A video about cosmic inflation and the BICEP2 results produced by the University of Sussex and PhD Comics!
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BICEP2 – The Video!
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2, cosmic inflation, PhD Comics, University of Sussex on July 23, 2014 by telescoperBICEP2 Redux: How the Sausage is Made
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2, Cosmology, dust, Inflation on July 6, 2014 by telescoperI came across this (rather lengthy, but very good) discussion of the BICEP2 story so far so thought I would share it here. There’s a particularly useful collection of articles at the end for those who would like to read more.
I’ll also take this opportunity to refer you to a recent BBC News story which states that the BICEP2 and Planck teams are now in discussions about sharing data. About time, if you ask me. Still, it will take a considerable time to work out the ordering of the authors if they ever do write a paper!
An ongoing problem with communicating science to the general public is the existence of widely-held misconceptions among the public regarding how science actually works. A case in point is the March 17 announcement by the BICEP2 Collaboration regarding the detection of B-Mode polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background and the events which have unfolded since then.
All too often, news stories and blog posts will trumpet some announcement with sensational headlines like “Scientists Say Cheap, Efficient Solar Cells Just Around the Corner”, or “Scientists Close in on Cure for Cancer.” Many people take such announcements at face value and consider the case closed. The work has been done. The reality of the situation, however, is that the initial announcement of a discovery or breakthrough is just the beginning of the hard work, breathlessly hyped headlines notwithstanding.
How Science Actually Works (or at least how it is supposed to work)
Once…
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Published BICEP2 paper admits “Unquantifiable Uncertainty”..
Posted in Bad Statistics, The Universe and Stuff with tags B-mode, Bicep2, Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, dust emission, Polarization, Primordial Gravitational Waves on June 20, 2014 by telescoperJust a quick post to pass on the news that the BICEP2 results that excited so much press coverage earlier this year have now been published in Physical Review Letters. A free PDF version of the piece can be found here. The published version incorporates a couple of important caveats that have arisen since the original release of the results prior to peer review. In particular, in the abstract (discussing models of the dust foreground emission:
However, these models are not sufficiently constrained by external public data to exclude the possibility of dust emission bright enough to explain the entire excess signal. Cross correlating BICEP2 against 100 GHz maps from the BICEP1 experiment, the excess signal is confirmed with 3σ significance and its spectral index is found to be consistent with that of the CMB, disfavoring dust at 1.7 σ.
Since the primary question-mark over the original result was whether the signal was due to dust or CMB, this corresponds to an admission that the detection is really at very low significance. I’ll set aside my objection to the frequentist language used in this statement!
There is an interesting comment in the footnotes too:
In the preprint version of this paper an additional DDM2 model was included based on information taken from Planck conference talks. We noted the large uncertainties on this and the other dust models presented. In the Planck dust polarization paper [96] which has since appeared the maps have been masked to include only regions “where the systematic uncertainties are small, and where the dust signal dominates total emission.” This mask excludes our field. We have concluded the information used for the DDM2 model has unquantifiable uncertainty. We look forward to performing a cross-correlation analysis against the Planck 353 GHz polarized maps in a future publication.
The emphasis is mine. The phrase made me think of this:
The paper concludes:
More data are clearly required to resolve the situation. We note that cross-correlation of our maps with the Planck 353 GHz maps will be more powerful than use of those maps alone in our field. Additional data are also expected from many other experiments, including Keck Array observations at 100 GHz in the 2014 season.
In other words, what I’ve been saying from the outset.
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Has BICEP2 bitten the dust?
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags B-modes, Bicep2, cosmic inflation, Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, dust, multiverse, Paul Steinhardt, Planck, Polarization, polarized dust on June 5, 2014 by telescoperTime for yet another update on twists and turns of the ongoing saga of BICEP2 and in particular the growing suspicion that the measurements could be accounted for by Galactic dust rather than primordial gravitational waves; see various posts on this blog.
First there is a Nature News and Views article by Paul Steinhardt with the title Big Bang blunder bursts the multiverse bubble. As the title suggests, this piece is pretty scathing about the whole affair, for two main reasons. The first is to do with the manner of the release of the result via a press conference before the results had been subjected to peer review. Steinhardt argues that future announcements of “discoveries” in this area
should be made after submission to journals and vetting by expert referees. If there must be a press conference, hopefully the scientific community and the media will demand that it is accompanied by a complete set of documents, including details of the systematic analysis and sufficient data to enable objective verification.
