# What Tells Your Story

I watched Hamilton on Disney+ recently. With GIFs and songs from the show all over social media for the last few years, there weren’t many surprises. One thing that nonetheless struck me was the focus on historical evidence. The musical Hamilton is based on Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, and it preserves a surprising amount of the historian’s care for how we know what we know, hidden within the show’s other themes. From the refrain of “who tells your story”, to the importance of Eliza burning her letters with Hamilton (not just the emotional gesture but the “gap in the narrative” it created for historians), to the song “The Room Where It Happens” (which looked from GIFsets like it was about Burr’s desire for power, but is mostly about how much of history is hidden in conversations we can only partly reconstruct), the show keeps the puzzle of reasoning from incomplete evidence front-and-center.

Any time we try to reason about the past, we are faced with these kinds of questions. They don’t just apply to history, but to the so-called historical sciences as well, sciences that study the past. Instead of asking “who” told the story, such scientists must keep in mind “what” is telling the story. For example, paleontologists reason from fossils, and thus are limited by what does and doesn’t get preserved. As a result after a century of studying dinosaurs, only in the last twenty years did it become clear they had feathers.

Astronomy, too, is a historical science. Whenever astronomers look out at distant stars, they are looking at the past. And just like historians and paleontologists, they are limited by what evidence happened to be preserved, and what part of that evidence they can access.

These limitations lead to mysteries, and often controversies. Before LIGO, astronomers had an idea of what the typical mass of a black hole was. After LIGO, a new slate of black holes has been observed, with much higher mass. It’s still unclear why.

Try to reason about the whole universe, and you end up asking similar questions. When we see the movement of “standard candle” stars, is that because the universe’s expansion is accelerating, or are the stars moving as a group?

Push far enough back and the evidence doesn’t just lead to controversy, but to hard limits on what we can know. No matter how good our telescopes are, we won’t see light older than the cosmic microwave background: before that background was emitted the universe was filled with plasma, which would have absorbed any earlier light, erasing anything we could learn from it. Gravitational waves may one day let us probe earlier, and make discoveries as surprising as feathered dinosaurs. But there is yet a stronger limit to how far back we can go, beyond which any evidence has been so diluted that it is indistinguishable from random noise. We can never quite see into “the room where it happened”.

It’s gratifying to see questions of historical evidence in a Broadway musical, in the same way it was gratifying to hear fractals mentioned in a Disney movie. It’s important to think about who, and what, is telling the stories we learn. Spreading that lesson helps all of us reason better.

# QCD Meets Gravity 2020

I’m at another Zoom conference this week, QCD Meets Gravity. This year it’s hosted by Northwestern.

QCD Meets Gravity is a conference series focused on the often-surprising links between quantum chromodynamics on the one hand and gravity on the other. By thinking of gravity as the “square” of forces like the strong nuclear force, researchers have unlocked new calculation techniques and deep insights.

Last year’s conference was very focused on one particular topic, trying to predict the gravitational waves observed by LIGO and VIRGO. That’s still a core topic of the conference, but it feels like there is a bit more diversity in topics this year. We’ve seen a variety of talks on different “squares”: new theories that square to other theories, and new calculations that benefit from “squaring” (even surprising applications to the Navier-Stokes equation!) There are talks on subjects from String Theory to Effective Field Theory, and even a talk on a very different way that “QCD meets gravity”, in collisions of neutron stars.

With still a few more talks to go, expect me to say a bit more next week, probably discussing a few in more detail. (Several people presented exciting work in progress!) Until then, I should get back to watching!

# Truth Doesn’t Have to Break the (Word) Budget

Imagine you saw this headline:

Scientists Say They’ve Found the Missing 40 Percent of the Universe’s Matter

It probably sounds like they’re talking about dark matter, right? And if scientists found dark matter, that could be a huge discovery: figuring out what dark matter is made of is one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in physics. Still, maybe that 40% number makes you a bit suspicious…

Astronomers Have Finally Found Most of The Universe’s Missing Visible Matter

Visible matter! Ah, what a difference a single word makes!

