Books could and probably will be written about this saga (science writers, call your agents): there is ambition, drama, excitement, Nobel fever, science-by-media, a telescope at the South Pole, and astrophysicists so hungry for data that they analysed images lifted from in Powerpoint slides when the originals were unreleased.
When the news started to unravel, it struck me that the cosmology community was in the same position as someone waking up in an unfamiliar Las Vegas hotel room with a throbbing headache, hazy memories of the night before, and a fresh tattoo reading "r=0.2".
Unfortunately, once the initial excitement died away, a number of voices asked whether BICEP2's signal had a more humble origin -- dust in our own galaxy. Dust can mimic a gravitational wave signal if it interacts with the galaxy's magnetic field. From a cosmic perspective, anything inside our galaxy is a "foreground" – dirt on the window through which we peer at the microwave background, the fossil light from the big bang coming to us from the furthest reaches of space.
It's possible that the cosmology community is slowly waking up to find itself in an unfamiliar Las Vegas hotel room with a throbbing headache, hazy memories of the night before, and a fresh tattoo reading "r=0.2".
For theoretical physicists, ambulance chasing involves getting papers out quickly after a major data release. Some ambulance chasers make significant contributions, some are just trying to draw attention to their earlier work, while others are banging out insubstantial papers in the hope that they will be cited by their slower colleagues. But whatever their motives, cosmologists have certainly been busy: the BICEP2 discovery paper has been cited 188 times on the Arxiv, all in "preprints" written within a month of the original announcement. I am pretty sure this is a world record, and you can always check the current tally.
Whenever you throw a party, there is always someone who double-dips the guacamole. In this case the jerk was Ephraim Hardcastle, a pseudonymous correspondent in the Daily Mail. This nimrod thought the most important thing to say about one of the biggest science stories in 50 years was that two of the experts asked to appear on the BBC news that night were both women of colour. Hardcastle's shtick is similar to that of the old Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger -- with the difference that Anger was a conscious parody.