I also have reservations about the way the communication of this result was handled but I wouldn’t go as far as Steinhardt did. I think it’s quite clear that the BICEP2 team have detected something and that they published their findings in good faith. The fact that the media pushed the result as being a definitive detection of primordial gravitational waves wasn’t entirely their fault; most of the hype was probably down to other cosmologists (especially theorists) who got a bit over-excited.
It is true that if it turns out that the BICEP2 signal is due to dust rather than primordial gravitational waves then the cosmology community will have a certain amount of egg on its face. On the other hand, this is actually what happens in science all the time. If we scientists want the general public to understand better how science actually works we should not pretend that it is about absolute certainties but that it is a process, and because it is a process operated by human beings it is sometimes rather messy. The lesson to be learned is not about hiding the mess from the public but about communicating the uncertainties more accurately and more honestly.
Steinhardt’s other main point is one with which I disagree very strongly. Here is the core of his argument about inflation:
The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?
The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests.
This is extremely disingenuous. There’s a real difference between a theory that is “immune to experimental and observational tests” and one which is just very difficult to test in that way. For a start, the failure of a given experiment to detect gravitational waves does not prove that gravitational waves don’t exist at some level; a more sensitive experiment might be needed. More generally, the inflationary paradigm is not completely specified as a theory; it is a complex entity which contains a number of free parameters that can be adjusted in the light of empirical data. The same is also true, for example, of the standard model of particle physics. The presence of these adjustable degrees of freedom makes it much harder to test the hypothesis than would be the case if there were no such wiggle room. Normal science often proceeds via the progressive tightening of the theoretical slack until there is no more room for manoeuvre. This process can take some time.
Inflation will probably be very difficult to test, but then there’s no reason why we should expect a definitive theoretical understanding of the very early Universe to come easily to us. Indeed, there is almost certainly a limit to the extent that we can understand the Universe with “normal science” but I don’t think we’ve reached it yet. We need to be more patient. So what if we can’t test inflation with our current technology? That doesn’t mean that the idea is unscientific. It just means that the Universe is playing hard to get.
Steinhardt continues with an argument about the multiverse. He states that inflation
almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multiverse, everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.
This may seem confusing given the hundreds of theoretical papers on the predictions of this or that inflationary model. What these papers typically fail to acknowledge is that they ignore the multiverse and that, even with this unjustified choice, there exists a spectrum of other models which produce all manner of diverse cosmological outcomes. Taking this into account, it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.
I don’t accept the argument that “inflation almost inevitably leads to a multiverse” but even if you do the rest of the argument is false. Infinitely many outcomes may be possible, but are they equally probable? There is a well-defined Bayesian framework within which one could answer this question, with sufficient understanding of the underlying physics. I don’t think we know how to do this yet but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done in principle.
For similar discussion of this issue see Ted Bunn’s Blog.
Steinhardt’s diatribe was accompanied yesterday by a sceptical news piece in the Grauniad entitled Gravitational waves turn to dust after claims of flawed analysis. This piece is basically a rehash of the argument that the BICEP2 results may be accounted for by dust rather than primordial gravitational waves, which definitely a possibility, and that the BICEP2 analysis involved a fairly dubious analysis of the foregrounds. In my opinion it’s an unnecessarily aggressive piece, but mentioning it here gives me the excuse to post the following screen grab from the science section of today’s Guardian website:
Aficionados of Private Eye will probably think of the Just Fancy That section!
Where do I stand? I can hear you all asking that question so I’ll make it clear that my view hasn’t really changed at all since March. I wouldn’t offer any more than even money on a bet that BICEP2 has detected primordial gravitational waves at all and I’d offer good odds that, if the detection does stand, the value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio is significantly lower than the value of 0.2 claimed by BICEP2. In other words, I don’t know. Sometimes that’s the only really accurate statement a scientist can make.
