Science

[FaultyMario]

Thanks, K.

[Dicknose]

We tend to say "science" (singular) but "mathematics" (plural)
And abbreviate that to maths.
I still find it funny to hear the word "math"

[Rob]

See also "sports".

[overpowered]

Nobody says "maths" in the U.S.

[tigeraid]

And we find it funny to hear "maths." Whenever Clarkson says it I giggle.

[tigeraid]

With all the clockwork predictability of Halley's Comet, last week Danny Faulkner of Answers in Genesis plead for Cosmos to show more "balance" by covering creationism. Tyson derided the idea as being akin to giving the Flat Earth Society equal time. Ridicule is the appropriate response to the ridiculous.

The episode opens by describing the mystery we are all born into. Awakening into existence on this tiny world under a blanket of stars, we are like abandoned babies who must break our cosmic isolation by figuring nature out for ourselves. The subtext, which rapidly becomes text as the episode proceeds, is that there is no received wisdom, no obvious divine plan, no big book of answers. There is only us and our capacity for pattern recognition to light a candle in the dark.

http://io9.com/cosmos-chronicles-how...jasonshankel01


A great episode. It's important that Cosmos spend the first couple of episodes shoving Creationism bullshit to the side and showing the importance of questioning our existence. I am fucking loving this show, even if (for me) it's more of a refresher course. This is the shit TV needs.

[Rob]

and mashed "potatoes".

[Crazed_Insanity]

Nobody says "maths" in the U.S.

Thanks for that OP, I was like, wow, was I getting it wrong all these years? We Americans just are weird! Kinda like we don't say aluminium. Strange that we develop a bit of our own English. Maybe we should just call our language Americanese!

[tigeraid]

Well we don't say it in Canada either. In fact I've only ever heard British people say it.

[LHutton]

Don't see how we can have a "Religion" thread without it. Maybe a weekly update with "what's going on in science!" ?

Anyone been watching Cosmos lately? What a great, great way to get science across to the average viewer. My wife is loving it. She even pauses it and asks me clarifying questions throughout the show. Learning is fun!

In related news, this happened in science this week:

Incredible Discovery Provides Evidence for the Big Bang Theory

http://space.io9.com/have-physicists...yes-1545591865

Kamionkowski and his team were there to announce that B-modes of gravitational waves have been detected in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Put simply, this is the best evidence yet that our universe was formed when very rapid expansion known as the Big Bang started a process that physicists call "inflation." As a result of this rapid inflation of physical space, everything in the universe was born.

Gravitational waves have been observed before, but the B-mode polarization is something new. This is a kind of gravitational wave that cosmological theorists have predicted would peak during those first 10-34 seconds of the primordial universe when we exploded from nothing into everything. So this announcement today confirms our first real observations of early inflation. Now that we can see B-mode gravitational waves, those observations put limits on just what happened when our universe was young, and how it got to be way it is today.

This isn't the first time gravitational waves have been detected. The 10-meter South Pole Telescope detected gravitational wave B-modes last summer, then Polarbear confirmed those results. What makes the BICEP-2 discovery different is that it's detecting primordial gravitational waves right at that early moment in the universe when waves from inflation are expected to peak. The actual signal is the faint twisting pattern in the polarization data. Mathematically, it's the curl. Colloquially, today's stories are going to be full of swirls.

Why does it matter? In a world with no data, all theories are equal. We now have data, so the number of inflation models that still make sense is a much smaller set. Even with this announcement, research isn't done — more projects going forward will be expanding and confirming these results. For more on all the details, Nature is running an entire special on gravitational waves and inflation. We also had some awesome discussion in the comments section yesterday about potential implications, with cosmologists from other projects jumping in to clarify.

Here's Professor Andrei Linde, one of the earliest proponents of the Big Bang Theory and a founder of Inflation Theory, being told his life's work was worth it:

The really interesting part is that inflation was driven by vacuum energy from empty space outside the expanding visible universe and this vacuum energy concentration was roughly equal to the energy of Grand Unification at which the strong, weak and electromagnetic force combine to form one force. This is roughly equal at the particle level to 1x10^12 LHCs.