 Thank you so much for joining us for another wonderful month of us coming on tap. We have two fabulous talks coming up for you, just in a little bit, but we are going to start the night off with some Nobel trivia, maybe if my clicker works, do you want to tap me forward please? To start with trivia, I just want to point out a small mistake. We are going to skip over to the first question from one to ten, but on your lovely trivia sheets they go from zero to nine. So either your heart so chooses, but just remember zero is one, two is three, you know, we're making it up as we go. So thank you much and enjoy trivia. Alright, I'm going to move on to number three. How many people were awarded the physics Nobel Prize in 2017 for the observation of gravitational waves? A is 3,240, B is 1,011, C is 12 and D is three. Alright, so now I'll move on to number four. To how many people can the Nobel Prize be awarded for a single discovery? A, 10,000, B, 100, C, 3 or D, 1. Alright, so number five. True or false? Vera Rubin was awarded a Nobel Prize for her observations of galaxy rotation curves, which lead, which led to the discovery of dark matter. True or false question? Number six, when Donna Strickland, Stickland won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2018, she became the blank woman to do so since the inception of the award in 1901. That A, first, B, 12, E, third, or D, 20. To number seven, Einstein worked alone to develop the theory of general relativity. That true or false, that Einstein worked alone to develop the theory of general relativity. Moving on to number eight, the Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs, who independently postulated its existence in 1964. So again, another true or false question here. On to number nine. Another true or false question, Marie Curie was originally intended to be excluded from the 1903 Nobel Prize for the discovery of radiation. But again, another true or false question, Marie Curie was originally intended to be excluded from the 1903 Nobel Prize for the discovery of radiation. And lastly, we'll do number 10. Number 10 is true or false. The Nobel Prize is a just and egalitarian method of recognizing the contributions that great individuals make to science. True or false? I would just like to ask everyone to bring up their trivia sheets to our trivia czar in training. If you're still going to bring those up until, well, do it soon because we're going to start grading. A second year graduate student at the University of Washington in the Astronomy Department, she studies the intersection of astronomy and data science. Please welcome Leah Fulmer. Astronomy is most intriguing. I actually want to acknowledge that we are currently situated on the traditional lands of the Puget Sound Salish and Ulamas tribes. All research facilities mentioned in this talk, without whose labor this work could not be conducted, is by observing. So the universe is filled with light and it is our job to gather that light and create some sort of physical narrative that explains why everything looks the way that it does. But there are so many ways to observe the universe. So if I'm an astronomer trying to judiciously think about how I should observe the universe, I need to think about what types of objects I want to observe. Do I want to look at a planet or a star or a galaxy? Because what I'm going to learn about the universe is going to be really different depending on what types of objects I look at. But what wavelength we're looking at. Galaxies look really, really different in the ultraviolet versus the infrared. So we have to make a decision about how we want to look, what types of light we want to look at by their wavelength. I got to think about cadence. So this is how often do I want to observe the things that I want to observe. Some astronomical objects, my favorite ones, they change in brightness over time. So if I'm looking at an object every 30 seconds, I'm going to get a lot of, a lot more information than I would if I looked at that object once a year, for example. Part of the sky I want to look at. So we exist in a galaxy, which means that sometimes when we look out, we are looking at the galaxy, that is our galactic home. We're looking at all the dust and stars in our galaxy. But other times, if we're looking through the pole of the galaxy, we're not seeing any of that. So different parts of the sky offer different information. Think about duration. So how long we would like to look at an object? An object, we want to look at it for 15 seconds, or do we want to look at it for, say, 100 hours? That's going to come back. So if we look at it for 100 hours, it's going to tell us a lot more information about what we're looking at than if we only look at it for 15 seconds. And finally, we need to think about brightness. So we can say I definitely want to look at galaxies. I definitely want to look at them in the ultraviolet. But depending on that object's distance, some ultraviolet bright galaxies are going to be very bright when we look at them, kind of like in the night sky. But then others, if they're very far away, for example, they're going to be very dim. And so the brightness, the inherent brightness of objects, mixed with how far away they are, mixed with the sensitivity of our telescopes, again, can give us really different information. And we have to make a decision about what we're going to look at. The exciting part is though, at that time, we look at the universe in a new way, we discover new phenomena that we never even expected to see. So that means that each time we took one of these elements, and we looked at the universe in an entirely new way, we found something that we could have never foreseen. And tonight what I want to do is I want to look at three different examples of one that's happened historically. But then I want to introduce