3 ms·

You know, a non-trivial amount of the distrust in science comes from science publications that find some fringe theory, even respectable fringe theories like th

by jerf 5y ago

You know, a non-trivial amount of the distrust in science comes from science publications that find some fringe theory, even respectable fringe theories like this one, and then publish articles about how they're 100% right and imbued with the full confidence of science. It's an interesting article, but the tone is terribly wrong.

excalibur 5y ago
I like how singluarity and inflation are the only things that could have possibly occurred prior to the big bang, turning evidence against one option into definitive proof of the other.
goalieca 5y ago
A lot of wonder and imagination is also inspired by fringe ideas. I’m not going to be so puritan about things.. leave that for the journals.
me_me_me 5y ago
I am 100% sure those kind of articles contribute nothing to distrust in science. I bet you a $100 the people who are anti science never read article like that. Dipping toes in flat earth community, when I still believed that its largely a 'for the lulz' community, there are predictable patters of how those are formed and propagated/sustained. There are few opinion makers that use techno/science babble to create theories that have easy to grasp headline so it easily spreads as a meme in the community. I strongly believe vast majority of those people are scams, selling books to their followers. But their followers dont read anything but their own post,headlines, materials. All easy reads exposing some secret knowledge kept from the people. In fact those communities are almost identical to religions, only their dogmas are still shifting, forming, spliting and evolving. But one universal mechanism for all is conformity to the dogma, any outsider get shutdown as an enemy and their ideas gets thrown away.
- runjake 5y ago
  They said "distrust in science", not "anti-science". Those are two entirely different things. Speaking as an American, most Americans see "science" in the news media and assume it's 1.) accurate and 2.) actual science, and then it turns out to be fringe, or the media got it entirely wrong and it gets stored in these people's personal caches of "How scientists are always wrong." Eg. the American debate on climate change.
  - jerf 5y ago
    I endorse this reply. I'm thinking not "flat earth" here, but people who are legitimately exhausted from the scientific media telling them eggs are good for you one month, and then that they're bad for you the month, and repeating that for literally decades. It is a rational conclusion to devalue science, or at least devalue science journalism, at that point. Science journalism should not be so free in giving people rational reasons to discount them.
adrian_b 5y ago
For most theories, it is relatively easy to find parts that should be removed because they either are erroneous or there is no evidence for them, but it is always much harder to find something else that is better and that could substitute the wrong parts. The author correctly notices that it is a mistake to extrapolate the Big Bang theory too far, because from some point there is no more evidence for what happened before. After this correct observation, then the author proceeds with a hypothesis about a prior "inflation", for which there is also no evidence, like for the more traditional Big Bang variants that are criticized. I believe that it is necessary to always make a clear distinction between facts that are reasonably certain and facts that are just wild hypotheses, which are interesting to discuss, but for which there exists no information that could either confirm or refute them. What we know with reasonable certainty is that the composition and evolution of the observable universe can be explained very convincingly if it started from an initial state of very high temperature, equivalent with a kinetic energy per particle of several tens of megaelectronvolt, i.e. higher than the binding energy of atomic nuclei. At this temperature, the matter consisted of a plasma containing free protons, neutrons, electrons and positrons (plus neutrinos and photons). There were equal numbers of protons and neutrons (i.e. equal numbers of u and d quarks) and slightly more electrons than positrons, the excess being enough to make the plasma electrically neutral. At this stage, besides the very high temperature, the average density was also much higher than today. The matter composing the currently observable universe would have been concentrated in a much smaller space than today, but that space would have been huge nonetheless. There is no evidence whatsoever about what might have happened before this stage. The popular presentations of the Big Bang theory assume that before this stage there were even higher temperatures and densities. This hypothesis might seem more satisfying intellectually, i.e. that everything might have started from a point, but it must be clear that there is no reason to believe this, except personal preferences about what to believe when there is no information about something. If we extrapolate backwards to higher temperatures, the plasma composition becomes more and more complex, first it also includes pions and muons and then more and more kinds of particles that are normally unstable. After some point, we no longer can predict anything with reasonable accuracy. We must not forget that the current physics cannot predict simple things like the mass ratios between nuclei or the atomic spectra, so expecting a good model for a state of matter for which we do not have any experimental data would be naive. Maybe before the known initial state there were indeed higher temperature and density states as in the popular Big Bang presentations and the Universe cooled to reach that state, but maybe the earlier temperatures were lower and something increased the temperature, like the author of the article supposes. We do not know anything that might have heated the Universe, but if the Universe was previously hotter we also do not know anything that could have provided the initial energy and we do not know how matter would behave at those higher temperatures and densities. So either way we exit the domain of quantitative models that can be fitted to match what we see around us and we enter the domain of speculations, which might be or not be of any use.
T-A 5y ago
> fringe theories like this one How do you define "fringe theory"? I'm pretty sure inflation has been the mainstream view among cosmologists since the 1980s.
- metaobject 5y ago
  I think the “fringe” comes from the theory that cosmic inflation occurred before the BB
  - T-A 5y ago
    Nothing fringe about it, it's a general feature of inflation models. Exponential expansion essentially quick-freezes the universe, until the field which drives it (the inflaton) decays. At that point, exponential expansion stops (so no more cooling) and the universe fills with a hot soup of decay products. It's called reheating, and plays the role of old-school big bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Reheating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Reheatin...

