Gravitational Waves and Space Dust

A news story from March 2014 needs an update -- could space dust invalidate the discovery of gravitational waves?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says I've kissed
mermaids Rhode l Nino. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and I'm Lauren

(00:20):
Folke BAM. And Joe is out on vacation and he
will be back soon. I think he's probably having amazing
adventures right now, yes, and we do. Well. Yeah, as
of this recording, I think he might actually be back
in the future when you hear this right well, even then,
he'll still have amazing adventures. He is the keeper of
the mystical acts, so which we have not had in

(00:41):
our podcast room for a long time, but we have
had it in our hearts. That's true, where where we
keep our access uh, which is dangerous. By the way,
I do not recommend speaking of danger. There's a danger
of doing a video about breaking news and science because
sometimes that breaking news turns out to be a different
story than what we first had thought. Which brings us

(01:05):
to today's episode. So way back in March of we're
recording this in late September, researchers at the background imaging
of cosmic extra galactic polarization to project, otherwise known as BICEP,
which is a lot easier to say. Yep. They announced
that they had discovered patterns in the cosmic background radiation

(01:26):
that matched what they expected to find as a result
of gravitational waves, which was a big deal, and I
did afford thinking video episode about it that published on
March twenty two, fourteen. So why is the hypothetical discovery
of of some waves a big deal? Well, gravitational waves
or something that is predicted by a specific interpretation of

(01:50):
the Big Bang theory of how our universe started. It's
specifically the inflation model of the Big Bang theory. So
they're after effects of the event. They're not directly detectable
by we mirror mortals. We can't see gravitational waves, but
we can look for their presence by the way they
might affect something else, like the cosmic microwave microwave background radiation.

(02:12):
So uh, the inflation model specifically describes that rapid expansion
of the universe in a fraction of a fraction of
affraction of a fraction of affraction, etcetera, etcetera. Of a second,
it's we're talking such the first moments that the universe existed. Yeah,
the very beginning of time. Calling it a moment even
seems weird because we're talking about tend to the negative

(02:36):
thirty six of a second, to tend to the negative
thirty three of a second, narrow in down. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's and I guess the terms of cosmic inflation,
it's an eternity. But for for those of us who
are living on our scale, this is a moment that
is unimaginably fast. But in that moment, the universe expanded

(02:59):
to an incredible amount, faster than the speed of light. However,
we're talking about if you are looking at the universe
from the outside, which don't even get me started there,
that's the whole other conversation. But imagine you could look
at the universe from the outside. You would see this
thing expand faster than the speed of light. Now, within
that universe, everything is obeying the various laws of our universe. Also,
it was so dense that light couldn't even travel in

(03:22):
it at this point. So, uh, this would have been
an incredible moment of expansion, and physicists believe that one
of the byproducts would be gravitational waves. So those gravitational
waves would, according to this model of inflation, have a
certain alignment in our our universe. They call it handedness,

(03:44):
and it's kind of the curvature of the wave. So
the BICEP two team were making these observations. They have
a telescope at the South Pole and they were looking
for signs of these gravitational waves, and they found what
they thought were those signs. Um they saw twists in
the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and that

(04:06):
appeared to be an alignment with the way the gravitational
waves were predicted to be. And in fact, there's an
amazing video. I'm sure a lot of you guys out
there have seen it. It was really very dear. Yeah,
I shared it when it when it first hit the web.
But Andre Lindy, who's known as the father of inflation, uh,

(04:27):
cosmic inflation, not monetary inflation, right right, he's he's kind
of one of the original purveyors of this concept. Yeah.
A student who had worked on the BICEP two project
went and visited his home, Lindy's home, and told the
professor about the findings, and it was a very emotional

(04:48):
joyous reaction because here was this, uh, this hypothesis that
this man had put forward, and he fully expected that
there would never be any confirmation of that within his
life time. Well, the support from the BICEP to finding
would mean that there would be a stronger foundation for
that particular Big Bang model of how our universe sprang

