NOVA’s Nobel Poll: Scientists Predict the 2013 Laureates

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<p>
  The selection process for the Nobel prizes—this year’s to be announced starting October 7—is highly secretive, but that doesn’t stop the speculation. In that spirit, we surveyed dozens of scientists in the fields of physics, chemistry, and physiology, asking who they think could win this year’s Nobel Prize.
 </p>
<h2>
  Physics
 </h2>
<p>
  For the physics prize, almost all of our respondents predicted that it will honor the discovery of the Higgs boson,
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/higgs-boson-revealed.html">
   announced tentatively in July 2012
  </a>
  and with
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/higgs-boson-discovered/">
   greater confidence in March 2013
  </a>
  . But with thousands of scientists involved in the discovery,
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/blog/2012/03/a-higgs-by-any-other-name/">
   eight or more
  </a>
  contributing to the origination of the theory, and the prize allowed to go to no more than three winners, how will the Nobel committee divvy up the laurels?
 </p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/nobel-medal.width-990_CHpDg2c.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The Nobel Prize medal
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  Most of the physicists responding to our poll felt that the prize would go to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, who independently invoked a new field—known today as the Higgs field—to explain why subatomic particles have mass. Their ideas were published within just weeks of each other. As Peter G. O. Freund, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago, wrote, “For the better part of the past half century the phenomenon discovered by Englert, Brout [Englert’s coauthor] and Higgs has been a crucial ingredient of the standard model of physics, and repeatedly verified indirectly along with this model. Now, after the phenomenon’s beautiful direct verification at the LHC, it is high time to honor its discoverers with the Nobel Prize.”
 </p>
<h2>
  Chemistry
 </h2>
<p>
  The chemists selected David A. Evans, a synthetic organic chemist at Harvard. Evans’s work focuses on both total synthesis and stereoselectivity. Total synthesis involves creating synthetic versions of compounds found in nature. The pharmaceutical industry relies on the field’s techniques heavily, as they allow researchers to mine the natural world for compounds that may prove beneficial as treatments, even if those compounds are incredibly rare. Evans is something of a total synthesis wizard—he and his lab have synthesized over 50 natural products throughout the years.
 </p>
<p>
  Stereoselectivity, Evans’s other speciality, is where one chemical reaction spits out different three-dimensional orientations of the same molecule, or stereoisomers. Specifically, Evans is interested in enantiomers, a specific class of stereoisomer that involves mirror images of the same molecule. Evans has been developing techniques that vary the levels of stereoselectivity in the hopes that someday we’ll be able to completely control the configuration of the final product. Like total synthesis, it’s important in the development and production of pharmaceuticals. The painkiller naproxen is a perfect example. One enantiomer relieves pain, while the other simply causes liver damage. Producing and selecting the right enantiomer is crucial.
 </p>
<h2>
  Medicine
 </h2>
<p>
  For medicine and physiology, unfortunately our poll didn’t garner enough results to say anything conclusive, but one widely-watched Nobel prediction site, ScienceWatch, published by Thomson Reuters, has identified as possible winners A. Paul Alivisatos, Chad A. Mirkin, and Nadrian C. Seeman for their work on DNA nanotechnology, a promising and relatively new field that uses the unique properties of both DNA and nanoparticles to study biological processes and treat the human body. Mirkin’s research, for example,
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/nanoparticles-and-the-future-of-medicine/">
   uses gold nanoparticles studded with nucleic acids
  </a>
  to deliver drugs targeted at specific cells.
 </p>
<p>
  It’s important to keep in mind that these predictions are just that, predictions. We’ll have to wait until next week to see if any pan out. But in the meantime, you can
  <a href="http://svy.mk/19mOIwz">
   voice your opinion in our public Nobel poll
  </a>
  and see which scientists the crowd feels are this year’s frontrunners.
 </p>
</section>
<p>
 Photo credit: Public domain
</p>