by jerf 5y ago

excalibur 5y ago

I like how singluarity and inflation are the only things that could have possibly occurred prior to the big bang, turning evidence against one option into definitive proof of the other.

goalieca 5y ago

A lot of wonder and imagination is also inspired by fringe ideas. I’m not going to be so puritan about things.. leave that for the journals.

me_me_me 5y ago

I am 100% sure those kind of articles contribute nothing to distrust in science. I bet you a $100 the people who are anti science never read article like that. Dipping toes in flat earth community, when I still believed that its largely a 'for the lulz' community, there are predictable patters of how those are formed and propagated/sustained. There are few opinion makers that use techno/science babble to create theories that have easy to grasp headline so it easily spreads as a meme in the community. I strongly believe vast majority of those people are scams, selling books to their followers. But their followers dont read anything but their own post,headlines, materials. All easy reads exposing some secret knowledge kept from the people. In fact those communities are almost identical to religions, only their dogmas are still shifting, forming, spliting and evolving. But one universal mechanism for all is conformity to the dogma, any outsider get shutdown as an enemy and their ideas gets thrown away.

runjake 5y ago
They said "distrust in science", not "anti-science". Those are two entirely different things. Speaking as an American, most Americans see "science" in the news media and assume it's 1.) accurate and 2.) actual science, and then it turns out to be fringe, or the media got it entirely wrong and it gets stored in these people's personal caches of "How scientists are always wrong." Eg. the American debate on climate change.
- jerf 5y ago
  I endorse this reply. I'm thinking not "flat earth" here, but people who are legitimately exhausted from the scientific media telling them eggs are good for you one month, and then that they're bad for you the month, and repeating that for literally decades. It is a rational conclusion to devalue science, or at least devalue science journalism, at that point. Science journalism should not be so free in giving people rational reasons to discount them.

adrian_b 5y ago

For most theories, it is relatively easy to find parts that should be removed because they either are erroneous or there is no evidence for them, but it is always much harder to find something else that is better and that could substitute the wrong parts. The author correctly notices that it is a mistake to extrapolate the Big Bang theory too far, because from some point there is no more evidence for what happened before. After this correct observation, then the author proceeds with a hypothesis about a prior "inflation", for which there is also no evidence, like for the more traditional Big Bang variants that are criticized. I believe that it is necessary to always make a clear distinction between facts that are reasonably certain and facts that are just wild hypotheses, which are interesting to discuss, but for which there exists no information that could either confirm or refute them. What we know with reasonable certainty is that the composition and evolution of the observable universe can be explained very convincingly if it started from an initial state of very high temperature, equivalent with a kinetic energy per particle of several tens of megaelectronvolt, i.e. higher than the binding energy of atomic nuclei. At this temperature, the matter consisted of a plasma containing free protons, neutrons, electrons and positrons (plus neutrinos and photons). There were equal numbers of protons and neutrons (i.e. equal numbers of u and d quarks) and slightly more electrons than positrons, the excess being enough to make the plasma electrically neutral. At this stage, besides the very high temperature, the average density was also much higher than today. The matter composing the currently observable universe would have been concentrated in a much smaller space than today, but that space would have been huge nonetheless. There is no evidence whatsoever about what might have happened before this stage. The popular presentations of the Big Bang theory assume that before this stage there were even higher temperatures and densities. This hypothesis might seem more satisfying intellectually, i.e. that everything might have started from a point, but it must be clear that there is no reason to believe this, except personal preferences about what to believe when there is no information about something. If we extrapolate backwards to higher temperatures, the plasma composition becomes more and more complex, first it also includes pions and muons and then more and more kinds of particles that are normally unstable. After some point, we no longer can predict anything with reasonable accuracy. We must not forget that the current physics cannot predict simple things like the mass ratios between nuclei or the atomic spectra, so expecting a good model for a state of matter for which we do not have any experimental data would be naive. Maybe before the known initial state there were indeed higher temperature and density states as in the popular Big Bang presentations and the Universe cooled to reach that state, but maybe the earlier temperatures were lower and something increased the temperature, like the author of the article supposes. We do not know anything that might have heated the Universe, but if the Universe was previously hotter we also do not know anything that could have provided the initial energy and we do not know how matter would behave at those higher temperatures and densities. So either way we exit the domain of quantitative models that can be fitted to match what we see around us and we enter the domain of speculations, which might be or not be of any use.

T-A 5y ago

> fringe theories like this one How do you define "fringe theory"? I'm pretty sure inflation has been the mainstream view among cosmologists since the 1980s.

metaobject 5y ago
I think the “fringe” comes from the theory that cosmic inflation occurred before the BB
- T-A 5y ago
  Nothing fringe about it, it's a general feature of inflation models. Exponential expansion essentially quick-freezes the universe, until the field which drives it (the inflaton) decays. At that point, exponential expansion stops (so no more cooling) and the universe fills with a hot soup of decay products. It's called reheating, and plays the role of old-school big bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Reheating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Reheatin...