Comments on: Reconstructing Inflation

By: Reconstructing Inflation :: Newstack

Reconstructing Inflation :: Newstack — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:42:33 +0000

[...] Read more: here [...]

By: Welcome all Kossacks « Abstract Nonsense

Welcome all Kossacks « Abstract Nonsense — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:24:07 +0000

[...] Go read the rest. Ultimately it’s a summary of a much deeper but less comprehensible post by Sean Carroll about inflationary models in cosmology. Now I need to make sure I go to sleep at normal hours instead of just before sunrise, so that among other things I don’t post a welcome ten hours after the fact. [...]

By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:27:06 +0000

Shantanu, there is no web link for the workshop or the talks; it was small and informal.

Ambitwistor, I hadn’t seen the patent. I’ll just have to make my millions some other way.

By: Shantanu

Shantanu — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:47:54 +0000

Sean or anyone else, could you provide a web link to this workshop and also the slides/videos
of the talks if they are available?

By: Ambitwistor

Ambitwistor — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:26:03 +0000

Sean: somewhat off-topic, but have you noticed that your article on the cosmological constant has been cited by a U.S. patent on an inflation-powered warp drive? (Saw this on Georg von Hippel's blog.) I guess you missed out on the trillions of dollars this gadget will earn for the patent-holder.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:40:11 +0000

Articles and comments like these are why I read Cosmic Variance. It’s all one full step above my head – I am a fascinated physics voyeur with mathematical limitations, so I can follow the arguements but get lost in the equations and am therefore unable to judge when there is disagreement – but that’s how learning happens, for me anyway.

The articles on society et. al. are interesting enough, but this is very valuable stuff for me. It strikes a middle ground between struggling through technical papers on arxiv and sighing at the handwaving meathead analysis of the pop sci press.

So my comment is: thanks for the article, and thanks very much to everyone who has posted in comments. I feel my brain expanding as I read: my favorite sensation.

By: Hiranya

Hiranya — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 02:34:35 +0000

Paul, no problem You can find all the data here at the LAMBDA site, this is and will continue to be the central repository for the data. Enjoy!

By: Paul Valletta

Paul Valletta — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:06:41 +0000

Hiranya, I was ill-informed, and that is “my fault”, my apologies if I made a slightly negative hand_waving in my post. Having gone over a vast number of sites detailing the WMAP data, the number of years these sites have been active, allows slight variations to be mis-interpreted.

The length of time (in years) just shows how difficult the task at hand must have been for all those involved in WMAP, and initally the COBE team. WMAP is rightly so, a fantastic success and will remain, one of the amazing achievements of Astronomical experiments, a minor miracle if ever there was one !

By: Plato

Plato — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 17:04:29 +0000

By simple analogies the complicated views of science has somehow been answered for the lay person? For the scientist as well?

How far did you want to take this in terms of empirical views? Or, be left with insulting comments about the way in which we look at the cosmos from the very beginning?

In cosmology, the early Universe was crossed by real acoustic waves generated soon after Big Bang. Such vibrations left their imprints 300 000 years later as tiny density fluctuations in the primordial plasma. Hot and cold spots in the present-day 2.7 K CMB radiation reveal those density fluctuations. Thus the CMB temperature fluctuations look like Chaldni patterns resulting from a complicated three-dimensional drumhead that

Not a soccer ball? Yet some would paint a Platonic image and give monte carlo demonstrations.

By: Amara

Amara — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:22:43 +0000

Sean: “It may someday be possible to detect them directly as gravitational waves, with an ultra-sensitive dedicated satellite; at the moment, though, that’s still pie-in-the-sky (as it were). More optimistically, the stretching caused by the gravity waves can leave a distinctive imprint on the polarization of the CMB â€” in particular, in the type of polarization known as the B-modes. These haven’t been detected yet, but we’re trying.”

BICEP’s main goal? That group’s Antarctica wintover finishes next week, so maybe (after a well-deserved holiday and after they’ve had time to reduce their data), you can update us on their results …