by I often think this. Never mind how invaluable it would be to have up-to-date reports on research in all areas all the time, it would just be more interesting. Right now we’re getting the missing Malaysian plane, 24/7, without much more than a fact or two, often not useful, each day.
On days when planes aren’t missing we get 24/7 politics. This is the most useless of all. By now we all know what everyone is going to say on whatever topic that is raised. Speculation and opinion. No news. And tedious in the extreme.
There has been a HUGE discovery in the world of science. Evidence has been found to support the theory of inflation. Dennis Overbye of the New York Times wrote about it yesterday, and I would start with him if you want to learn about what this means. He is one of my favorite science writers and he generally makes difficult ideas accessible.
Read this piece! It’s not long, it’s got helpful graphics, you can google “multiverse” afterwards for something fun. The findings need to be confirmed, but according to the piece we shouldn’t have to wait long. Lots of other groups are working on it.
I was particularly happy about the news because Andrea Linde, “a prolific theorist who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983,” was kind to me when I was looking for scientists to propose alternative theories for the results from the work of the Parapsychology of Duke University. (I wanted to know if the Duke experiments were free of fraud and sloppy controls, which I found them to be, were there any other explanations in all of physics to account for what they found.)
Andrei Linde is just such a generous, charming man. I heard him speak at NYU and if you had seen him with those NYU students. He adored them, they adored him. You can get a sense of that here, when you see Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford colleague and a member of the team that found the evidence, tell Linde of their discovery.
UPDATE: I went back to find earlier posts of me gushing over Andrei Linde, and I found this one where I went to hear him speak with Alan Guth, the man who first came up with the idea of inflation (if I’m understanding correctly)!! Also, Andrei Linde is a man of many talents.
Oh wow, the World Science Festival put the talk online, you can watch it here.
