## Remembering Clover

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on April 10, 2018 by telescoper

I was tidying up some papers in my desk yesterday and came across a clipping dated April 9th 2009, i.e. exactly nine years ago to the day. Amazed by this coincidence, I resolved to post it on here but was unable to work out how to use the new-fangled scanner in the Data Innovation Institute office so had to wait until I could get expert assistance this morning:

Sorry it’s a bit crumpled, but I guess that demonstrates the authenticity of its provenance.

The full story, as it appeared in the print edition of the Western Mail, can also be found online here. By the way it’s me on the stepladder, pretending to know something about astronomical instrumentation.

I wrote at some length about the background to the cancellation of the Clover experiment here. In a nutshell, however, Clover involved the Universities of Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester and was designed to detect the primordial B-mode signal from its vantage point in Chile. The chance to get involved in a high-profile cosmological experiment was one of the reasons I moved to Cardiff from Nottingham almost a decade ago, and I was looking forward to seeing the data arriving for analysis. Although I’m primarily a theorist, I have some experience in advanced statistical methods that might have been useful in analysing the output. It would have been fun blogging about it too.

Unfortunately, however, none of that happened. Because of its budget crisis, and despite the fact that it had already spent a large amount (£4.5M) on Clover, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) decided to withdraw the funding needed to complete it (£2.5M) and cancel the experiment. I was very disappointed, but that’s nothing compared to Paolo (shown in the picture) who lost his job as a result of the decision and took his considerable skills and knowledge abroad.

We will never know for sure, but if Clover had gone ahead it might well have detected the same signal found five years later by BICEP2, which was announced in 2014. Working at three different frequencies (95, 150 and 225GHz) Clover would have had a better capability than BICEP2 in distinguishing the primordial signal from contamination from Galactic dust emission (which, as we now know, is the dominant contribution to the BICEP2 result; see thread here), although that still wouldn’t have been easy because of sensitivity issues. As it turned out, the BICEP2 signal turned out to be a false alarm so, looking on the bright side, perhaps at least the members of the Clover team avoided making fools of themselves on TV!

P.S. Note also that I moved to Cardiff in mid-2007, so I had not spent 5 years working on the Clover project by the time it was cancelled as discussed in the newspaper article, but many of my Cardiff colleagues had.

## WMAP wins the 2018 Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on December 4, 2017 by telescoper

It’s very nice on a gloomy Monday morning to be able to share some exciting news and to congratulate so many friends and colleagues, for last night the 2018 Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics was awarded to the team who worked on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The citation reads:

For detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies.

The award, which is for the sizeable sum of \$3 Million, will be shared among the 27 members of the WMAP team whose names I list here in full (team leaders are in italics):

Chris Barnes; Rachel Bean; Charles Bennett; Olivier Doré; Joanna Dunkley,;Benjamin M. Gold; Michael Greason; Mark Halpern; Robert Hill, Gary F. Hinshaw, Norman Jarosik, Alan Kogut, Eiichiro Komatsu, David Larson, Michele Limon, Stephan S. Meyer, Michael R. Nolta, Nils Odegard, Lyman Page, Hiranya V. Peiris, Kendrick Smith, David N. Spergel, Greg S. Tucker, Licia Verde, Janet L. Weiland, Edward Wollack, and Edward L. (Ned) Wright.

I know quite a few of these people personally, including Hiranya, Licia, Eiichiro, Joanna, Olivier and Ned, so it’s a special pleasure to congratulate them – and the other members of the team – on this well-deserved award.

Don’t spend all the money in the same shop!

## What the Power Spectrum misses

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on August 2, 2017 by telescoper

Just taking a short break from work I chatted over coffee to one of the students here at the Niels Bohr Institute about various things to do with the analysis of signals in the Fourier domain (as you do). That discussion reminded me of this rather old post (from 2009) which I thought might be worth a second airing (after a bit of editing). The discussion is all based on past cosmological data (from WMAP) rather than the most recent (from Planck), but that doesn’t change anything qualitatively. So here you are.

The picture above shows the all-sky map of fluctuations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background across the sky as revealed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, known to its friends as WMAP.