The Mistaken Assumptions That Changed Physics History

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<p>
  “Don’t assume,” they always say.
 </p>
<p>
  Last month, Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard, published an
  <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.2954v1.pdf">
   essay on how mistaken assumptions have delayed the progress of astronomy
  </a>
  . In the same spirit, I wanted to find out how the course of physics has been influenced by assumptions, acknowledged or otherwise. Can lessons from the past help us be more aware of the assumptions we bring to physics today? Is it desirable—or even possible—to work without assumptions?
 </p>
<p>
  In the years after scientists came to accept light as a wave, brilliant researchers spent untold hours chasing after the “ether,” hypothetical stuff through which light waves were thought to propagate. Water waves are disturbances in water, sound waves are disturbances in air, and so light waves must be a disturbance in
  <em>
   something
  </em>
  , the reasoning went. When the sophisticated experiments built to search for the ether couldn’t find it, theorists got to work trying to explain away ether’s experimental no-show. It was only when Einstein published his theory of special relativity in 1905 that the solution became clear: Ether wasn’t just hard to find. It didn’t exist.
 </p>
<p>
  If Einstein resolved one roadblock, he set up another. He adamantly refused to accept the randomness built in to quantum mechanics, famously quipping that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, and holding fast even as experiment after experiment (including one he helped to design) showed those dice tumbling. “My instinct for physics bristles at this,” wrote Einstein.
 </p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dice_620.width-990_cxLgtmc.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  It’s hard to imagine an astronomer dismissing observational data on the evidence of her “instinct for astronomy,” which highlights a key difference between the two fields. “The special aspect of astronomy is that we have limited information on things far away; it’s not like experiments in the laboratory where we can control conditions,” says Loeb. Astronomers therefore have to make more judgment calls than their colleagues in physics, and when they get it wrong, it’s usually because they don’t recognize the limits of their knowledge—their mistakes are failures of humility.
 </p>
<p>
  Physicists, on the other hand, have heaps of data, but they approach that data with certain assumptions that feel like common sense: Waves need something to wave through! The universe should behave predictably! But, says David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at MIT, “Sticking to what feels like common sense or intuition can trip us up.”
 </p>
<p>
  Einstein was “one of the most accomplished scientists ever—he took part in the process of discovering quantum mechanics,” says Loeb, and yet “he had a prejudice that turned out to be wrong.”
 </p>
<p>
  To Loeb, the ideal scientific attitude is like that of the perfect detective, who brings no assumptions about the guilt or innocence of any individual to his analysis of a case. “What you want is to start with a completely blank slate,” says Loeb.
 </p>
<p>
  But Kaiser takes a rosier view of scientific mistakes, one that suggests a somewhat different corrective. “I think we can find
  <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/data/c/creager/profile/TheRightWaytoGetItWrong.pdf">
   instances where mistakes led to productive outcomes
  </a>
  ,” says Kaiser. “It’s not always all bad.”
 </p>
<p>
  Indeed, Kaiser points out, even though physicists were wrong about the ether, their investigations led to critical insights, like Maxwell’s equations, which are now part of the essential physics toolkit. “We still use Maxwell’s equations even though for Maxwell, there was no such thing as an elementary electric charge. He thought the world was made out of ether!” The equations stayed the same; the world changed around them.
 </p>
<p>
  Hidden assumptions can also live at the heart of how we
  <em>
   do
  </em>
  science. Today, for example, most theorists expect that the deepest laws of nature will turn out to be simple and elegant. So far, that assumption has held up pretty well. But, says Kaiser, it’s possible that today’s most vexing puzzles—dark matter, dark energy, the nature of black holes—signal some breakdown of our basic assumptions about elegance and simplicity.
 </p>
<p>
  While hindsight might lead us to brand assumptions as bald mistakes, to Kaiser, they’re more like misplaced priorities. In his 2011 book “
  <a href="http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/">
   How the Hippies Saved Physics
  </a>
  ,” he tells the story of quantum physics’ journey from the “shut up and calculate” mode, which dominated teaching and research in the years after World War II, to a more open-minded approach that embraced “late-night speculation.” What the Cold War pragmatists never guessed was that the philosophical musings of the “hippies” would yield up a raft of cutting-edge applications based on the strange phenomenon of entanglement.
 </p>
<p>
  “Coming out of World War II and during the war, physicists were extremely creative under tremendous time pressure,” says Kaiser. “These were extremely practical, goal-oriented applications of the Schrödinger equation. They were absolutely brilliant with world-changing impacts,” including everything from transistors to nuclear weapons. Yet a cultural resistance to “daydreaming” kept them from thinking deeply about the
  <em>
   meaning
  </em>
  of the equations they employed so successfully.
 </p>
<p>
  “We are not going to get to a land where we have no biases and no intuition,” says Kaiser. Scientists are human beings; their neutrality comes from the rigor of their methods rather than some superhuman ability to transcend personal biases. So, he argues, we should build “safety nets” into the scientific culture to “allow little pockets of support for crazy ideas”—that is, ideas that defy common sense and conventional wisdom and yet have some kernel of plausibility. Kaiser is optimistic that today’s scientific culture is making room for “weird” ideas, with microgrants and new research centers, like the Perimeter Institute, where “not-quite-mainstream stuff” can gain some purchase.
 </p>
<p>
  One day, those offbeat ideas just might start to seem like common sense.
 </p>
<p>
<strong>
   Go Deeper
  </strong>
<br/>
<em>
   Editor’s picks for further reading
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  FQXi:
  <a href="http://fqxi.org/community/essay/winners/2012.1">
   Which of our basic physical assumptions are wrong?
  </a>
<br/>
  Read the winning entries in FQXi’s 2012 essay competition.
 </p>
<p>
  Hyperphysics:
  <a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/mmhist.html">
   The Michelson-Morley Experiment
  </a>
<br/>
  Learn about the 1887 experiment that helped put ether theory to rest.
 </p>
<p>
  Wikipedia:
  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates">
   Bohr-Einstein debates
  </a>
<br/>
  Explore the twists and turns of the ongoing dispute between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr over the foundations of quantum mechanics.
 </p>
</section>

