This is what I love about science. The ability to check and revise as required.
As Irish comedian Dara O’Briain puts it, “Well of course science doesn’t know everything, if science knew everything it’d stop”.
A ghost in the machine.
Part of the problem is that the Planck team has not made the raw foreground data available, he says. Instead, BICEP researchers had to do the best they could with a PDF file of that map that the Planck team presented at a conference.That sounds like something that I would do for a homework problem, not for something for publication...
Edit: was just thinking that perhaps the spirals were just an artifact of how the pdf stored the image
Heh, JPEG artifacts would be as big of a fail as neutrinos moving faster then light due to a dodgy fibre optic connector.
I took a contour plot that I had – it was a pdf generated directly from the graphing software, so it appeared to be an uncompressed image… I did the old “save as reduced size pdf” – it reduced the size by about 32%.
This is the subtraction of a cropped section of the images (the sort of compression noise that their background image could possibly have): (if the images were the same, the subtracted image would have been pure black)
much of the blockiness is just from the original image:
The same could be said for the Higgs boson. Everything they didn’t want was screened out.
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