鈥淭HE wolves are circling the campfire.鈥� That鈥檚 how one cosmologist describes the reaction of some of his colleagues to last month鈥檚 headline-grabbing discoveries about the early universe.
One stunning claim was that the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole had seen evidence that the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation. Another was that it had detected the imprint of long-sought gravitational waves.
Those claims have since come under intense scrutiny. Some physicists now say that the team didn鈥檛 adequately exclude other processes that could have given rise to the data (see 鈥�Star dust casts doubt on recent big bang wave result鈥� and 鈥�Big bang breakthrough: The dark side of inflation鈥�).
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So is what some commentators described as the 鈥�discovery of the century鈥� about to be brought crashing down? There is real room for doubt about the results. Confirmation bias is as much a danger in the physical sciences as elsewhere: by setting out with a clear theoretical prediction of what they should see, the BICEP2 team may have ended up seeing exactly what they wanted to.
Nonetheless, they were right to publish their results early to allow rigorous independent scrutiny. A robust debate should now determine whether it was a case of publish to be feted, or publish to be damned.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭esting time for inflation鈥