Bangs big and small in cosmic origins debate – WBNews

It turns out that sometimes this same “observer effect” crops up in science journalism. The story goes that, right now, there is a quiet debate happening that could have implications for how the Universe as we know it came to be – and what came before. And the debate is being driven in part by the fact that news outlets including BBC News took a small peek into the machine of modern-day astrophysics. It started in a fairly pedestrian way: I spotted a paper authored by someone with a familiar name, outlining analyses of what is known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. Professor Sir Roger Penrose, along with his colleague Vahe Gurzadyan, had crunched through the publicly-available data on this ever-so-slightly jumbled glow of light that permeates the whole of the cosmos. They found neat, circular rings of order in the CMB, a feature which would support a theory of Professor Penrose’s: that the Big Bang is just the latest in an endless cycle, rather than a beginning per se. Image caption The initial paper suggested these rings were echoes from before the Big Bang As is common among cosmologists, the researchers published the idea on Arxiv.org, a repository for scientific papers before they go through the publishing process – where I found the manuscript and wrote a story on it, among other news outlets. Three weeks later, two papers were posted to the Arxiv site refuting Professor Penrose’s hypothesis: one by Hans Kristian Eriksen and Ingunn Wehus…more detail