Cosmic Inflation Hysteria, Bio Evolutionary Hysteria

What If Cosmic Inflation Is Wrong? Where It Is Shown That Scientists Are Prisoners Of What Looks Good:

How plausible is a piece of knowledge? How does one establish the plausibility of a piece of knowledge? This is the sort of meta theory of knowledge (meta-”epistemology”) which the progress of science unceasingly reveals.

Thus, establishing new science is not just a revelation of the world out there, but a revelation of how we think, and, even better, how we could think, if we wanted to be even more clever than we already are.

In particular mass sociological effects control the “data” all too easily, the more subtle the “data” is.

Here we consider evolution and especially the attitude relative to Lamarck, and then the so-called Big Bang, or as it is now fashionable to say among the cognoscenti, in a bout of poetic mystifying jargon, the ΛCDM model. (Much more sophisticated than Big Boom theory!)

In both cases, silly, and thus all the more enthusiastic, herd effects are involved.

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Nothing Real New In Darwinism, But Lots Of Insufferably Shattering New Ideas In Lamarck:

The debate about biological evolution was exemplary: Greece was making lot of money from having mastered selection of species, both natural and artificial, 25 centuries ago. Anaximander, earlier, informed us we all evolved from fishes. Then came the Christian Jihadists, burning books, libraries and infidels, cutting intellectuals alive with oysters shells until they succumbed. Fast forward 23 centuries, and research professor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, having ruined his eyes by spending thousands of hours studying mollusk, and other invertebrate fossils behind his microscope, came up with several new insights.

Lamarck thought that evolution was urged along by two other forces. Teaching evolution was outlawed in England, Lyell and Darwin went to learn it in Edinburgh, Scotland. Next Darwin rolled the basic Greek theory out, claiming to have observed it in Galapagos finches as Lamarck had observed it mollusks. Darwin’s basic theory, purged from its Lamarckian elements, became widely accepted.    

There was no proof that the further additions suggested by Lamarck were wrong, though. However, believing that there was anything in evolutionary theory beyond what the Greeks already knew 25 centuries ago, became “unscientific”. Since when is believing that something could be true which we have no proven is not true “unscientific”?

Since science is a church with great bishops?

Nothing was really completely new in Darwinism, but lots was really new, and religiously shocking, in Lamarck. After lots of ridicule, Lamarck took 2 centuries to be proven right.

We know now that Lamarck was right on one of his two suggested mechanism. And I am pretty sure he is true on the other. Underlying both is full bore Quantum Physics.

Thus spoke Zarathrustra.

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Here comes the Bible, latest version! Perfectly correct, if one supposes their suppositions about their suppositions just as correct…

Inflationistas’ Hysteria:

I am for more mild inflation in matters economical, and also in matters cosmological, but not beyond that.

For decades, cosmologists have screamed from every rooftop that cosmic inflation was right. I was dubious, because they made an hypothesis which was astounding, to explain something rather mundane. (And extremely natural, if one entertains the fancy that the universe is hundreds of billion years old, not just 13.8 billion!)

The short of it is that the universe is huge, at least 45 billion light years across, but looks everywhere the same, as if it originated from just one place (or as if it were immensely old). To explain the discrepancy, some cosmologists, starting in the USSR, assumed the universe expanded at enormously faster than light speed. The speed of light along loops in space is locally limited. The speed of space, though is not limited (a curved manifold of dimension n embeds in one of dimension (2n +1) so that the curvature of the former is a trace of the flat one of the latter).

This was a huge hypothesis to explain a smaller problem. Basically, it looked as if cosmologists had got the temporal dimension of the universe wrong. Or maybe the Big Bang was wrong. Or maybe both, a bit.

Instead, cosmologists assumed a completely new force, Cosmic Inflation, and thus a completely new source of energy. They went for a phantasmagoric “explanation”, instead of modestly admitting that they did not really witness the proverbial “First Three Minutes”, from their position, on the right of God.

If CI existed, why should CI appear just once? Why not here, there, and everywhere, now, yesterday and tomorrow? Could one make universes out of nothing? Yes, yes and yes, screamed hysterical cosmologists from all rooftops.

A rule in thinking is that when one has a problem with a ready class of explanations one should not explain it with supernatural explanations from the get-go, before the more obvious explanations have been proven wrong.

Here conventional theories of the Hot Big Bang may not be not quite correct, so hysterical physicists decided that everything-we-know makes no sense, to start with. It turns out that their arguments amounted to hand waving (OK, a gas cools down when expanding; however a quantum fluctuation is not a gas!) fabulous mathematician cum physicist Roger Penrose claims that obtaining a flat universe classically without any recourse to inflation out of a quantum fluctuation is 10^100 more likely.

A casual look shows that conventional Big bang theory makes a lot of assumptions we have no proof of (for example in astrophysics). Absence of logical contradiction is no proof of experimental existence. Especially when, in the end, the theory one gets (the conventional Hot Big Bang) seems incorrect (because nothing can solve the flatness problem, short of immense age!)  

The philosophical problem became even more acute when an experimental cosmological inflation was discovered, Dark Energy. The conjunction of CI and DE made the universe expand tremendously, brake down, and then re-accelerate. Weird. Both inflations differ by a factor of 10^27 in their energy density.

So why not go with Dark Energy alone? Then the universe maybe hundreds of billions of years old.

Why not? Just to say that can’t possibly be true, because one has seen the universe expands very fast, in a tremendous cosmic inflation, amounts to starting with one’s conclusion.

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The Common Denial Mechanism About Evolutions Either Biological Or Cosmological; We Know, You Don’t, & What We Know Pleases Authority:

The Big Bang cosmology is in the exact mood of the Bible: nothing really new in that mood. They can say they have numbers, I can see there is a lot of completely circuitous logics, where the end proves the beginning. In any case, if it’s in the Bible, it’s right, and God cares about creating a little universe for us.

What hurt with Lamarck’s insights was the God of the Bible again (and the entire empires resting on it). Lamarck basically said intelligence, animal intelligence and an increasing mysterious complexity organizing force intrinsic to life, organized the universe. In any case, smarts, but not those of the God of the Bible. That was therefore censored from the Anglo-Saxon world, where God is a question of national security, or, at least, manifest destiny, grabbing entire continents… When the forces of obscurantism had to surrender, they embraced an obscure amateur gentleman researcher of good English stock. (Not to demean Darwin, but Lamarck, and even his enemy, competitor, contradictor and colleague Cuvier, did the heavy lift, 60 years prior…)

Insights about what truth could be never comes from herds, especially herds of mandarins, when they are genuinely new.  

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Big Bang, ΛCDM model, Lamarck