You appear to be bending over backwards to imply that you didn’t write it without coming out and making the assertion. I have no doubt that you have excellent reasons for that choice.
I could also see some preppers doing the same thing.
“The Big Bang is going down!!”
Also, perverts…
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I’m not mainstream. But if objects are eventually discovered that are apparently older (and not by a little) than the Big Bang says the universe is, then it’s really time to look at alternatives to the Big Bang. These alternatives have to look quite a bit like the Big Bang, because the universe does indeed look like the result of a big bang. However, in recent decades, the Big Bang has had a lot of modifications attached to it. The pure, unmodified Big Bang has already fallen to cosmic inflation and the accelerating universe.
Why would they ? I mean the big bang is practically a creation story in scientific disguise. It was even first proposed by a catholic priest. Even the Vatican supports the Big Bang Theory.
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From what I’ve seen, Fox News presents itself as a valid news organization. Boing Boing presents itself as a general interest blog.
The Fox News scientists are often presented as preeminent experts on the issues, this Boing Boing guy says it’s the opinion of a TV comedy writer, stripper and bar bouncer who does physics on the side and he says this within his second sentence.
This puts Boing Boing on the side of Fox News? Hardly. You must be joking or have some other sort of agenda behind your drivel.
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I was talking to a Creationist once telling him that religion has a bad track record on challenging scientific theory, and I used as an example of how the Vatican didn’t believe Galileo when he had proof the Earth didn’t go around the sun. His response was that he wasn’t Catholic so that didn’t apply to him. Reality hardly matters.
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Hey articulatedjunc -
I begin the second sentence with “In my opinion, (the opinion of a TV comedy writer, stripper and bar bouncer who does physics on the side)…,” which should act as a small disclaimer that I’m not stating absolute established fact.
Testing assertions is awesome. I discuss some ways to test mine somewhere in this long interview.
One set of tests is to find stuff that’s older than the Big Bang age of the universe. This depends on better and better means of detecting old stuff. We’re right on the verge - in the next five or ten years, astronomers will find a bunch of objects that are anomalously old, or they won’t. If they find heavy element dust or billion-star-mass quasars or highly-developed cosmic filaments that are only 280 million years younger than the Big Bang, then people will think about modifying the Big Bang.
Another test involves building a reasonably complete theory of how a non-Big Bang universe would work without denying the huge amounts of data which suggest that we live in a Big Bang universe. Such a theory would suggest that universe is a drag queen - it’s dressed up like a Big Bang, but it’s really something kinda different.
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First they came for Pluto, and I did not speak out…
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Hey Aelfscine -
I’m a TV comedy writer - of course I’m gonna go for the sensational headline (which I happen to believe, so it’s not that sensational, at least in my head). Everybody’s kinda lucky I didn’t go with the headline “Big Bang Meerkats 19 Baby Hedgehogs Who Can’t Even Boobies Boobies BOOBIES!”
And the article does present three actual cosmic phenomena that, if you were looking for reasons to be skeptical of the Big Bang, you’d look closely at them.
So, yeah, framed clownishly. But as you say, “a neat thought experiment.”
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It is definitely NOT a completely new and novel idea only coming out of left field that the universe is fundamentally compatible with information theory, and may in fact be essentially a “cosmic computer.” This idea has been around for decades, and has been suggested by many extremely intelligent and lauded scientists.
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look, just because our theory of how the universe came to be may seem to be at odds with the experimental evidence, it’s really hard to look at the CMB and not come to the conclusion that the universe was a lot denser and a lot hotter in the past than it is today, and that we had to have had some sort of inflationary period, if our understanding of physics is even remotely correct.
these objects that you posit are too old to be consistent with the theory may only mean that the details of the theory are wrong. certainly our grasp of the physics of such high energies and short timescales are incomplete, to be overly generous.
i’m not sure why you want to discard occam’s razor and declare that the universe is trying to fool us all by appearing that it was hotter and denser in the past when it really was not. if you unmoor yourself from all the basic tenets of science, then sure, anything is possible. but going off of what we can observe, it’s pretty hard to deny that the universe (or at least our observable part of it) was once a lot more dense and a lot hotter. note that being hotter and denser does not imply that it was ever smaller than it is today; it always was and is infinite in extent.
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Er – saying that particle physics is stuck, doesn’t know what it’s doing, and that once the Big Bang theory gets replaced by whatever crackpot thing it is that you’ve come up with even though you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about is pretty much EXACTLY what the climate change denialists are doing.
You may not be politically motivated, but your relationship to the scientific field you’re talking about is really very much the same.
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It’s a huge misrepresentation of the “pure Big Bang theory” to say that it’s been modified by cosmic inflation and by acceleration. It’s a straw-man version fo what the Big Bang really is.
Cosmic acceleration fits in perfectly with the Big Bang theory. Hell, it was there at the beginning, in the form of the cosmological constant. It’s not a modification of it at all, it’s just a version.
Likewise, inflation. That perhaps is more of a modification, but it in no way invaldates the rest of the Big BAng model. Indeed, it could be said that Inflation is what puts the BAng in the Big Bang. (And has been; I think I stole that line from Max Tegmark.)
Check out my blog post from several years ago about why “Big Bang” is a terrible name for a great theory: http://www.galacticinteractions.org/?p=508
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[quote=“avunculoid, post:15, topic:54554”]
If the general douchiness of the author explaining in his bio that he has an exceptionally high IQ doesn’t tip you off
[/quote]I find your insulting post to be a tip off that you’re rather humorless and somewhat obtuse. Did you somehow miss the part where he’s quoting Wikipedia?
Lighten up a little, dude.
saying it will be replaced by a theory of information processing is complete horseshite and I wish BB wouldn’t give a platform to it.
Yes, spreading ideas you don’t agree with can only lead to disaster.
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I’ve wondered if it’s possible that our large region is simply moving into a more vacuous ‘chamber’ of a filament in the Cosmic Web.
Like a gas expanding, that’s giving us the view of inflation.
The Big Bang relies on too many assumptions; Isotropy, Homogeneity, Dark Matter.
The LHC switch-on is due to put at least some theories to bed.
Hopefully.
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Hey joeblough -
I like Occam’s Razor. Would hope that a modified or post-Big Bang theory would be simple in its essential principles. And I’m not denying that explodey stuff happened - just not the entire universe all at once.
The physics of information has to be largely consistent with Big Bang physics. The active center of the universe must have an apparent Big Bang age and a causal chronology that can be followed back through time. But that doesn’t necessitate a single, solitary explosive unfolding of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
[quote=“rknop, post:53, topic:54554”]
EXACTLY what the climate change denialists are doing.
[/quote]Ironically, by being absolutist, you’re practicing something very similar to climate change denier tactics.
You may not be politically motivated, but your relationship to the scientific field you’re talking about is really very much the same.
What does that even mean?
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“A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Maybe check out Act Three here, including the “crackpot test.”
As someone who works on some of what’s referred to here, and who knows people working on much of the rest, this is utter bollocks.
Seriously BB, you have had good science coverage, but this post is hardly worthy of Fox.
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