Abstract
At an April 25 news conference, a NASA spokesperson gave an eager press corps the highly-anticipated results of the "boomerang" experiment: Using high-altitude balloons sent up from Antarctica (where the cold, dry, thin, stable air permits the most accurate measurements), researchers had gathered sufficient data to determine that the universe's geometry is very nearly flat. Details appear in the April 27 issue of Nature, and some spectacular graphics and video clips appear on at least one researcher's website. The bottom line of this highly technical, hard-to-explain discovery is this: The shortest distance a beam of light can travel between two distant galaxies is a straight (or nearly straight) line, rather than a curved line.