(05:08):
into being. Uh. It is not the only model that's
been proposed um there and there are variations on the
Big Bang theory, and there are variations that were there
are other models of the universe's existence that don't really
follow the Big Bang theory. And at the time, the
researchers at BICEP two said they felt very strongly their
results were reliable and not due to error. They had

(05:31):
analyzed the data for three years before announcing it, so
this wasn't like a brand new discovery. They looked up
in the sky and saw it. This was they saw something,
and then they subjected that to analysis repeatedly to make
sure that what they were looking at was what they
thought it was. And they said they had even eliminated
the possibility that cosmic dust cause a false reading, which

(05:52):
means now we've got science right. Okay. So by May
of two thousand fourteen, other researchers already began to question
if perhaps cosmic dust might have caused an issue, after all,
that even though the team had said that they had
accounted for that, it may still have ended up affecting

(06:13):
the results. And in September two thou fourteen, so it's
the week that we're actually recording this, another team of scientists,
this time with the European Space Agency's Plunk satellite, said
that they had discovered far more space dust out there
than what was previously believed to exist in this specific
window of space that the BICEP researchers were looking into. Yeah,

(06:36):
they essentially said, look, it's dusty out there, and there
is no clear view at all. Even though this one
particular site where BICEP two was stated was thought to
have been relatively right, it turns out that there's no
such thing. Well, yeah, yeah, and you know right, they
had accounted for some space dust, just not enough. And

(06:57):
the thing about this dust is that light from it
can be polarized by magnetic fields and space, creating swirls
that look an awful lot like what we would expect
these gravitational ripples to look like, right, Now, the scientists
at Plank with the Planck satellite are very careful not
to say that the bicep to findings are false. What
they do say is that it's likely that space dust

(07:17):
could account for at least some of the data that
the team has come up with it that they say
are are their results, and uh they say, well, this
this new finding brings that into question. And so researchers
from both groups are going to work together and compare
their their respective huge amounts of data and try to

(07:38):
determine what extent, if any, space dust might have corrupted
those findings. So it could be that we still find
evidence for gravitational waves after all of the settles. Sure,
it's really difficult to suss out, is the thing. It's
not like with a camera that you would use where
you just twist a ring on the lens and visually
confirm that what you're looking at is in focus right,

(07:59):
or what exactly within your field of vision you're focusing on. UM,
you have to compare image brightness using several frequencies in
the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what most of these satellites
UM telescopes are using and UM and also take into consideration, right,
that polarization of the light, and so this data combined

(08:20):
can help you distinguish between things in near and far
fields of view and also identify dust the noise of
the dust from everything else going on. This really reminds me.
I mean, it's it's a crazy, uh comparison to make,
but if you've ever seen those videos from a security camera,
like at a gas station where there's some creepy ghost

(08:43):
and it turns out it's a bug that's walking across
the lens, and it's because the camera's focal point isn't
close enough, right, You can't nothing that is that close
to the camera is going to be in focus. We're
talking about a very like macro version of creepy gravitational ways.
But it was dust. No, maybe, maybe we don't know.
It may turn out again that there are, uh, there

(09:06):
is some evidence of gravitational waves there, but that the
thought right now is that those waves are going to
be significantly weaker than what the BICEP two team originally thought,
which might make it necessary for people to kind of
re evaluate how they think about this particular model of
the universe. Right. Yeah, it may just mean that some

(09:26):
of the models of the inflation are a little off.
In fact, when this finding was first announced by the
BICEP two team, they actually said, these waves are much
stronger than what we had anticipated. So it could be
that this all just sort of evens out in the
long run. I mean, that is a possibility. So the
worst case scenario for the BICEP two team is that

(09:47):
the plot data ends up invalidating the earlier findings entirely,
where the space dust ends up being the full extent
of what they discovered, and they did not, in fact
notice the polarization of cosmic microwave background radiation. Now, that
does not necessarily mean that gravitational wave hypothesis itself is invalid.
It just means that the evidence we thought we had

