Stanford
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2014–2022
2:39 · 3.2M views · Mar 17, 2014
A short Stanford video in which Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with BICEP2 evidence supporting cosmic inflation, the first apparent images of primordial gravitational waves.
Shared for its moving moment of scientific discovery, and later cited as a cautionary example after the BICEP2 result was retracted.
5 comments from Hacker News
Sharing my cryiest ever video clip, when Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough: [1]. I've seen it thirty times and I cry (oh, the tears) every time. I also cried at the end of Real Steal. [1] this video
They made a nice video of the researcher surprising Prof Linde with the news: this video The reaction of the couple is great!
I don't know how to estimate their reckless from the outside, but it is simple fact that however sensitive, they only had one waveband and so no real way of estimating the foreground contamination. I think it is also well established that the foreground estimation was made by looking closely at pictures from a presentation showing preliminary Planck skymaps of the dust emission, and then building a foreground model from that. They also put out this adorable video as part of the announcement, maybe not the greatest show of caution ever: this video
NASA also publishes. Yet we still got this: [LINK] BICEP2 was a respected scientific collaboration, and it ended up like this: [LINK] The even took a touching video of one of the participants notifying the theorist that predicted the result about their achievement. this video Just a two off the top of my mind.
It's not really mistakes that is the issue though, its more the fact that they got reeeeelly close to outright fabrication. They had a very shaky estimate of an important background (the foreground) and instead of being cautious they put out a video like this as part of the announcement: this video