Introducing The Spherical Cow Company

The Spherical Cow Company produces short documentary videos to demonstrate the explanatory power of simple physical models and to help us understand and aesthetically appreciate the natural world.

Our blog is a forum for our own commentary on our videos and for discussion of questions and comments raised by our videos.

Our first video introduces us to the sky as it looks when viewed using telescopes sensitive to light with wavelengths thousands of times longer than optical light.  This is the kind of light that heats up food in a microwave oven.  At these wavelengths, the brightest contributor to the sky light is something called the cosmic microwave background (CMB).  We show maps of the CMB and explain how they are revealing what the Universe looked like about 13.7 billion years ago in a thin shell 13.7 billion light years away.

The video is the first in a series aimed at telling the story of some simple physical modeling, predictions from that modeling, and the subsequent confirmation of those predictions decades later -- a confirmation made possible by precision measurements of the CMB.  It is an amazing story.  The modeling is of events at the edge of the observable Universe when the Universe was just hundreds of thousands of years old.  It is really quite remarkable to me that we can apply the laws of physics that we have learned from laboratory experiments here on Earth, to phenomena at the edge of the observable Universe, and have subsequent observation of those phenomena confirm the resulting predictions!  It is an amazing (and unexplained) fact that the Universe is highly regular and predictable. 

I have been studying the CMB since the first detection of its brightness variations by the COBE satellite in 1992 (one of two COBE CMB results that led to a Nobel Prize).  I am currently working on data from two CMB-mapping instruments:  the South Pole Telescope and a satellite called Planck.

The Spherical Cow Company currently consists of University of California at Davis undergraduate students David Gribble and Justin Smith, graduate student Damien Martin and Professor Lloyd Knox (that's me).