Discovery of evidence for cosmic inflation

First of all, I don't really understand it.  Haven't had time to read much about it yet, and was never that interested in the idea of cosmic inflation during the early part of the universe's existence, anyway.  But not understanding and not being that interested have never been good reasons for not discussing something.  If you understood something perfectly, I would think it would be the least interesting thing for you to discuss.  Which is how physics professors--with important exceptions that I have been fortunate to know--usually teach physics, as if they understand it perfectly.

Being on lunch break, however, makes it something I will discuss only briefly.  There are two important things involved in this discovery announced yesterday.  One is that it gives very good evidence for the idea of cosmic inflation, and the other is that it seems to be the first confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves.  Well, actually there's a third reason it's a great discovery, if it's not a "trick of light" deluding our radio antennas.  The inflation theory of Alan Guth and Andre Linde is based on quantum mechanics, so these gravitational wave signatures that have been detected were produced by a quantum process, implying a heretofore unknown but much sought connection between  quantum physics and the classical physics of general relativity .

See the New York Times article by Dennis Overbye for a more detailed discussion.

This discovery involves detecting and interpreting the polarization of very faint radio waves.  To get an idea of the meaning of polarization as it applies to electromagnetic waves, see my 11 June 2011 post.

Note added later: The next year, this discovery announcement was retracted. But, non-primordial gravitational waves were discovered that year (2015), coincident with the 100th anniversary of Einstein's publication of his general relativity theory of gravity. Gravitational wave detection has occurred several times since then.