Author: Katie Zavadski

by Katie Zavadski & Chris Bodenner

From Michael Lemonick’s explainer on the discovery of the “first direct evidence of cosmic inflation” (visualized in the above video referenced by a reader):

[J]ust .0000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds (give or take) after the Big Bang, the [Inflationary Universe theory] said, the cosmos underwent a burst of expansion so furious that it was briefly flying apart faster than the speed of light. Exceeding light speed is supposed to be impossible, except that that law applies only to something moving through spacetime, not spacetime itself expanding. Just as with gravitational waves, there’s plenty of reason to think it really happened, but again, no proof.

Not until now, anyway. … The telescope the researchers used—the [BICEP2]—is tuned to see the critical kind of polarization in background radiation, but there was no guarantee it ever would. Inflation theory comes in several versions, all of which posit different intensities. “In some,” says MIT’s Alan Guth, who was one of the inflationary universe theory’s original inventors, “the waves are so weak they could never be detected. To see them turn up is beautiful.”

Theoretical physicist Matt Strassler dives deeper. Jamie Condliffe describes how the BICEP2 crushes the competing popular idea of a cyclic universe:

The cyclic model, championed by Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, predicted that the Universe expanded and contracted over very long cycles. Starting with a Big Bang and ending with a Big Crunch, the growth of the Universe, Turok reckoned, would be tempered by gravity pulling it pack together, in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction. … The main benefit of the now-debunked cyclic model was that it neatly sidestepped the fact that all the matter in the Universe, every atom around us, had to come from somewhere. As far as it was concerned, everything had been here forever.

The inflation model, however, defines a very clear starting point to our Universe, before which there was… well, nobody quite knows.

MIT physics professor Max Tegmark further contrasts Inflationary Cosmology (IC) with the now-discredited Traditional Cosmology (TC):

Q: What caused our Big Bang?
TC: There’s no explanation – the equations simply assume it happened.
IC: The repeated doubling in size of an explosive subatomic speck of inflating material.

Q: Did our Big Bang happen at a single point?
TC: No.
IC: Almost: it began in a region of space much smaller than an atom.

Q: Where in space did our Big Bang explosion happen?
TC: It happened everywhere, at an infinite number of points, all at once, with no explanation for the synchronization.
IC: In that tiny region – but inflation stretched it out to about the size of a grapefruit growing so fast that the subsequent expansion made it larger than all the space that we see today.

Q: How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
TC: There’s no explanation — the equations simply assume that as soon as there was any space at all, it was infinite in size.
IC: By exploiting a clever loophole in Einstein’s general relativity theory, inflation produces an infinite number of galaxies by continuing forever, and an observer in one of these galaxies will view space and time differently, perceiving space as having been infinite already when inflation ended.

Q: How big is space?
TC: There’s no prediction.
IC: Probably infinite.

Nature‘s conversation with lead BICEP2 researcher John Kovac is here. He and his team’s discovery finally allows Stephen Hawking to claim victory in one of his famous bets. Sarah Gray looks ahead:

Despite meticulous checking by the [BICEP2] team, there is no way to be 100% certain of these results. The findings have to be verified, but according to Time, several research projects are already underway to test the results. Researchers are also already building BICEP3, which hopes to be operational by next summer. This discovery is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of learning about the expansion of the universe[;] it opens the door to new discovery and helps narrow down possible theories.

by Katie Zavadski & Patrick Appel

With Amazon raising the price of Prime by $20, Yannick Lejacq wonders how far Amazon can push consumers:

Giving up a few beers or a dinner out doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice compared to all the time and money Amazon Prime has saved me over the past few years. But I have to wonder what the current price jump portends for the future of Amazon. The company knows that I’m an addict. And like any addict, I’m not entirely reasonable when it comes to my spending habits. I say that Prime saves me money, but really I’m just assuming it does. The real convenience is that it saves me from lurking on countless other websites just to find the best possible deals.