These are two articles, the first from this year and the second from 2017, talking about the same thing. Leave out dark matter and dark energy, and the rest of the universe is made of ordinary protons, neutrons, and electrons. We sometimes call that “visible matter”, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to spot. Much of it lingers in threads of gas and dust between galaxies, making it difficult to detect. These two articles are about astronomers who managed to detect this matter in different ways. But while the articles cover the same sort of matter, one headline is a lot more misleading.

Now, I know science writing is hard work. You can’t avoid misleading your readers, if only a little, because you can never include every detail. Introduce too many new words and you’ll use up your “vocabulary budget” and lose your audience. I also know that headlines get tweaked by editors at the last minute to maximize “clicks”, and that news that doesn’t get enough “clicks” dies out, replaced by news that does.

But that second headline? It’s shorter than the first. They were able to fit that crucial word “visible” in, without breaking the budget. And while I don’t have the data, I doubt the first headline was that much more viral. They could have afforded to get this right, if they wanted to.

Read each article further, and you see the same pattern. The 2020 article does mention visible matter in the first sentence at least, so they don’t screw that one up completely. But another important detail never gets mentioned.

See, you might be wondering, if one of these articles is from 2017 and the other is from 2020, how are they talking about the same thing? If astronomers found this matter already in 2017, how did they find it again in 2020?

There’s a key detail that the 2017 article mentions and the 2020 article leaves out. Here’s a quote from the 2017 article, emphasis mine:

We now have our first solid piece of evidence that this matter has been hiding in the delicate threads of cosmic webbing bridging neighbouring galaxies, right where the models predicted.

This “missing” matter was expected to exist, was predicted by models to exist. It just hadn’t been observed yet. In 2017, astronomers detected some of this matter indirectly, through its effect on the Cosmic Microwave Background. In 2020, they found it more directly, through X-rays shot out from the gases themselves.

Once again, the difference is just a short phrase. By saying “right where the models predicted”, the 2017 article clears up an important point, that this matter wasn’t a surprise. And all it took was five words.

These little words and phrases make a big difference. If you’re writing about science, you will always face misunderstandings. But if you’re careful and clever, you can clear up the most obvious ones. With just a few well-chosen words, you can have a much better piece.

# Congratulations to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez!

The 2020 Physics Nobel Prize was announced last week, awarded to Roger Penrose for his theorems about black holes and Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Of the three, I’m most familiar with Penrose’s work. People had studied black holes before Penrose, but only the simplest of situations, like an imaginary perfectly spherical star. Some wondered whether black holes in nature were limited in this way, if they could only exist under perfectly balanced conditions. Penrose showed that wasn’t true: he proved mathematically that black holes not only can form, they must form, in very general situations. He’s also worked on a wide variety of other things. He came up with “twistor space”, an idea intended for a new theory of quantum gravity that ended up as a useful tool for “amplitudeologists” like me to study particle physics. He discovered a set of four types of tiles such that if you tiled a floor with them the pattern would never repeat. And he has some controversial hypotheses about quantum gravity and consciousness.

I’m less familiar with Genzel and Ghez, but by now everyone should be familiar with what they found. Genzel and Ghez led two teams that peered into the center of our galaxy. By carefully measuring the way stars moved deep in the core, they figured out something we now teach children: that our beloved Milky Way has a dark and chewy center, an enormous black hole around which everything else revolves. These appear to be a common feature of galaxies, and many others have been shown to orbit black holes as well.

Like last year, I find it a bit odd that the Nobel committee decided to lump these two prizes together. Both discoveries concern black holes, so they’re more related than last year’s laureates, but the contexts are quite different: it’s not as if Penrose predicted the black hole in the center of our galaxy. Usually the Nobel committee avoids mathematical work like Penrose’s, except when it’s tied to a particular experimental discovery. It doesn’t look like anyone has gotten a Nobel prize for discovering that black holes exist, so maybe that’s the intent of this one…but Genzel and Ghez were not the first people to find evidence of a black hole. So overall I’m confused. I’d say that Penrose deserved a Nobel Prize, and that Genzel and Ghez did as well, but I’m not sure why they needed to split one with each other.

