When a team of cosmologists announced at a press conference in March that they had detected gravitational waves generated in the first instants after the Big Bang, the origins of the Universe were once again major news. The reported discovery created a worldwide sensation in the scientific community, the media and the public at large. […] Now, serious flaws in the analysis have been revealed that transform the sure detection into no detection. The search for gravitational waves must begin anew. The problem is that other effects, including light scattering from dust and the synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving around galactic magnetic fields within our own Galaxy, can also produce these twists.
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The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?
The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multiverse, everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.
It’s like climate science on a universal scale.
I have a theory that more and more scientists are becoming stupid charlatans. Prove me wrong.(actually I hope someone does!)
At least the experiment was made and no result was found and this was reported. This is science. For my take, red shift is a fact, big bang is a theory. CO2 is a fact; man-made global warming is a scam.
Science is full of discoveries which later turn out to be the results of insufficient measurement—eg. the tools aren’t as precise as needed or because of ignorance to other phenomenon. Sometimes those errors will lead to other discoveries. That’s why peer review and a push to replicate experiments exist. Lo and behold, the peer review is still working!
So if inflationists are right then we can’t know and will never know. I suppose if no further evidence for any other theory were found in the next couple of hundred years than I would accept their theory as likely.
What we need is a theory as to why man is unable to grasp their own intellectual limitations:-)
“Science” has become the establishment, the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. It ALL revolves around money, power and control. The new Galileo Galilei of the 21st century will most definitely NOT be a so-called “scientist.”
I feeeeel, lacking the mathematical ability to actually participate, that the failure of the gravity wave experiment is in fact more interesting than the success. Whenever you go looking for something predicted by theory and you don’t find it, you have to go back and start over.
Whenever you hear something like this “… the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests…” it pays to remember J.J. Thompson’s “Raisin Bun” model of the atom, and how it withstood every test. Until Geiger and Marsden proved it wasn’t so, conclusively, with one experiment. Upon learning of their experiment, Mr. Thompson was heard to say “Well, sh-t! There goes my fame and fortune.”
It also pays to remember the scorn and abuse that was heaped upon that funny looking, long haired Jewish kid when he released that first relativity paper in 1915. He put up with a lot of cr@p for a really long time. After July 16th 1945 the giggling and pointing pretty much stopped, which must have been nice for him.
You may be sure that there’s kids out there right now burning Jolt cola and hot pockets by the case, figuring out a way to blow up the Inflationary model. [Bwaha! science joke!] Sooner or later one of them will do it. Then we will all slap our foreheads and say “Oh, duh! I should have thought of that!”
Big difference? The cosmologists behind the inflationary theory aren’t picking our pockets and attempting to micro-manage our lives based on their beliefs.
As someone who has worked in scientific fields all of his life, I always said astrophysicists are at the top of the BS chain.
Most space science is BS. It usually goes something like this. Huge possible new discovery of something big.
They’ll show you a photo of random looking star field with a bunch of pixelated crap that no one can really tell you about and a nice “artists impression” of what they think it really is.
Throw in a paragraph or two about dark matter and congratulations you’ve got any article about space in the last 15 years.
On the “settled science” front, with friends like NRO, we don’t need friends. http://m.nationalreview.com/article/381895/its-time-conservative-global-warming-agenda-eli-lehrer
It’s like climate science on a universal scale.
These theories have become Mythology ,not science. The top sentence says it all. Science now uses models that can never fail. its not observation any more but political consensus on what they want to believe. But hey this is the age of superstition where people can never be wrong .
“It’s like climate science on a universal scale”
Except that no one is trying to take away my SUV because it might get bigger in 2030…
“…….. it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.”
Which brings us back to a religious basis for the origin/explanation of the universe, a basis also scientifically meaningless.
It’s not that I’m particularly religious but rather that the big bang model really never could explain the initial existence of the super dense start point. Where did that point come from? And in what nothingness did it exist?
Intellectually, humans are probably incapable of explaining the origin, nature, and future course of the universe. God is as good an explanation as the big bang theory. Both are scientifically meaningless.
Note: I am NOT saying humans should stop striving for understanding, not saying that science is meaningless, not endorsing religious fundamentalism.
They may not be “picking pockets” but they may be changing things to suit their purposes. It’s still deceptive and unscientific.
Also, Galileo didn’t develop the heliocentric theory.
“Also, Galileo didn’t develop the heliocentric theory.”
I missed the part where I claimed he did. Deceptive and unscientific? No, I think it’s more that they are groping toward the truth. Perhaps inflationary theory may ultimately prove useful, in that some other researcher may become motivated to disprove it, and thereby find a better answer as to how the Universe came into being.
