Space and Time May Not Have Any Actual Reality NEW Discovery

[_Res Ipsa]

Ajax, this might help. https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/w ... 36f2bb2ad1 I’ve found Ethan’s blog very helpful in understanding the BBT and its ramifications. It sounds like Rush’s understanding is a few decades out of date.

[_Physics Guy]

Actually I'd say this Ethan guy is exaggerating the support for pre-Bang cosmology. There have been quite a few speculative theories about the Bang not really being the beginning but so far the evidence still fits the original theory best. And it's also simpler than the other theories.

The answer to Limbaugh's question of where the universe was at the Big Bang is: the same place it is now. No-one can actually say anything about where the universe is in relation to anything outside itself, but Big Bang cosmology doesn't say anything about that, either, so you may as well say that the answer to Where is the universe? hasn't changed since the Big Bang.

[_Morley]

I'm starting to get curious about just how well critical thinking and a general education can serve as a BS detector in technical science.

Physics Guy, I'm curious, too. What's your speculation on this? From what you've read here: Yes or no?

edit: You, too, DrW. What's your opinion?

[_Res Ipsa]

Actually I'd say this Ethan guy is exaggerating the support for pre-Bang cosmology. There have been quite a few speculative theories about the Bang not really being the beginning but so far the evidence still fits the original theory best. And it's also simpler than the other theories

What, exactly, are you referring to?

[_MeDotOrg]

Rush Limbaugh had an interesting question about the big bang theory. If the entire universe were in a hot dense space the size of a tennis ball, where was it, and how did it get there?

How is that an interesting question? Where is the universe right now?

- Doc

It's right over here.

[Guest]

About cosmology: inflation is the big refinement to the Big Bang that was added in the 1980s but it really just means that there was an early phase of expansion that was extremely fast. It's essentially an epicycle added to the basic Big Bang theory. It postulates an inflaton field for which there is no other evidence, but it accounts for the otherwise eery uniformity of the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists have been taking it seriously for a long time because it's their bread and butter, but by normal scientific standards it's just a plausible conjecture. And it really doesn't much change our picture of most of cosmological history, back down to very small size and very high temperature.

Much more speculative still are any theories that try to extrapolate before that, reaching conclusions about singularity-free "Big Bounces" or "multiverse" scenarios. Expecting any of these guesses to be accurate is like expecting Isaac Newton to invent the iPhone, only probably a lot more so. It's quite hard to test these theories even weakly, and a lot of the airtime they get is for being an interesting "what-if" rather than having evidence. The last study I read that tried to compare a "bounce" model to the vanilla Big Bang found that the vanilla model fit the microwave background power spectrum better. The author was unhappy about that, since she had invested a lot of time in loop-inspired quantum cosmology and really wanted to find evidence for it.

Other than that one recent thesis I had to evaluate, I haven't kept in close touch with cosmology for years, but I doubt that the basic ethos of the field has changed much since I was a post-doc in a group that did do some cosmology. There is hard data, but not much compared to normal astronomy, and astronomy has much sparser data than experimental fields. So cosmology is a very theory-driven field in which fads come and go. If you're inside the bubble the accepted conventions can seem pretty stable but by the standards of the rest of physics it's all very iffy, at least past a certain point. And up to that point, it's all basically still just Big Bang.

[_Physics Guy]

About how to judge BS in science if you're not actually an experiment in the field: I really don't know at all. I can only make guesses.

On the one hand I think it's probably a bad sign if you read something which is entirely made of jargon mumbo-jumbo. Anybody who has any business presenting technical stuff to a lay audience has to understand that that is not comprehensible, so if somebody is just flooding you with arcane terminology then you can be pretty sure they're either too incompetent at communication to be worth reading further, or they're deliberately trying to overawe you with snow.

On the other hand, though, I think it's probably also a bad sign if somebody is trying to make out that a highly technical subject is really nothing but a bunch of philosophical platitudes that are familiar from some other source whether ancient or modern. If there's one thing we've learned since the Renaissance it's that reality just isn't like that. Reality is full of details and the details really matter.

I guess a first guess at how to sniff-test science journalism is to look for stuff that at least avoids both those extremes. It should neither pretend that the technical details don't matter, nor assume that they are already familiar. It should make some effort to explain things in familiar terms, but perhaps I can put it perversely: a really good explanation should not be too good. If it makes some subtle thing seem really simple then it has probably over-simplified.

Something I like to look for myself is an awareness on the part of the author that not all concepts are equally difficult. So I'm impressed by statements like, "This part is the simple part," or, "This point is hard to believe but it really turns out to be true." Sometimes science is weird, but if somebody says something really weird without batting an eye then I suspect that they may be parroting something they don't really understand themselves.

[_Philo Sofee]

Good points Physics guy. I am just now finishing up (in the next couple days) Brian Green's book "The Fabric of the Cosmos." I think it is a very well done book for we rookies. A great over view if nothing else. His defense of Strong Theory is far stronger than I expected it would be. Gotta read Lee Smolin's "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" next for the other view. I tried reading Erivn Laszlo's most recent "What is Reality" and it just isn't near on the accurate level nor real level as either Green or Smolin. I was quite disappointed and ranted and raved about it to my wife who just rolled her eyes and said "Shut up, go upstairs and meditate."

[_Jersey Girl]

my wife who just rolled her eyes and said "Shut up, go upstairs and meditate."

I encourage you to listen to that wise woman. In better weather, I'd recommend that you go outside for meditation.

:-)

[_DoubtingThomas]

. No-one can actually say anything about where the universe is in relation to anything outside itself, but Big Bang cosmology doesn't say anything about that, either, so you may as well say that the answer to Where is the universe? hasn't changed since the Big Bang.

A universe cannot be expanding without an outside. Our expanding universe has to be inside another universe. Right? Or am I full of it?