I spent many long hours fiddling with the data coming from the WMAP experiment, partly because I’ve never quite got over the fact that such wonderful data actually exists. When I started my doctorate in 1985 the whole field of CMB analysis was so much pie in the sky, as no experiments had yet been performed with the sensitivity to reveal the structures we now see. This is because they are very faint and easily buried in noise. The fluctuations in temperature from pixel to pixel across the sky are of order one part in a hundred thousand of the mean temperature (i.e. about 30 microKelvin on a background temperature of about 3 Kelvin). That’s smoother than the surface of a billiard ball. That’s why it took such a long time to make the map shown above, and why it is such a triumphant piece of science.

I blogged a while ago about the idea that the structure we see in this map was produced by sound waves reverberating around the early Universe. The techniques cosmologists use to analyse this sound are similar to those used in branches of acoustics except that we only see things in projection on the celestial sphere which requires a bit of special consideration.

One of the things that sticks in my brain from my undergraduate years is being told that if you don’t know what you’re doing as a physicist you should start by making a Fourier transform of everything. This approach breaks down the phenomenon being studied into a set of  plane waves with different wavelengths corresponding to analysing the different tones present in a complicated sound.

It’s often very good advice to do such a decomposition for one-dimensional time series or fluctuation fields in three-dimensional Cartesian space, even you do know what you’re doing, but it doesn’t work with a sphere because plane waves don’t fit properly on a curved surface. Fortunately, however, there is a tried-and-tested alternative involving spherical harmonics rather than plane waves.

Spherical harmonics are quite complicated beasts mathematically but they have pretty similar properties to Fourier harmonics in many respects. In particular they are represented as complex numbers having real and imaginary parts or, equivalently, an amplitude and a phase (usually called the argument by mathematicians),

$Z=X+iY = R \exp(i\phi)$

This latter representation is the most useful one for CMB fluctuations because the simplest versions of inflationary theory predict that the phases φ of each of the spherical harmonic modes should be randomly distributed. What this really means is that there is no information content in their distribution so that the harmonic modes are in a state of maximum statistical disorder or entropy. This property also guarantees that the distribution of fluctuations over the sky should have a Gaussian distribution.

If you accept that the fluctuations are Gaussian then only the amplitudes of the spherical harmonic coefficients are useful. Indeed, their statistical properties can be specified entirely by the variance of these amplitudes as a function of mode frequency. This pre-eminently important function is called the power-spectrum of the fluctuations, and it is shown here for the WMAP data:

Although the units on the axes are a bit strange it doesn”t require too much imagination to interpret this in terms of a sound spectrum. There is a characteristic tone (at the position of the big peak) plus a couple of overtones (the bumps at higher frequencies). However these features are not sharp so the overall sound is not at all musical.

If the Gaussian assumption is correct then the power-spectrum contains all the useful statistical information to be gleaned from the CMB sky, which is why so much emphasis has been placed on extracting it accurately from the data.

Conversely, though, the power spectrum is completely insensitive to any information in the distribution of spherical harmonic phases. If something beyond the standard model made the Universe non-Gaussian it would affect the phases of the harmonic modes in a way that would make them non-random.

However,I will now show you how important phase information could actually be, if only we could find a good way of exploiting it. Let’s start with a map of the Earth, with the colour representing height of the surface above mean sea level:

You can see the major mountain ranges (Andes, Himalayas) quite clearly as red in this picture and note how high Antarctica is…that’s one of the reasons so much astronomy is done there.

Now, using the same colour scale we have the WMAP data again (in Galactic coordinates).

The virture of this representation of the map is that it shows how smooth the microwave sky is compared to the surface of the Earth. Note also that you can see a bit of crud in the plane of the Milky Way that serves as a reminder of the difficulty of cleaning the foregrounds out.

Clearly these two maps have completely different power spectra. The Earth is dominated by large features made from long-wavelength modes whereas the CMB sky has relatively more small-scale fuzz.

Now I’m going to play with these maps in the following rather peculiar way. First, I make a spherical harmonic transform of each of them. This gives me two sets of complex numbers, one for the Earth and one for WMAP. Following the usual fashion, I think of these as two sets of amplitudes and two sets of phases. Note that the spherical harmonic transformation preserves all the information in the sky maps, it’s just a different representation.