the instruments that are coming online in the next decade and think about what new things we might see given these new, given new instrumentation. In 1960, NASA was trying to think about communication by satellites. So we were communicating the array of view waves for a very long time, but we want to figure out how to do this over very long distances. So what they did was they built these really large, like, metallic spheres that they sent off into space. And the idea was that on the West Coast someone would release a radio broadcast, it would bounce off the sphere, and then someone on the East Coast would try to observe it with a radio telescope. Simple, right? Well, it turns out that between 1960 when these were launched and 1964, when our telescope to observe them was built, they didn't actually need this technology anymore. And so NASA was left with this instrument that really had no particular purpose. So two astronomers, Penzies and Wilson, tried to, or decided to try their hand at radio astronomy, which was this new emerging field of astronomy. We're going to look at the stars and radio waves for the first time, which is, I think, kind of exciting because, like, we had been communicating to each other through radio waves for, like, decades. And so Penzies and Wilson were like, what is the universe trying to communicate to us? You know what I mean? Very exciting. So radio, radio observation is difficult, though, because radio waves are everywhere, right? That's kind of the point. You can stick out your radio antennae and it'll just catch a bunch of them. But when you're trying to look at something very specific, like the sky, you want to make sure that you are actually getting your signal from where you want it from, and not from everything else that could be at play, right? So Penzies and Wilson did a very careful job of making sure that there was no interference that all other signals were muted or very quiet, so that whatever we found from the universe would be very clear. And what they found was far louder than they ever expected. They discovered this, like, huge, super loud radio signal coming from everywhere in the universe. And at first they didn't believe it. They were like, this can't be right. We've never heard of anything like this. This is absurd. It's probably, it's probably our detector. It's probably New York, something like that. So they painstakingly, like, quieted the signal from all these things. They took out some pigeons that were trying to nest in the horn, and yet they still found this pervasive radio signal. So a modern understanding of this signal looks like this, or a modern observation of it looks like this. This is a map of the sky. If it were taken out from all around you and slapped on a 2D, this is what you would see. And the color variation represents 2.7 kelvin plus or minus 200 micro kelvin. So a very, very tiny variation all across the sky of this consistent but three kelvin signal. And they didn't know what it is, but they were like, okay, we're going to call it the cosmic microwave background. Cosmic because, comes from the cosmos, microwave because the strongest signal peaks in microwave wavelengths. They were using a radio telescope, but microwave is just right next to it. So the peak signals in microwaves and background because it is so pervasive throughout all of the sky. Meanwhile, some collaborators at Princeton were trying to think about the origins of the universe. They had this idea that there might have been a big bang that would have started the universe, but they knew that they needed to find evidence for this, right? So they were thinking, well if there really was this big bang it would have released a tremendous amount of radiation right at the start. And as the universe expanded, all of that energy would dissipate over the volume of the universe. As the universe got bigger and bigger, that energy dissipating over larger volumes, it would get cooler. And if that really did happen, these are a lot of f's at the moment, if that really did happen, you would probably see some sort of signal all over the sky at about the same temperature. And that is exactly what Penzies Wilson found. So by accident they took this telescope that NASA had built for satellite communication, they stuck it out there, and they found literally the origins of the universe. This changed our understanding of astronomy and physics as we know it, and it was a really, really big deal just by looking at something in a new wavelength. Oh, that's the cascading way back. Um, exactly. And so, oh, side note, oh this is kind of fun. So again, Penzies and Wilson didn't actually think that they had found what they found, or they didn't think it was real, right? They didn't think it was a real signal. And it turns out that like a lot of people had actually found this signal previously, not thinking it was very, not thinking it was real. In particular, Andrew McKellar found something, found the CMB, the Cosmic Microwave background in 1941, but asserted that this signal will have its own perhaps limited significance. He basically said it's probably nothing. And we later learned that it was literally the origins of the universe. So, you know, never underestimate yourself. Okay, so that is one way in which we look into the new universe, or this universe, and in a new way, and we discover a new phenomenon. Another way that we're doing this is through duration. So, in 1990, the Hubble State Telescope was launched. It came back with these super blurry pictures. Everyone was really upset because that's really genuinely very sad to send out your telescope and have it come back blurry. But they did what they needed to do. They put some glasses on the telescope and they were coming back with these really remarkable images. Okay, and so the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which