# 4gravitons, Spinning Up

I had a new paper out last week, with Michèle Levi and Andrew McLeod. But to explain it, I’ll need to clarify something about our last paper.

Two weeks ago, I told you that Andrew and Michèle and I had written a paper, predicting what gravitational wave telescopes like LIGO see when black holes collide. You may remember that LIGO doesn’t just see colliding black holes: it sees colliding neutron stars too. So why didn’t we predict what happens when neutron stars collide?

Actually, we did. Our calculation doesn’t just apply to black holes. It applies to neutron stars too. And not just neutron stars: it applies to anything of roughly the right size and shape. Black holes, neutron stars, very large grapefruits…

That’s the magic of Effective Field Theory, the “zoom lens” of particle physics. Zoom out far enough, and any big, round object starts looking like a particle. Black holes, neutron stars, grapefruits, we can describe them all using the same math.

Ok, so we can describe both black holes and neutron stars. Can we tell the difference between them?

In our last calculation, no. In this one, yes!

Effective Field Theory isn’t just a zoom lens, it’s a controlled approximation. That means that when we “zoom out” we don’t just throw out anything “too small to see”. Instead, we approximate it, estimating how big of an effect it can have. Depending on how precise we want to be, we can include more and more of these approximated effects. If our estimates are good, we’ll include everything that matters, and get a good approximation for what we’re trying to observe.

At the precision of our last calculation, a black hole and a neutron star still look exactly the same. Our new calculation aims for a bit higher precision though. (For the experts: we’re at a higher order in spin.) The higher precision means that we can actually see the difference: our result changes for two colliding black holes versus two colliding grapefruits.

So does that mean I can tell you what happens when two neutron stars collide, according to our calculation? Actually, no. That’s not because we screwed up the calculation: it’s because some of the properties of neutron stars are unknown.

The Effective Field Theory of neutron stars has what we call “free parameters”, unknown variables. People have tried to estimate some of these (called “Love numbers” after the mathematician A. E. H. Love), but they depend on the details of how neutron stars work: what stuff they contain, how that stuff is shaped, and how it can move. To find them out, we probably can’t just calculate: we’ll have to measure, observe an actual neutron star collision and see what the numbers actually are.

That’s one of the purposes of gravitational wave telescopes. It’s not (as far as I know) something LIGO can measure. But future telescopes, with more precision, should be able to. By watching two colliding neutron stars and comparing to a high-precision calculation, physicists will better understand what those neutron stars are made of. In order to do that, they will need someone to do that high-precision calculation. And that’s why people like me are involved.

# QCD Meets Gravity 2019

I’m at UCLA this week for QCD Meets Gravity, a conference about the surprising ways that gravity is “QCD squared”.

When I attended this conference two years ago, the community was branching out into a new direction: using tools from particle physics to understand the gravitational waves observed at LIGO.

At this year’s conference, gravitational waves have grown from a promising new direction to a large fraction of the talks. While there were still the usual talks about quantum field theory and string theory (everything from bootstrap methods to a surprising application of double field theory), gravitational waves have clearly become a major focus of this community.

This was highlighted before the first talk, when Zvi Bern brought up a recent paper by Thibault Damour. Bern and collaborators had recently used particle physics methods to push beyond the state of the art in gravitational wave calculations. Damour, an expert in the older methods, claims that Bern et al’s result is wrong, and in doing so also questions an earlier result by Amati, Ciafaloni, and Veneziano. More than that, Damour argued that the whole approach of using these kinds of particle physics tools for gravitational waves is misguided.

