Sunday, August 26, 2012

Why you don't overturn the Big Bang via a media interview

Why you don't overturn the Big Bang via a media interview:





We're not going to overthrow the Big Bang so much as incorporate elements of it into a new model that better explains the large-scale structures of the Universe.





Being a reporter requires a certain cynicism about press releases. After all, whether something is newsworthy can often be determined by gaining the attention of a media outlet. So press officers (who are usually not scientists, and even if they are, they can't be experts in every area of science—no one can be) are under a lot of pressure to hype scientific results, whether they're significant, marginal, or incremental.
That's not inherently a bad thing: small amounts of progress can still be very interesting. And it's how science actually works: big, groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting results are very rare, and usually can only be recognized retrospectively thanks to the smaller, more incremental work of daily research.
However, even my Cary-Grant-in-His-Girl-Friday cynicism was challenged today. I received a press release from the University of Melbourne titled "Big Bang theory challenged by big chill" and it was even more breathless than usual. In fact, the tone of the release felt more like a work of a crackpot than legitimate research: full of grandiose claims about overthrowing well-established science and implicit comparison of the lead researcher to Einstein and ancient Greek philosophers. Even the name of the theory, "quantum graphity," sounded suspiciously like something a crackpot would come up with.
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