The Inflation Debate - Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed?

Ktulu
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The Inflation Debate - Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed?

 

This article from Sciam.com I found very interesting.  Obviously, from the title, it is regarding Inflation.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-inflation-summer&page=3

I start on page 3 because you have to go in the back way to get the full article on sciam.com

Anyways, well worth the time invested in reading it.

 

"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc


TGBaker
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Ktulu wrote: This article

Ktulu wrote:

 

This article from Sciam.com I found very interesting.  Obviously, from the title, it is regarding Inflation.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-inflation-summer&page=3

I start on page 3 because you have to go in the back way to get the full article on sciam.com

Anyways, well worth the time invested in reading it.

 

It must not be forgotten of how iffy or tentative many of our peripheral physics theories are.  Theists will want to cling to particular interpretations of various theories  some of which like Penrose-Hawking ( singularity)may be made obsolete by Harte-Hawkings with no boundary condition. The very fact that these are competing means that theists cannot claim it as proof (perhaps as only support) of their claims.  And the razor cuts both ways.  There are a lot of beautiful scenarios out there and we tend to the aesthetic ( we'll like one over the other from the get go).  I like Susskind's holographic principle. But if I were to analyse why it is probably because of my background. Phenomenologically, I can see a nothingness as a flat infinite field that begins the big bang and to which through entropic expansion and cold death returns.  Nothingness would be the potentiality of virtual particles that eventually actualize as the Bang ( in other words an infinite field of information( virtual to actualized particles)  The openness that we feel from consciousness as freedom is perhaps nothing more than this futurity which is ontologically prior to every past and present moment.  It is the wave function that collapses from/with our observation.  But this still does not settle some of the bigger questions since this scenario could be interpreted as a closed system in which case one universe would follow another. Alternatively one could posit the originating field without a boundary condition in which case every multiverse would be its own boundary condition to its ground of origin in the field leaving the "universes" separated yet meaningfully conditioned and intiutively compatible in structure( logic ) and mathematics.  But see even though I see this as elegant it is derivitive from my experience of physics, Eastern philosophy and monism.  We can criticize to large extent any of the philosophical persuppositions in our popular physic including Einstein's in that the scenario of mine shows how the phenomenonlogical aspects of physic may be presented.  This is not a critque on the other hand of the mathematical consistencies of quantum physics apart from the extent that those formulae are altered by the philosophical a priori of the physicist.  

While we see that physics is more safely practiced through math we crave phenomenological and existential  (visual ) understanding.  In this domain is where most conflict lies and the woo woo stuff like absolute consciousness as a field of actualization (creation ) to that of Intellegent Design raise their heads. I think the only advantage of knowing multiple woo woo scenarios is that you can defeat a theism as less probable than a fields of boundless consciousness/energy. This woo can be defeated in turn by something more plausible and so forth.   How profound was Newton's Laws? We use them today. But Einstein's relativity made Newton's view relative to and limited by a bigger picture.  But what if we view EInstein as not having found the full story. What if his M= E/c2 ( E=Mc2)  was simply a formula that adjusted the ratio of light to remain constant no matter what the imput or measurement  was to accomadate and interpret the Mickelson-Morley experiments? Then what we have is something that merely corresponds to our experience of light rather than a defintion of the thing itself!!!! A photon at a theoretical rest state has zero mass. This leaves it really as a geometric point and likely purely our mental construct.   The failure of Einstein to intergrate gravity into a unified field theory and the fact that we have competing theories that make opposite claims of this unification means that we are overlooking something significant that is not only mathematically profound ( and beautiful ) but phenomenologically tied to our mental processes and consciousness.  The fact that information may be no more than one particles awareness of another ( as one fields interacts with another) may mean that ultimately human consciousness that abstracts attributes from its experience may be no more than the complex of the physical world's properties as a nexus of causality. Anyway that's what I think but that's only for today.

"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa

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Ken G.
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Ktulu wrote: Very Interesting !

 Yep ! very interesting ! thanks for posting this article, just the other day, I saw this copy of "Scientific American"  at the supermarket,and I almost brought that magazine for this article. And I could not find it on the web ?

Signature ? How ?