26 Phil Plait - Just After the Big Bang

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2014

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

We all heard the cosmos-stretching news this week. On Monday, a team of researchers working with a special telescope at the South Pole confirmed that they had observed evidence of "inflation," the sudden and rapid expansion of the universe that occurred in an unimaginably small slice of time just after the Big Bang, the beginning of space and time some 13.8 billion years ago. The researchers achieved this feat by examining what is known as the cosmic microwave background or CMB, which has been called the "residual heat of creation." It is a light glow that suffuses the universe and that is nearly as old as the Big Bang itself—its leftover radiation and, you might say, its signature. For most of us, though, all this talk of "inflation"—which quickly gets even more complicated, with phrases like "gravitational waves" and "polarized light" getting thrown around—can seem pretty intimidating. But that's the wrong way to look at it. If we don't understand the stunning insights of modern astrophysics and cosmology, it's just because nobody has explained them to us well enough—yet. There are science communicators out there who are more than up to the task, though, and one of them is Slate blogger and self-described "bad astronomer" Phil Plait. On the show this week, we talk to Plait about this recent discovery—he explains what is actually going on, and what we can take away from it. This episode of Inquiring Minds also features a discussion of troubling new research on the melting of Greenland, and on whether or not basketball players actually get "hot," statistically speaking, becoming more likely to make future shots if they have already made several shots in a row.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Friday, March 21st, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.
0:05.5	I'm Chris Mooney.
0:06.5	And I'm Indravis Gontas.
0:07.9	Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.
0:14.1	We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.
0:18.3	You can find us online at climatedesk.org, and you can follow us on Twitter at Inquiring
0:23.4	show and on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast.
0:32.4	This was a big week in science, like Higgs boson big, if not even bigger. People are already talking
0:39.9	about the scientists who discovered or have shown proof of gravitational waves from the images
0:46.6	of the Bicep 2 telescope in Antarctica. So these data are actually the first direct evidence
0:53.8	that the theory of inflation that describes
0:57.4	what happened just after the Big Bang is exactly right. In order to help us navigate through the
1:04.2	data and the complicated ideas that are coming out of these data, we invited Phil Plate, who's also known as the
1:12.1	Bad Astronomer. He's an astronomer, a skeptic, a popular science blogger, and the author of two
1:18.2	books, one called Bad Astronomy and another called Death from the Skies, that enumerates all the
1:23.4	things in the skies that could harm us in different ways. So this discovery has been all over
1:28.2	the news. And some people oversimplify it and some people talk about it as being incredibly
1:32.9	complex. And of course, we need both sides of the coin in order to really grasp the importance of
1:39.5	this finding. So if you first read about these results and you don't know anything about the fundamental
1:46.5	questions in experimental or theoretical physics, it's hard to see how really relevant or how
1:52.4	big this discovery is. So we need someone who can take us through those models and through
1:58.8	the implications of these data in order to grasp the significance
	...

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