launches Hubble, he said, I have this really, really good idea. How about we look at nothing? And people are like, what are you talking about? He said, why don't we look at the darkest part of the sky that we've ever seen and just put Hubble there for a hundred hours and see what happens? So, people were really upset about this for a couple of reasons. Hubble is a very valuable telescope. It matters what you do with it for the time that you do it. A hundred hours is a very long time to look at what we think might be nothing, okay? Second of all, we actually at this time did not have a really good idea of how many galaxies were in our universe. People thought it was like, I think like 10 billion. So they were saying, just statistically, no matter, like if we look at this very tiny part of the sky, we're probably not going to see all that much because there's probably not that many galaxies in our universe, right? 10 billion over universe is a low density. Almost like a vacuum of density. Okay, anyway, so the director said, you know what? I can do what I want because that's actually, the thing about these things is if you're the director of this telescope, you get this thing called director's discretionary time. You really can do whatever you want. So, he said, I'm going to do whatever I want. I want you to look at it. Let's go. And they did so and what they found was remarkable. They found what's now known as the Hubble Deep Field. They found an incredible plethora of galaxies that they never expected to see. So, there's so much going on in this picture, so I want to break it down just a little bit. Some of the objects in this image are foreground stars. So, they're stars that are in our Milky Way that just happen to be in our field of view, but we know that they're foreground stars because they have these fun little crosses. Which describe, or like, the results of the relationship between the light and then interference with the telescope itself. So, we know that those are in our Milky Way, but what we also see is nearby galaxies. So, we know that they're nearby because they're really big, just like the way our eyes work. If something is very close to us, it takes up a lot of space in our field of view. So, these galaxies are really big, but we can also see some of their internal structures, which is very, very exciting. Super, equally exciting is that we can see really far away galaxies. So, every single little dot in this image is an entire galaxy of light, because at that distance, you only see very bright things like galaxies. But I mean that every single dot in here is the farthest galaxy that we had ever seen in the history of astronomy at this time. So, the Hubble Deep Field revolutionized our understanding of how many galaxies were in our universe and, like, the shapes of those galaxies and the evolutionary histories of those galaxies, all because someone said, let's look for a very, very long time at something that we don't know what's going to happen. Let's take the risk, and they did, and it super worked out. Yeah, this is amazing. And this image is a galaxy. That is super far away. Okay, all right, moving on. Probably to think about, or one more, one more example. When we look at new types of objects, we get new types. We find new things that we didn't expect to see. So, in 2009, the Kepler-Says Telescope came out trying to look for exoplanets. So, it was like, exoplanets are planets that are outside of our solar system around other stars. And the light, and now, exoplanets are very, very exciting. Research into exoplanets is the fastest way to find aliens, so that's super applicable. And we really just want to understand what is it like on a world? That's not our world, right? And so, the way that we find these planets is actually so planets are really, really small, and they're really difficult to see directly. Sometimes we can do that, but one of the ways that we see planets that are further away is through their light curve. So, a light curve just describes the change in brightness of an object over time. And when we look at a planet's host star, and its change in brightness over time, if the planet is right in the line of sight between us and that star, we'll see that the planet blocks some of the light from that star. So, it's very bright up here, less bright down here. And if it does so periodically in this very specific way, we know that we found a planet, okay? So, this is called the planet transit method of finding isoplanets. And what actually happens is we observe this star every 30 seconds or so, and we create a light curve, so it's kind of bouncing around, but you can see that at some point it dips a little bit. And we can say, okay, we think that there's a planet there, especially if it happens multiple times, if it has a very short period, we can say, all right, we've definitely found a planet, okay? So, at the same time that this is happening though, wait, I'm getting tired. Okay, so at the same time that this is happening, Kevlar is collecting more data than we had ever really worked with at that time, right? And so, some people were developing computers to identify where these little dips were happening in the data, but we also wanted to ask citizen scientists or non-professional scientists to look at these light curves and help us to identify where the planets were, right? So, they would get a light curve like this. Again, light curves showing brightness over time, these are in days, so over the course of six or seven days, how is this brightness changing? And they would say, lookie there, we have got ourselves a planet, we know this because the brightness is significantly lower for this period of time and then shoots back up to the stars like ambient brightness or like basic brightness, right? So, we have thousands of people, I think like 100, like 300,000 people