5 ms·
That's not really a fair way to present the situation. It isn't 'In the 21st century people couldn't imagine the universe could be curved, how terribly quaint!'
by SEMW 13y ago
That's not really a fair way to present the situation. It isn't 'In the 21st century people couldn't imagine the universe could be curved, how terribly quaint!'.
Rather, it's more like 'In the 21st century the best data available from CMB anisotropies was that Ω was approximately 1 (or a tiny bit more), with Ω=1 being inside the confidence interval, so most cosmologists used a model where Ω=1. Later, better data showed that the true value of Ω was actually very slightly less than 1, so cosmologists started using the new, slightly more precise value.'
The fact that there's a change in the words you can use to describe the universe at Ω=1 ('open' at Ω<1, 'flat' at Ω=1, 'closed' at Ω>1), and the latest update happens to have crossed that line (so makes for good headlines), doesn't change that this is just another case of science slowly homing in on a true value.
- lmm 13y agoThe idea that medieval people thought the world was flat is entirely unfair, but still popular.
- aninhumer 13y agoThis reminds me of a letter from Einstein (EDIT: It was Isaac Asimov) where he points out that saying the earth is flat is a pretty good approximation of the curvature of the earth. It's also worth pointing out that educated people have known the earth is round since the classical period.
- lsd5you 13y agoIt was Isaac Asimov I believe. http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
- talmand 13y agoTIL that Asimov supported the notion of "nearly right", which is good enough as long as you tried really hard and could explain how you got to your incorrect answer.
- summerdown2 13y ago"Nearly right" is good enough, providing it's within the accuracy you need for any particular job.
- talmand 13y agoI suppose that depends on how the question is asked. Taking a question that has a yes or no answer with one of them being correct and changing the parameters so that nearly right is good enough doesn't seem proper to me.