Thursday, May 29, 2014

News (2014/05/29)

First of all, I must apologise for the fact that I haven't been updating my blog as much as I'd intended to over the past few weeks. As often happens, real life has gotten in the way, including (for example) my graduation. I can now officially carry the post-nominal letters BScAdv(Hons), although anyone concerned for my ever-inflating ego will no doubt be glad to hear that I have very little intention of doing so.

In terms of the blog, I'm currently working on a post on Fourier analysis and the following post will likely be on the physics of mechanical flight, by popular request. At the current rate I'm going that might not be for a while though!

In physics news, since my last news post some rumours have arisen that the BICEP2 results may not be as sound as initially claimed. Basically, Adam Falkowski has claimed that the BICEP2 collaboration have miscalculated the galactic foreground radiation by misinterpreting an image on a Planck collaboration slide, and their primordial polarisations can mostly be accounted for due to this error (a claim that the BICEP2 team strongly denies). A sceptical take on the rumour is provided by Sesh Nadathur, who argues that the issue has been blown far out of proportion. It will be interesting to see how things unfold in the coming months!