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BICEP2: The Dust Thickens…
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2, Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, dust, Planck, Polarization, polarized dust on May 29, 2014 by telescoperOff to a day-long staff training event today so just time to post a quick update on the BICEP2 saga (see various posts on this blog). There’s a new paper on the arXiv today by Flauger, Hill and Spergel. The first part of its rather lengthy abstract reads:
BICEP2 has reported the detection of a degree-scale B-mode polarization pattern in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and has interpreted the measurement as evidence for primordial gravitational waves. Motivated by the profound importance of the discovery of gravitational waves from the early Universe, we examine to what extent a combination of Galactic foregrounds and lensed E-modes could be responsible for the signal. We reanalyze the BICEP2 results and show that the 100×150 GHz and 150×150 GHz data are consistent with a cosmology with r=0.2 and negligible foregrounds, but also with a cosmology with r=0 and a significant dust polarization signal. We give independent estimates of the dust polarization signal in the BICEP2 region using four different approaches. While these approaches are consistent with each other, the expected amplitude of the dust polarization power spectrum remains uncertain by about a factor of three. The lower end of the prediction leaves room for a primordial contribution, but at the higher end the dust in combination with the standard CMB lensing signal could account for the BICEP2 observations, without requiring the existence of primordial gravitational waves. By measuring the cross-correlations between the pre-Planck templates used in the BICEP2 analysis and between different versions of a data-based template, we emphasize that cross-correlations between models are very sensitive to noise in the polarization angles and that measured cross-correlations are likely underestimates of the contribution of foregrounds to the map. These results suggest that BICEP1 and BICEP2 data alone cannot distinguish between foregrounds and a primordial gravitational wave signal, and that future Keck Array observations at 100 GHz and Planck observations at higher frequencies will be crucial to determine whether the signal is of primordial origin. (abridged)
The foreground analysis done in this paper seems to me to be much more convincing that that presented in the original BICEP2 paper and it confirms that the data as presented can not discriminate between B-modes arising from a polarized foreground component and from the presence of primordial gravitational waves. As I’ve said before (several times now), the press hype surrounding this discovery was a bit premature and we have to wait for observations at other frequencies before a clearer picture emerges through the dust.
UPDATE: A new Nature News and Views Article contains a strong statement by David Spergel to the effect that BICEP2 provides no evidence either for or against the existence of primordial gravitational waves.
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That BICEP Rumour…
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2, Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, Primordial Gravitational Waves on May 14, 2014 by telescoperSo there’s been another twist in the story of BICEP2 and whether or not it has actually detected primordial gravitational waves.
This time it is a blog post on a site called Résonaances by Adam Falkowski who alleges that the BICEP2 team has made a pretty astounding error in their analysis of the data. This suggestion has been picked up by a couple of fairly influential science news sites (here and here). The BICEP2 team deny having made any such error and are quoted in the news stories defending their results in robust terms.
Before I continue let me make it clear that I stand by the scepticism I have expressed on this blog about this result (which, in fact, is shared by many of my colleagues in the cosmology fraternity1). The problem is that the measurement is made at a single frequency (150 GHz) and it is by no means clear on that basis whether it has the black-body spectrum that would characterize it as being associated with the cosmic microwave background rather than some sort of foreground emission. At 150 GHz the major worry is that polarized emission from galactic dust might contribute significantly to the signal, and might even swamp any primordial contribution.
Anyway, the blog post states that:
To estimate polarized emission from the galactic dust, BICEP digitized an unpublished 353 GHz map shown by the Planck collaboration at a conference. However, it seems they misinterpreted the Planck results: that map shows the polarization fraction for all foregrounds, not for the galactic dust only (see the “not CIB subtracted” caveat in the slide). Once you correct for that and rescale the Planck results appropriately, some experts claim that the polarized galactic dust emission can account for most of the BICEP signal.
Here’s the map concerned as it appeared in the conference talk as presented on the blog post:
The point about this is that dust emission increases with frequency, so that at 353 GHz it would be expected to dominate the primordial cosmic microwave component. However, if one can measure the polarized component of this emission at high frequency (where it is larger and consequently easier to measure) then one could try to estimate the polarized contribution at the lower frequency measured at 150 GHz by BICEP2 by assuming it has a similar polarized fraction. This is actually just about the only way to estimate the foreground contribution.
Unfortunately in this map there is an additional unpolarized foreground arising from the Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) which comprised integration dust emission from extragalactic sources. Including this component makes the polarized fraction look lower than it would if it were separated out and only the more highly polarized Galactic contribution considered. In other words including the CIB leads to an underestimate of the polarized fraction and consequently an underestimate of the foreground contamination at 150 GHz.
So now there are three issues:
- Did BICEP2 actually use this digitized image to estimate the polarized foreground for their experiment?
