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The article seems one-sided and, from the outside, I don't know what I don't know. Can someone comment on other substantive points of view? And was BICEP2 reall
by forapurpose 9y ago
The article seems one-sided and, from the outside, I don't know what I don't know. Can someone comment on other substantive points of view? And was BICEP2 really as reckless/dishonest as is portrayed?
EDIT: Some other perspectives in the comments:
> ... part of what gets overlooked in some of this is that BICEP2 had done lovely work — they had great data at far higher sensitivity than any previous polarisation experiment, if I am recalling things correctly; the analysis was flawed but the data was good.
> PRL referees saved the BICEP2 people from themselves by getting them to remove the worst of their mistakes. If the referees had quickly let the paper through, likely the paper would have had to have been formally retracted.
> I did some searching around for examples of any apology from the BICEP2 people or negative effects on any of their careers, could find nothing. A quite remarkable fact is that Kovac’s Wikipedia entry still has the following as description of his career: / “He is the principal investigator of the BICEP2 telescope, which is part of the BICEP and Keck Array series of experiments.[3][4][5] Measurements announced on 17 March 2014 from the BICEP2 telescope give support to the idea of cosmic inflation, by reporting the first evidence for a primordial B-Mode pattern in the polarization of the CMB.[6][7][8] If confirmed, this measurement provides a direct image of primordial gravitational waves and the quantization of gravity.”
> If Keating is complaining about how a single prize determines research (ehm… does it really?) then he’d better complain about tycoons determining research by handing out money to people from failed experiments.
...
The latter is a troubling sign to me. It was predictable (I predicted it, at least) that as governments cut taxes and cut funding to universities and science, more power would concentrate in the hands of a wealthy few (private and corporate) and research would become far more dependent on pleasing them. What value is research without independence? Arguably it does more harm than good, by creating disinformation and undermining legitimate research.
EDIT2: Added a key comma in the first sentence
- tombone12 9y agoI don't know how to estimate their reckless from the outside, but it is simple fact that however sensitive, they only had one waveband and so no real way of estimating the foreground contamination. I think it is also well established that the foreground estimation was made by looking closely at pictures from a presentation showing preliminary Planck skymaps of the dust emission, and then building a foreground model from that. They also put out this adorable video as part of the announcement, maybe not the greatest show of caution ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA
- sytelus 9y agoThere seems to be plenty of evidence that almost everyone in the community thought that claims made by bicep2 was reckless and hyped for the purpose of generating the news headlines. They didn’t even disclosed clearly about possiblity that claims could be wrong even when they full well knew they could. A reviewer forced them to add that possibility in that paper which they only did grudgingly. If it wasn’t for the reviewer, the paper would have been now looked as outright lie. This was one of the most sought after experimental result and it was expected that team would be very careful in making any claims. So when big claims were indeed made, it didn’t took too lonng to do independent review and refute their claims. https://phys.org/news/2014-06-experts-big-bolstering-discovery.html https://phys.org/news/2014-06-experts-big-bolstering-discove... https://dreamheron.wordpress.com/category/bicep2-cmb/page/6/ https://dreamheron.wordpress.com/category/bicep2-cmb/page/6/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/01/30/bicep2-wrong-sharing-results/#.Wtp6qsqxWf0 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/01/30/bicep2-wro... https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/bicep2-experiments-big-bang-controversy-highlights-challenges-for-modern-science/2014/07/23/707bc9e6-02c6-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.efdd48fe9e84 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/bicep...