 You really shouldn't trust anything that a quirk says. They make up everything. Okay, first a disclaimer. I am not a physicist. I took a couple of advanced physics courses in college before I went into engineering, but I only know about this stuff because I like reading popular science articles. Regardless, I'm going to try to explain to the best of my ability why the announcement of polarized microwave background radiation means that you should be celebrating. So on March 17th, the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made an announcement that has physicists and astronomers everywhere freaking out because it's going to be a huge deal if it's correct. A radio telescope at the South Pole called BISEP, background imaging of cosmic extra-galactic polarization, was built to look at the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic background radiation. You've probably heard of the Big Bang, our current best guess for how the universe started. One of the reasons that we're pretty sure that the Big Bang happened is this cosmic background radiation that BISEP is looking at. You usually only see radiation when there's something like a nuclear bomb or a star or a microwave oven or some other sort of energy source emitting it, but this radiation isn't coming from a bomb or a star, it's coming from everywhere and is pretty much the same intensity no matter what direction you're looking. That was one of the predictions of the Big Bang theory and when physicists first saw this picture of what radiation looks like in deep space, that space without any stars or microwave ovens or anything, they applauded for a long time because just as predicted by the Big Bang theory, this is the light emitted by the beginning of the universe. So the Big Bang theory has been around for a while now and it's been very successful, but it does have a few problems. First, we can see galaxies that are so far apart that even if they had shined light beams at each other right at the moment of the Big Bang, that light still wouldn't have made it from one to the other. However, those galaxies are almost exactly the same temperature, which is really weird because there's no reason for them to be the same temperature. Cosmically speaking, things really shouldn't be the same temperature unless there's been some sort of contact between them. Like if you have a thermos of hot water and a thermos of cold water, the only way to get them both equally warm is to pour one into the other. So if they're so far apart that even light from the beginning of time wouldn't have gotten from one to the other, why isn't one just a thousand degrees hotter than the other one? I mean, they're perfectly insulated. Another problem is that you'd expect a massive explosion to require some sort of energy, right? I mean, it's a Big Bang, the biggest bang. Actually, it's possible that the total energy of the universe is zero. You have tons of matter and energy expanding outward, but you also have gravity, which is sort of like a negative energy sucking everything back in. If you add the energy and mass of the universe to the negative energy of gravity, you get just about zero, which is good for us because if there was too much gravity, then the universe would have imploded right after the Big Bang. And if there wasn't enough, then everything would have just zipped off and never formed planets or stars. But what are the odds of it being almost exactly zero? I mean, it's a pretty big coincidence if it is. Why should it be that way? Physicists have been trying to solve the problems with the Big Bang for decades now. One of the most popular and elegant of those solutions is called inflation theory, which suggests that just after its beginning, the universe had a brief period of faster-than-light expansion. Inflation theory suggests that all known particle forces, the electromagnetic force, the weak and strong nuclear forces, were all the same thing at that period in time. And that unified force inflated the universe like a beach ball attached to a fire hose. That would be great news for physicists because they've been working like crazy to get general relativity, which only works for big things like the universe, to work with quantum mechanics, which only works on small things like the particles those three forces work on. However, inflation was constructed with the idea that all of those forces are really just expressions of the same force, which would imply that we can eventually have just one equation for everything. Quantum mechanics, general relativity, all in one package. That would be awesome. Inflation also solves the problem of the same temperature galaxies by saying that they could be touching each other before they were forced too far apart to interact with each other. And if that wasn't enough, it solves the problem of the zero energy universe too. If you've got something that's expanding everything like crazy, by the time it's finished, everything's far enough apart that it doesn't really matter if gravity is a little too weak or too strong. So inflation theory would be pretty awesome if it were true, but how are we supposed to know what happened a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang? That was almost 14 billion years ago. Well, one of the predictions of inflation theory is that we would expect to see ripples of gravity from that period of inflation, a sort of shock wave that would have the effect of polarizing any radiation that went through it. The guys at Bicep just announced that when they pointed their telescope at an empty region of space that only had the cosmic background radiation, that radiation was polarized in exactly the way that inflation theory said that it would be. That is a huge deal. It solves like five problems of physics and cosmology at once. It has massive implications for how the Big Bang actually started and it paves the way for a ton of new discoveries. So while you're recovering from your St. Patrick's Day celebrations, make sure that you take some time to celebrate the majesty of the human mind and what scientific inquiry you can accomplish. If you've got any questions about inflation theory or the Big Bang, or if you're a physicist who'd like to correct anything that I just said, please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week.