Point is, there is no hidden agenda here, as there is in much of the more “earthly” pseudo-science.
David, the point of a scientific theory is not to explain things, it is to generate new and exciting questions. A scientific theory that does not create more questions than it answers is a bad one.
The point of religion IS to explain things and answer questions. A religion that doesn’t answer questions properly and lead its adherents to a right and harmonious path is a bad one.
The one has nothing to do with the other. Both are necessary and sufficient unto themselves.
I agree that human beings are probably far too small to encompass the “origin, nature, and future course of the universe”. Perhaps, if we are not too proud, venal and self destructive, we could get bigger and encompass more.
I never said you did. It had been mentioned previously by someone else. Nor did I state outright that there is a hidden agenda. However, it is not unheard of in this day and age for those purporting to be scientists to fudge things to their advantage. Perhaps the equipment is not up the task. Maybe there is something they are overlooking. Who knows? This is why scrutiny is important.
Justthinkin ….. lowered standards across the board is part of it. I also believe that there are fewer opportunities for researchers to actually do anything original.
Results are that more and more scientists who are less and less equipped for original thought and work are seeking an ever dwindling opportunity to make a real mark in their field of study.
Desperation.
Indeed. You aren’t being asked to pay for inflation – or anti-inflation.
Real scientific theories are easily falsifiable. In old quantum theory the first ionization energy of He turned out wrong.
Exit old quantum theory. Modern quantum mechanics agrees with experiment within about 8 significant figures.
The magnetic moment of the electron agrees with theory to about 12 sig fig. And so it goes.
Special relativity is easy to falsify but that hasn’t been done. Etc.
Radix malorum est cupiditas, I say. The lust for money, government grant money, is extremely corruptive.
Hence the desire for press conferences to announce new “discoveries” which really should not have been discussed
in public. Einstein was very averse to this BTW.
As history this is amusing but … decidedly at odds with the real history (Einstein’s first relativity paper was in 1905
for instance; by 1915 he was well established and his 1915 paper on GR was delivered to the German Physics
Society of Berlin, of which he was a member). However, your final statement is correct and I know at least one of them.
The fact that it is difficult to falsify string theories (mainly related to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a preferred
string theory) is worrisome and convinces many that string theory is erudite BS. The relativists in my university,
for example, won’t go near it.
It’s like climate science on a universal scale.
…or the story of evolution. Subjective interpretation piled on subjective interpretation. Each ‘proving’ the other.
‘If you don’t like this interpretation, we have others…’
Like AGW, evolution also stopped. No constant stream of living things crawling out of the ooze and creating a living stream from simple organisms to the complicated.
But the religion lives on…
Astrophysics is a religion.
I have long been dissatisfied with the current cosmological standard model. There is no proposed mechanism in the Standard Model for inflation. It isn’t there in any of the equations, it’s just assumed that the universe expanded faster than the speed of light for the first fraction of a second. Dark Matter and Dark Energy don’t pop out of any of the Standard Model equations for particles nor any form of string theory. And there are an infinite number of possible string theories, each with as much validity as the next.
We’ve been going down the wrong path with superstrings and m-branes and dark matter and dark energy for decades.
I find the work of Louise Riofrio and John Kulick to make a lot more sense. Riofrio has proposed that the speed of light is not truly constant, and is slowing according to the formula GM=Tc^3 (meaning in the very early universe the speed of light was much higher and no inflation is needed). Kulick has proposed that the Big Bang was not an instantateous event 13.7 billion years ago, but a continuous process that is ongoing even now – and when I looked at Kulick’s paper, I realized that Riofrio’s equation emerges as one implication of his idea.
Necessary and sufficient unto themselves.
That will (must) be the final word on these orthogonal magisteriums.
Niall from Winnipeg.
This is how science works guys. It’s how it has always worked. What’s so, so funny about you sorry lot is that you deal in absolutes. You imagine that admitting an error is somehow failure. If conservatives had their way, we’d never have come down from the trees. (Not that most of you believe we were in the trees in the first place.)
@John:
If you had stopped or at least taken a different tack after your first two sentences you might have contributed something to the discussion. Certainly I agree with those two sentences and in all probably so do the others commenting.
Unfortunately you didn’t stop and it made you look like thousands of other loonies that inhabit the internet blogs. So predictable and tiresome…… If you had just said “It’s Bush’s fault.” and nothing more we all would have understood your complete message.
That’s how science works – except in climate science, where engaging in debate is enough to get you equated with Holocaust deniers.