So once I’m hooked, what’s another $20? Or another $50? How far can Amazon push Prime before it starts to lose customers rather than continue to gain?

Derek Thompson fits Prime into Amazon’s overall business strategy:

For investors, Prime represents a key lever for generating profits in the future. Many of the analysts I spoke to for my business column last year on Amazon said they didn’t think it could raise prices dramatically on most of its merchandise. Instead, they said Amazon could always raise the price of Prime on its most passionate customers and add hundreds of millions of dollars to its bottom line just like that. …

The power of memberships isn’t just that they represent dependable revenue for Amazon in the topsy-turvy world of retail. It’s also that they’re sticky for customers. Couch potatoes have a hard enough time canceling their $90-a-month gym memberships, thanks to status quo bias and general laziness. It’s even harder to justify canceling a $8.25-a-month membership that gets you free fast shipping to the biggest online store, a great digital video offering, and more, just because the price went up by less than $2 a month.

Jordan Weissmann crunches the numbers:

by Katie Zavadski

Matthew Cordle hit and killed Vincent Canzani while driving drunk. Joel Oliphint has the inside story of his viral video confession, which got him a sentence of six-and-a-half years:

The video’s shock factor (“I killed a man”), professional production (good lighting and editing, emotional music), and storytelling (building drama by obfuscating then revealing Cordle’s identity) all contributed to its appeal. But another aspect is Cordle’s averageness. He doesn’t come across like an actor. He’s focused, though not particularly poised. He seems like a regular, middle-class kid with whom millions of YouTube viewers could identify. Before the crash, Cordle’s sister Grace says she thought of him as “just a normal teenage kid. The problem is, he’s not a teenager anymore.” Chances are you know more than a few people like that — the man-child who never quite left his teenage years behind, going from job to job and partying hard on the weekends. The driven types could relate to him too; self-medicating a quarter-life crisis with massive amounts of alcohol is what a lot of middle-class kids call “college.” …

It’s true the video was not solely for the message and Canzani. It was for Cordle’s benefit, too, at least mentally and emotionally. The video didn’t alleviate the guilt of taking another man’s life, but admitting his guilt in a public way enabled Cordle to grapple with and accept it. This was something active when everything since the crash had been suffocatingly passive.

by Katie Zavadski

Steven Miller ponders the success of NYC’s Citi Bike:

Even when adjusted for its size, Citi Bike’s ridership numbers have quickly surpassed comparable systems. While there are many factors shaping Citi Bike’s success, a new report from NYU argues that the program’s connections to transit could be a key to its strikingly high ridership. … One in 10 Citi Bike stations is within 100 feet of a subway stop, more than half are within 750 feet and nearly three-quarters are within a quarter-mile. In the other two cities, both rail transit and bike-share stations are spaced farther apart, and their ridership numbers have lagged behind Citi Bike’s.

Meanwhile, J. Green finds that DC’s busiest bikeshares aren’t necessarily giving their neighbors an economic boost:

Some 66 percent of bikeshare users traveled to a destination where they expected to spend money. Of those, 63 percent planned to spend $10-$49 and 30 percent planned to spend more than $50. The researchers found that most users would spend money at businesses near CaBi stations, with 39 percent reporting spending would occur within 2 blocks of the station and an additional 40 percent indicating spending would occur within 4 blocks. According to the research, about 16 percent said they wouldn’t have made the trip had a CaBi station not been nearby. (While interesting, these figures would have been made more useful had they been compared to the amounts pedestrians, regular bicyclists, and car users expected to spend near the same stores).

As for the 140 businesses surveyed, the vast majority didn’t know whether CaBi had any effect on customer traffic levels, just 10 percent perceived an increase. About 20 percent thought that CaBi had directly and positively impacted sales, while the rest were unsure or neutral. The good news may be none thought CaBi hurt their sales. The vast majority of businesses (70 percent) also thought CaBi had a positive effect on the neighborhood. The rest weren’t sure or neutral. Again, no negative perceptions.

Previous Dish on bikeshare programs here and here.