or something like that, looking at these light curves and they find this object. So, they find this light curve, they say this is like nothing we've ever seen for a couple different reasons. One, it's very asymmetrical here. So, we've got a shallow slope here, but then a steep upslope here. If you'll remember when a planet passes in front of a star because the planet is spiritually symmetrical, the light curve, the dip in the light curve is also spiritually symmetrical. So, if this light curve is showing a shallow dip and then equipped it, maybe something passing in front of it, but it's definitely not spherical like all of the other planets we know about. So, that's suspicious, right? Secondly though, it's lasting many, many, many days. So, normally the transit of a planet lasts about a couple hours, but this one was lasting weeks. So, that's very different than what we're expecting. So, they saw this early on in Kepler's lifetime and they said, okay, let's look at it for four more years and they did that and they found even a weird step. So, when a planet goes in front of a star, normally it creates a brightness. It didn't the brightness by about 1%, which is what you might see over here. But then about two years into its observation, it did 15%. That's more than any other planet could do to a star that we've ever seen, right? And then toward the end of Kepler's lifetime, it was like, I'm freaking wild and then Kepler shut off, right? So, we were like, what the heck? What did you just, so, okay, so... So, we have future folks, or future folks, folks after 2013. So, modern folks have observed this, have observed this star since then and so we have ongoing research about this star. But to this day, we don't actually know what the star is. We just call it Boyajin's Star after the principal investigator, Tabitha Tabi Boyajin. Sometimes they call it Tabi Star. But yeah, so we still don't know what it is. Some options are maybe something like catastrophic happened in front of the star, right? Maybe something's blocking the light, but it's creating so much dust in the air or something that it's obscuring the star for a very long period of time. Similarly, maybe some asteroids came and covered up the star a little bit exactly in front of our field of view. That's not super likely because, again, it would have to happen exactly in our field of view. And then, I mean, there's always aliens, right? Maybe there's this civilization that needs energy from its star, so during those moments, it's taking them. So actually, okay, all joking aside, it's probably not aliens. It's very precarious for an astronomer to suggest that this might be aliens, mostly because journalists love to say, well, an astronomer said it, so, you know. And it becomes less, it loses its umph if every couple of years, someone's saying, probably aliens, you know. So, but never fear, there actually is one astronomer who will always remind us that it might be aliens. There's one astronomer at Harvard who is always down to say, maybe it's aliens. We all know who it is. If you're interested, you can Google Harvard, a astronomer, aliens, and you will know. So, this one, if you can't see it, is the title and it says, one guess which. Okay, so it's probably not aliens, but you know, keep in our hopes alive. And we're very glad that people are still studying Voyage and Star to this day, okay? So again, we're left with these, this looks, I think that I've outlined this many more, but every single time that we look at one of these realms in a new way, we discover new phenomenon. What's so exciting about this decade is that one of the telescopes that's coming on in the next decade, LSST, is going to study all of these in a new way simultaneously. So, LSST is going to observe half of the sky, the entire, like the entire half of the sky every couple of nights for a decade. It has an observational program known as Wide Fast Deep. It's going to observe the largest through the sky more often and with a very high sensitivity telescope. So, astronomers are essentially casting out a net of a telescope, trying to catch whatever they can about the cosmos, right? And the truth is we don't really know what we're going to find, but we know that every time we observe the universe in a new way, we discover a new phenomena, right? So, my job, so, okay, LSST comes online in a couple of years. My job, and we know what it does in, whatever, 2022. 2022 actually is very accurate. When it comes online in 2022, we're probably going to be observing things that we've never seen before. So, I and others have that amount of time to develop an algorithm that is going to be able to systematically identify the things that we've never seen before and tell us that we got them. So, I'm going to be specializing in anomaly detection. So, yeah, anomaly detection, anomalies I think that we've never seen before. We are going to try to systematically detect them, even though we don't know idea what they look like and could probably never imagine them to this day. So, these are simulated observations of what LSST will observe. We've got a black hole activity over here, some sort of typical supernova, and then a super loop and a super bright supernova over here. And my job is to take this information and build an algorithm that says, yes, I have seen this go up and down before. I probably not that new, but say, maybe over here nothing has ever been that bright. That's probably super new, right? And so, we're going to be trying to think about both anomalous observations. So, if an object like curve looks pretty typical, but then something shoots up or loses some flux, kind of like Boyat and Starr, we want to know if there's only a particular number of strange observations. But we also want to know maybe that object is oscillating, that the brightness of that object is oscillating in a way