Discover how mistaken assumptions have changed the course of physics history.

Who's Afraid of Quantum Mechanics?

<div class="related"></div>
<p></p><p>Is quantum mechanics less spooky than advertised?</p><p>That’s the question being mulled in the blogosphere after last month’s <a href="http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=4192">three-day writers’ workshop</a> on quantum mechanics. [Disclosure: The workshop received support from the Foundational Questions Institute, which also supports this blog.] As Tushna Commissariat asks at the <a href="http://blog.physicsworld.com/2014/09/12/once-upon-a-timethe-art-of-telling-a-good-quantum-tale/">physicsworld.com blog</a> :</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do science writers overemphasize and ultimately misconstrue the weirder, “spooky” aspects of quantum theory, or are they right to focus on these facets because they are the very things that interest people?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“The problem, of course, is that weirdness sells, and it’s hard to find the right balance between mentioning enough of the exotic aspects to draw people in without being gratuitously confusing,” writes physicist and author Chad Orzel, blogging at <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2014/08/29/nordita-workshop-for-science-writers-day-two/">Uncertain Principles</a> .</p><p>What’s the harm in emphasizing quantum “spookiness”? It could unintentionally undermine good science. Quantum mechanics may be weird, but it’s theoretically and experimentally rigorous. It isn’t mysticism or pseudoscience. By picking our adjectives from the Halloween bin, we may unintentionally cause readers to lump quantum theory with ghost stories and quasi-spiritual snake oil like the “Law of Attraction.”</p>
<p>But quantum weirdness isn’t just snappy branding. The rules of the quantum world are defiantly at odds with our everyday expectations, and even extensive experience with the equations of quantum theory can only go so far toward establishing a “ <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2014/07/quantum-intuition/">gut feeling</a> ” about how things go in the quantum world.</p><p>Quantum mechanics isn’t the only strange creature in the zoo, of course. As physicist Sabine Hossenfelder points out at her blog <a href="http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-ordinary-weirdness-of-quantum.html">BackReaction</a> :</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We could just discard it as headline making, a way to generate interest, but that doesn’t really explain why quantum mechanics is described as weirder or stranger as other new and often surprising effects. How is time-dilation in a gravitational field less strange than entanglement?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Time dilation—the relativistic effect that causes time to pass more slowly when you’re in a strong gravitational field or traveling close to the speed of light—is pretty weird, and I’m not sure I agree with the assertion that writers don’t emphasize the bizarreness of this and other relativistic oddities. Yet it must mean something that even Einstein, the guy who came up with relativity, was unnerved by quantum mechanics.</p><p>Because of that discomfort, Einstein rejected of some fundamentals of the quantum worldview. But for others, quantum “spookiness” is a welcome thrill. Hossenfelder quotes <a href="http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/why-we-love-what-we-dont-understand/?_php=true&amp;_type=blogs&amp;_r=0">Anna North’s recent Op-Talk piece</a> in the New York Times:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Many of us may crave that tug, the thrill of something as-yet-unexplained… We may want to get to the bottom of it, but in another way, we may not — as long as we haven’t quite figured everything out, we can keep the wonder alive.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>North is talking about science fiction, but her point applies to science, too. Breakthrough discoveries often open more questions than they answer. That’s one of the great pleasures of science: it doesn’t snuff out wonder, it kindles it. Is that “spooky”? If spooky means supernatural, then no. But if it expresses something that lies beyond the edge of our understanding, then I’d say yes.</p><p>In using the language of spookiness and mystery to describe quantum mechanics, do we do science a disservice, or are we embracing the thrill of the as-yet-undiscovered? What do you think: Is quantum mechanics spooky?</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>

