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> At the moment, there is no alternative theory of the early Universe that explains more. I thought this was a very important point that the author just sort o
by smeyer 11y ago
> At the moment, there is no alternative theory of the early Universe that explains more.
I thought this was a very important point that the author just sort of brushed aside. There are serious flaws with inflation and real concerns to address with recent measurements, but it still remains the best available theory. It's not like everyone is latching on for purely sentimental reasons or something.
- alchemism 11y ago>Among today’s physicists, there are some who still believe the cosmos cycles in and out of being in this way. It may take science some time to grudgingly test hypotheses drawn from mysticism and metaphysics. So perhaps not so much due to sentimentality as pride?
- Retric 11y agoWhat other test would you suggest? Right now we can collect light from the distant cosmos and run local experiments, but it's really hard to test for large scale effects at the local level. Which means detecting photons and making predictions about what they suggest is the only real option.
- al2o3cr 11y ago"It may take science some time to grudgingly test hypotheses drawn from mysticism and metaphysics" Especially since the production of testable hypotheses from mysticism and metaphysics appears to have a time-constant larger than science's current age...
- Florin_Andrei 11y agoThis is business as usual, no reason to get too excited. General relativity and quantum mechanics are also pretty clearly flawed, from the fact that they are mutually incompatible. And yet both are very successful theories. That's just how science works, it doesn't give you absolutes of any kind.
- littletimmy 11y agoThe fact that they are mutually incompatible does not mean they are "pretty clearly flawed". In their particular domain they work splendidly well, just as Newton's laws work splendidly well when talking about the movement of objects at human scale. All we can say is that they are incompatible at some extreme.
- nilkn 11y agoThe Standard Model is flawed just on its own as well. For instance, while it accurately predicts the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the electron, it does not do so for the muon. It's also spectacularly wrong about the vacuum energy (over 100 orders of magnitude wrong).
- darkmighty 11y agoWoah, I had the idea that quantum theory had the "small stuff" all going well according to predictions. Is the phenomenon you describe with the muon incompatible with the quantum field theories?
- nine_k 11y agoThey are clearly flawed, but these flaws do not prevent their extremely successful practical applications. The same is the case with Newtonian mechanics: it's quite good when you need to construct a lever, a house, an automobile, or an airplane. They start to slightly squeak when you need to build a rocket or predict an orbit of a planet close to a star. This is where you detect the flaws, find a better approximation (SR/GR and QM), and it allows for vastly more interesting practical applications, from atomic bombs to GPS devices, and also turns your idea of cosmos upside down. So when a refinement on GR and/or QM is found, we should expect some quite interesting practical applications, along with another upheaval of the idea of cosmos. This makes studying the incompatibility "in some extreme" a very practical thing.