- Did they make the error of which they have been accused?
- Does this invalidate the BICEP2 announcement?
The answer to (1) is that I don’t know for sure but it’s certainly possible that they did. It sounds a pretty ropey approach, but the Planck data are not publicly available so they had to improvise. Even if (1) is the case, I am not at all sure that (2) is true. They may have, but in their responses to the suggestion they have denied it. It seems such a silly error that I’d be surprised, but that doesn’t in itself make it untrue.
However, even if (1) and (2) are the case that doesn’t mean that (3) is true, i.e. it does not imply that the entire analysis presented by BICEP2 is wrong. They have several different estimates of the foreground contribution using other methods so the entire result clearly does not stand or fall on the basis of the use of this particular map in a particular way.
I repeat what I’ve said before in response to the BICEP2 analysis, namely that the discussion of foregrounds in their paper is disappointing. I’d also say that I think the foreground emission at these frequencies is so complicated that none of the simple approaches that were available to the BICEP2 team are reliable enough to be convincing. My opinion on the analysis hasn’t therefore changed at all as a result of this rumour. I think BICEP2 has definitely detected something at 150 GHz but we simply have no firm evidence at the moment that it is primordial. That will change shortly, with the possibility of other experiments (specifically Planck, but also possibly SPTPol) supplying the missing evidence.
I’m not particularly keen on the rumour-mongering that has gone on, but then I’m not very keen either on the way the BICEP2 result has been presented in some quarters as being beyond reasonable doubt when it clearly doesn’t have that status. Yet.
Rational scepticism is a very good thing. It’s one of the things that makes science what it is. But it all too easily turns into mudslinging.
Note: 1 I use the word “fraternity” in the sense given in the Chambers Dictionary as “any set of people with something in common” rather than as “an all-male N American college association”. Cosmology is neither “all-male” nor exclusively American and I did not mean to imply either by my use of English.
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Planck versus BICEP2: Round One!
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv, Bicep2, Cosmology, dust, Inflation, magnetic fields, Planck, Planck Collaboration on May 6, 2014 by telescoperYou may recall my scepticism about the recent announcement from the BICEP2 experiment about evidence from polarized microwave emission for the existence of primordial gravitational waves generated during a period of cosmic inflation.
Well, in between a couple of meetings this morning, I realised that there’s a paper just out onto the arXiv from the Planck Collaboration. Here’s the abstract:
This paper presents the large-scale polarized sky as seen by Planck HFI at 353 GHz, which is the most sensitive Planck channel for dust polarization. We construct and analyse large-scale maps of dust polarization fraction and polarization direction, while taking account of noise bias and possible systematic effects. We find that the maximum observed dust polarization fraction is high (pmax > 18%), in particular in some of the intermediate dust column density (AV < 1mag) regions. There is a systematic decrease in the dust polarization fraction with increasing dust column density, and we interpret the features of this correlation in light of both radiative grain alignment predictions and fluctuations in the magnetic field orientation. We also characterize the spatial structure of the polarization angle using the angle dispersion function and find that, in nearby fields at intermediate latitudes, the polarization angle is ordered over extended areas that are separated by filamentary structures, which appear as interfaces where the magnetic field sky projection rotates abruptly without apparent variations in the dust column density. The polarization fraction is found to be anti-correlated with the dispersion of the polarization angle, implying that the variations are likely due to fluctuations in the 3D magnetic field orientation along the line of sight sampling the diffuse interstellar medium. We also compare the dust emission with the polarized synchrotron emission measured with the Planck LFI, with low-frequency radio data, and with Faraday rotation measurements of extragalactic sources. The two polarized components are globally similar in structure along the plane and notably in the Fan and North Polar Spur regions. A detailed comparison of these three tracers shows, however, that dust and cosmic rays generally sample different parts of the line of sight and confirms that much of the variation observed in the Planck data is due to the 3D structure of the magnetic field.
There’s also a press release from the European Space Agency which includes this nice picture:
This study is at 353 GHz, compared to the 150 GHz of the BICEP2 measurements. Galactic dust emission increases with frequency so one would expect more of an effect in this Planck map than in BICEP2, but the fact that polarized foreground emission is so strong at these frequencies does give one pause for thought. The Planck data actually cover the whole sky, so the above map has clearly been censored; below you can see the actual region of the sky covered by BICEP2, so there is little or no direct overlap with what’s been released by Planck:
We’ll have to wait until later this year to see what’s going on in the masked regions (i.e. far above and below the Galactic Plane, where the dust emission is presumably weaker) and indeed at the 7 other frequencies measured by Planck. It’s all a bit of a tease so far!