that we've never seen before. So, maybe the entire source itself is anomalous. We also want to think about theorized anomalies. So, much like the CNB, there are theorists who say, you know, this type of object should probably exist, or that type of object, they would be rare, but, you know, they should probably exist. And so, we want to be aware of theorized anomalies that people have thought of already, but we also want to be aware of completely unforeseen anomalies that no one has even thought to ask if it exists. We want to be able to find those two. So, the kind of moral of the story is that we don't know what surprises we might find, but that's what makes it so exciting, right? That's what makes it so exciting. We get to go into the office every day and say, you know, how do I build the best tool to tell us what we've never seen before? And that's that. Thank you. Questions I would love to answer them. Yes! The question was, am I excited about James Webb? Yes, I'm very excited about it. Yeah, yes, I'm very excited. And I don't know when it's going to be here. So, just to save my energy resources, I'm going to be latently excited until it's launched. I'm going to be super excited. Any other questions? I thought I saw another hand here. Oh, yes. Was that signal? Yes. That is a wonderful question. Okay, love this question. All right, so one second. I want to put this down for maximum hand talking. Okay, so yes, how do we know? That's such a good question. So I mean, okay, so again, the Big Bang released all of this energy. As the universe expanded and the energy dissipated, that temperature, the energy cooled, right? So the energy probably had a specific temperature. And then as the universe expanded, it cooled, right? So we know, we have a theory of how much energy was released because we know how much matters in our universe. And we have an idea of the volume of our universe, or at least our observable universe. And so we have an idea of that amount of energy divided by this amount of volume. What temperature should that be? And it is exactly the temperature that we see. Now, there's always a possibility that that could be a coincidence, but the specificity, which with those two line up, and the fact that the C and B has so few fluctuations, it's basically the exact same temperature all over, tells us that it is a very, actually, it tells us that it's a very strange phenomenon that is very probably connected to the Big Bang itself. So yeah, the consistency of the C and B temperature and the connection between our theoretical temperature and the observe. Thank you for your question. Any more questions? Oh, we got one more, I think. Yeah, that's a great question. So they asked if LSST data is going to be public. Yes, yes. So eventually, LSST will have public data. But for the first two years when it's commissioning, when they're making sure that the telescope is doing what it's supposed to do, only particular universities will have that data. So the university is one of the major funders and founders of LSST. And so we will get that data like a year earlier than everybody else. But then yes, it is meant to be a public telescope, which is super exciting. Maybe there will be a citizen science project with it. Of course there will be. Fun. So how much data is it going to be? Okay, so by the time it's done with its 60, or well, its 10-year survey should be about 60 petabytes. Every night, it's a couple terabytes. So more than we've ever seen ever. It's very exciting. I'd like to welcome you all back for our second talk of the evening. Congratulations again to our trivia winners. Our next speaker at the University of Washington in the Astronomy Department, please give a warm welcome to Samantha Gilbert. Study exoplanet atmospheres for my research, but tonight I'm not going to be talking about that. I'm going to be talking about something entirely different. So for me, the most exciting part of being a scientist is that I go to use data to tell a story. It makes scientists the authors of our universe, right? But what's unfortunate about scientists being the authors is that we rarely think to write the story of the scientists themselves. So the story I want to tell you tonight has everything. It has science. It has drama. It has egos. It has really esoteric vector math. Interesting to me about this story is I think it really encapsulates a lot of the things that are really wrong with how some people do science today. The main characters of our story are a special subset of physicists called cosmologists. And cosmologists are interested in learning what our universe was like at its very beginning. The key to understanding the origin of the universe is this thing called the cosmic microwave background. And Leah sort of talked about this before. So in this chapter, I'm going to do a real deep dive into what the cosmic microwave background is and why studying it is so important. Surprise, okay. The background or the CMB is basically just a sea of photons that fills our entire universe. And you'll often see it depicted as this sort of heat map that Leah showed you before. And we call this heat map a CMB sky map. When we say the CMB, we're really just talking about a special kind of light in our universe. Well, what makes it so special? So the CMB is special because it's actually the first light that ever existed in our universe. So what that means is it's the furthest into our universe's past that we can see. And that's pretty amazing because that means the same CMB we observed today consists of the very same photons that ever first separated from the hot soup of atoms that existed in our early universe. So the CMB formed 400,000 years after the Big Bang. On the scale of a human lifetime, that's the same. Looking at the CMB is the same as looking at a picture of the universe when it was less than a day old. I'm