Now what I do is swap the amplitudes and phases for the two maps. First, I take the amplitudes of WMAP and put them with the phases for the Earth. That gives me the spherical harmonic representation of a new data set which I can reveal by doing an inverse spherical transform:

This map has exactly the same amplitudes for each mode as the WMAP data and therefore possesses an identical power spectrum to that shown above. Clearly, though, this particular CMB sky is not compatible with the standard cosmological model! Notice that all the strongly localised features such as coastlines appear by virtue of information contained in the phases but absent from the power-spectrum.

To understand this think how sharp features appear in a Fourier transform. A sharp spike at a specific location actually produces a broad spectrum of Fourier modes with different frequencies. These modes have to add in coherently at the location of the spike and cancel out everywhere else, so their phases are strongly correlated. A sea of white noise also has a flat power spectrum but has random phases. The key difference between these two configurations is not revealed by their spectra but by their phases.

Fortunately there is nothing quite as wacky as a picture of the Earth in the real data, but it makes the point that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than can be described in terms of the power spectrum!

Finally, perhaps in your mind’s eye you might consider what it might look lie to do the reverse experiment: recombine the phases of WMAP with the amplitudes of the Earth.

If the WMAP data are actually Gaussian, then this map is a sort of random-phase realisation of the Earth’s power spectrum. Alternatively you can see that it is the result of running a kind of weird low-pass filter over the WMAP fluctuations. The only striking things it reveals are (i) a big blue hole associated with foreground contamination, (ii) a suspicious excess of red in the galactic plane owing to the same problem, and (iiI) a strong North-South asymmetry arising from the presence of Antarctica.

There’s no great scientific result here, just a proof that spherical harmonic phases are potentially interesting because of the information they contain about strongly localised features

PS. These pictures were made by a former PhD student of mine, Patrick Dineen, who has since quit astrophysics  to work in the financial sector for Winton Capital, which has over the years recruited a number of astronomy and cosmology graduates and also sponsors a Royal Astronomical Society prize. That shows that the skills and knowledge obtained in the seemingly obscure field of cosmological data analysis have applications elsewhere!

## CMB Spectral Distortions Revisited

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2017 by telescoper

While uploading some bibliographic information for bureaucratic purposes yesterday I noticed that an old paper of mine had recently attracted a number of citations. The paper was written while I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex in 1990, but not published until 1991 by which time I had moved to Queen Mary College (as it was then called). The citation history of this article is actually quite interesting:

You can see that it was cited a bit immediately after publication, then endured a long spell from 1997 to 2012 in which nobody seemed interested in it, then experienced something of a revival. It currently has a total of about 49 citations, which doesn’t exactly make it a classic in a field which is extremely active, but it’s nice to see it hasn’t been forgotten entirely.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

As the abstract makes clear we wrote this paper in response to a measurement of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation by the FIRAS instrument on the satellite COBE that had demonstrated that it was extremely well fitted by a Planck spectrum, with little room for any deviation away from a perfect black-body shape. Here’s the measured curve from COBE and some other experiments at the time:

The accuracy of the fit allows one to place limits on any process happening in the early Universe that might produce a distortion of the spectrum. There are a number of things that could do this. Any energy released in the early Universe takes time to thermalise, i.e. for the radiation field and the matter to come into thermal equilibrium via Compton scattering, double Compton scattering and Bremsstrahlung. Imperfect thermalisation produces a spectrum which doesn’t quite match the Planck curve.

Two types of distortion are possible, both introduced in classic papers from 1969 and 1970 by Rashid Sunyaev and Ya. B. Zel’dovich. One type is called a y-distortion (which corresponds to photons being shifted from low frequency and the other is called a μ-distortion, which is described by inserting a chemical potential term to the usual Planck formula for the black-body spectrum. Observational limits on both forms of distortion are very tight : |y|<1.5 ×10-5; |μ|<1.5 ×10-5, which places stringent limits on any energy release, including that which would arise from the dissipation of primordial acoustic waves (which is what John and I concentrated on in the paper).