Here’s what the press release says about BICEP2
In March 2014, scientists from the BICEP2 collaboration claimed the first detection of such a signal in data collected using a ground-based telescope observing a patch of the sky at a single microwave frequency. Critically, the claim relies on the assumption that foreground polarised emissions are almost negligible in this region.
Later this year, scientists from the Planck collaboration will release data based on Planck’s observations of polarised light covering the entire sky at seven different frequencies. The multiple frequency data should allow astronomers to separate with great confidence any possible foreground contamination from the tenuous primordial polarised signal.
P.S. It’s gratifying to see the Planck Collaboration have used extragalactic Faraday Rotation measures to probe the Galactic Magnetic field as I suggested on this blog not long ago. The article that first advocated doing this with CMB maps can be found here.
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Galactic Loops as Sources of Polarized Emission
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2, Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, dust, foregrounds, Galactic emission on April 8, 2014 by telescoperSince I seem to have established myself as an arch-sceptic concerning the cosmological interpretation of the the BICEP2 measurement of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), I couldn’t resist posting a link to an interesting paper by Liu et al. that has just appeared on the arXiv.
The abstract is:
We investigate possible imprints of galactic foreground structures such as the `radio loops’ in the derived maps of the cosmic microwave background. Surprisingly there is evidence for these not only at radio frequencies through their synchrotron radiation, but also at microwave frequencies where emission by dust dominates. This suggests the mechanism is magnetic dipole radiation from dust grains enriched by metallic iron, or ferrimagnetic molecules. This new foreground we have identified is present at high galactic latitudes, and potentially dominates over the expected B-mode polarisation signal due to primordial gravitational waves from inflation.
The authors argue that foreground emission from our own Galaxy has not been fully subtracted from maps of the cosmic microwave background. This emission could result in significant contamination of the CMB polarization if it is associated with dust grains aligned with the Galaxy’s magnetic field.
I’m grateful to one of the authors of the paper, Philip Mertsch, for sending me this map of the Galactic Loops with the BICEP2 region superimposed on it, demonstrating that there is potential for a contribution…
This paper is likely to provoke quite a discussion, so I thought I’d suggest one possible way of testing it, namely by updating the analysis presented by myself and Patrick Dineen in 2003 with new data. Here’s the abstract of our old paper:
We present a diagnostic test of possible Galactic contamination of cosmic microwave background sky maps designed to provide an independent check on the methods used to compile these maps. The method involves a non-parametric measurement of cross-correlation between the Faraday rotation measure (RM) of extragalactic sources and the measured microwave signal at the same angular position. We argue that statistical properties of the observed distribution of rotation measures are consistent with a Galactic origin, an argument reinforced by a direct measurement of cross-correlation between dust, free-free and synchrotron foreground maps and RM values with the strongest correlation being for dust and free-free. We do not find any statistically compelling evidence for correlations between the RM values and the COBE DMR maps at any frequency, so there is no evidence of residual contamination in these CMB maps. On the other hand, there is a statistically significant correlation of RM with the preliminary WMAP individual frequency maps which remains significant in the Tegmark et al. Wiener-filtered map but not in the Internal Linear Combination map produced by the WMAP team.
The idea is that cross-correlating the CMB pattern with Faraday rotation measures should provide an independent diagnostic of the effect of magnetic fields. Our analysis was based on old CMB data, so there’s an interesting project to be done updating it with, e.g., Planck CMB data and a larger set of rotation measures. See the comment below for a reference to more recent work along these lines, but still not including Planck.
Anyway, this all goes to show that there’s one question you can always ask about an astrophysics result: have you considered the possible role of magnetic fields?
Follow @telescoperAAA Day in the LIfE of the 137 SS Mystic – August 3, 2013 – N, SHE, and NUN … where Egypt hid the swastika
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2 on March 26, 2014 by telescoperOh my…
August 3, 2013
So where did Egypt hide the swastika?
How was it vEILed?
UPDATE March 24, 2014
The Smoking Gun and the Gravity of the Situation
Jesus positioned between the two thieves RED and BLUE
a.k.a. the two B-mode gravitational waves
polarized RED and BLUE gravitational waves
On March 17th, 2014 an announcement was made that confirms what I AM now sharing.
