http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gravity-waves-cmb-b-mode-polarizat... http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6917/abs/nature01269.html Ron Cowen: Telescope captures view of gravitational waves Images of the infant Universe reveal evidence for rapid inflation after the Big Bang. Nature 507 (17 March 2014) 281-282 http://www.nature.com/news/telescope-captures-view-of-gravitational-waves-1.... The paper all that hype is based on appears to be this manuscript: http://bicepkeck.org/b2_respap_arxiv_v1.pdf I think their point is supposed to be, that we have yet another angular-statistics confirmation of some of the predictions of "inflationary cosmology" which yet again seems, at least naively, to be very impressive theory-observation agreement. I personally never found this kind of thing to be as impressive as the hype, because whatever I've seen has not compared different possible theories versus the evidence; only one theory. E.g. perhaps these impressive agreements might actually be predicted pretty universally by a much wider class of cosmic models; and if not I haven't seen a convincing and clear demonstration of not, nor a clear understanding of just what class of models are permitted and which not. In short, it should be about discriminating among theories, not about exhibiting agreement with one theory. But anyhow, at present I have not read this paper; that was just a general purpose rant. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)