There was a lot of good-natured ribbing of Damour in the rest of the conference, as well as some serious attempts to confront his points. Damour’s argument so far is somewhat indirect, so there is hope that a more direct calculation (which Damour is currently pursuing) will resolve the matter. In the meantime, Julio Parra-Martinez described a reproduction of the older Amati/Ciafaloni/Veneziano result with more Damour-approved techniques, as well as additional indirect arguments that Bern et al got things right.

Before the QCD Meets Gravity community worked on gravitational waves, other groups had already built a strong track record in the area. One encouraging thing about this conference was how much the two communities are talking to each other. Several speakers came from the older community, and there were a lot of references in both groups’ talks to the other group’s work. This, more than even the content of the talks, felt like the strongest sign that something productive is happening here.

Many talks began by trying to motivate these gravitational calculations, usually to address the mysteries of astrophysics. Two talks were more direct, with Ramy Brustein and Pierre Vanhove speculating about new fundamental physics that could be uncovered by these calculations. I’m not the kind of physicist who does this kind of speculation, and I confess both talks struck me as rather strange. Vanhove in particular explicitly rejects the popular criterion of “naturalness”, making me wonder if his work is the kind of thing critics of naturalness have in mind.

# Guest Post: On the Real Inhomogeneous Universe and the Weirdness of ‘Dark Energy’

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a paper by a colleague of mine, Mohamed Rameez, that generated some discussion. Since I wasn’t up for commenting on the paper’s scientific content, I thought it would be good to give Rameez a chance to explain it in his own words, in a guest post. Here’s what he has to say:

In an earlier post, 4gravitons had contemplated the question of ‘when to trust the contrarians’, in the context of our about-to-be-published paper in which we argue that accounting for the effects of the bulk flow in the local Universe, there is no evidence for any isotropic cosmic acceleration, which would be required to claim some sort of ‘dark energy’.

In the following I would like to emphasize that this is a reasonable view, and not a contrarian one. To do so I will examine the bulk flow of the local Universe and the historical evolution of what appears to be somewhat dodgy supernova data. I will present a trivial solution (from data) to the claimed ‘Hubble tension’.  I will then discuss inhomogeneous cosmology, and the 2011 Nobel prize in Physics. I will proceed to make predictions that can be falsified with future data. I will conclude with some questions that should be frequently asked.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not necessarily shared by my collaborators.

The bulk flow of the local Universe:

The largest anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background is the dipole, believed to be caused by our motion with respect to the ‘rest frame’ of the CMB with a velocity of ~369 km s^-1. Under this view, all matter in the local Universe appear to be flowing. At least out to ~300 Mpc, this flow continues to be directionally coherent, to within ~40 degrees of the CMB dipole, and the scale at which the average relative motion between matter and radiation converges to zero has so far not been found.

This is one of the most widely accepted results in modern cosmology, to the extent that SN1a data come pre ‘corrected’ for it.

Such a flow has covariant consequences under general relativity and this is what we set out to test.

Supernova data, directions in the sky and dodgyness:

Both Riess et al 1998 and Perlmutter et al 1999 used samples of supernovae down to redshifts of 0.01, in which almost all SNe at redshifts below 0.1 were in the direction of the flow.

Subsequently in Astier et al 2006, Kowalsky et al 2008, Amanullah et al 2010 and Suzuki et al 2011, it is reported that a process of outlier rejection was adopted in which data points >3$\sigma$ from the Hubble diagram were discarded. This was done using a highly questionable statistical method that involves adjusting an intrinsic dispersion term $\sigma_{\textrm{int}}$ by hand until a $\chi^2/\textrm{ndof}$ of 1 is obtained to the assumed $\Lambda$CDM model. The number of outliers rejected is however far in excess of 0.3% – which is the 3$\sigma$ expectation. As the sky coverage became less skewed, supernovae with redshift less than ~0.023 were excluded for being outside the Hubble flow. While the Hubble diagram so far had been inferred from heliocentric redshifts and magnitudes, with the introduction of SDSS supernovae that happened to be in the direction opposite to the flow, peculiar velocity ‘corrections’ were adopted in the JLA catalogue and supernovae down to extremely low redshifts were reintroduced. While the early claims of a cosmological constant were stated as ‘high redshift supernovae were found to be dimmer (15% in flux) than the low redshift supernovae (compared to what would be expected in a $\Lambda=0$ universe)’, it is worth noting that the peculiar velocity corrections change the redshifts and fluxes of low redshift supernovae by up to ~20 %.

