I don't think the average person, and to be perfectly clear, you are far from the average

person, so this will be easy for you, appreciates just how messy science is. Popular conceptions of science, and I'm looking at you in particular

science journalism, paint this simplified picture of how science works, where there is a problem.

A bunch of scientists get to work, they work really hard, and they produce an answer,

and that theories are either right or wrong, black or white,

and they're either accepted by the evidence or they're totally rejected by everybody.

Either a scientific idea works or it doesn't work.

But that's not even close to how the scientific process actually unfolds.

And while I'll save a full discussion of the process of science for a later episode,

feel free to ask to accelerate that timeline, I want to use something called the Cosmic

Microwave Background Cold Spot as an example of how we can have a really, really solid understanding of the big picture

and not be entirely sure what's going on with some of the details, not be confident

what the potential answers are and whether it's worthy of excitement or not, and not even

agree about whether what we're seeing is even real and how all that can happen.

And it doesn't affect the big picture because scientific theories are not perfect.

Yeah, that sounds pretty messy.

But this is what science actually looks like.

To be perfectly honest, in today's episode, I'm not going to focus too much on the physics of what the cold spot could be.

Spoiler alert.

Our best guess is that it's a super void along the line of sight, but this is disputed.

I actually want to talk a lot about why the cold spot might be interesting and why we

think it's interesting. And so to do that, I have to dig into the physics of the CMB itself,

...