This is a bi-lingual blog of the members of the ADAMIS team at Laboratoire APC and invited guests. We comment on selected papers and events exploring, or relevant to, the interface between physics, cosmology, applied math, statistics, and numerical algorithms and which we have found interesting.

The opinions expressed in this blog reflect those of their authors and neither that of the ADAMIS group as a whole nor of Laboratoire APC.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

First Planck science papers are out ... but CMB-free ... [arXiv:1101.2048, ..., arXiv:1101.1721]

First science results from Planck are finally available. At last ... Well they have been out since January, 11, but let's not be picky about these few weeks ... What is that after all, when compared to more than 15 years of sweating and toiling it took to get the instrument designed, built, tested, launched, and operating ... And moreover so well, as these recent results seem to demonstrate so convincingly.

Granted for some of us, including the writer, the intensity of work on Planck oscillated wildly over the time, there were however those, who unfailingly and ardently put nearly all their time, day-in day-out, in assuring the project's success. Kudos to all those ... and all the others without whom this might not have been happening ...

A complete list of these first science papers can be found here or here. The reported results derived from less then one year of the data (while the satellite is up there at the Lagrange point L2 of the Earth-Sun system, scanning incessantly for well over 20 months and will keep going till the end of this year for its High Frequency Instrument and beyond that for the Low Frequency one) are indeed quite remarkable and the list of science topics where Planck is already making a difference quite long. Check some other friendly blog for a nice summary and the official ESA press release.

All so satisfying, eh ?! But wait ! Exciting they may be, however even quick browsing through the papers titles suggests that none of these first results from after all a quintessential CMB satellite, is directly related to CMB ?! This becomes even odder, when one realizes that no CMB signal is lurking anywhere from between the instrument noise in any of the full-sky maps shown in any of these papers even at the frequencies at which the familiar pattern of hot and cold patches should be peeking unmistakably at us, e.g., Fig. 43 of this paper. Woow ... quite a letdown one might think.

But then wait again, on the second thought the fact that no CMB results appear in these early papers may indeed be not that unusual. After all we all heard for a decade now how hard it is to measure the CMB anisotropies. It is enough to think of how minute these anisotropies are and how well the data and the instrument need to be understood to assure that the derived results are correct with such a precision. No surprise then that this has to take time. And then given that CMB is just one, it does not seem so particularly strange that the team wants to put its best foot forward right from the onset and make sure that everything is as good as it only can be. Even if that takes time ... After all, 15 years have already passed anyway ...

However, making a concerted effort, e.g., as described in Sect. 8.2 of this Planck paper, to actually remove the CMB from the presented sky maps ?! Well that seems to be an utterly different story.
Surely it looks like too much, too paranoid, unwarranted wasteful use of resources by those, who in the course of 15 year long project without any doubt have had to lose their distance to what they do, to its place in the "bigger picture", and to their study subject ?!

Well that all may well be but ... unintended use of the data is not such an unusual occurrence in the present-day science. Science prides itself of being a 'self-regulating' system, which sooner or later rejects cheaters and charlatans of all sorts, however the issue of using somebody's data without his/her consent has been always a bit more tricky. (An analogy with computer hackers and proprietary software cracking imposes itself here and in fact does have a similar moral ambiguity for many.) Experimental teams do tend to look at those as their own property at least during a so-called proprietary period, i.e., time prior the data has to be publicly released as usually, at least in the case of so large and expensive projects as Planck, is imposed by the funding sources. They do tend to protect their property by hedging themselves with safety guards of all sorts and imposing rules and penalties on mis-behaving team members.

Such a right is typically recognized by others for, let's call it, moral, i.e., "they worked for that hard and long enough", and pragmatic, i.e., "after all only the experimental insiders with 15 year experience have enough expertise to do it right for us", reasons. Typically, but not always ... And technology provides new ways for abuse ... Just recall the role of cell-phone cameras in the "Pamela case", or PostScript deciphering of the Boomerang CMB anisotropy maps, or just drawing unwarranted, premature conclusions from a public relation image as it already happened in the case of Planck and this picture. In none of those cases anything tangible has been stolen, has it ?!

Intentions of those who do that, let's call them, generously, scientific mavericks, are diverse ... In some cases it is an act of yet another moral crusade of those protesting teams, who never fully and publicly release their data. Some think that the data are usually paid anyway with tax-payers money and thus belong to everybody. For yet others, it is just due to an inner urge to be first, to scoop the original teams of a thunder, gain 5 minutes of fame, before inevitably being relegated to oblivion ... (hopefully) approaching as soon as a more thorough and meaningful analysis is provided by the original teams.

Whatever the intentions, the facts seem to indicate that once data are out in whatever form of a plot, an image, or a paper, well, they are out, and be better prepared for that, as the Planck team has just tried.

And the rest of the science world will need to wait a bit longer ... even for a mere glimpse ...

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