INFORMATION ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED AN INSTANT AFTER THE BIG BANG—A CORRECTION. I posted here in March about an experiment which seemed to have provided information about the universe only 10 to the minus thirty-fifth seconds after the Big Bang. This was thought to be the “apparent first direct evidence of…cosmic inflation — a theory that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in barely the blink of an eye”.
This article reports on an announcement by the team that had conducted the experiment that acknowledges that the experiment did not resolve the issue—that the announcement in March may have been wrong. The problem is that the experiment does not exclude the possibility that polarized galactic dust emission rather than gravitational waves produced the experimental results. Experiments later this year with a different telescope may settle the question.
Is the cause galactic dust emission or gravitational waves? I am struck by the ability to identify and test for another explanatory variable in experiments which cover such long distances and such a long amount of time