technogeeky

Academic historian: sacrifice earnings to maximize learnings.

History Channel: sacrifice learning to maximize earnings.

Someone should send history channel a big bag of 'l's

It does give string theorists something to hope about. The idea that we can access any information about time (and hence energy) scales so close to the Planck scale is very encouraging.

In fact, this experiment is the single largest jump to small time scales physics has ever seen. We're stuck here at ~13.71 BYr. In cosmology, we're stuck at around ~ 270,000 years (CMB). In particle physics, we can push all the way back to ~ 10^-24 seconds (or so).

But to have evidence of what happened in our universe at scales of 10^-36 seconds (or so) is absolutely astounding. It's monumental achievement to exploit the CMB (again, at ~ 270,000 yrs) to telescope to such a small timescale.

And it's only a little bit further down to get to the string scale.

Boston.com has the best images posting I've seen and they have been consistently good for the past several years.

Thanks for the good work.

I tried to explain the basics and importance of your discovery to a friend, and I found myself thinking a specific part of your discovery is important.

I explained that the CMB itself is a transition from an opaque plasma to a transparent medium. I explained that plasmas both emit and absorb light (hence the features of a spectrograph from our Sun or any other body). I had previously explained that photons emitted from the Sun's core take about 8 minutes + about 180,000 years to travel to our Earth telescopes.

But here I emphasized a key difference: The photons from the Sun's core are emitted and re-absorbed countless numbers of times because they must travel through a plasma. In this way, the detailed (quantum) state of these (such as their phase) is lost. In other words, the photon we see with our telescope isn't the 'same photon' as the one emitted.

Travelling through a plasma will destroy your change to measure original phase. But your photons did not travel though a plasma. They were emitted by a plasma but travelled through a vacuum. In the case of your measurement, it is the same photon as the one emitted. And because you are (or we are, in interpreting your paper) filtering out the E modes and the lensed B modes... you are seeing photons which have travelled cleanly from the CMB emission to our telescopes. Ones which have skirted subsequent gravitational distortion.

So, my question is: Is this mostly correct? Are there any cool details you would add? Can you correct my picture where it is wrong, so I can be a good scientist and teacher and correct myself?