Television static; how science works

"Front Row at the Dawn of Time," Lawrence M. Krauss's wonderfully titled editorial in the International Herald Tribune today, has two tidbits I wanted to note, both of them a little too long for a tweet. (At least for me, Twitter has become the replacement of blog posts that mostly just refer to an interesting article.)

The first has to do with cosmic background radiation, and it teaches "those of us old enough" something we might not have known:

... for those of us old enough to remember television before cable, when the TV stations went off the air and the screen filled with static, about 1 percent of the static visible on the screen was due to this radiation from the Big Bang.

So on the few occasions when I woke up in the middle of the night after falling asleep in front of the TV, mostly in the summer when time seemed to behave differently during the school vacation, and I would sometimes get into a rhythm of staying up until dawn to avoid the heat and humidity of the long days — on those few occasions, almost lost in the white noise, I was a witness to the Big Bang.

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The second point is a reminder about the grain of salt necessary when reading science journalism in newspapers:

It is an unfortunate facet of science reporting that it isn’t often made clear that most anomalies in experiments tend to go away, just as most theoretical ideas turn out to be wrong.

Instead of attributing significance to potentially strange results, it is the business of science to try and prove them wrong before we blindly move forward. Skepticism is the business of the day, and it is wise to remember this next time you read an astounding discovery claimed in the press.

Science is about results, and proving things, but it approaches proof as much by disproving as it does by proving.

How There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

This article by Sean Carroll, "A Universe from Nothing?", is a very clear explication of the two primary explanations in contemporary physics of how it is that there is something (the universe) rather than nothing. Carroll begins by referring to Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing" and David Albert's negative review of Krauss's book in the New York Times. Carroll also nicely lays out how Krauss and Albert are talking past each other, as they are addressing two different versions of the questions they differ on. 

But the real reason to read Carroll's article is independent of its occasion (the dispute between Krauss and Albert). Even those for those with little or no background in physics, Carroll lays out the issues so clearly that you can get a sense of what possibilities are established by contemporary physical theory. I cannot recommend the article highly enough!