Welcome to The Nature of Reality

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<p>
  When I was seven, I understood relativity perfectly. I
  <em>
   got
  </em>
  it. At least I thought I did. And it was glorious.
 </p>
<p>
  It all started with
  <em>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Navigator">
    The Flight of the Navigator
   </a>
</em>
  , that movie about the kid who accidentally stumbles upon a space ship and has a grand old afternoon traversing the galaxy in the company of its cargo of friendly creatures. The problem? When he returns to Earth he finds that eight years have elapsed. He has been declared missing; when he rings the bell at his old house, a stranger answers the door.
 </p>
<p>
<em>
   The Flight of the Navigator
  </em>
  is a story about
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/spacetime-trip.html" target="_blank" title="A Trip Through Spacetime">
   time dilation
  </a>
  . The ship was traveling close to the speed of light, so time passed significantly more slowly for its passengers than it did for those back on Earth. That’s special relativity for you. It seemed easy, elegant, amazing.
 </p>
<p>
  For the next few years, that was my relationship with relativity. Then came the equations, and suddenly relatively didn’t seem so easy any more. Elegant, maybe. But that first spark of intuition got lost in symbols, equations, calculations and miscalculations. So I wondered: Why can’t we have it both ways? Is it possible to be both wide-eyed and rigorous, methodical and amazed?
 </p>
<p>
  That’s a balance even physicists struggle with. As MIT theorist Max Tegmark told NOVA, “When I was in high school, physics was my most boring subject….It was only later that I realized that physics isn’t at all about just solving some equations. It’s about figuring out what reality is all about.”
 </p>
<p>
  That’s what we’re doing on this blog: taking on the biggest questions of all, the ones that get at the very nature of reality. What happens to information inside a black hole? What are we really talking about when we talk about teleportation? What if the laws of physics can’t be unified? Every week, we’ll have a new post from a scientist or science writer–look for James Stein, Sean Carroll, and Frank Wilczek in the coming weeks and months–with plenty of room for you to join the discussion with your own questions and ideas.
 </p>
<p>
  We hope you’ll let us know what subjects in fundamental physics you want to hear about—the stranger, the better. Can neutrinos really go
  <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html">
   faster than the speed of light
  </a>
  ? What is this
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/spacetime-lemonade.html">
   spacetime
  </a>
  thing anyway? Is our universe just one of countless others in a
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/johnson-multiverse.html">
   multiverse
  </a>
  ? Join us as we dive deep and discover how physics is changing what we thought we knew about the nature of reality.
 </p>
</section>

