Disastrous hype
This is one of the worst press releases accompanying a study I’ve seen:
The headline and the body appear to have nothing to do with the study itself, which explores the creative properties of an explosion with certain attributes. However, the press office of the University of Central Florida has drafted a popular version that claims researchers – who are engineers more than physicists – have “detailed the mechanisms that could cause the [Big Bang] explosion, which is key for the models that scientists use to understand the origin of the universe.” I checked with a physicist, who agreed: “I don’t see how this is relevant to the Big Bang at all. Considering the paper is coming out of the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, I highly doubt the authors intended for it to be reported on this way.”
Press releases that hype results are often the product of an overzealous university press office working without inputs from the researchers that obtained those results, and this is probably the case here as well. The paper’s abstract and some quotes by one of the researchers, Kareem Ahmed from the University of Central Florida, indicate the study isn’t about the Big Bang but about similarities between “massive thermonuclear explosions in space and small chemical explosions on Earth”. However, the press release’s author slipped in a reference to the Big Bang because, hey, it was an explosion too.
The Big Bang was like no other stellar explosion; its material constituents were vastly different from anything that goes boom today – whether on Earth or in space – and physicists have various ideas about what could have motivated the bang to happen in the first place. The first supernovas are also thought to have occurred a few billion years after the Big Bang. This said, Ahmed was quoted saying something that could have used more clarification in the press release:
We explore these supersonic reactions for propulsion, and as a result of that, we came across this mechanism that looked very interesting. When we started to dig deeper, we realized that this is relatable to something as profound as the origin of the universe.
Err…
