One of my favourite scenes in Ghostbusters is when the team is summoned to the mayor’s office, following their run-in with Walter Peck and brief incarceration in the cells. Mayor Lenny and his cronies are trying to decide whether to take the Ghostbusters’ claims of an impending disaster of ‘biblical proportions’ seriously or not. Lenny asks a pertinent question:

What if you’re wrong?

to which Venkman immediately retorts

If I’m wrong nothing happens. We’ll go to jail! Peacfully, quietly. We’ll enjoy it! … But if I’m right, and we can stop this thing… then — Lenny — you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.

In March, when the BICEP2 team announced via press conference (and pre-print) the detection of a B-mode signal in a polarisation map of the cosmic microwave background, the cosmology community — predictably — went apeshit. Why? The signal is predicted to be imprinted by gravitational waves during a period of inflation immediately after the formation of the Universe. Inflation is a theoretical scenario proposed to explain (amongst other things) why the Universe appears to be flat and isotropic. There was talk of the discovery of the century, Nobel Prizes, et cetera.

The problem is that many roads lead to Rome. ‘Foregrounds’ (viz. anything you are not interested in) can mimic the cosmological signal, in particular, Galactic dust. Pretty much as soon as the announcement was made, the sceptics (which basically includes all scientists) began the onslaught, which effectively amounted to a kind of steroidal peer review.

Recently, the furore has reached fever pitch, as the methods by which the BICEP2 team accounted for certain Galactic foregrounds have been called into question. On the arXiv this week, Flauger, Colin, & Spergel argue that the BICEP2 results might be consistent with a primordial gravitational wave origin, but could also be consistent with a foreground polarisation signal; only additional observations at multiple frequencies (BICEP2 only observed one) that can better disentangle the foregrounds will confirm or refute the result.

Okay, even I’d admit that rocking up to Andrei Linde’s house and cracking open the champagne was probably a tad too premature, but it feels like much of the criticism of the BICEP2 team originates in the feeling that the result was put out there prematurely, to much hype, without dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. But these are not stupid people; it’s inconceivable that the BICEP2 collaboration would not have had lengthy internal discussions about how this result in particular would be received and scrutinised by the community, especially from rival teams and the usual crowd of cosmological pundits. This was an experiment. They did the best they could, and then made a judgement call to put the — potentially game changing — result into the wild, and tell the world about it. We all know what a competitive field this is, and it’s disingenuous to argue that it doesn’t matter who comes first. It was a risk worth taking, considering the payoff.

Maybe the interpretation of the BICEP2 result is incorrect, and we haven’t seen the imprint of primordial gravitational waves. But if it is wrong, then what have we lost? The BICEP2 team themselves will no doubt be disappointed, maybe even embarrassed, but that is the risk that was weighed up against the seductive prospect of being the first to reveal something truly profound about our Universe. The rest of us? Nothing really. Other experiments are aiming to detect B-modes anyway, so if the foreground problem is real, then this will surely come to light in due course, and either the BICEP2 result will hold up, or go away. We just have to sit tight.

Meanwhile, cosmologists have been pawing over the details of the experiment, forensically scrutinising and, most importantly, thinking about the science — perhaps getting some new ideas for when the next batch of data comes along. This can only be a good thing. Of course, since this is splashed all over the Internet, The Public get to see how science is actually done, with the most important lessons being that (a) we are always sceptical and (b) sometimes even the best of us get it wrong. Again, no bad thing.

Sometimes — well, often — cutting edge science has a rough side. Analysis can be dirty, as we stretch the limits of data whilst simultaneously pummelling it up against the wall of scientific rigour. That’s where the exciting stuff lies. I think, in general, we (astronomers at least), have become too staid in our approach; unwilling to trust gut instincts and take a chance, or take risks in publishing results that might later turn out to be ‘wrong’. How many have sat on interesting results for months or even years, agonising over the minutiae that make not a jot of difference to the Main Result, while meanwhile Rome burns? As long as methods are communicated clearly and honestly, and data and codes made open, it is only our interpretations that can be incorrect. In this day and age, errors in analysis will be zeroed-in on and shot down, and erroneous interpretations and over-ambitious assertions will quickly be forgotten. It’s worth remembering that the important stuff will always be looked at with a second pair of eyes.

Yes, it’s important to be careful, and not saturate the market with blatantly dodgy results, but — at least now and again — we need more scientific courage of the kind that the BICEP2 team have displayed.

We’re not saving the world here, we are just trying to find out how it works.