Fermilab Rings in Higgs Week

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<p>
  Higgs week is here!
 </p>
<p>
  This week, the search for the
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2012/06/the-higgs-boson-explained/">
   Higgs boson
  </a>
  —the elusive subatomic particle that is a critical piece of the Standard Model of physics—may reach its climax when, on Wednesday, two research teams
  <a href="http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/">
   announce the results
  </a>
  of their work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
 </p>
<p>
  But before there was the LHC, there was the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at Fermilab. And before the LHC’s big announcement, there was a not-quite-so-big
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2012/07/live-webcasts-the-latest-higgs-results/">
   announcement
  </a>
  from the Tevatron teams as they gathered with colleagues this morning to announce the results of the most detailed analysis so far of ten years’-worth of their Higgs search data.
  <br/>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_774" style="max-width: 510px">
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/11-0226-01d.width-990_s3SrH33.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p class="wp-caption-text">
    The Tevatron at Fermilab. Image courtesy of Fermilab.
   </p>
</div>
</p>
<p>
  The Tevatron
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2011/09/hail-and-farewell-grand-colliders.html">
   shut down last year
  </a>
  , passing the baton to the newer, more powerful LHC. But the scientists working on two of the Tevatron’s detectors, CDF and DZero, haven’t given up searching for traces of the Higgs in their own data. Using ever-smarter computer algorithms, they aim to wring as much information as they can out of the data they’ve accumulated. As Wade Fisher, the Michigan State University scientist representing DZero at this morning’s conference, put it: “We’re still working, we’re not stopping….There’s still gas in the tank.”
 </p>
<p>
  What they’ve found so far is suggestive of the Higgs, but doesn’t rise to the level of discovery. Combining data from both CDF and DZero, they’ve
  <a href="http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/Higgs-Tevatron-20120702.html">
   eked out a signal
  </a>
  that might be due to the Higgs, but there is also a one-in-550 chance that it is down to random fluctuations.
 </p>
<p>
  To claim a
  <a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/06/29/what-does-it-take-to-claim-discovery-of-the-higgs/">
   discovery
  </a>
  , the physicists need to whittle that random-chance number down to one in three and a half million—“five sigma,” in stat-speak.
 </p>
<p>
  That’s what the physics world will be holding its breath for on Wednesday, when two LHC collaborations release their results.
 </p>
<p>
  Will they confirm the hints that the Tevatron has seen? Or will these inklings—and our hopes of completing the Standard Model of physics–evaporate into the mist of random fluctuations?
 </p>
<p>
  As Fermilab’s Eric James put it this morning: “We’re likely, after all this time, to find something out one way or the other.”
 </p>
</section>

