he said. “It is our Helen of Troy, launching a thousand experiments.” This was an incautious metaphor. Mr. Turner should be reminded that Helen admits to Odysseus that she is a slut, or, in the more pointed language of Thersites in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, "All the argument is a whore and a cuckold, a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon!" Does Mr. Turner think that the Big Bang theory and inflation are destined for a similar disaster?

This is so very interesting; one would need to be brain dead not to find it so. Yet, and ultimately, it does not even address the question about what caused (or came before) the big bang. Why IS there something rather than nothing? O, the brain hurts. Without these questions it means very little, if anything, to be human. I guess.

So I guess this means the creationists are right, eh? Just kidding. This is why I love science. Always testing, always updating.

hmmm... scientists admit that based on fact and available data, inflation is not yet proven and may not be the answer to the earliest beginnings of the universe... on several other notes: Republicans still dispute climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence... Christians still think Jesus defied gravity and walked on water... Scientology teaches that psychiatry is fraud... I long for a world where we base our statements and decisions on evidence as derived from available data, not doing so is the root of (most) evil... scientists, like the ones described in this article, are the most honest of any human beings out there, I wish there were more people like them...

I am speechless. I am without speech.

The title is misleading. It's not a "speck" of dust; the dust signal is seen all over the sky.

It is actually a close-up of a Van Gogh painting.

it's unfortunate it doesn't seem to be true, but as the story said, it's what science is all about. if it ain't right, it ain't right. of course, the anti science crowd seems to see this as a weakness instead of strength.

"Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said he could appreciate the frustration of his colleagues, who have been wandering in the wilderness for nearly four decades looking for clues to the Beginning.

“Inflation is the most important idea in cosmology since the hot Big Bang,” he said. “It is our Helen of Troy, launching a thousand experiments.”"

Why do I get the impression that when the next "important idea" is proposed it too will launch a "thousand experiments", not to mention a raft of metaphors.

One day though one of these experiments may disclose "clues to the Beginning". I can almost see that day, an excited researcher will scream with joy at this great discovery. As his colleagues crowd around him anticipating a look at the evidence he will point to a tiny speck where, upon close examination, they will just perceive a sign saying "Start Here!"

Scientists making claim to have found 14 billion year-old evidence are possibly wrong.

Imagine that.

I highly recommend to Google "Hubble's Ultra Deep Field: The Single Most Important Image Ever Taken".
Unfortunately, part way through it is hacked for about 20 seconds by some poor fool playing air guitar. Just turn off the sound, skip by him, but reconnect trying not to miss a word of the video. It's only a few minutes long. Once you view it, give yourself the gift of contemplating what it means. It is wonderful far, far, far beyond words. I'm going to watch it for the umpteenth time right now. It expands your consciousness. You will not be the same.

In the end, we may find that our universe has it's limits...but we will find out along the way that the human imagination has none.

We may find that there are limits to our universe, but along the way find that there are none to our human imagination in finding them.

I cannot discern whether this is an affirmation of science or of religious faith, or both.

I admire the fortitude and commitment of the scientists working on these projects.

An excellent example of how science works, when politicians (and their owners) don't have a vested interest in the results.

I think these scientists are to be applauded for being willing to concede that their earlier result was probably misleading. It really throws into sharp relief the climate change deniers in the scientific community.

Every few years our particle physicists build machines that require more energy to break matter into ever smaller parts. At the same time our astrophysicists
are looking for better explanations as to how something so small can inflate
into our know universe. One wonders if they should be talking to each other more.

Hopefully, we will be able to detect these signals better with NASA's James Webb Next Generation Space Telescope with longer wavelength coverage and greater sensitivity than with Hubble. It will orbit 1.5 million km from Earth in space without the interference of Earth's atmosphere.
http://jwst.nasa.gov/about.html
http://jwst.nasa.gov/facts.html
http://jwst.nasa.gov/comparison.html

Oh, come on, God created the universe 6000 years ago with a word. Well, even with this setback where the detection of gravity waves are concerned, there is still overwhelming evidence for the inflation model of the universe. I would say it has millions of times more evidence than the god theory but anything times zero is still zero. Keep seeking, valiant scientists! If our models are refined, that's just the nature of science.