So why did interest in this get revived a few years ago? The answer to that is that advances in relevant technology have now made it possible to think about an experiment that can measure much smaller spectral distortions than has hitherto been possible. A proposal for an experiment, called PIXIE, which includes such a measurement, is described here. Although spectral distortions are only a secondary science goal for PIXIE, it could push down the upper limits quoted above by a factor of 1000 or so, at which level we should expect to see departures from the Planck curve within the standard model, which would be a very important test of basic cosmological theory.

That all depends on whether PIXIE – or something like it – goes ahead.

## A Spot of Hype

Posted in Astrohype, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 19, 2017 by telescoper

A few weeks ago a paper came out in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (accompanied by a press release from the Royal Astronomical Society) about a possible explanation for the now-famous cold spot in the cosmic microwave background sky that I’ve blogged about on a number of occasions:

If the standard model of cosmology is correct then a spot as cold as this and as large as this is quite a rare event, occurring only about 1% of the time in sky patterns simulated using the model assumptions. One possible explanation of this ( which I’ve discussed before) is that this feature is generated not by density fluctuations in the primordial plasma (which are thought to cause the variation of temperature of the cosmic microwave background across the sky), but by something much more recent in the evolution of the Universe, namely a local large void in the matter distribution which would cause a temperature fluctuation by the Sachs-Wolfe Effect.

The latest paper by Mackenzie et al. (which can be found on the arXiv here) pours enough cold water on that explanation to drown it completely and wash away the corpse. A detailed survey of the galaxy distribution in the direction of the cold spot shows no evidence for an under-density deep enough to affect the CMB. But if the cold spot is not caused by a supervoid, what is it caused by?

Right at the end of the paper the authors discuss a few alternatives,  some of them invoking exotic’ physics early in the Universe’s history. One such possibility arises if we live in an inflationary Universe in which our observable universe is just one of a (perhaps infinite) collection of bubble-like domains which are now causally disconnected. If our bubble collided with another bubble early on then it might distort the cosmic microwave background in our bubble, in much the same way that a collision with another car might damage your car’s bodywork.

For the record I’ve always found this explanation completely implausible. A simple energy argument suggests that if such a collision were to occur between two inflationary bubbles, it is much more likely to involve their mutual destruction than a small dint. In other words, both cars would be written off.

Nevertheless, the press have seized on this possible explanation, got hold of the wrong end of the stick and proceeded to beat about the bush with it. See, for example, the Independent headline: Mysterious ‘cold spot’ in space could be proof of a parallel universe, scientists say’.

No. Actually, scientists don’t say that. In particular, the authors of the paper don’t say it either. In fact they don’t mention proof’ at all. It’s pure hype by the journalists. I don’t blame Mackenzie et al, nor the RAS Press team. It’s just silly reporting.

Anyway, I’m sure I can hear you asking what I think is the origin of the cold spot. Well, the simple answer is that I don’t know for sure. The more complicated answer is that I strongly suspect that at least part of the explanation for why this patch of sky looks as cold as it does is tied up with another anomalous feature of the CMB, i.e. the hemispherical power asymmetry.

In the standard cosmological model the CMB fluctuations are statistically isotropic, which means the variance is the same everywhere on the sky. In observed maps of the microwave background, however, there is a slight but statistically significant variation of the variance, in such a way that the half of the sky that includes the cold spot has larger variance than the opposite half.

My suspicion is that the hemispherical power asymmetry is either an instrumental artifact (i.e. a systematic of the measurement) or is generated by improper substraction of foreground signals (from our galaxy or even from within the Solar system). Whatever causes it, this effect could well modulate the CMB temperature in such a way that it makes the cold spot look more impressive than it actually is. It seems to me that the cold spot could be perfectly consistent with the standard model if this hemispherical anomaly is taken into account. This may not be exotic’ or exciting’ or feed the current fetish for the multiverse, but I think it’s the simplest and most probable explanation.

Call me old-fashioned.

## A Quite Interesting Question: How Loud Was the Big Bang?

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on March 16, 2017 by telescoper

I just found out this morning that this blog got a mention on the QI Podcast. It’s taken a while for this news to reach me, as the item concerned is two years old! You can find this discussion here, about 16 minutes in. And no, it’s not in connection with yawning psychopaths. It was about the vexed question of how loud was the Big Bang?

I’ve posted on this before (here and here)but since I’m very busy again today I  should recycle the discussion, and update it as it relates to the cosmic microwave background, which is what one of the things I work on on the rare occasions on which I get to do anything interesting.

