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This interview with the authors describes a fascinating book that gives facts about cosmology in a combined education and the challenges to the people who can't quite believe in the conclusions scientists draw. Looks neat.
Despite having the world's knowledge at our fingertips, we live in a time of great scientific illiteracy. Disinformation is rampant about vaccines, climate change and even pandemics like Covid-19. But it gets even trickier when talking about the origins of life, the universe, and everything. Some of the facts we often hear about the cosmos are so absurd to imagine — they can almost feel like a religious dogma.
Of course, cosmic theories are based on mountains of data, not whimsical guesses. Yet, how do scientists really know a supermassive black hole is at the center of the Milky Way? How do scientists know distant nebulae are (sometimes) made of hydrogen clouds? How do scientists know 14 billion years ago there was a massive explosion of matter and energy that formed everything in our universe?
We hear these claims often, but most of us aren't able to examine the gritty details behind a scientific theory. Two astronomers get at this problem in the new book The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook: Or, How To Beat The Big Bang (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[...] But Handbook goes one step further, explaining the scientific process in detail, so if you don't accept the mainstream Big Bang theory, you can create your own. Yes, [authors] Barnes and Lewis encourage you to take on the intellectual giants of cosmology — Einstein, Hawking, and all the rest — by taking this data and interpreting your own hypothesis.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2020, @08:10PM (5 children)
You miss one critical failing of science, both contemporary and in the past. When you start speaking of models you run into a problem. When one model is assumed to be correct, things start building up on top of it to artificially support that model rather than challenge it. Cosmic inflation [wikipedia.org] is the best example of this. If you actually rerun our universe from the moment of the big bang to today using all we know, it ends up looking nothing like what we observe - at all. So did we throw away the model or perhaps assume a conclusion we made at some point must have been incorrect?
No, we instead invented cosmic inflation. Cosmic inflation claims that briefly after the big bang, for no explicable reason, everything suddenly just broke all laws of physics as we know them and flew into (dramatically) faster than light warp speed. And then it just as magically it stopped and resumed at its previous rate like nothing happened. There's absolutely no physical basis for why this might have been the case; it's just randomly adding magic to make what we observe fit a model which we assume to be true. And now indeed some might claim that the cosmic microwave background radiation is evidence of the big bang. But it's not. It actually refutes the big bang unless you add magic. This makes it practically impossible to refute models, even when they're completely wrong - because an immense amount builds upon them and if you can't swipe it all cleanly away with one fell stroke, then the new theory will never meet widespread adoption. Basically we end up holding new ideas to a vastly higher standard than we hold existing ones, when the exact opposite should be true since otherwise we risk prematurely pruning the 'right' hypothesis simply because it lacked refinement. Alternatively it may be that something we believe to be true (and thus expect a new model to also validate) is simply false.
And this is not a new problem. You mentioned the geocentric/heliocentric view. When you assume a heliocentric view you can retrofit everything to work with it, but it leads to really *really* strange stuff. For instance it would mean that at some point in Mercury's orbit it simply turns around and starts hauling ass the other way, once again - like magic. And so people simply accepted this because they assumed geocentricism was correct. And even if the heliocentric model was more elegant in many ways, it didn't (yet) explain absolutely everything that had been built upon the geocentric model and indeed it required completely throwing away some long held views such as that planets can magically just turn around. If not for Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation which not only explained everything but packed it all into an elementary little formula - we likely would not have gotten away from geocentricism until we could see the universe 'as through the eyes of god'. But for more complex issues it may be that such a simple formulation or existential solution does not exist which may lead us following a path that begins with 2+2=5.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday July 17 2020, @08:18PM (3 children)
How do you know what the universe would look like if rerun without the use of a model? If you want to say "cosmic inflation sounds wacky", go ahead. I'll agree. But the challenge is to find a better model that fits all the known facts.
That said, we KNOW our current theories are wrong. We just don't have better ones. We know because in various special conditions quantum theory and relativity make different predictions. (We don't know which predictions are correct, because these "special conditions" make observation quite difficult.)
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2020, @09:14PM (2 children)
I don't think it sounds wacky. It's just a hack, and a very extreme one at that. It's like adding a (if (n % 273 == 147) goto WEIRD_FAILURE_SKIP) in a program. And in both cases, such a failure is often indicative of a much more fundamental issue. As for how we know what the universe would look like - well some things are pretty straight forward. One of the biggest issues that we run into is that parts of the universe that we know are causally connected can't be causally connected given our assumption of the age of the universe. Causally connected means two regions are connected by a distance smaller than speed_of_light * age_of_universe. In other words they've been able to causally effect one another. Add in some warp speed magic though and you can patch that right up.
I do not think a *bad* theory is better than no theory because *bad* theories become inertially sustaining. What causes the dimming of KIC 8462852 (Tabby's star)? There have been lots of hypothesis but none really do well without hacks, so the answer is 'we don't know'. And that should be the general path we take. I put *bad* in quotes to emphasize that the reason the big bang + inflation is bad is because of something much greater than uncertainty. We know that the underlying concept simply does not work without magic and that means there is a very good chance that the underlying concept is simply wrong.
By contrast like you mention there are certain issues with quantum gravity preventing a real unification of the micro (quantum mechanics) and the macro (relativity) world. But this is matter is largely just going to be one of refinement. But there is basically zero probability that either concept is fundamentally wrong or will ultimately end up requiring magic to fix. Similar to how Newtonian Gravity could not explain Mercury's orbital precession. It was off by literally 1/100th of one degree per century more than Newton would have predicted, and that was a major exception and major problem. That's generally the sign of a good hypothesis. By contrast (again) the big bang just simply doesn't work at all unless you add magic.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 18 2020, @01:15AM
Actually, it's my suspicion that the resolution of the quantum theory/relativity conflict will be as different from both of them as Newton's gravity was from epicycles. (Note that epicycles can be made to make the same predictions as Newton's gravity. But the crystal spheres that were the original model that caused epicycles to be considered get increasingly into trouble.)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 18 2020, @01:51PM
What's supposed to be wrong with hacks? They help illuminate the problem. Any better model will need to have an explanation for cosmic inflation, either modeling the inflation or explaining why it's actually some other effect.
What bad theory? Big Bang Theory to the contrary is a good theory.
Unless, of course, it's not going to be a matter of refinement. Given how very different general relativity and quantum mechanics are, I think we'll need more than mere refinement to get there.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday July 17 2020, @09:37PM
Just for the record, the universe expanding faster than the light in it travels does not break any laws of physics. And if you do have a better model, by all means, present it and put it up for scruteny. That's what science is here for.