As short-lived sentient beings, we want to find answers to the big questions within our lifetimes. But some of the deepest mysteries of the universe might continue to elude us for the foreseeable future. We cannot even be sure that we are asking the right questions. But I find it absolutely amazing that a few pounds of gray matter can not only construct mathematical theories of creation but can also build tools to explore the first moments of all existence. In the darkness of our world, the endeavor of science continues to shine a bright light.

I'm surprised that any of the scientists wouldn't be thrilled by these results. Unexpected results often lead to new science. Confirming what we believe to be true is kind of boring. Finding out that the universe is more complicated is exciting!

All of the theory of the big bang started with interpreting the "red shift" in the spectrum of stars as the Doppler Effect of receding objects. The possability that the effect was caused by dust in space acting as a light filter biasing the spectrum has to be studied.

Can one imagine if we had put the estimated 2 trillion dollars we spent in Afghanistan and the 4 trillion spent in Iraq (including VA and medical and disability costs) into fundamental scientific research? The main drivers of our economy for the last few decades have been microprocessors and semiconductors and this was motivated and started by fundamental research during WW2. Essentially we have been coasting since then. We should be ashamed of our leadership.

is that dust on the lens or dust in space? i've long said that when the evidence is found it would be shaped like a hot dog bun and be blue. However, here the bluest part appears to be outside the bun. look again.

This is disappointing but knowing what isn't true gets us one step closer to what is true. Finding the remnants of gravitational waves that existed at 10 to the -36 power second after the big bang must be one of the most difficult tasks in all of science. If humanity has figured out the physics of the universe down to this infinitesimal instant after the beginning of time, we have achieved enormous understanding since 1900. It's really kind of frightening to get that close to creation itself.

More investigations will be run, more theories will be developed, and hopefully The Times will able to publish many more articles as we get closer to t=o, the beginning of everything.

It is not the best idea to invent a new force to explain a single phenomenon when that force is not needed to explain any others and seems to be at odds with some, e.g., electron positron annihilations.

Science marches on, and its self-correcting nature has made a few scientists contrite --but we have to ask, would this, now clearly premature "finding" ever seen the light of day had the Bicep group been less concerned about popularity, online media raves, primacy, and twitter infatuation?

Does no else ever feel that these characters are fantasists talking to each other in an unreal world that will never impact reality? How much money is being drained from life sciences for this nonsense?

The scientific method works, and the truth wins eventually, but the wishful thinking of scientists who can almost taste their Nobel Prize does lead to mistakes. It is an old story. And the strong orthodoxy that has emerged around the theory of inflation, supported by literally no data so far, is a perfect set up for such mistakes. A tip off, by the way, is when the scientific collaboration gives a press conference to announce their results. Rutherford did not do that. Marie Curie did not do that. It is a modern phenomenon and not a good one.

What was there before the Big Bang? Is the miniscule mention of a "bouncing universe" supposed to explain it all? Where did all the matter of the universe come from?
I think that Black Holes offer us a clue. They tell us nothing escapes Black Holes, stars, light. I think that this the future of the universe. That the universe is moving toward a cataclysm that reverses the Big Bang - the Big Squeeze. Black Holes do the work to compress the universe.

To put the universe into another cycle. A dormant stage that may last 30, 40 billion years, waiting for the next Big Bang.

And on and on and on. Forever.

At the time it was announced with massive fanfare and without peer review, physicists at Princeton and elsewhere had expressed major doubts about the claim and their concern on the manner of the announcement.
Thanks, nevertheless, NYT, for your update and corrections. Academic pressures, funding, publications, promotions, profiteering are now emboddied in medicine and biology enterprises so it's difficult not to be duped.
Physics has been less afflicted by the hype and profit factor-let's hope it stays that way.

The NY Times unfortunately needs to explain science at only high school level, so I would also like to recommend a book. With only one year of college math and physics and a lifetime fascination with astronomy and cosmology, I thought that understanding Hawking Radiation, the Big Bang, Inflation, the Higgs boson etc in detail would always be beyond me.

