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The ink dried.
The video logo says "NASA - JPL California Institute of Technology"
(National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cal Tech)
At 1:26:10 Dr. Lawrence reads a question from a sheet that someone has asked by Internet:
"'What is the biggest surprise from the CMB data?' (I'll take that to mean from Planck.)"
Again, he appears rather ill-at-ease having to answer this, and he hems and haws over what to say and what not to say.
"There weren't .. there weren't the kind of surprises that we get here, that result in, statements that you SOMETIMES hear scientists make, like, um, 'WOW! Everything we thought yesterday turns out to be wrong!!' Heh, heh. Now, you've seen how it works: we've got, got, a model that fits better than ever, with parameters that we've measured better than ever, [pause, shuffle, squirm] so, perhaps, let me just talk and flip back here, it'll take a while to get back to the slide I want to show you. Perhaps the question about the anisotropy, difference between two halves of the sky, still being there, that, that's potentially quite important. The fact that the cold spot is still there. The fact that the Hubble constant .. let me add one more thing about the Hubble constant. The reason that Planck gets a low Hubble constant is because the mass that we determine is high, and higher than before: higher mass, lower Hubble constant; and that comes from these bumps and wiggles out here that have never been measured before. So, uh, it's not that anybody before was wrong, it's just that the data didn't exist before to do that. But the fact that the Hubble constant is as low as it is, intention, that's interesting, there are some numbers about clusters of galaxies, that maybe initially looked a little surprising but that's going to be sorted out. But there's one thing that I didn't mention, and this is another interesting fact, and maybe this starts to look like a little bit of a surprise. You see this red line [points to first part of curve in "Planck TT Spectrum" graph] going through these points here? Except your impression by eye, that there are more points on the low side here than on the upper side, is correct. This, this model doesn't fit these measurements down here [points below the red 'best-fit' line in the graph], as well as it does down here [points on both sides of lower graph]. You can kind of see it in the residuals down here. They're more on the negative side than on the positive side. You can, you can try to turn the knobs on the model lots of ways. And there are some things that for a while look kind of promising. You can fit these fit these points... That's maybe a bit of a surprise.
"...We've got some things that's like, 'Is this the kind of thing I should be lying awake at night worrying about'?" ...
Another audience member asks if this Planck data gives any new insights regarding the shape of the universe, since a few hundred years ago, we thought the 'earth was flat', but now we know it's a sphere. [Actually, we've known that Earth is a sphereoid for about 90 years.]
Dr. Lawrence answers that now we know that light travels in straight lines, that outer space is not curved (as Einstein postulated), and that now we believe that the universe is flat (instead of the earth).
So, therefore, while we once thought that the universe is a sphere and the earth is flat, now we've grown up to believe that the earth is sphereoid and the universe is flat.
How d'ya like that for progress?
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