(10:08):
isn't what we believed it to be, and that maybe
that we need to find new evidence. We need to
find a new way of engineering test in order to
look for that exactly. It just made me that, you know,
the evidence is still there, we just have to find
the way to find it. Um. So we can't be
certain that even if the Planck satellite data does invalidate

(10:29):
those results, that the hypothesis itself is wrong. It just
means that we don't have the evidence to support it anymore. Right,
So this is this isn't quite this sad story that
it might seem like on the surface, Right, This is
actually a great story. And the reason why it's a
great story is because it really illustrates how science is

(10:50):
supposed to work. And this is what is we really
wanted to talk about. And we kind of use this
as a as a launching pad to do two things.
One to address something that was said in an earlier
video and to to talk about the scientific process. And
it sounds like it is kind of a bummer to
have your discovery invalidated, But that's how we get at

(11:10):
the information that gives us a better idea of how
reality works. Yeah, that is how we science. In fact. Yeah,
if we didn't do that, if we just decided that
every single time someone discovered something and there was no
critical analysis of it at all, that that was reality,
we would have a very skewed vision of reality. We'd
be back to humors. Yeah. Yeah, And and this isn't

(11:32):
wishy washy either. I Mean, sometimes in some portions of
the media, you you hear people misinterpreting this kind of
discovery process or or process of questioning as scientists don't
know what they're talking about. And well that's the point.
Now scientists don't know what they're talking about. We're questioning
it up, questioning it all the time, right, and if

(11:52):
it turns out that it holds up to the questions,
then you feel more confident about the answers. And so, yeah,
it's not a black or white scenario. I seen so
many stories that have tried to um to summarize this
particular story about the Planck satellite data as Planck satellite
data invalidates Big Bang theory, and I think, well, you

(12:12):
now you are mostly overexaggerated. So yeah, there there's some
critical thinking is needed, not only when you're doing science,
but when you're reading science news. It's very important. So
some things were pretty darn sure about. So with those
things were really sure about, it would take extraordinary evidence

(12:34):
to the contrary to make us change those those ideas,
those thoughts. Right, So like the theory of gravity, it
would take extraordinary evidence for us to significantly change the
theory of gravity. That theory of evolution is another great example.
It would take extraordinary evidence to really make us say

(12:58):
that theory. Oh wait, we were wrong. Yeah, and keep
in mind again, I know all of you guys out
there know this, But in science, a theory is not
I have an idea. A theory is where we have
a body of information about something that we are extremely
confident reflects reality. And when we say extremely confident, we

(13:18):
do allow for the possibility that there could be something
that's wrong. It needs to be tweaked. There might be
tiny elements of it that need to be fixed. But
it's very unlikely that the full collection of ideas is
wholly incorrect. If it is, that requires phenomenal evidence to
support the objection. And this is how science works. Okay,

(13:40):
So so this sounds an awful lot like we're talking
about some kind of method of doing science. Wow, if
only we had a term for the method with which
science is put to use. You mean you mean a
scientific method, that would be brilliant. Yes, it is the
scientific method we're talking about, which is not a brand

(14:02):
new idea. Oh certainly not what we know today, as
the scientific method came out of the Renaissance and the
thinkers influenced by it in the surrounding centuries. There. During
the Renaissance, the Catholic Church started backing off of its
domination of public thought. You know that their persecution of
resistors to their dogma led in part to the Dark

(14:24):
Ages and it's six hundred year erosion of kind of
civilization as we know it circa five hundred to Europeans
during the Renaissance became a reacquainted with ancient Greek and
Roman works, and be their entire capacity for dealing with
data and mathematics were vastly expanded by Islamic influences. So

(14:47):
all of that was super rad um, and a few
people were really quite key in bringing the scientific method
into being. First in the early to mid thirteenth century
we have Albertus Magnus, who made the distinction between revealed
truth i e. Like from a divine power and experimental findings.

