BICEP2’s eyes on the prize

On 17 March 2014, a team of astronomers working on the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole announced that they had detected what some call the smoking gun of cosmic inflation. In a Harvard University press conference and in papers simultaneously submitted to scientific journals, they claimed to have seen a signature in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background indicative of primordial gravitational waves (see John Carlstrom, Tom Crawford, and Lloyd Knox, “Particle physics and the cosmic microwave background,” Physics Today, March 2015, page 28 ). If correct, that detection would have been in contention for the title of “discovery of the century.”

Media attention was intense and widespread. As a cosmologist, I was excited about what seemed likely to be the opening of a new observational window into the earliest moments of creation, grateful that Nature had been so amazingly kind to us, and eager for further exploration. I enjoyed seeing the South Pole Telescope from my own collaboration basking in reflected glory as it photobombed BICEP2 in media from all around the world.

As many readers will recall, the story did not hold together for long. Glory faded to ignominy. Within weeks the entire cosmology community knew the claim was in doubt; within a year the BICEP2 team, in concert with the Planck collaboration, had convincingly demonstrated that their signal was in fact thermal emission from interstellar dust grains. They had made fantastically low-noise measurements of the sky at millimeter wavelengths, with exquisite control of instrumental systematics, but they claimed a stronger case against galactic contamination than was warranted by the data.

What went wrong? That question led cosmologist Brian Keating from the University of California, San Diego, an originator of the BICEP concept and the source of its name, to do some soul searching. In his new book Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor, Keating blends an inside account of the BICEP2 debacle, his own personal history, a history of cosmology, and an anti-Nobel jeremiad.

For Keating, what went wrong comes down to this: The team’s judgment was corrupted by the desire for the glory of a Nobel-worthy discovery and the fear that credit might go to their competitors if they did not act quickly. He speculates that the existence of the Nobel Prize itself stoked such desires and that he may even have been edged out of the leadership of BICEP2 by the Nobel rule of no more than three laureates per prize.

Keating’s discussion of the Nobel Prize is timely. The prize’s negative effect on the cosmology theory community has come up more than once in discussions I’ve had over the past year. Keating provides a critique from many angles and proposes solutions as well. That discourse, however, was my least favorite aspect of the book. The other elements of Losing the Nobel Prize were much more compelling and came together as an organic whole. Whenever Keating returned to the subject of the prize, I felt yanked out of the arc of the story.

Rather than all that attention on the Nobel, I wanted more details on how the team managed to trick themselves into being so confident that they held a press conference about their findings. They even produced a YouTube video of Chao-Lin Kuo of the BICEP2 leadership delivering the news of a 5-sigma detection to his Stanford University colleague Andrei Linde, one of inflation’s handful of theoretical discoverers. That video is now painful to watch.

My other chief complaint about the book involves some of the physics explanations. For example, referring to the Big Bang, Keating writes: “The model seemed to violate Newton’s third law, a law that every freshman physics student learns: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The Big Bang seems to be all reaction, with no action preceding it.” With that and a few other passages, I found myself wondering if the author’s comments expressed an idiosyncratic viewpoint, poetic license, or just plain error. However, I appreciated many of the other scientific explanations, such as how one could construct a modulating polarimeter by wearing polarized sunglasses and spinning around.

I enjoyed numerous other aspects of the book as well. I learned fascinating things from the history of cosmology that I hadn’t known before. The personal account is well-told, compelling, and nicely woven together with early parts of the BICEP story. For example, Keating writes about having to leave Antarctica to help his ailing, estranged father: “The irony of it all was painful. For years I’d dedicated my life to trying to reveal the cosmos’s origin story, even though my own version was mostly a mystery. Then, suddenly, just when the telescope I’d ‘sired’ had reached adolescence, I was forced to abandon it, just to comfort a man who’d left me as a child. In my gut, I knew there’d be many telescopes to come, but I only had one father, flaws and all.”

The prose sometimes approaches the richness of poetry: “Dust complicates cosmology, yet it is the history of our universe, writ small. Dust, ubiquitous and unglamorous, never clamors for attention but cannot be ignored, for dust—star stuff itself—is the very firmament beneath our feet.” Some might find such passages too much. I enjoyed those flourishes. Sprinkled throughout are instances of good humor, such as Keating’s observation that both he and Galileo got on the wrong side of “the Church” (which for Keating was Professor Sarah Church of Stanford).

Losing the Nobel Prize highlighted the extent to which fear of losing out on credit for a huge discovery corrupted the integrity of the BICEP2 team’s process, which I had not fully appreciated before. But how important was the existence of the Nobel Prize itself? Keating claims it was very important, but he does not attempt to disentangle the influence of the prize from other social and psychological pressures. Also, as often happens with firsthand accounts of conflict, his speculation as to Nobel-related motivations for his exclusion from the leadership left me wondering about the perspectives of the others involved.

All the same, I found Losing the Nobel Prize a compelling personal memoir, a fascinating history of cosmology, and an interesting firsthand account of a dramatic scientific adventure.