When it was observed that even with this ‘corrected’ sample of 740 SNe, any evidence for isotropic acceleration using a principled Maximum Likelihood Estimator is less than 3$\sigma$ , it was claimed that by adding 12 additional parameters (to the 10 parameter model) to allow for redshift and sample dependence of the light curve fitting parameters, the evidence was greater than 4$\sigma$ .

As we discuss in Colin et al. 2019, these corrections also appear to be arbitrary, and betray an ignorance of the fundamentals of both basic statistical analysis and relativity. With the Pantheon compilation, heliocentric observables were no longer public and these peculiar velocity corrections initially extended far beyond the range of any known flow model of the Local Universe. When this bug was eventually fixed, both the heliocentric redshifts and magnitudes of the SDSS SNe that filled in the ‘redshift desert’ between low and high redshift SNe were found to be alarmingly discrepant. The authors have so far not offered any clarification of these discrepancies.

Thus it seems to me that the latest generation of ‘publicly available’ supernova data are not aiding either open science or progress in cosmology.

A trivial solution to the ‘Hubble tension’?

The apparent tension between the Hubble parameter as inferred from the Cosmic Microwave Background and low redshift tracers has been widely discussed, and recent studies suggest that redshift errors as low as 0.0001 can have a significant impact. Redshift discrepancies as big as 0.1 have been reported. The shifts reported between JLA and Pantheon appear to be sufficient to lower the Hubble parameter from ~73 km s^-1 Mpc^-1 to ~68 km s^-1 Mpc^-1.

On General Relativity, cosmology, metric expansion and inhomogeneities:

In the maximally symmetric Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker solution to general relativity, there is only one meaningful global notion of distance and it expands at the same rate everywhere. However, the late time Universe has structure on all scales, and one may only hope for statistical (not exact) homogeneity. The Universe is expected to be lumpy. A background FLRW metric is not expected to exist and quantities analogous to the Hubble and deceleration parameters will vary across the sky.  Peculiar velocities may be more precisely thought of as variations in the expansion rate of the Universe. At what rate does a real Universe with structure expand? The problems of defining a meaningful average notion of volume, its dynamical evolution, and connecting it to observations are all conceptually open.

On the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics:

The Fitting Problem in cosmology was written in 1987. In the context of this work and the significant theoretical difficulties involved in inferring fundamental physics from the real Universe, any claims of having measured a cosmological constant from directionally skewed, sparse samples of intrinsically scattered observations should have been taken with a grain of salt.  By honouring this claim with a Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy may have induced runaway prestige bias in favour of some of the least principled analyses in science, strengthening the confirmation bias that seems prevalent in cosmology.

This has resulted in the generation of a large body of misleading literature, while normalizing the practice of ‘massaging’ scientific data. In her recent video about gravitational waves, Sabine Hossenfelder says “We should not hand out Nobel Prizes if we don’t know how the predictions were fitted to the data”. What about when the data was fitted (in 1998-1999) using a method that has been discredited in 1989 to a toy model that has been cautioned against in 1987, leading to a ‘discovery’ of profound significance to fundamental physics?

A prediction with future cosmological data:

With the advent of high statistics cosmological data in the future, such as from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, I predict that the Hubble and deceleration parameters inferred from supernovae in hemispheres towards and away from the CMB dipole will be found to be different in a statistically significant (>5$\sigma$ ) way. Depending upon the criterion for selection and blind analyses of data that can be agreed upon, I would be willing to bet a substantial amount of money on this prediction.