showing you my baby picture because I'm vain, but also because I think that the CMB is basically a baby picture of our universe. Thank you. Old light still exists today is a really who wants to know what our universe was like at its very beginning. Just like looking at your baby picture gives you a glimpse into your past. Looking at the baby picture of our universe, the CMB gives us a glimpse into our universe's past. And when we compare these pictures, the picture of our universe as a baby to the picture of our universe today, cosmologists can actually fill in the blanks between how our universe began and what we see today. CMB actually formed after our universe began. There's stuff that happened before it. And what happened before the CMB is the big bang that we all know and love. After the big bang before the CMB formed isn't as clear. We're not as sure. Right now the working model for what happened after the big bang is called inflation. So when inflation happened, we think the universe expanded in size by the order of 10 to the 26. This is like something the size of an apple expanding to the size of our universe in less than a second. So an event like that is really explosive, right? So you would think that we'd be able to see a lot of evidence for such an explosive event like this, but weirdly we don't actually see the amount of mountain of evidence that we would expect to see. But there are pieces of evidence that are theorized to exist. So by definition, if inflation happened and the universe did expand really, really quickly, there would have been an expansion in the fabric of space time itself. And changes in space time have very special messengers called gravitational waves. Thank you for bearing with me. Inflation would have induced such drastic changes in space time that it would have to leave gravitational waves behind it in its wake. And one way to think about this is to sort of imagine a boat speeding through still water. The calm still water at space time, inflation speeds through space time and leaves a wake of waves rippling behind it. All these waves, gravitational waves. Guys, we want to detect the traces of gravitational waves dating back to inflation when the universe was not even a second old. So how can we do something like that? So as these inflationary gravitational waves rippled through the sea of CMV photons, they should have basically lined up the CMV photons in a pattern that we should be able to see today. It's theorized that the way in which these primordial gravitational waves realign the CMV photons would be visible to us as a signature pattern that we can identify. Sort of like a footprint that a wild animal might leave in its tracks. So the signature footprint that these gravitational waves leave behind is the sort of curly signal that we call B mode polarization. There's B mode polarization which is sort of the footprint that gravitational waves leave behind in the CMV. And in this picture here, you're seeing the sort of two flavors of B mode polarization that exist, left-handed and right-handed. And that's going to come back later. As inflationary gravitational waves print a special polarization pattern on the CMV and we call this special pattern B mode polarization. So that's all well and good, but unfortunately B mode polarization is actually a really, really faint signal and it's really, really, really hard to detect. In fact, you need a telescope more sensitive than any previous CMV telescope in history. Polarization is an extraordinarily difficult thing to detect, but proving it exists would prove that inflation really happened by detecting the traces of inflationary gravitational waves and making the discovery that proves inflation would certainly win for the Nobel Prize. Questionable, at best. We're going through the scientific background and the clicker nonsense, but this is where our story actually begins. And in this chapter, we're going to talk about one experiment that sought to detect B mode polarization and thereby prove that inflation really happened. And this experiment was called FICEF, the postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in 2002 when he came up with the idea for refracting telescopes to detect B mode polarization in the CMV. He called this telescope FICEF, which stands for background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization. Not very catchy. So after building FICEF in the South Pole, the team did their first observations in 2005. And after the successful observing run, the FICEF team realized that they could probably detect B mode polarization if they just made their detectors even more sensitive. So naturally, if they went to build their sequel, which they called FICEF 2. So when FICEF 2 started observing, the team could not believe what they saw. I know that this plot might look like a random smattering of lines, but what this plot actually looks like is exactly the result that you would expect if B mode polarization was in the CMV. And it has this exact distinctive curly B mode pattern that I showed you before. And the blue and red regions are meant to represent the different handedness, the left and right handedness. And when they saw this, it was actually an even stronger signal than they had anticipated. So, so far, so good. Everything was looking great for FICEF 2. In 2014, FICEF 2 released their results to stake their claim on the discovery that would prove inflation. They held a press conference at Harvard, where they announced to a room full of reporters and the world that they had solved the mystery of our universe's earliest moments. They also filmed a video with the foremost theorist of inflation, Andre Lind, communicating to him that they had basically shown that his predictions weren't right. And this is a day that most theorists never even get to see in their lifetimes. So Andre