Comments on: Planck First Light

By: Peter H

Peter H — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:55:01 +0000

When will WMAP respond to Liu and Li? Planck will need a stick in the sand to move on from.

By: Eric M

Eric M — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:04:50 +0000

@15: Cosmic Kurtosis rolls off the tongue better.

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:29:20 +0000

This reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask. I’ve heard that when you fall into a black hole, everything you see above is blue shifted and is much brighter than it was when you started your fall. How bright does the CMB get? Do you need CMB-block? (Obviously, you’ve got bigger problems, but I was kind of wondering and what with the LHC not producing any convenient black holes …)

By: o1

o1 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:17:25 +0000

I think it won’t be consistent with inflation as I expect CMB to be a result of photon-photon scattering and therefore it should depend on our local Galactic neighborhood.

By: Peter Coles

Peter Coles — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:53:30 +0000

If there is non-Gaussianity you might have to rename this blog “Cosmic Skewness”…

By: Cartesian

Cartesian — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:34:23 +0000

Hello,

It does look like something fractal, see :
http://eternal-cartesian.blogspot.com/2009/09/6.html

Cordially

By: Ethan Siegel

Ethan Siegel — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:12:48 +0000

Sean, I think n_s = 1.00 is even more vanilla, but overall I agree with you. I’ve just seen so many 2- and 3-sigma results over the years in many different subfields of physics simply get overturned when statistics improve and/or new data comes in. I think that — with the exception of non-Gaussianity — there’s very little that’s going to surprise us about Planck. But we don’t know until we do the experiment, and that’s why we do it.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:17:18 +0000

My predictions:

1. The scale of slow-roll inflation is low

2. No promordial gravity waves are observed

3. The CMB is mostly generated by a late decaying modulus field and not the inflaton

By: Brando

Brando — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:28:09 +0000

My question is: will Alan Guth be happy with the data?

By: MedallionOfFerret

MedallionOfFerret — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:37:21 +0000

Hey, I can answer the last question. There is a preferred direction to space: down. I know that may seem a little quarky, but that’s exactly what the data will show. Is that cool enough?