Tag: inflation
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The world … er, the universe is flat!
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] What’s the Shape of the Universe? A New Study Is Sparking Debate For Curiosity: What is the shape of the universe? The universe is everything that we can observe,…
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Why falsifiability is a false guide to what is and isn’t science
I had a liberal arts education, which means that I mostly use what I learned to post nonsense on Twitter. However, thanks to my advisor, I got a solid grounding in the philosophy of science. While I’m certainly no philosopher myself, I also (hopefully) have a less simplistic view of how science works and doesn’t…
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Why physicists hate time
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Wait a second: What came before the big bang? Not everyone thinks the universe had a beginning. This story originally appeared in the print edition of the September issue…
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The search for magnetic monopoles, the truest north
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The hunt for the truest north Many theories predict the existence of magnetic monopoles, but experiments have yet to see them For Symmetry Magazine: If you chop a magnet…
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BICEP3: Revenge of the telescope
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Dusting for the fingerprint of inflation with BICEP3 A new experiment at the South Pole picks up where BICEP2 left off For Symmetry Magazine: When researchers with the BICEP2…
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Listening to the sounds of the cosmos
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Last year, I went to a conference in Florida to hear — and in some cases meet — some of the leading thinkers in the study of gravitational waves.…
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The Daily Beast’s latest astronomy columnist is…me!
Now it can be told: I will be writing a weekly post for The Daily Beast (making me The Weekly Beast?), on space, astronomy, and such things. My first column is about inflation, and why it’s a big deal: If you compare any two points on the night sky, their temperature as measured in microwave…
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New data offer a peek into the Universe’s first instants
Today was an exciting and stimulating day: the BICEP2 collaboration announced the first measurement of the cosmic microwave background that might tell us whether or not inflation happened. Inflation is the hypothetical rapid expansion of the Universe during its first instants, which explains a lot about why the cosmos appears the way it does. However,…
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On the multiverse, metaphysics, and meaning
I don’t spent a lot of time thinking about the multiverse: the possible existence of regions of the cosmos that have never been connected to ours at any time, and may never be in the future. That’s because those parallel pocket universes aren’t directly detectable, and may never be even indirectly detectable, putting them into…
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Was the Big Bang actually the beginning?
I usually avoid the kinds of sexy big questions that often make cosmology books by Paul Davies or Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose popular. The main reason for that is because those big questions may not be answerable, because they are beyond the reach of our telescopes or experiments. One such question—what, if anything, came…
Bowler Hat Science 