[RadioAstronomer]

I personally believe inflation is the best fit to current data.

[RadioAstronomer]

Bump

[B Knotts]

Inflation, eh?

Hmmm...so how much was a candy bar at the beginning of the universe?

Sorry. Bad joke.

[Physicist]

Here's the Boomerang result. I never get tired of posting this:

The only possible criticism is that the error bars seem to be too large. To my eye, the chi-squared per degree of freedom seems considerably less than one.

[oneway]

they're thought to be manifestations of sound like compressional waves in the plasma epoch

My thoughts exactley

[longshadow]

As of this writing, NASA's MAP (Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite was scheduled for launch at the end of June. Frorn its quasi-stable perch at the Lagrange point L2, a million miles antisunward from Earth, MAP should be able to measure the CMB power spectrum with unprecedented sensitivity and precision.

Do you know if this instrument has been launched yet, and when it is scheduled to start producing useful data?

Has Vegas started running betting pools on the outcome of such experiments:

"Inflationary Cosmology is running 7-to-2, while straight vanilla Big Bang is lagging at 9-to-1, and Steady-State brings up the rear as the longshot of the day at 250-to-1."

Now there's a sport that would require some brains to be a truly knowledgeable handicapper!