Concluding : on the amusing sociology of ‘Dark Energy’ and manufactured concordance:

Of the two authors of the well-known cosmology textbook ‘The Early Universe’, Edward Kolb writes these interesting papers questioning dark energy while Michael Turner is credited with coining the term ‘Dark Energy’.  Reasonable scientific perspectives have to be presented as ‘Dark Energy without dark energy’. Papers questioning the need to invoke such a mysterious content that makes up ‘68% of the Universe’ are quickly targeted by inane articles by non-experts or perhaps well-meant but still misleading YouTube videos. Much of this is nothing more than a spectacle.

In summary, while the theoretical debate about whether what has been observed as Dark Energy is the effect of inhomogeneities is ongoing, observers appear to have been actively using the most inhomogeneous feature of the local Universe through opaque corrections to data, to continue claiming that this ‘dark energy’ exists.

It is heartening to see that recent works lean toward a breaking of this manufactured concordance and speak of a crisis for cosmology.

Questions that should be frequently asked:

Q. Is there a Hubble frame in the late time Universe?

A. The Hubble frame is a property of the FLRW exact solution, and in the late time Universe in which galaxies and clusters have peculiar motions with respect to each other, an equivalent notion does not exist. While popular inference treats the frame in which the CMB dipole vanishes as the Hubble frame, the scale at which the bulk flow of the local Universe converges to that frame has never been found. We are tilted observers.

Q. I am about to perform blinded analyses on new cosmological data. Should I correct all my redshifts towards the CMB rest frame?

A. No. Correcting all your redshifts towards a frame that has never been found is a good way to end up with ‘dark energy’. It is worth noting that while the CMB dipole has been known since 1994, supernova data have been corrected towards the CMB rest frame only after 2010, for what appear to be independent reasons.

Q. Can I combine new data with existing Supernova data?

A. No. The current generation of publicly available supernova data suffer from the natural biases that are to be expected when data are compiled incrementally through a human mediated process. It would be better to start fresh with a new sample.

Q. Is ‘dark energy’ fundamental or new physics?

A. Given that general relativity is a 100+ year old theory and significant difficulties exist in describing the late time Universe with it, it is unnecessary to invoke new fundamental physics when confronting any apparent acceleration of the real Universe. All signs suggest that what has been ascribed to dark energy are the result of a community that is hell bent on repeating what Einstein supposedly called his greatest mistake.

Digging deeper:

The inquisitive reader may explore the resources on inhomogeneous cosmology, as well as the works of George Ellis, Thomas Buchert and David Wiltshire.

# When to Trust the Contrarians

One of my colleagues at the NBI had an unusual experience: one of his papers took a full year to get through peer review. This happens often in math, where reviewers will diligently check proofs for errors, but it’s quite rare in physics: usually the path from writing to publication is much shorter. Then again, the delays shouldn’t have been too surprising for him, given what he was arguing.

My colleague Mohamed Rameez, along with Jacques Colin, Roya Mohayaee, and Subir Sarkar, wants to argue against one of the most famous astronomical discoveries of the last few decades: that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, and thus that an unknown “dark energy” fills the universe. They argue that one of the key pieces of evidence used to prove acceleration is mistaken: that a large region of the universe around us is in fact “flowing” in one direction, and that tricked astronomers into thinking its expansion was accelerating. You might remember a paper making a related argument back in 2016. I didn’t like the media reaction to that paper, and my post triggered a response by the authors, one of whom (Sarkar) is on this paper as well.

I’m not an astronomer or an astrophysicist. I’m not qualified to comment on their argument, and I won’t. I’d still like to know whether they’re right, though. And that means figuring out which experts to trust.

Pick anything we know in physics, and you’ll find at least one person who disagrees. I don’t mean a crackpot, though they exist too. I mean an actual expert who is convinced the rest of the field is wrong. A contrarian, if you will.