Bittersweet Victory: Physics After the Higgs

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<p>
  When I see those victorious Olympic athletes all bedecked on the podium, beaming their gold-medal smiles and crying their gold-medal tears, I can’t help thinking:
  <em>
   Now what?
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  And now that the coming-out party for the Higgs (or the Higgs-like boson, if you must) is over—the bubbly popped, the headlines receded—are physicists asking themselves the same question?
 </p>
<p>
  Certainly, physicists are not crying into their champagne. The discovery of a new boson right where the Higgs should be is a scientific tour-de-force. “It confirms, as it completes, the Standard Model of fundamental physics,” Frank Wilczek wrote
  <a "="" 04="" 2012="" blogs="" href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2012/07/thanks-mom/&lt;/a&gt; on the morning of the announcement. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And yet, science thrives on observations that &lt;em&gt;don’t&lt;/em&gt; match up with predictions. Dark energy and dark matter, two of the greatest discoveries in a century of astrophysics, were hit upon because of the yawning gap between prediction and observation. If the universe is a puzzle, &lt;a href=" http:="" nova="" physics="" wgbh="" whos-afraid-of-the-dark-alternatives-to-dark-energy="" www.pbs.org="">
   dark energy
  </a>
  and
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2012/04/whos-afraid-of-the-dark-alternatives-to-dark-matter/">
   dark matter
  </a>
  are odd-shaped pieces that puckishly refuse to be wedged into place and, in their refusal, open up the possibility that the puzzle is actually richer and more complex than we ever anticipated. The Higgs, on the other hand, snaps right into place with a satisfying “Eureka!”
 </p>
<p>
  But if the puzzle of the Standard Model is now complete, where does that leave physics?
 </p>
<p>
  “There’s this huge looming question: The Standard Model works impeccably, but it leaves a lot of things unexplained,” says David Kaiser, a physicist and science historian at MIT. The Standard Model does not account for gravity, for instance, and it provides no explanation for why the physical constants take the particular values that they do. Like the periodic table of the elements, the Standard Model is an utterly faithful census of the ingredients that make up our universe. But while we know the elegant atomic underpinnings of the motley periodic table, we are still seeking the deeper laws that are expressed in the Standard Model.
 </p>
<p>
  “I always felt the best possible thing for the LHC would be to
  <em>
   not
  </em>
  see the Higgs,” says Peter Woit, a theorist at Columbia University. That would have cracked the Standard Model wide open, perhaps giving scientists a glimpse of the deeper physics underlying it. In this sense, says Woit, “The Standard Model is a victim of its own success.” Though it fails to answer some fundamental questions about out universe, it is so impervious to experimental contradiction—so perfect in its predictions—that physicists may soon find themselves at an impasse.
 </p>
<p>
  “If this is really the Higgs, then we have completed the Standard Model,” says physicist Peter Fisher of MIT. “We have created this model that describes exquisitely the world around us. We could legitimately say that, as a field of endeavor, we’ve done all there is to be done, and ask: Is this a place to stop and reassess?”
 </p>
<p>
  Physicists do have some guesses at what may lie beyond the Standard Model. There’s
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2012/07/supersymmetry-looking-in-natures-mirror/">
   supersymmetry
  </a>
  , for one, which suggests that elementary particles have mirror-image “superpartners” that differ in spin. Yet, to the surprise of some physicists, even the LHC has been unable to turn up any evidence of these superpartners. That suggests that, if superpartners are out there, they don’t possess the neat mirror-image symmetry we expected. Instead, the mirror that divides “us” from “them” may be warped.
 </p>
<p>
  “With the Higgs, you knew exactly what to look for,” says Woit. But the mirror of supersymmetry, if it exists, “could be warped in any arbitrary way,” leaving physicists to pursue an almost limitless game of hide-and-seek. And what if the superpartners—or other hints of new physics—are hiding where the LHC can’t find them?
 </p>
<p>
  But the story of the Higgs isn’t over yet. Over the coming months, physicists on the
  <a href="http://cms.web.cern.ch/org/cms-higgs-results">
   CMS
  </a>
  and
  <a href="http://atlas.ch/news/2012/latest-results-from-higgs-search.html">
   ATLAS
  </a>
  teams will look to see whether this thing they have found decays in the ways they expect. Perhaps the new boson will turn out to be not so “vanilla” after all. Historically, it is often the “one last measurement to nail it down” that ends up taking physics in a new direction, Kaiser points out.
 </p>
<p>
  To Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, finding the new boson is just the beginning. “Having won this glorious battle, I’m psyched up for complete victory. We need to see some of the new particles that low-energy supersymmetry predicts. I think that will eventually happen at the LHC.”
 </p>
<p>
  “There is also room for gratuitous, but not perverse, speculation about the Higgs being a ‘portal’ into hidden sectors—hypothetical worlds of particles that have neither strong nor weak nor electromagnetic interactions,” adds Wilczek.
 </p>
<p>
  Yet Steve Ahlen, a Boston University physicist who helped build the ATLAS detector, thinks that the story of the quest for the Higgs has a somewhat different moral: “The most impressive thing about the success of the LHC, CMS and ATLAS is that thousands of people from all over the world, supported by tax dollars from many hundreds of millions of people, achieved success without the promise of fortune, power or fame, but for the simple joy of observing the beautiful world we live in. I think there is an important lesson to be learned from that.”
 </p>
</section>

