Since a couple of months we can witness an extremely interesting situation (I would rather call it a conflict) in Cosmology. A little bit of recent history. The cosmic inflation is an extremely short (about 10^{-33} seconds) period of the extremely fast Universe expansion right after the initial singularity. On 17th of March 2014 BICEP2 collaboration announced that their experiment detected the so-called B-modes. This was considered as a major evidence to support the ideas of cosmic inflation. However, on the 19th September 2014 Planck experiment showed that the results of BICEP2 were insignificant:
- Once the “galactic emission” [dust] is correctly subtracted, there still remains an excess [signal] but it is at present too weak to be considered a detection and could be the result of [experimental error].
Despite this public press release, Guth, Linde and Starobinsky were awarded in 2014 the $1 million Kavli Prize in Astrophysics…
Two months ago an interesting article by Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb appeared in Scientific American. This article further challenged the evidences behind cosmic inflation theory. The fact of questioning provoked violent reactions from inflation proponents including Guth and Linde. A rebuttal signed by 33 physicists appeared on Scientific American web site. On the other hand, Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb presented their informative rebuttal as well. This story is developing very quickly and I hope that the good science and the scientific rigour will win after all.