4 ms·
She does apply it to the big bang as well. She says that it's just the simplest explanation we have and that it's probably wrong too.
by nswest23 4y ago
She does apply it to the big bang as well. She says that it's just the simplest explanation we have and that it's probably wrong too.
- superposeur 4y agoAs I read the post, she takes the fact of a Hot Big Bang (narrowly construed in the modern sense of a homogenous, hot initial state prior to which vanilla GR breaks down, not as a literal singularity) to be a fact knowable by the normal process of science. Whereas the question of what came before that — I.e. what modified description takes over at higher temperatures yet — is placed in a different epistemic category of forever unknowability. Of course, for any theory that applies within a certain domain, there’s always the question of what happens beyond that domain (“what came before that… and before that… and before that…?”). But this infinite regress isn’t particularly noteworthy. If I understand her correctly, she is claiming to be able to draw a particular line and to say that we can know things on one side of this line but— even in principle — can never know anything past this particular line. She certainly understands her stuff. But I respectfully disagree with her conclusions — I see no reason to think that we might not make progress on the question through the normal process of science.