The announcement apparently confirms Einstein’s musings about gravitational waves, an expanding universe and an early ‘imprinting’ that took place.
There are rumors of a big bang Nobel prize.
But inflation came with a very specific prediction – that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky – the famous Cosmic Microwave Background.
The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal.
Scientists call…
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Responding to the Mail
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Bicep2, Daily Mail, Hiranya Peiris, newsnight, Royal Astronomical Society on March 24, 2014 by telescoperWhat was that quotation by Oscar Wilde, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us aren’t reading the Daily Mail“? Last week that particular element of the gutter press took the opportunity to display its aptitude for racism and sexism in a snide piece about the appearance of two female (shock!) and non-white (horror!) scientists on Newsnight. It’s not really a surprise that the Daily Mail would publish such a scummy article, but it’s still depressing to see how the minds of some people work.
For the record I’ll say that I only know one of the scientists concerned personally (Hiranya Peiris of University College, London). Speaking as a cosmologist, I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that if someone from the press had phoned me up and asked me to suggest an expert to invite onto a television show to explain the BICEP2 results then Hiranya would have been right at the top of my list – because she’s a brilliant scientist (in exactly the relevant area) and a gifted communicator to boot. Is it really so hard to grasp the idea that a brilliant scientist can be female? Or born in Sri Lanka?
Anyway, University College was quick to criticize the Daily Fail in an open letter from Professor David Price, Vice-Provost for Research. Meanwhile a flurry of enraged emails was going around the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society (of which I am a member) that led to a collective response being issued on Friday.
Here follows the RAS statement on the matter which I reproduce here in full, apart from the link to the offensive Daily Mail “article” which I have removed because I don’t want them to profit from traffic sent by this blog.
The statement was written by RAS President David Southwood and RAS Press Officer Robert Massey who are to be congratulated for their measured yet forceful riposte. The last two paragraphs are particularly good.
I’m glad the task of responding to the Daily Mail wasn’t left to me. I would have been far less diplomatic.
–0–
The Council and President of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) have offered unequivocal support to astronomers Dr Hiranya Peiris and Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock. An article in the Daily Mail suggested that they were selected to appear on an episode of theBBC Newsnight programme on the basis of their ethnic background, nationality and gender.
The two astronomers discussed results from the BICEP-2 experiment announced earlier this week, which offered evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe and for a rapid expansion of the cosmos (known as inflation) shortly after the Big Bang. If confirmed, this discovery is of huge significance and was rightly covered by news media all over the world.
Dr Peiris is a world-leading cosmologist now based at University College London (UCL), with degrees from Cambridge and Princeton. In 2012 she received the RAS Fowler Award in recognition of her immense contribution to her field at an early stage of her research career.
Dr Aderin-Pocock has a background in space engineering and science communication and is now co-presenter of theBBC’s The Sky at Night, a role which demands the ability to convey complex ideas to the public at large.
Both scientists are thus exceptionally well qualified to discuss the BICEP-2 results and were natural choices for the Newsnight piece.
In the Daily Mail article, columnist ‘Ephraim Hardcastle’ (the nom de plume of Peter Mackay) not only ignored their expertise entirely but incorrectly suggested that the BICEP-2 team consisted only of white, male, American astronomers.
Astronomy world-wide has long ceased to be a closed male world and the backgrounds of astronomers have long been culturally diverse. Specifically in Britain, women now make up 27% of UK university lecturers in astronomy [see e.g. the 
RAS Demographic Survey (2011)] and lead space- and ground-based research projects alike.
RAS President Prof. David Southwood commented: “Astronomy did not begin in Western Europe and has always been an international science. Today researchers from many nations and many cultures routinely work together to achieve shared goals. In the UK, our field is enriched by some of the most talented people from all over the world who choose to join teams in this country.
“It is deeply regrettable that the Daily Mail column chose to overlook the scientific achievements of the BICEP-2 team and the expertise of Hiranya and Maggie and instead concentrate on their skin colour and gender. The implied and deplorable message – that astronomy is the exclusive business of people who are white and male – completely ignores the successful efforts made by the RAS and other scientific bodies to create an environment where science can be done by those best suited to do it, irrespective of background culture, nationality or gender.”
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In the Dark 