Undergrad Cosmic Test Reveals Odd Findings for Einstein's Relativity

[bhobba]

TL;DR

What the popular press writes and a scientific paper says may be somewhat different.

In my news feed this morning, I got the following story:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scient...ity-on-a-cosmic-scale-and-found-something-odd

Sounded important, so I thought I would get the actual paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12992

Am I missing something? It is interesting, but is it particularly important?

Thanks
Bill

 

[Vanadium 50]

The paper is more than a year old and has 15 citations, not zero, and not a zillion. That tells you that it is more or less typical among such papers.

 

[malawi_glenn]

The paper is more than a year old and has 15 citations

I first read "the paper is more than 15 years old".
Need more coffee...

 

[Vanadium 50]

I first read "the paper is more than 15 years old".

In some frame, it is.

 

[Ibix]

I think the gist of it is, if you assume a certain class of theories (which include "vanilla" GR) contains the correct theory of gravity, and assume some prior on those theories, and then do a Bayesian estimate of the best fit parameters to predict our current measures of some key cosmological numbers, then GR is not the favoured model. But it's not a resoundingly significant (in the statistical sense) result, and I've no idea how plausible cosmologists in general find their assumptions.