The refutation of Bicep2's announced discovery illustrates the ease and comfort with which the scientific community ingests and adapts to new information compared to religious organizations.
Just following the Ides of March of this year, researchers from the BICEP2 installation at the South Pole publicly announced the finding of a very specific variety of polarized light in the cosmic microwave background. This light is thought only to be produced by interaction with gravitational waves produced by the accelerating expansion of the universe in the slimmest subsection of time following the Big Bang. The announcement was quite monumental, ultimately suggesting that a previously-unexplored and incredibly exciting area of physics known as the idea of grand unification could be better understood in our lifetime. My clumsy and bearskin-clad effort to explain the unbelievable magnitude and majesty of what a unified theory and evidence of faster-than-light speeds would represent is profoundly and embarrassingly unrefined. I highly recommend individual understanding of this topic, as it is more awe-inspiring that any alternative I could list. Unassociated scientists were publicly optimistic, though all provided caveats regarding the need for peer-review and a confirmation of the findings. The staff of BICEP2 reportedly waited a year to announce their findings, in an effort to apply due diligence to their research, and finally felt comfortable when the Keck Array installation (a new post in the same spot) showed the same results.
Test for colorblindness or a picture of gravity waves? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.
Attention faded, as it does, and soon the excitement of a Unified Theory receded to a tiny table in the back corner to drink coffee and catch up on Stephen King. The plausibility of the findings and their revolutionary potential was still a topic of debate, and I had the pleasure of listening to a group of people much smarter than myself discuss the subject. One person in the group was very convinced, and his attitude could best be described as "proceed as if true," but even he happily provided caveats regarding the ultimate need for more information.
Today the Washington Post carried an article quoting Uros Seljak, a physics and astronomy professor at UC Berkeley, as saying there is still a question regarding the source of the detected polarized light. There is a chance, Seljak contends, that the received signal could have been produced by the interference of dust in space situated much, much closer to Earth than the edge of perceivable light. This is similar (again, in a clumsy and indelicate fashion) to taking a flash picture outside at night and seeing a pinpoint light source in the picture as if someone was standing fifty meters away with a flashlight. The light source is actually a particle in front of the camera, reflecting light from the flash back into the lens, but one could be forgiven for the confusion. The question should be decided later this year, when the Planck Space Telescope takes a more refined "picture" of the visible sky in multiple frequencies and with a much finer tolerance for differentiation between dust and a physics revolution.
There is no tolerance for seeing this and thinking "ZOMG, ghost orbs!" Idiot.
The finest point to take away from BICEP2's announcement and the associated debate is the overall world view that allows for such an effortless and non-defensive incorporation of newly-discovered information tempered by the need for independent verification, the closest thing to a chiseled-in-stone commandment you're likely to find in this community. There may be personal embarrassment involved in working diligently on a world-changing project, then having to face the idea that you may have been so excited you were tricked by space dust, but regardless of the outcome there will be no honor killings. There will be no excommuncations from the church of rational thought, no proclamations of heresy leveled by both sides, no resulting schismatic split leaving us with Fundamentalist Science and Hip Young Reformed Science. The information will be measured on its merits, the evidence considered with multiple sets of sober eyes, the results based on fact. Science and the secular community around it is the only game in town if you prefer facts over superstition and reasoning over faith, which is exactly the set of tools best suited to aid us in understanding the actual universe of which we are a very real part.
That would be us, on the right.
Since beginning to slog and wade its way out of the thickly-encrusted Augean stables that is religion, a labor which has yet to reach completion due to no conveniently diverted rivers in the area, science has repeatedly shamed and outpaced religion when both are confronted with a new development in our primitive understanding. Unable to simply wait around until flaccid holy men can get drunk enough to have a serious argument about nothing at all, science regularly and without undue stress has undergone reformation, using the process of discovery and reason to incorporate verifiable knowledge such as the effects of gravitation and heliocentrism. Religion responded to this approach to the world with condemnation and death sentences, a childish and ignorant recitation of their primitive and phenomenally wrong holy books, and an arms-crossed refusal to embrace logic which persists and has regrown immense strength in our time.
Again, pictured on the right.
BICEP2's reported findings and their detractors are, quite literally, discovering and debating over what may be the single most important astronomical discovery in our lifetimes, with incomprehensible ramifications to every single aspect of our tiny little lives. And they are doing it without the vitriol one would expect if exposed to what we laughably call modern news and religious debate, with absolutely zero danger that the debate will result in any kind of split in the community. There is, quite literally, no way for an evidence-based community such as the one I describe to have a fault wherein these kinds of schisms have their genesis. Differences of opinion or of conclusion are resolved by the presentation of fact, those facts being the result of experiments and evidence and peer-review, none of which any religious community has the slightest time for.
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