The Importance of Silk Damping in the Early Universe

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This is damping that was first studied by Joe Selk, our recent podcast cast. Photons moving the speed of light want to smooth things out in regions where you're over dense and hotter. And so the photons damp the oscillations. This leads to a prediction for what you should see when you look at how much variation there is in temperature in the microwave background. When you look at larger scales up to about one degree on the sky, there should be more variation.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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