I used to be very unsympathetic to these people. I was convinced that the big results of a field are rarely wrong, because of how much is built off of them. I thought that even if a field was using dodgy methods or sloppy reasoning, the big results are used in so many different situations that if they were wrong they would have to be noticed. I’d argue that if you want to overturn one of these big claims you have to disprove not just the result itself, but every other success the field has ever made.

I still believe that, somewhat. But there are a lot of contrarians here at the Niels Bohr Institute. And I’ve started to appreciate what drives them.

The thing is, no scientific result is ever as clean as it ought to be. Everything we do is jury-rigged. We’re almost never experts in everything we’re trying to do, so we often don’t know the best method. Instead, we approximate and guess, we find rough shortcuts and don’t check if they make sense. This can take us far sometimes, sure…but it can also backfire spectacularly.

The contrarians I’ve known got their inspiration from one of those backfires. They saw a result, a respected mainstream result, and they found a glaring screw-up. Maybe it was an approximation that didn’t make any sense, or a statistical measure that was totally inappropriate. Whatever it was, it got them to dig deeper, and suddenly they saw screw-ups all over the place. When they pointed out these problems, at best the people they accused didn’t understand. At worst they got offended. Instead of cooperation, the contrarians are told they can’t possibly know what they’re talking about, and ignored. Eventually, they conclude the entire sub-field is broken.

Are they right?

Not always. They can’t be, for every claim you can find a contrarian, believing them all would be a contradiction.

But sometimes?

Often, they’re right about the screw-ups. They’re right that there’s a cleaner, more proper way to do that calculation, a statistical measure more suited to the problem. And often, doing things right raises subtleties, means that the big important result everyone believed looks a bit less impressive.

Still, that’s not the same as ruling out the result entirely. And despite all the screw-ups, the main result is still often correct. Often, it’s justified not by the original, screwed-up argument, but by newer evidence from a different direction. Often, the sub-field has grown to a point that the original screwed-up argument doesn’t really matter anymore.

Often, but again, not always.

I still don’t know whether to trust the contrarians. I still lean towards expecting fields to sort themselves out, to thinking that error alone can’t sustain long-term research. But I’m keeping a more open mind now. I’m waiting to see how far the contrarians go.

# Congratulations to James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz!

The 2019 Physics Nobel Prize was announced this week, awarded to James Peebles for work in cosmology and to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the first observation of an exoplanet.

Peebles introduced quantitative methods to cosmology. He figured out how to use the Cosmic Microwave Background (light left over from the Big Bang) to understand how matter is distributed in our universe, including the presence of still-mysterious dark matter and dark energy. Mayor and Queloz were the first team to observe a planet outside of our solar system (an “exoplanet”), in 1995. By careful measurement of the spectrum of light coming from a star they were able to find a slight wobble, caused by a Jupiter-esque planet in orbit around it. Their discovery opened the floodgates of observation. Astronomers found many more planets than expected, showing that, far from a rare occurrence, exoplanets are quite common.

It’s a bit strange that this Nobel was awarded to two very different types of research. This isn’t the first time the prize was divided between two different discoveries, but all of the cases I can remember involve discoveries in closely related topics. This one didn’t, and I’m curious about the Nobel committee’s logic. It might have been that neither discovery “merited a Nobel” on its own, but I don’t think we’re supposed to think of shared Nobels as “lesser” than non-shared ones. It would make sense if the Nobel committee thought they had a lot of important results to “get through” and grouped them together to get through them faster, but if anything I have the impression it’s the opposite: that at least in physics, it’s getting harder and harder to find genuinely important discoveries that haven’t been acknowledged. Overall, this seems like a very weird pairing, and the Nobel committee’s citation “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” is a pretty loose justification.

# Still Traveling, and a Black Hole

I’m still at the conference in Natal this week, so I don’t have time for a long post. The big news this week was the Event Horizon Telescope’s close-up of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87. If you’re hungry for coverage of that, Matt Strassler has some of his trademark exceptionally clear posts on the topic, while Katie Mack has a nice twitter thread.