from Blank On The Map
Explaining physics to the public is hard. Most physicists do a lousy job of conveying a summary of what their research really means and why it is important, without the use of jargon and in terms that can be readily understood. So it is not particularly surprising that occasionally non-experts trying to translate these statements for the benefit of other non-experts come up with misleading headlines such as this, or this.
Just to be clear: Planck has not mapped the universe as it was in the first tiny fraction of a second. (To be fair, most other reports correctly make this distinction, though they differ widely on when inflation is supposed to have occurred.) I think this is an important thing to get right, and I'm going to try to explain why, and what the CMB actually is.
However, I'm going to try to do so with the help of an analogy. This analogy is not my original invention – I heard Simon White use it during the Planck science briefing – but I think it is brilliant, simple to understand and not vastly misleading. So, despite the health warning about analogies above, I'm going to run with it and see how far we get.
Read more>>