As you probably know the Big Bang theory involves the assumption that the entire Universe – not only the matter and energy but also space-time itself – had its origins in a single event a finite time in the past and it has been expanding ever since. The earliest mathematical models of what we now call the  Big Bang were derived independently by Alexander Friedman and George Lemaître in the 1920s. The term “Big Bang” was later coined by Fred Hoyle as a derogatory description of an idea he couldn’t stomach, but the phrase caught on. Strictly speaking, though, the Big Bang was a misnomer.

Friedman and Lemaître had made mathematical models of universes that obeyed the Cosmological Principle, i.e. in which the matter was distributed in a completely uniform manner throughout space. Sound consists of oscillating fluctuations in the pressure and density of the medium through which it travels. These are longitudinal “acoustic” waves that involve successive compressions and rarefactions of matter, in other words departures from the purely homogeneous state required by the Cosmological Principle. The Friedman-Lemaitre models contained no sound waves so they did not really describe a Big Bang at all, let alone how loud it was.

However, as I have blogged about before, newer versions of the Big Bang theory do contain a mechanism for generating sound waves in the early Universe and, even more importantly, these waves have now been detected and their properties measured.

The above image shows the variations in temperature of the cosmic microwave background as charted by the Planck Satellite. The average temperature of the sky is about 2.73 K but there are variations across the sky that have an rms value of about 0.08 milliKelvin. This corresponds to a fractional variation of a few parts in a hundred thousand relative to the mean temperature. It doesn’t sound like much, but this is evidence for the existence of primordial acoustic waves and therefore of a Big Bang with a genuine “Bang” to it.

A full description of what causes these temperature fluctuations would be very complicated but, roughly speaking, the variation in temperature you corresponds directly to variations in density and pressure arising from sound waves.

So how loud was it?

The waves we are dealing with have wavelengths up to about 200,000 light years and the human ear can only actually hear sound waves with wavelengths up to about 17 metres. In any case the Universe was far too hot and dense for there to have been anyone around listening to the cacophony at the time. In some sense, therefore, it wouldn’t have been loud at all because our ears can’t have heard anything.

Setting aside these rather pedantic objections – I’m never one to allow dull realism to get in the way of a good story- we can get a reasonable value for the loudness in terms of the familiar language of decibels. This defines the level of sound (L) logarithmically in terms of the rms pressure level of the sound wave Prms relative to some reference pressure level Pref

L=20 log10[Prms/Pref].

(the 20 appears because of the fact that the energy carried goes as the square of the amplitude of the wave; in terms of energy there would be a factor 10).

There is no absolute scale for loudness because this expression involves the specification of the reference pressure. We have to set this level by analogy with everyday experience. For sound waves in air this is taken to be about 20 microPascals, or about 2×10-10 times the ambient atmospheric air pressure which is about 100,000 Pa.  This reference is chosen because the limit of audibility for most people corresponds to pressure variations of this order and these consequently have L=0 dB. It seems reasonable to set the reference pressure of the early Universe to be about the same fraction of the ambient pressure then, i.e.

Pref~2×10-10 Pamb.

The physics of how primordial variations in pressure translate into observed fluctuations in the CMB temperature is quite complicated, because the primordial universe consists of a plasma rather than air. Moreover, the actual sound of the Big Bang contains a mixture of wavelengths with slightly different amplitudes. In fact here is the spectrum, showing a distinctive signature that looks, at least in this representation, like a fundamental tone and a series of harmonics…

If you take into account all this structure it all gets a bit messy, but it’s quite easy to get a rough but reasonable estimate by ignoring all these complications. We simply take the rms pressure variation to be the same fraction of ambient pressure as the averaged temperature variation are compared to the average CMB temperature,  i.e.

Prms~ a few ×10-5Pamb.

If we do this, scaling both pressures in logarithm in the equation in proportion to the ambient pressure, the ambient pressure cancels out in the ratio, which turns out to be a few times 10-5. With our definition of the decibel level we find that waves of this amplitude, i.e. corresponding to variations of one part in a hundred thousand of the reference level, give roughly L=100dB while part in ten thousand gives about L=120dB. The sound of the Big Bang therefore peaks at levels just a bit less than 120 dB.

