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I think that you're probably technically right (the best kind!) and probably aligned with mainstream Physics, but... I'm really surprised that Inflation got su

I think that you're probably technically right (the best kind!) and probably aligned with mainstream Physics, but... I'm really surprised that Inflation got such a "foothold"... in that it's quite wobbly as a therory, AFAICT. For a kick-off it's pretty hard (impossible?) to falsify. Yes, we can all agree that something like the Big Bang happened; just by looking at the expansion, everything was obviously a lot more squished up. (Extrapolate backwards and you get 'silliness' like the Singularity... which is just a photosynthesis[1] way of saying NaN.) [1] Shamelessly stolen from a redditor: "I like to use difficult words so people think I'm photosynthesis.". EDIT: Honestly, I'm not a kook! Neil Turok usually has good introductory lectures for this field...

JadeNB 11y ago
> I think that you're probably technically right (the best kind!) and probably aligned with mainstream Physics, but... I wasn't meaning to describe my own understanding, or to endorse (or reject) the articles', only to describe what I thought was meant. > For a kick-off it's pretty hard (impossible?) to falsify. Yes, we can all agree that something like the Big Bang happened; just by looking at the expansion, everything was obviously a lot more squished up. (Extrapolate backwards and you get 'silliness' like the Singularity... which is just a photosynthesis[1] way of saying NaN.) Indeed, as your parenthetical points out, I think that even your second sentence might be debatable. Questions about the beginning of the universe are, necessarily, not subject to experimentation, at least not now or in the foreseeable future; so my understanding—and bear in mind, as Dave Barry would say, that I have read several books of popular physics—is that the best that we can do is to give explanations that, based on our current understanding of the current laws of physics, are compatible with the observeable consequences of the distant and (physics-ally) exotic past. Since extrapolation eventually produces results that are guaranteed mathematical nonsense, assuming that they are still valid just before they're nonsensical seems inevitably to be more an article of faith than of science in its usual sense. P.S. Also, with folks like Max Tegmark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark) not only 'out there', but at MIT, I don't think anyone need fear being labelled a kook for what he or she believes, or doesn't believe, about the origin of the universe. P.P.S. Hello from the thread on Street-Fighting Mathematics, where we've also been chatting! :-)
aroberge 11y ago
Without an inflationary era in the early universe, you would be left with having to explain 1) the fact that we see very few (none so far) magnetic monopoles; 2) the cosmic horizon problem; 3) the flatness problem. Without inflation, how would you solve these? Inflationary models make predictions about higher moments distribution of fluctations in the cosmic microwave background. These can be measured; so specific models can be falsified.

JadeNB 11y ago

> I think that you're probably technically right (the best kind!) and probably aligned with mainstream Physics, but... I wasn't meaning to describe my own understanding, or to endorse (or reject) the articles', only to describe what I thought was meant. > For a kick-off it's pretty hard (impossible?) to falsify. Yes, we can all agree that something like the Big Bang happened; just by looking at the expansion, everything was obviously a lot more squished up. (Extrapolate backwards and you get 'silliness' like the Singularity... which is just a photosynthesis[1] way of saying NaN.) Indeed, as your parenthetical points out, I think that even your second sentence might be debatable. Questions about the beginning of the universe are, necessarily, not subject to experimentation, at least not now or in the foreseeable future; so my understanding—and bear in mind, as Dave Barry would say, that I have read several books of popular physics—is that the best that we can do is to give explanations that, based on our current understanding of the current laws of physics, are compatible with the observeable consequences of the distant and (physics-ally) exotic past. Since extrapolation eventually produces results that are guaranteed mathematical nonsense, assuming that they are still valid just before they're nonsensical seems inevitably to be more an article of faith than of science in its usual sense. P.S. Also, with folks like Max Tegmark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark) not only 'out there', but at MIT, I don't think anyone need fear being labelled a kook for what he or she believes, or doesn't believe, about the origin of the universe. P.P.S. Hello from the thread on Street-Fighting Mathematics, where we've also been chatting! :-)

aroberge 11y ago

Without an inflationary era in the early universe, you would be left with having to explain 1) the fact that we see very few (none so far) magnetic monopoles; 2) the cosmic horizon problem; 3) the flatness problem. Without inflation, how would you solve these? Inflationary models make predictions about higher moments distribution of fluctations in the cosmic microwave background. These can be measured; so specific models can be falsified.