Then I read "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos" by Dennis Overbye. By page 114 I thoroughly understood Hawking Radiation (the seeming paradox that nothing can escape a black hole, yet they sometimes radiate vast amounts of energy and evaporate into nothingness), and by the end of the book understood that Inflation was a necessary consequence of the collapse of the supercooled Higgs field (!) (Yes: the mysterious Higgs boson IS that big a deal: the one we recently created might be the first one in the Universe since literally the beginning of time.)

It's also a really fun, well-written book, full of the driven characters who drove the discoveries, like the cranky old-fashioned cosmologist Allan Sandage: at one point, the colleagues that he refused to speak to would walk around preening themselves at their newfound importance.

The scientists involved in the re-analysis of their data should be commended for their intellectual honesty and for humility. We need more role models like this among our thought leaders and politicians.

I doubt inflation helped the big bang. The vast distances between hotness in space-time is evidence against it.

Anyway, before stating a definitive gravitational origin again, which is the probability that within a galaxy like the Milky way, from the aged dust of its exploded stars, the living being who theorizes and uses computers was formed - computers included? A favourable case among infinite unfavourable possibilities? Fifty-fifty? To be or not to be, is that the question? Are calculations simplified or made more complex when the subjective self of each one is the entity that is studied? So, what is the relationship between life and immense numbers? Is life a folding process of infinity, a singular wrinkle in space? Is it just something infinite that would have enough to allow a self, something isolated but of infinite or divine claims? But, is infinity credible within something with a beginning, out of a Big Bang? And is it credible within something with an ending, with the inevitable death around the corner? Along these lines, there is a book, a short preview in http://goo.gl/mjx0Pq Just another suggestion

This is a good example of the often ignored truth that scientists are fallible human beings. They saw what they wanted to see the first time around. Similarly, Science often overlooks phenomena that challenge their established world view. The Bicep group deserves credit for admitting error, but the larger truth was voiced by J.B.S. Haldane (I paraphrase): The Universe is not only stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can even conceive.

My theory, the creator creates itself resulting in the existence of the universe. I know, it's not science nor religion. But I like it.

I was immensely excited at the initial announcement, and I remain so now -- maybe even more. What an incredible search! We are indeed an audacious and creative species. As much as the news so often causes me to despair, there are other aspects of our existence -- poetry, music, scientific endeavors like this -- which inspire and give me hope. I do not see error here, but a quest for knowledge honorably undertaken. Let us continue, each in our own way.

So prior to the Big Bang, what if anything existed ? Hard to get ones mind around the idea.

Nice to see the true nature of scientific investigation confirmed once again - look for the "truth" and except that what you think is "true" can sometimes be wrong. If only the believers in a supernatural power and other fantasies would do the same the world would be a better place.

I am not a scientist, much less a cosmologist, even though I was a student of Mathematics, Science and Engineering. Yet, I think the "Super singularity" with which the Big Bang is supposed to have occurred is simply impossible even to imagine, let alone occur.
Universe has to be eternal; it never had a beginning, as Big Bang theory suggests, nor can the universe have an end. Logically it is possible to deduce that the universe is oscillating. So, instead of "the Big Bang", we may have a series of Big Bangs.

So many questions and unsolved riddles.

Thank goodness we don't know the answers! Life might be intolerably boring if we did. As it is, these mysteries imbue life with a magical quality. None of us, even our most brilliant scientists, know the answers. The possibilities remain endless and our quest for truth marches ever onward. And we are left to dream about what yet may come.

Anyway, with a more humanistic and relaxed approach to the whole subject, which is the probability that within a galaxy like the Milky way, from the aged dust of its exploded stars, the living being who theorizes and uses a computer was formed - computer included? A favourable case among infinite unfavourable possibilities? Fifty-fifty? To be or not to be, is that the question? Are calculations simplified or made more complex when the subjective self of each one is the entity that is studied? So, what is the relationship between life and immense numbers? Is life a folding process of infinity, a singular ripple in space, a beautiful wrinkle in the skin? Is it just something infinite that would have enough to allow a self, something isolated but of infinite or divine claims? But, is infinity credible within something with a beginning, out of a Big Bang? And is it credible within something with an ending, with the inevitable death around the corner? Along these lines, there is a book, a preview in goo.gl/mjx0Pq Just another suggestion in order to free-think together for a while

This is the way science is supposed to work!! Critical review of an hypothesis leads to renewed interpretation of the data followed by either refutation or verification and mostly always leading to more work. I salute the BICEPS group for "getting it right" with respect to how science works andshould be practiced, regardless of the danger of receiving an uppercut to the ego...

