On 6 June 2014 19:39, Kim Jones <kimjo...@ozemail.com.au> wrote: > On 6 Jun 2014, at 7:15 am, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 5 June 2014 22:09, Kim Jones <kimjo...@ozemail.com.au> wrote: > >> > On 5 Jun 2014, at 12:28 pm, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > Anyway, the Standard Model of cosmology says it got so big due to >> inflation followed by the big bang. >> >> Ummmm......following the big bang >> >> That depends if you take the big bang to mean the initial hypothetical > singularity (which doesn't occur in eternal inflation) or the fireball that > starts when inflation ends and ends when "recombination" occurs. I > generally take the BB to include at least "the first 3 minutes", which puts > it (or 99.9999999999999999999999...% of it) post-inflation. > > OK - thank you for that amazing clarification. I don't know what I take > the big bang to mean. I think I probably deep down agree with Fred Hoyle > who invented the term for sarcastic reasons in the first place. Why do we > "need" a big bang at all? Why can't inflation account for the entire > process? > > I'm not sure if you're being sacastic or not, but if you're going to nitpick, I feel that I have to at least attempt to clarify why I said what I said. Yes, I admit that I have taken the Big Bang to mean the quark soup / plasma that followed inflation, and I even thought that was what most people thought of as the BB. So sue me.
Anyway, assuming you're being serious, yes, it looks like Sir Fred was right, a fact that gives me great satisfaction because I am a big fan of his less loopy moments (e.g. "The Black Cloud" and "October the First"). If the BICEP result holds up then the indications are that inflation occurred, and like so many scientific theories it's the gift that keeps on giving. You explain one little cosmological discrepancy, or maybe a couple, and "kablooey!" (to quote Calvin and Hobbes) --- in exchange, you get an infinity of universes. Not a bad rate of exchange. Like Quantum theory giving us the multiverse, inflation gives us something even grander, maybe an omniverse or something - infinite, eternal, and including all possible variants on whatever the real laws of physics are, assuming variants are allowed. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
