Comment This is my office mate's Ph.D. thesis (Score 5, Informative) 542
I work at UChicago (Carlstrom, the professor here, is my advisor). For more information about CMB polarisation, I reccomend Wayne Hu's (a theorists) webpages at http://background.uchicago.edu.
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.
