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posted by martyb on Friday July 17 2020, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the calling-all-crackpots dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 18 2020, @08:36AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday July 18 2020, @08:36AM (#1023298) Journal

    where he referred to quantum mechanics as "spooky action at a distance."

    Wrong. He absolutely accepted that quantum mechanics worked, he just was convinced that it was not complete, and that the complete theory would then no longer have that problem. Not much unlike Newtonian gravitation had an action-at-a-distance gravitational force, but even Newton himself was convinced that an actual action at a distance was not meaningful and the actual, so far unknown mechanism should be local, and indeed Einstein showed that Newtonian gravitation is just an approximation to a local theory, General Relativity.

    the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics (the one we have now adopted)

    Actually the question of the correct interpretation is far from settled. But even if it were, there's an important word in your sentence: “now”.

    At Einstein's time, “the” Copenhagen interpretation (actually there are several variants) was definitely not established. And indeed, as interpretation one may argue whether it is even in the realms of science (it is not experimentally verifiable, after all; the formalism of quantum mechanics of course is, but that's one thing all interpretations of quantum mechanics agree on), or should rather be considered philosophy. So even when ignoring the points raised by the other answer to your post, you still have not demonstrated any case where Einstein attacked established science.

    Relativity was adopted incredibly rapidly, perhaps moreso than any hypothesis before or since. It certainly was a major exception to Planck's famous witticism that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' Einsteins' 'annus mirabilis' was 1905. By 1908 he had received worldwide recognition and accolade.

    And three of the four publications of that “annus mirabilis” were not related to relativity. That in particular included the publication he got his Nobel prize for, the explanation of the photoelectric effect.

    And why do you think that as late as 1921, the Nobel committee did not award the prize to Einstein for his Theory of Relativity?

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