Hi Brent,
On 1/24/2012 9:47 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/24/2012 6:08 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi John,
1. I see the Big Bang theory as a theory, an explanatory model
that attempts to weave together all of the relevant observational
facts together into a scheme that is both predictive and explanatory.
It has built into it certain ontological and epistemological premises
that I have some doubts about.
Such as?
Let us start with the heavily camouflaged idea that we can get
something, a universe!, out of Nothing.
2. Dark energy is nothing more than a conjectured-to-exist entity
until we have a better explanation for the effects that it was
conjectured to explain. We have never actually detected it. What we
have detected is that certain super-novae seem to have light that
appears to indicate that the super-novae are accelerating away from
us. This was an unexpected observation that was not predicted by the
Big Bang theory so the BBT was amended to include a new entity. So be
it. But my line of questions is: At what point are we going to keep
adding entities to BBT before we start wondering if there is
something fundamentally wrong with it?
I think what you refer to as the Big Bang Theory is called the
concordance theory in the literature. It includes the hot Big Bang,
inflation, and vacuum energy. The reason Dark Energy (so called in
parallel with Dark Matter) was so readily accepted is that it was
already in General Relativity in the form of the cosmological
constant. It didn't have to be amended; just accept that a parameter
wasn't exactly zero.
A "constant" that Einstein himself called the "greatest mistake of
his life". The problem is that one can add an arbitrary number of such
scalar field terms to one's field equations. Frankly IMHO, it is more
"something from nothing" nonsense.
It is not possible to prove that something exists in an absolute
sense, for who is the ultimate arbiter of that question?
There is no ultimate arbiter. What is thought to exist is model
dependent and it changes as theories change to explain new data.
WOW! We been informed that we can now make things pop in and out of
existence merely by shifting our belief systems. Who might have imagined
such a wondrous possibility! Umm, NO. Existence is not subject to our
perceptions, theories of whatever.
Onward!
Stephen
Brent
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