Lind and his wife, weep, overjoyed by the news that his theory would become law. And to celebrate their achievement, they pop open some champagne. On FICEF 2's big announcement, the plot thickened, literally. So over 250 papers were published in response to the initial FICEF discovery paper. And if you don't publish papers a lot, this is a really big deal. You would be a huge deal in your field if your scientific paper got 250 citations in your lifetime, okay? And one of the papers that was written in response to FICEF 2 is the most important paper of all that we're going to spend a lot of time dating about tonight. And that paper was published by FICEF 2's main competitor, the Planck experiment. And the Planck paper had the one plot that could actually put FICEF 2's Nobel Prize in its grave. And what their plot basically showed is that you could get the entire FICEF 2 signal from cosmic dust alone. FICEF 2 had so confidently announced a result that was so quickly disproven, had a rippling effect throughout the community, right? So scientists were really horrified because they thought now the public is going to discredit us, they're not going to trust us. Journalists were also horrified because they felt they played a role in spreading misinformation, but also because they felt like they were seeing a really ugly side of the scientific community. So as all of this unfolded in the public eye, the world got to see a part of the scientific community that usually stays under wraps. And Dennis Overby, a New York Times reporter kind of put it best, he said the sharp elbows, egos and all were on full display. So the fact that FICEF 2 made this false result announcement is a really big deal and it made a huge impression on me when I was a young physicist in 2014. So I had sort of a selfish reason for wanting to tell you this story tonight. I've always really wanted to work out why this happened. Why did FICEF announce a falsehood with so much confidence? Also, that gives cosmic dust. So we're going to unpack this further. So lucky for us would be investigators. Brian Keating, who remember I told you was the inventor of FICEF and one of the main scientists on the FICEF 2 team actually wrote down his account of the events leading up to 2014 when FICEF 2 made their faithful announcement. And he called his book Losing the Nobel Prize. Maybe he was a little salty. This book is great because reading it gives you an inside look into how FICEF 2 made a lot of really important decisions, how they made important decisions to design their experiment, how to design their instrument, and then of course how to share their results. And it also gives you an inside peek into what a really high stakes laboratory environment can be like often at its worst. Besides from Brian Keating's book, which I've read for you, I want to revisit the events of 2014. Let's run it back. Okay, so recall that FICEF 2 was going to go after B mode polarization with even more bigger than its predecessor FICEF. And FICEF 2 improved upon the FICEF instrument with way more detectors that were also 10 times more sensitive than their predecessors. This time they also chose to study the CMB only at its strongest wavelength. And they did this because they wanted to try to get their results as quickly as possible. And this is going to come back later, so I really want you to hold on to this one wavelength business. The last time I showed you this plot, I said it showed the exact B mode curl pattern we were looking for, and that when FICEF 2 observed the signal, it was much stronger than they had anticipated. What I left out is that they were actually really skeptical of this result, specifically because it was so much stronger than they had anticipated it to be. And they had a really good reason to be skeptical. So among the stars and planets that fill our galaxy, there's also a sea of cosmic dust. And this isn't the dust that's, you know, lurking in the corners of your house. It's really dust that contains metals. And metals have characteristic magnetic fields. And it turns out that magnetic fields can also line up photons into a special pattern. So what this means is that when you're looking for a special polarization pattern in the CMV, what this means when you're looking for this special pattern is you have to be able to distinguish between a polarization pattern caused by cosmic dust, which you don't care about, and a polarization pattern caused by inflationary gravitational weights, which you really, really, really care about. And the BICEF 2 team was well aware that cosmic dust could masquerade as their B mode polarization signal. So I want to emphasize something here. Cosmic dust is really not well understood, and this is a really, really, really hard problem to solve. So to the credit of the BICEF 2 team, they used five different models to try to predict how cosmic dust might affect the signal they were seeing. And when they used these models, their results pointed all to the same conclusion that their B mode signal was real. But the stakes are really high, and they knew that they had to double triple check their results. So this is where the one wavelength thing comes back. So remember that BICEF 2 decided that their instrument was only going to look at the CMV at the wavelength where it's strongest. So it turns out that only looking at that wavelength tells you nothing about how much of your signal is coming from cosmic dust. So they simply didn't have the tools to figure out if their result was real or not. So they had to reach out to the competition. And their main competitor was Planck. And Planck is a billion-dollar satellite funded by the European Space Agency. And because Planck has so much more money and so much more resources and so much more time, they actually look at the CMV not only at the one wavelength where it's strongest, but a