CapitalistImperialistPig

Wolfgang leads us to Jester who finds a potentially disastrous uncertainty in the BICEP2 data. Jester: Barring a loose cable, the biggest worry about the BICEP signal is that the collaboration may have underestimated the galactic foreground emission. BICEP2 performed the observations at only one frequency of 150 GHz which is very well suited to study the CMB, but less so for polarized dust or synchrotron emission. As for the latter, more can be learned by going to higher frequencies, while combining maps at different frequencies allows one to separate the galactic and the CMB component. Although the patch of the sky studied by BICEP is well away from the galactic plane, the recently published 353 GHz polarized map from Planck demonstrates that there may be significant emission from these parts of the sky (in that paper the BICEP patch is conveniently masked, so one cannot draw any quantitative conclusions). Once the dust from the BICEP announcement had settled, all eyes were thus o...

Dennis Overbye, writing in the NYT, has a nice article on the significance of the BICEP2 measurements. He makes a point that I had not understood (I'm assuming that he is right). The gravitons themselves, theory says, are produced by the same process by which black holes leak. It is known as Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, the renowned black hole theorist, best-selling author and avatar of cosmic mystery who discovered it in a prodigious calculation in 1973. Shortly thereafter, William Unruh, now at the University of British Columbia, showed that you didn’t need black holes to see this radiation, just acceleration in space. In this case, the role of the black hole you can’t get out of is played by the rapidly retreating horizon you can’t reach in the inflating universe. Hawking radiation has been part of the physics firmament for decades; it’s the best-known prediction of quantum gravity. “Now it seems that Hawking and Unruh were right!” sai...

Cosmic inflation is purported to solve many ills that beset big bang cosmology. C. Fred Bergsten, an assistant Treasury secretary from 1977 to 1981, and director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says its Earthly namesake can have similar benificent effects down here below . BY virtually ignoring trade, President Obama and Congressional Republicans are missing a major opportunity to create jobs. The United States runs an annual trade deficit of about $600 billion, or 4 percent of our entire economy. Eliminating that imbalance would create three million to four million jobs, according to Commerce Department estimates, at no cost to the budget. ... First, the United States must, in effect, weaken the dollar by 10 to 20 percent. This step alone would produce one million to three million jobs. It’s been done before: In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility in gold, and in 1985, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III reached an agreement ...