What It's Like to Be Right About the Big Bang: Genesis of a Viral Video

[rug]

What's it like to learn that your decades' worth of work have paid off? Now we know.

Mar 18 2014, 7:38 AM ET
Megan Garber

Imagine that you have spent 30 years of your career working on a single project, dedicated to a single idea. Imagine that there have been doubters along the way. Imagine that you, yourself, have occasionally been unsure about whether it's all worth it.

Imagine what it would feel like to find out that it is.

Well, now we know what that's like—or, at least, we have a good idea. Yesterday, as part of the big announcement that the Big Bang's "smoking gun" has been found, Stanford posted a video to YouTube. The brief production features the physicist Chao-Lin Kuo paying a visit to the home of his colleague, the fellow physicist Andrei Linde, to tell him that all his work had paid off: New evidence supports the cosmic inflation theory that Linde has been championing for decades. The theories he has honed and advocated are likely correct. He has, to be scientific about it, hit the jackpot.

The video is remarkable not just for its content—the hugs! the wine! the shock turning into joy turning into relief!—but also for what it tries to do: to use the capabilities of the Internet to add a human dimension to the typical opacity of cosmological science. It was successful, too: In a single day, the video got more than half a million views—an impressive reach, when you consider that the production's subject is gravitational waves.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/what-its-like-to-be-right-about-the-big-bang-genesis-of-a-viral-video/284474/

[Hekate]

1. Absolutely wonderful! What a fantastic moment!

I love scientists

[newfie11]

2. +infinity

[Gothmog]

3. This is a great video

Thanks for posting

[Octafish]

4. Thank you, rug!

Thank you, Dr. Linde.

Interesting how We the People -- or life -- may be the reason for the universe. We certainly are in the right space-time for it.

[malaise]

5. Magnificent

Rec

[Ron Obvious]

6. I wonder why everyone is focussing on the Big Bang?

There hasn't been any real doubt about the Big Bang for decades, ever since the discovery of the microwave background radiation confirmed it.

The significance of the (possible) discovery of graviational waves is that it is the last missing bit of the standard model of physics and Einstein's model of gravity, not that it confirms the Big Bang.