hi cosmo-media,

A science journalist wants an interview, most probably about http://arXiv.org/abs/0801.0006, so that s/he can choose one sentence to publish from a telephone conversation of probably 10-20 minutes or more....

The journalist refuses to use electronic communication, even jabber!

S/he will probably telephone tomorrow Friday 4 Jan 2008 at 15:00.

S/he also wants our comments on Niarchou & Jaffe (NJ07):

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0702436v2 http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19225811.300-fold-testament-what-sha...

My initial thoughts are:

# practical: to get the references to 0702436, download the source and paste the .bbl file into the .tex file, then latex && latex && dvips

* the NJ07 method is less physically direct than ours, since it focuses on spherical harmonics on the 2-sphere rather working directly in comoving 3-space;

* NJ07 is a perturbation simulation approach: the limitations of this approach are described in Section 1.2.1 of Roukema (2000) MNRAS, 312, 712, arXiv:astro-ph/9910272;

* specifically, they assume that even on the largest scales, the function P(k) is a power law k^n function and that the phases of the perturbations are Gaussian distributed, which at the largest scales in a multiply connected universe is an assumption with neither observational nor theoretical support - it might be right, it might be wrong;

* the closest papers to their method are probably Caillerie et al. 2007 arXiv:0705.0217 which works directly with the eigenmodes of the PDS, up to k = 230, where k = l \frac{R_C}{c/H_0}, and and Aurich 2005b arXiv:astro-ph/0412569; NJ07 use up to "beta" = 41 which seems to more or less correspond to k, i.e. they have 5 times less resolution than Caillerie et al.; Caillerie et al's conclusion is that the PDS fits WMAP better than the infinite flat model; Aurich et al. say that it's not yet possible to make "firm" conclusions.

* apart from the normalisation of their probabilities, their Fig. 5 looks like it agrees with Aurich et al. and Caillerie et al for Omega_{tot} \sim 1.015-1.018

However, the journalist probably wants "sound bites" for the "human interest factor" rather than "just science". My suggestions for sound bites if it's about NJ07:

* "NJ07 have done some interesting work, but their method requires making some assumptions about theoretical models which have no physical motivation to be correct on the largest scales of a PDS universe. We avoid making this type of assumption and use the observations directly."

* "The apparent space associated with the PDS is the three-dimensional space called the hypersphere or 3-sphere. So we work in the hypersphere, embedded in Euclidean 4-space, which makes it relatively easy to work with. NJ07 work primarily on the 2-sphere instead of on the 3-sphere. This could cause some problems."

* "We agree with their final phrase 'the issue of the topology of the Universe is far from settled'."

As for sound bites about our own work.... i don't have any good ideas so far.

pozdr boud