It's mid-December, which means it's time for the annual run of "Best Noun of 2007" stories in every major media outlet. Being kind of a mid-major media outlet, ScienceBlogs doesn't produce an official list, but there'll be a lot of discussion here about the top science stories of the year. This will mostly involve wrangling about stem cells and global warming and suchlike, which I'm happy to leave to my colleagues, while we take up the really important question:
What was the most significant development in physics or astronomy in 2007?
Was it Garrett Lisi's Exceptionally Simple Theory for Making Smoke Come Out of Jacques Distler's Ears? The Auger results about high-energy cosmic rays and active galactic nuclei? One of the umpteen weird stories about supersolids? The maybe-it's-the-Higgs "bump hunting" saga at Fermilab?
If you've got an opinion, leave it in the comments.
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2007 runs through 31 December. Uncle Al's experiment runs 27-30 December at 45.04°N. Response maxima are 44.95° latitude (WGS 84) and 03 January (Earth perihelion).
Opposite-parity paired outputs might net zero J/g difference. Metric gravitation is validated, ho hum. Non-zero net output with amplitude phasing vs. time of day and geographic orientation is richer...
1) General Relativity is wrong (teleparallel gravitation),
2) perturbative string theory is wrong (BRST invariance),
3) conservation of angular momentum is wrong (Noether's theorem).
That competes for phattest physics of 2007, yes? Science is empirical! We'll see.
It was a really a year for non-stories, such as the nonexistent Higgs bump and the nonexistent 'TOE'. How about the Big Hole (in the CMB) or the death of /\?
oh, i vote for Garrett. i was the commentator (commenter?) that put in the last post under the theory of everything original post asking for you all to continue commenting/arguing in the scienc blogs, it was a great few days reading blogs from the pros! unfortunately i feel like i killed the posting since no one posted after me...sorry....Dr. Distler's reactions were priceless.....so Garrett gets my vote!
Hmm, this depends. Are you going to use the winner of this poll to decide what to write some kind of year-end retrospective post? Because if so, I'm going to vote for the thing I most want to hear someone writing about :) Which would be:
The Auger results about high-energy cosmic rays and active galactic nuclei?
Because this got almost no coverage that I saw, and I still don't really understand what happened there. The only writeup I ever really found on this was backreaction's, and I'm still not sure what it was saying.
As far as I can understand this so far: There's this thing called the GZK cutoff, which is supposed to put an upper bound on the energy of the cosmic rays that can reach earth. But somebody, somewhere at some point in the last decade was reporting seeing cosmic rays that exceeded GZK. A handful of theorists (like the doubly special relativity and de sitter relativity people) jumped on this like wild dogs as evidence of new physics.
So it sounds like AUGER was trying to corroborate or refute these GZK violator sightings. Backreaction put it:
...but... what did they find? The first part seems to be saying that the UHECRs are real, and that they're NOT coming from anywhere local (which seems to imply that a GZK-violation effect is in play, because GZK should be more likely to eat the signals that came from a long way away?). But then the second part seems to be "confirming the GZK-cutoff", which would imply nothing above the GZK cutoff can actually happen? (Do I misunderstand what a "UHECR" is?)
What the heck did AUGER find? Did they see GZK-violating rays, implying we need some theory to explain how they got here? Did they disprove the existence of GZK-violating rays, thus implying the DSR peoples are wasting their time? Did they just see the same things as previous searches for high-energy rays? Did anything happen at all? So confused...
Coin: Because this got almost no coverage that I saw, and I still don't really understand what happened there. The only writeup I ever really found on this was backreaction's, and I'm still not sure what it was saying.
Ahem.
Whoops :)
Angering string theorists is too easy, so my vote's for Auger.
Now that I understand the Auger result better... actually I'm going to second Kea's vote for the discovery of the Eridanus supervoid lurking behind the WMAP cold spot. We explained something that had previously been on the verge of threatening the cosmological principle, and we did it by finding a hole in space larger than practically any astronomical feature you can think of. That's kind of cool.
How about the Big Hole (in the CMB)
Ahem...the CMB isn't what has the hole in it!
...supervoid lurking behind the WMAP cold spot...
You mean "in front of"... ;)
I wondered how much attention the 'supervoid' got outside of the University of Minnesota. People here were excited, but it's good to know that it has been well-received in the community at-large.