How My Nobel Dream Bit the Dust
“You may speculate from the day that days were created,
but you may not speculate on what was before that.”
—Talmud, Tractate Hagigah 11b, 450 A.D.
To go back to the beginning, if there was a beginning, means testing the dominant theory of cosmogenesis, the model known as inflation. Inflation, first proposed in the early 1980s, was a bandage applied to treat the seemingly grave wounds cosmologists had found in the Big Bang model as originally conceived. To call inflation bold is an understatement; it implied that our universe began by expanding at the incomprehensible speed of light ... or even faster! Luckily, the bandage of inflation was only needed for an astonishingly minuscule fraction of a second. In that most microscopic ash of time, the very die of the cosmos was cast. All that was and ever would be, on a cosmic scale at least—vast assemblies of galaxies, and the geometry of the space between them—was forged.
For more than 30 years, inflation remained frustratingly unproven. Some said it couldn’t be proven. But everyone agreed on one thing: If cosmologists could detect a unique pattern in the cosmos’s earliest light, light known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a ticket to Stockholm was inevitable.
Suddenly, in March 2014, humanity’s vision of the cosmos was shaken. The team of which I had been a founding member had answered the eternal question in the affirmative: Time did have a single beginning. We had proof. It was an amazing time indeed.
For weeks I had known it was coming. Our entire team was furiously working to finalize the results we would soon make public. We had relentlessly reviewed the data, diligently debating the strength of the findings, discussing what could be one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. In the intensely competitive world of modern cosmology, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. If we were right, our detection would lift the veil on the birth of the universe. Careers would skyrocket, and we would be forever immortalized in the scientific canon. Detecting inflation equaled Nobel gold, plain and simple.
But what if we were wrong? It would be a disaster, not only for us as individual scientists but for science itself. Funding for our work would evaporate, tenure tracks would be derailed, professional reputations ruined. Once gleaming Nobel gold would be tarnished. Glory would be replaced by disappointment, embarrassment, perhaps even humiliation.
The juggernaut rolled on. The team’s leaders, confident in the quality of our results, held a press conference at Harvard University on March 17, 2014, and announced that
