Stories about science often suggest a process of steady advancement — a direct path from hypothesis to revelation. Yet it rarely happens that way. The road to progress is typically strewn with false starts, wrong turns and other miscues — as a group of astronomers and physicists known as the BICEP2 collaboration recently found out.
In March 2014, they announced to the world that their small telescope at the South Pole had uncovered possible signs of gravitational waves produced within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the Big Bang — potentially opening a window into a new regime of physics. The tentative findings garnered international headlines. But later that year, new data showed that the signal they’d seen was primarily due to dust in our galaxy rather than to gravitational waves from the cosmic dawn.
The experience was disappointing for the team behind BICEP ...