(15:07):
Then in the mid to late thirteenth century, Roger Bacon
called for an end to blind acceptance of popular ideas.
He particularly targeted Aristotle's work, which was really just to
point out that even great thinkers can be and frequently
are wrong about things, and that evidence must always be
considered right. This is this is the rise of critical thinking.

(15:28):
So that we stress all the time on this show. Yeah, yeah,
Then in sixty one influenced by the scientific work of
folks like Copernicus and Galileo. Francis Bacon published a proposed
approach to scientific inquiry called the Novum Organum science trum
because Latin was super posh at the time. It was

(15:49):
it was the the the language of currency at that point.
But but yes, this this paper that this was published
and put forth inductive reasoning as the best way to
science and and really the he didn't phrase it quite
like that. Well, I mean, I don't know, I don't
really speak Latin very well, so maybe that was how

(16:09):
he phrased it. Um. But but really as the only
way for humankind to master the world around us. I
like that. We have to thank the Bacon boys for
a lot of the scientific method, uh huh um. And
and this paved the way for folks like Isaac Newton
and Robert Hook and Louis Pastor to make and test
observations about our world that still vastly influence our civilization today. Um.

(16:34):
And and for them, I mean, and you know, continually,
for us, disproving ideas was every bit as important as
proving ones. That's a great point if if you're if
your scientific presentation is not falsifiable, as in, there is
no way for someone to check against you, right, Yeah,
there's no way to present a counter to it because

(16:55):
it relies on something that isn't itself unfalsifiable. That's not
scien is. You have to have it be falsifiable for
it to be science. And uh, that doesn't mean that
it's itself is false. It just means that you have
to be able to have a scenario in which evidence
contrary to what you found would prove it to be wrong.

(17:15):
That doesn't necessarily mean that evidence actually exists. It just
has to have the possibility of existing. And if you
are a really good scientist, I mean, no one likes
to be proven wrong. Let's get that all the way
right now. I hate it when it happens. It happens frequently,
and I hate it every single time. However, if you're
a good scientist, you accept that as a possibility. And

(17:38):
when someone provides an objection to something that you have
put forth, then it is the responsibility of scientists to
make sure to look and see does the objection have
merit to it, And if it does, then you have
to go back and look at what went wrong. Maybe
it was the methodology that the first scientist use in

(18:00):
his or her experiments. Maybe it was a mistake in
analyzing the data that came out of the experimentation process.
And through this, we can get closer and closer to uh,
what we believe is to be reality. Keeping in mind
that we're filtering, filtering everything through the human experience. So,
oh sure, you know we're we're measuring what we can

(18:21):
measure based on our limited senses. Yeah. There, we know
there's stuff out there that we like, gravitational waves, we
know their stuff out there. At least we highly suspect
there is stuff out there that we cannot directly observe,
and so this becomes really super tricky. But but it's important,
right to UH, to be able to accept the fact
that you can be wrong, and to be proven wrong

(18:44):
is not is not a strike against you. It's a
strike four science right right, It's the entire thing is
a revolving process of asking questions and finding ways of
testing hypothetical answers to those questions. And so if you
are encountering someone who resists that, who says that they
don't want people questioning their work, that's a warning flag.

(19:07):
Oh yeah, yeah, So if you were to come up
and uh, and you see a critical analysis of someone's
work and that person, the person who's being analyzed, is
being reactive in a negative way. They're saying, you know this,
You're being ridiculous or whatever. Assuming that the critical analysis
is in fact merited, it not always is correct. But

(19:29):
if it is merited and the person is putting up
a big fuss about being analyzed, then that is not
a good sign of science. Uh. You know, you a
good scientist will welcome analysis and criticism. Um. And if
things all went well, then what you end up with
is other scientists replicating that. First, scientists work to make

