Rundown on inflation and gravity waves

[steuard]

So that physics announcement that I posted the rumors about happened, and it was indeed just as big of a deal as rumor had made it. Here are a few links I've found that summarize the results nicely:

• An overview for general audiences by Scientific American.
• A nice discussion of the details along with some reasons for the usual skepticism.
• An informal rundown on some of the implications by a non-cosmologist.
• And finally, a charming video of theorist Andrei Linde hearing the news in person for the first time.

This is really cool, and there are some neat, neat implications. (The data points to an energy scale for inflation that happens to be very close to the expected energy scale of grand unification of fundamental forces in simple supersymmetric models of particle physics, for instance.) It'll be great to see if this result holds up.