First Direct Evidence of Cosmic Inflation

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<p>
  When Alan Guth proposed the theory of
  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Inflationary-Universe-Alan-Guth/dp/0201328402">
   cosmic inflation
  </a>
  almost 35 years ago, he wondered whether it would ever be possible to prove his hypothesis that the universe ballooned up exponentially in the first moments after the Big Bang. There was ample
  <a href="http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_cosmo_infl.html">
   indirect evidence
  </a>
  : the universe’s surprisingly uniform temperature, the apparent “flatness” of spacetime, and the conspicuous absence of magnetic monopoles. In the years that followed, astronomers used satellites like
  <a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3311206.html">
   WMAP
  </a>
  and
  <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/planck-snaps-infant-universe-1.12671">
   Planck
  </a>
  to search for echoes of the inflationary era in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Their results lined up with many inflationary predictions, but fell short of being the “smoking gun” that would have had Guth and other theorists popping their champagne.
 </p>
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<p>
  Well, bring on the bubbly: Using a telescope called
  <a href="http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/CMB/bicep2/">
   BICEP2
  </a>
  , a team of astronomers led by John Kovac (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has
  <a href="http://bicepkeck.org/b2_respap_arxiv_v1.pdf">
   detected a polarization pattern
  </a>
  in the microwave background radiation that is the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation. This “B-mode” polarization is a “twisty” pattern created by gravitational waves. The discovery is also the first direct image of gravitational waves.
 </p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/10mspt_mars_h_620.width-990_ZxNKyy9.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The 10-meter South Pole Telescope and the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) Telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Credit: Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  The news is generating plenty of buzz.  Here are our picks from some of the best coverage we’ve seen so far:
 </p>
<p>
<strong>
   Nature
  </strong>
  :
  <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/how-astronomers-saw-gravitational-waves-from-the-big-bang-1.14885">
   How astronomers saw gravitational waves from the Big Bang
  </a>
<br/>
  A suite of special coverage, including an explainer on gravitational waves and an interview with John Kovac, who maintains that he, for one, has held off on the champagne:
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   My role in this process has been to remain calm at all times. The time to celebrate, I think, will be once we have published our results and presented them to the scientific community.
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
<strong>
   The New York Times
  </strong>
  :
  <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/space/detection-of-waves-in-space-buttresses-landmark-theory-of-big-bang.html">
   Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang
  </a>
</p>
<p>
  Dennis Overbye talks (or emails) with everyone-who’s-anyone as he traces the history of inflationary theory from its inception in 1979 to its greatest confirmation yet today, closing with the possibility that inflation is continuing elsewhere in the cosmos:
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   Most of the hundred or so models that have been spawned by Dr. Guth’s original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion with atoms, stars and planets, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles here and there endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
<strong>
   WIRED
  </strong>
  :
  <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/gravitational-waves-b-mode-inflation/">
   Cosmologists Finally Capture an Elusive Signal From the Beginning of Time
  </a>
</p>
<p>
  Adam Mann explains “how primordial B-modes could be so important if you’ve never heard of them” and highlights the need for followup observations to confirm the result:
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   In fact, BICEP’s data is somewhat at odds with other experiments, such as the Planck space telescope, which have carefully mapped the CMB but not seen primordial B-modes. But it’s also possible that these other teams simply missed what BICEP is seeing and, now that they know how to look for the primordial B-modes, can confirm the results fairly quickly using already existing datasets, perhaps within a matter of weeks. No doubt, other collaborations will begin taking new data to try and detect the primordial B-modes on their own.
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
<strong>
   Sky and Telescope
  </strong>
  :
  <a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Proof-of-Inflationary-Universe-To-Be-Announced-Monday-250522521.html">
   Proof of Inflationary Universe To Be Announced Today?
  </a>
</p>
<p>
  In advance of today’s announcement, Sky and Telescope’s Alan MacRobert rounded up coverage of the search for B-modes and  explained what B-modes are and how gravitational waves create them.
 </p>
</section>

Kate Becker

Articles