Now if we could just teach, politicians specifically , and generally the public at large, to behave in this way, we could probably solve most of the world's pressing problems with far less difficulty and certainly long before these problems reached the the crises proportions necessary to goad self serving politicians into action.

Long live science, scholarship and the principles of the Enlightenment!

The importance of the collaborative nature of scientific investigation is clearly demonstrated by this search for ancient light in the universe. Even though the theory espoused by Bicep and the Planck Institute were at odds with each other they collaborated rather than each going their own way in order to find a solution to a very complex problem.

There's a lot to be learned from this. Lets apply it to the many complex worldly problems society must deal with.

Some comments reflect skepticism about the possibility of finding the truth about the origin of the universe, which contrast with the upbeat mood following the news in March last year. We need to remember that the inflation hypothesis was suggested after the previous theoretical models clashed with new found data (sometimes accidentally like background radiation). However, 4 decades is not much time in the history of knowledge for such a pessimistic outlook. We must avoid the pitfall of agnosticism (the Kantian "thing in itself"). Eventually, humanity will find the correct answer if we keep trying.

Dark matter and dark energy are theoretical concepts not created ex-nihilo as someone suggested. Contrariwise, they are a reflection of emprical findings previously unknown.

I understand the thinking behind the Big Bang theory, but it leaves to many questions, such as where is the universe expanding to?
Is the universe creating its own space, more universe. Then there is the contradiction of multiple universes. Universe means all that exists, not just some of it.
What would separate these universes from each other? Now we do see evidence of what might be called big bangs when a black hole ceases to exist. Did the Big Bang originate from a singularity maybe? And what about the idea of quantum vs electromagnetic forces. How did all the EMFs combine to create mass?

You can not say there was nothing before the universe, as I recall the theory that matter can not be created or destroyed still holds. It may change forms, but it is still there. AS for dark matter, it is a theoretical construct, but there does not seem to be any way to test it. How would you find it? It is postulated due to the expansion we see. So it is used to explain why gravity does not keep the known universe from contracting. But even gravity can only be explained by its effect. Big matter has more gravitational effect, but the really big pieces of matter are moving away from each other. Well there are galaxies that might collide, but most of them are leaving each other.

Too many paradoxes to be explained.

Even if scientists can go back to the exact moment of the Big Bang and explain everything about it, this will still leave unanswered the question "What was here before the Big Bang?"

This same question is left unanswered by the Bible. In particular, the Bible says that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," but the Bible never addresses how God himself was created or came into existence.

In short, even if the Bible is true and/or even if the Big Bang is true, neither one explains what was here before the universe came into existence.

Neither time nor space has any beginning or any end. No matter how far the human brain can mentally travel in space, there is always something farther out - space continues infinitely, there is literally no end to it. Similarly, no matter how far the human brain can mentally travel back in time, even to the moment when the universe first began, time continues to extend backward from even that point in time, infinitely.

A friend of mine gave me a slim volume called, "New Ideas for a New Era", which I believe is available on Amazon, containing papers on novel ideas in physics and mathematics. There are several papers that deal with the origin or more accurately the probability of origin of the universe and the big bang and how the universe will evolve, going through phases. The results that those ideas give seem to match the results expressed in this article. Through a simple idea of adding probability to the space-time, he not only explained the expansion of the universe but also the accelerated expansion that has been observed and to explain which dark energy has been posited. One of the papers says both dark matter and dark energy are one and the same thing and arise due to the probabilistic nature of the space-time. One of the most amazing ideas is a new kind of set theory which says that not only does this universe must exist but shows that there has to exist an infinite number of not only our type of universe but an infinite number of infinite types of universes. I hope the public gets to know about this book and read it, because I am positive that they will also be blown away by the ideas it contains as I was. Thanks.