broad range of wavelengths, including the wavelengths that would tell you how much of your signal is coming from dust. BICEF 2 reaches out to Planck and they say, hey, would you mind sharing your data? We're trying to figure out if we're looking at dust or not. But Planck actually refuses. And this refusal sets off a bomb in the BICEF 2 community. And they find themselves playing armchair psychologists. Why wouldn't Planck share their data? Did they already detect the same B-mode polarization that BICEF 2 was looking for? That their Nobel Prize was hinging up? Or, as BICEF 2 feared, did Planck just find cosmic dust ruling out a B-mode polarization detection? So, among these possibilities one stood out as the scariest possibility of all to the BICEF 2 team. And that was that Planck was going to try to scoop them. That they already had detected the B-mode polarization and they were going to steal their Nobel Prize. So, as a result of their fear that they were going to be scooped, BICEF 2 made a fateful decision to protect their Nobel Prize. They popped the champagne. Out of fear that Planck was going to scoop them, they hold this Harvard Press conference, they film this feel-good video with the theorists behind inflation. But what I hadn't told you before is that when they did all of this to sort of stake claim over their discovery they actually had to put their paper through peer review. So, in case you couldn't tell by the audience reaction that is a no-no. That is a bad thing to do and that's because peer review is kind of what makes science credible in the first place. It's important to check against the dissemination of junk science, right? You really need other scientists to independently assess your results. No peer review. We know now that BICEF 2 basically did all these shenanigans to protect their ownership of their discovery before the community could actually verify it. What they did is basically the scientific equivalent of this. Right? I understood that. My millennial office mates thought no one would get this. So, unscientific decisions that led them down a path of self-humiliation were some of the decisions that BICEF 2 made. So, first, remember they designed their instrument to focus only on one wavelength. And remember that focusing only on this one wavelength is sort of a success-oriented approach. An approach in the sense that, sure, the CMB is strongest out of that wavelength but you don't know how much of your signal is coming from cosmic dust. And as Plunk showed that your entire signal is coming from cosmic dust. Second, they chose to bypass peer review again because they were worried about their discovery being scooted. And finally, they did a premature victory lap where they held a press conference and they filmed a feel-good video at the foremost theorists behind inflation, Andre Lindt. So, did they do all these things because they're horrible, malicious people who really want to mislead the public? No, of course not. But I would argue that all of these decisions really have one thing in common. And what all these decisions have in common is that they're motivated by fear. Right? Out of environments are part and parcel of an individualistic conception of science. And an individualistic conception of science says that the most important thing is to get a result before your competition. And when that's the environment that you're working in, you tend to make decisions based on fear. So, I would argue that the reason that bicep 2 made these decisions based on fear is that they were operating in such a toxically competitive environment that it became dysfunctional. So, whether you think competition is really good for science, really bad or somewhere in between, I think that this case study shows us that it's really worth thinking about the ways that we systemically and interpersonally encourage competition and how that might jeopardize our ways of knowing. But I want to leave you on a hopeful note and that's that Planck and bicep 2 are actually teaming up. The next generation of CMV instruments are going to combine their resources and their know-how to go out to this really important discovery together. Final thought that I want to leave you with is that competition might be the most efficient route to a result but collaboration is likely the most efficient route to a reliable result. They're allowed to go out. CMV 2 is funded but has a direct correlation with the decisions that they made. I would argue some people say it could be true but I would argue that it's also a systemic problem in that science is sort of built structurally to be a fear-soaked environment and when you're operating in an environment like that even if you're a great scientist it's hard to make scientific decisions. Any other questions? Planck also wasn't free from operating in a toxically competitive environment. I think Planck didn't share their data because they were being self-serving as well. Again, this isn't because any of these scientists are malicious people it's because structurally science is built to work this way. It's built to encourage competition. That's a great question. The question is how long does peer review usually take? Having not actually written a paper myself yet I'm not sure but from what I can tell it can take a few months to six months eight months. First year grad student at UW he asked if you think competition is a good thing what would be sort of a safe way, a more moderate way to foster it and I'm going to say the same wise words that were once said to me I don't really suggest that we indication throughout the entire process and I would agree this is a really, really sticky problem that I think all scientists would agree that we're dealing with inter-personally and systemically in our careers and I just wanted to throw it out there that maybe it doesn't have to be this way.