(19:51):
sure that the results are also replicable, and if they are,
that's great. It means that it adds to our vision
of what reality is. So this is where we get
into things like, let's say I make an extraordinary claim,
and let's say I even get a patent for my
extraordinary claim because this has happened where I claim that
I have created a perpetual motion machine, which, according to

(20:15):
our understanding of the universe, is impossible. Yes, very much that,
but I've got the patent for it. I've even put
off put on some demonstrations where I've got a thing
that seems to be working, but don't let anyone get
too close to it, because you know, I don't want
to end up breaking my one working prototype. Yeah, that's
an extraordinary claim. And if I resist any attempts to

(20:35):
analyze that, then that's a warning flag. Um. And uh,
just as we have to take a critical eye toward
the science, we also have to take a critical eye
toward those who object to the science and make sure
that those objections are in fact merited. Evidence needs to
be supported on all ground and that's where we get

(20:56):
into that scientific method. That's what it's about. Yeah, so, uh,
you know, it's the whole prove it part of science.
So the cool thing to me is that these two teams,
the PLOCK satellite team in the BICEP two team are
going to work together. They're going to look at this
data together and they're going to determine what to you know,
what is as close to the truth as we can

(21:18):
get according to all this data, And after that we
will have a better idea of whether or not there
were any gravitational waves detected in that amazing discovery that
was announced back in March or if that was just
a misguided misinterpretation of the data. Either way, it's not
something to be discouraged about. It's something to be happy

(21:39):
about because it means the process is working. It's the
coolest possible failure. Yeah. In fact, scientists say all the time, well,
at least the theoretical ones do. I don't know so
much about the experimental scientists. But uh, scientists say all
the time that they that failures in a way are
more exciting successes because of success. While that does is

(22:00):
it tells it confirms something that you've suspected and and
it basically means that you need to find other ways
of attacking it. Yeah, or yeah, you gotta you know, well,
we prove that you guys want to go to lunch.
But a failure means there's something else going on. You
gotta figure out what that thing is, and that's the
exciting discovery part of science, right. So um, some some

(22:21):
scientists appear to be masochistic in that way. They want
they want to see more failures because it means that
there's more stuff going on. The Higgs boson is a
great example of that too. Yeah, oh yeah. There are
a lot of scientists who were saying, I kind of
hope we don't discover the Higgs boson, because if we do,
that's almost like a dead end. Like we we found
the thing we thought was there, and yes it was there,
and now we're done. Whereas if we look for it

(22:44):
and it's not there, something else is going on, and
that's really exciting. For those of us who report on science.
We kind of like to have the end. The the
ends kind of do make stories better a lot of
the time. It does make the narrative easier to tell. Yeah, yeah,
although you know, at the same time, there's a lot
to be said for it to be continued. Yes, And
in fact, that's what this show largely is. I mean,

(23:06):
it's all about looking at the future, which spoiler alert,
guys were not there yet, uh and never will be
because tomorrow is another day. But it does mean that
we get a lot of to be continued in this
So Lauren, thanks so much for for really getting into
that research on the on the history of the scientific method.
That was super cool and even as a medievalist, I

(23:28):
was not aware of a lot of it. Um, yeah,
I'm medievalist who does a podcast about the future. It's
a weird world we live in. So uh, guys, if
you have any suggestions for future topics that we can tackle,
maybe there's an old episode of forward thinking that we've
done that you think merits a revisit, kind of like
in this instance where new information has come up and

(23:48):
we really needed to address the fact that things have changed.
You need to get in touch with us and let's
know about it. Let us know on Twitter or Facebook
or Google Plus. You can find us on Twitter or
Google Plus. We have the handle f W thinking. Just
put fw thinking in the search bar over at Facebook.
It will pop right up. Leave us a message, tell
us what you think, and we'll talk to you again

(24:09):
really soon. For more on this topic in the future
of technology, I visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to

(24:29):
you by Toyota. Let's go Places,