DAVID SPERGEL: 宇宙怀疑论者
一个发现宇宙膨胀理论错误的天文物理学家
作者：Ron Cowen
John Jameson/Princeton Univ.
David Spergel first spotted the blunder while on a train in late March. Ten days earlier, researchers had made front-page headlines by holding a press conference announcing the probable detection of gravitational waves from the far reaches of space. That long-sought
signal provided evidence that the infant Universe had undergone a brief but enormous expansion called cosmic inflation, and the result had prompted talk of a Nobel prize for the team, which was led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
David发现这个错误是在三月份下旬，早在十天前，研究人员已经监测到来自太空深处的引力波，这个信号表明宇宙的膨胀来自一场大爆炸，这个研究结果使得这个团队获得了诺贝尔奖的提名，这个团队是有来自马萨诸塞州的天文物理实验室的John Kovac领导的。
Spergel was troubled from the start by the evidence that Kovac‘s team had gathered from the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole. As an astrophysicist who studies the early Universe at Princeton University in New Jersey, he worried that the signal might be an
artefact. On the train, en route to giving a lecture in New York City, he realized that the BICEP2 team had made a mistake when accounting for how nearby dust might alter the long-distance signal. He raised his concerns in his talk, and in May he co-authored
a paper that pointed out the flaws (R. Flauger et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7351; 2014).
Spergel对这个团队通过在你南极BICEP2望远镜手机的证据感到很困惑，作为一个已经研究多年的天文物理学家，他担心这个信号可能是人造信号。在去纽约的火车上，他认为BICEP2团队在尘埃如何改变远距离信号的问题上犯了错误，他在他的课上展开了讨论，在五月份，他以联合作者的身份发表一篇论文指出了其中的错误。
Spergel, who sports a shaved head and a voice that can fill a room, decided that he needed to speak out. “I wanted to let the broader physics community know there were reasons to have doubts,” he says.
Spergel这个说的最大声对BICEP2团队的结论摇头的人，坚信必须让他们知道为什么他们的结论是有疑问的。
Social media amplified his criticisms. A video of his New York talk drew nearly 2,000 views, alerting others to the controversy. Soon, talk of a Nobel prize for the BICEP2 team was eclipsed by discussions about how it had made a cosmic mistake.
之后，社交媒体放大了他的质疑，一个来自纽约的视频很快获得超过2000的点击量，让很多人都卷进了这样争论。很快，诺贝尔提名委员会开始审查他们如何犯错误的。
When the BICEP2 researchers published their findings in June (P. A. R. Ade?et al.?Phys. Rev. Lett.112, 241101; 2014), they were more tentative than at the press conference — although not enough to satisfy Spergel. A forthcoming analysis of satellite data may
soon settle the controversy. For cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the episode shows the danger of announcing major results too early. Although the BICEP2 researchers may have had good reasons to hold a press
conference, he says, “they or others in a similar situation in the future may lean towards awaiting some vetting”.
当BICEP2团队在六月份发表他们的结论的时候，他们也是踌躇的，尽管没有大道让Spergel的地步，一个从卫星传来的数据分析很快制止了争论，这个争议显示轻易太早下结论是十分危险的。Spergel说尽管BICEP2有足够的理由开个新闻发布会，我相信以后在这种情况下，他们会多等一会儿。
