As I’ve said, didn’t realize that what I posted was so provocative. Been talking about the informational universe online since I lost my TV-writing job last year without running into this degree of indignation. I wrote for network TV for about 20 years, where we learn how to not go too far - my agenda is not to unduly disrupt or offend. You can visit my Twitter feed, @dumbassgenius, and see more than 10,000 non-trollish tweets. Dumb, silly and lame tweets, yes, but not tweets designed to provoke a s**tstorm.
There’s a picture of me on the cover of a November, 1985, issue of Denver’s Westword magazine, wearing roller skates and a loincloth and pointing at a big sheet of paper which reads, “NO BIG BANG.” So if I’ve been provocatively trolling, I’ve been doing so since before there was an internet. (Actually, the loincloth and roller skates are somewhat trollish.)
Yeah, I’m a dumb-ass too --frequently in the traditional sense, I’m afraid. That said, I have quite enjoyed this romp down the deep time rabbit trail. A dash of absurdity can do wonders when pondering what lies beyond our evolutionary wheelhouse.
I’m not going to speculate on the accuracy of this particular counter theory to “the big bang”, but I would point out that the account of the big bang as widely accepted by physicists for the last 80 odd years has been fending off increasing challenges for a while now, and many well respected physicists, including Roger Penrose who staunchly defended it for years, now reject it’s generally accepted form.
There is an entire book devoted to the numerous and, for many, nameless contributors to what we now recognize as the paradigm of Western science and its discoveries. I read your post with this in mind and I appreciate you sharing your thoughts here. It’s clear that your enthusiasm is driven by a desire to reframe and strengthen cosmological theory rather than merely throwing brickbats at it.
Judging by the comments so far, it seems that most of the discontent with this post stems from perhaps an overzealous editorial decision (The headline could easily have been written as a question and retained its click-worthiness) as well as a tone that seems to have struck many as more argumentative than speculative. If this is reflective of enthusiasm and not ego, that’s pretty forgivable.
And March has 31 days, so it’s not just 30/3 here being 1/4 somewhere else already. On the other hand, we’ve established that this is the kind of really really cosmic cosmic physics you can do without being good at math.
No, it’s not exactly what climate change denialists are doing, or even much like it. The climate change denialists start with their goal, which is to prevent US and other politicians from regulating large energy businesses in ways that will negatively affect the bottom line, whether or not it floods the planet, starves half of humanity, drives large percentages of species into extinction, or whatever other horrible things you could imaging, because all of those are Somebody Else’ Problem, and given their goal, they figure out how to make it politically difficult for politicians to be willing to make those regulations and easy for them to not be willing to make those regulations. Then they go sell the public whatever it takes to make that happen. Anti-Evolutionism was around long before the climate change worries, but it was one of many convenient tools (not only do those people tend to vote Republican, if you can convince them to vote, but teaching people to deny one kind of science makes it easy to convince them to deny other kinds of science.)
Crackpots, on the other hand, tend to start with their really cool theory, and suddenly for a minute there it all makes sense, and go on from there. Most of them aren’t trying to do deep political manipulation to gain other believers, they just assume that you’ll agree that it’s as cool as they think it is.
Yes, the overzealousness was a miscalculation. (But why should someone who claims to have a theory of the universe be good at calculating?) I do get pretty psyched about the theory - been thinking about it since 1981.
here’s a fun quote from Winston Churchill:
“I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I
saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I
saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s
Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from
plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation
was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.”
Do you have all of your ideas regarding cosmology in one place? I see there is some of it here, but there is a lot of interview material that has nothing to do with the topic.
The real problem is the Boing Boing editor’s choice to take your uniformed musings that start with a declaration that the Big Bang theory off base and about to go down based on nothign other than ignorance and wishful thinking, and to put that article on their front page with a title that belongs on a Plasma Cosmology site, not on a site of people who actually ought to be listened to occasionally
You’re ignorant about what you’re talking about, and at least in the comments you indicate that, although your main article labels you as a standard-issue science crackpot of the sort that should be ignored.
The Boing Boing editors really should know better than to enhrone this sort of sophomoric pseudoscientific rambling with a front-page article, especially with such a provocative title. This is the really annoying thing.
There is a difffference between posting a thought, and between a headline with a provcative title followed by an article based completely on ignorance.
It’d be little different from an article wondering where autism comes from, with a headline “VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM AFTER ALL!”
Sometimes we know things. Sometimes educated people should know about them. Sometimes we should know better than to push something to the fore that is really just classic garden-variety crackpottery.
There is a difference between musing on ideas and enthroning ignorance.
My problem with the article is apparently unsubstantiated statements such as the following:
In rolling cycles of universal computation, old, collapsed, neutron-rich galaxies are lit up again, being hosed down by neutrinos (which have probably been channeled along cosmic filaments), turning some of their neutrons to protons, which provides fuel for stellar fusion. Each calculation takes a few tens of billions of years as newly lit-up galaxies burn their proton fuel in stars, sharing information and forming new associations in the active center of the universe before burning out again
Is there any theory, tested or otherwise, that says neutrinos are channeled along “cosmic filaments” (whatever those are–dark-matter structures?)? Do neutrinos turn neutrons to protons? What exactly is “proton fuel” and why would “burning” it “share information”? I burn gas in my car and the only information that gets shared is the dropping of my tank needle. I try to keep up with cosmology and particle physics, but all of these things seem to me more likely in an Iain M. Banks novel than in current scientific understanding.
Let’s throw in a link to Max Tegmark’s website. His book “Our Mathematical Universe” talks about the different levels of Universe (mostly he defines the term at four levels), implied by our current, pretty good understanding of physics. Don’t think of inflation as a modification as if that isn’t correct. Inflation helps explain the current observations. Inflation implies a lot of different parts of the universe that we can’t reach but are there nonetheless.
"old, collapsed galaxies being hosed down by neutrinos dancing along cosmic filaments. newly-lit galaxies burning proton fuel in stars as they deeply ponder one thought every 10 billion years."