As you can see in the Figure above, this is close to the threshold of pain,  but it’s perhaps not as loud as you might have guessed in response to the initial question. Modern popular beat combos often play their dreadful rock music much louder than the Big Bang….

A useful yardstick is the amplitude  at which the fluctuations in pressure are comparable to the mean pressure. This would give a factor of about 1010 in the logarithm and is pretty much the limit that sound waves can propagate without distortion. These would have L≈190 dB. It is estimated that the 1883 Krakatoa eruption produced a sound level of about 180 dB at a range of 100 miles. The QI podcast also mentions  that blue whales make a noise that corresponds to about 188 decibels. By comparison the Big Bang was little more than a whimper..

PS. If you would like to read more about the actual sound of the Big Bang, have a look at John Cramer’s webpages. You can also download simulations of the actual sound. If you listen to them you will hear that it’s more of  a “Roar” than a “Bang” because the sound waves don’t actually originate at a single well-defined event but are excited incoherently all over the Universe.

## Fake News of the Holographic Universe

Posted in Astrohype, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on February 1, 2017 by telescoper

It has been a very busy day today but I thought I’d grab a few minutes to rant about something inspired by a cosmological topic but that I’m afraid is symptomatic of malaise that extends far wider than fundamental science.

The other day I found a news item with the title Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe. You can find a fairly detailed discussion of the holographic principle here, but the name is fairly self-explanatory: the familiar hologram is a two-dimensional object that contains enough information to reconstruct a three-dimensional object. The holographic principle extends this to the idea that information pertaining to a higher-dimensional space may reside on a lower-dimensional boundary of that space. It’s an idea which has gained some traction in the context of the black hole information paradox, for example.

There are people far more knowledgeable about the holographic principle than me, but naturally what grabbed my attention was the title of the news item: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe. That got me really excited, as I wasn’t previously aware that there was any observed property of the Universe that showed any unambiguous evidence for the holographic interpretation or indeed that models based on this model could describe the available data better than the standard ΛCDM cosmological model. Naturally I went to the original paper on the arXiv by Niayesh Ashfordi et al. to which the news item relates. Here is the abstract:

We test a class of holographic models for the very early universe against cosmological observations and find that they are competitive to the standard ΛCDM model of cosmology. These models are based on three dimensional perturbative super-renormalizable Quantum Field Theory (QFT), and while they predict a different power spectrum from the standard power-law used in ΛCDM, they still provide an excellent fit to data (within their regime of validity). By comparing the Bayesian evidence for the models, we find that ΛCDM does a better job globally, while the holographic models provide a (marginally) better fit to data without very low multipoles (i.e. l≲30), where the dual QFT becomes non-perturbative. Observations can be used to exclude some QFT models, while we also find models satisfying all phenomenological constraints: the data rules out the dual theory being Yang-Mills theory coupled to fermions only, but allows for Yang-Mills theory coupled to non-minimal scalars with quartic interactions. Lattice simulations of 3d QFT’s can provide non-perturbative predictions for large-angle statistics of the cosmic microwave background, and potentially explain its apparent anomalies.

The third sentence (highlighted) states explicitly that according to the Bayesian evidence (see here for a review of this) the holographic models do not fit the data even as well as the standard model (unless some of the CMB measurements are excluded, and then they’re only slightly better)

I think the holographic principle is a very interesting idea and it may indeed at some point prove to provide a deeper understanding of our universe than our current models. Nevertheless it seems clear to me that the title of this news article is extremely misleading. Current observations do not really provide any evidence in favour of the holographic models, and certainly not “substantial evidence”.

The wider point should be obvious. We scientists rightly bemoan the era of “fake news”. We like to think that we occupy the high ground, by rigorously weighing up the evidence, drawing conclusions as objectively as possible, and reporting our findings with a balanced view of the uncertainties and caveats. That’s what we should be doing. Unless we do that we’re not communicating science but engaged in propaganda, and that’s a very dangerous game to play as it endangers the already fragile trust the public place in science.

The authors of the paper are not entirely to blame as they did not write the piece that kicked off this rant, which seems to have been produced by the press office at the University of Southampton, but they should not have consented to it being released with such a misleading title.