Physicist’s reaction to news about Big Bang ‘smoking gun’ discovery is priceless

Over 30 years ago, Professor Andrei Linde, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University, was one of the lead authors on a research paper that detailed how the universe suddenly expanded at an exponential rate during the tiniest fractions of a second after the Big Bang — a concept called cosmic inflation.

When the news broke yesterday that astrophysicists had discovered actual physical evidence of this expansion, thus validating the work of Linde and his colleagues after all this time, Chao-Lin Kuo, one of Linde's coworkers at Stanford who was on the BICEP2 team that made the discovery, delivered the news to him.

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Check out his reaction:

It's hard not to get a little choked up when you see his shock morph into joy at the announcement.

It sounds like Kuo is speaking a different language when the door opens and he first tells Linde and his wife about the discovery. Technically, he is — it's the language of mathematics and probability — but that short phrase, "five sigma, at point two" basically means that he and his colleagues discovered gravitational waves with amplitude of 0.2 (which is apparently very large on the scales they're dealing with), and it's a solid detection, as the 'five sigma' means that a there's only a one in two million chance that the detection would have been due to a random fluctuation.

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This discovery is a huge one, not just as a validation of Linde's work and the work of his colleagues, or just the work of the physicists who made the discovery. If the BICEP2 detection stands up to peer scrutiny, it can have big implications for science, mostly by letting us rule out certain ideas about how gravity and the universe work and thus refining what we know. However, it can also, possibly, lead us in new directions, and it may even provide more support for the idea that our universe is only one of many that exist in an infinite multiverse.

(Screenshot and video courtesy of Stanford University)

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