"Celebrate! Proof of Cosmic Inflation!" Oh, Really?
I was going to ignore this story until one of Darwin's Cheerleaders posted it at me as if it refuted this entire article exposing the Tyson version of Cosmos.
Here is a bit of humor to start us off. It was originally an ethnic joke (the nationalities are changed in various places on the Web) that I re-purposed.
Big announcement: The Holy Grail of cosmic irreligiosity, the "smoking gun" to prove the Big Bang and the inflationary universe, has been announced. Yippie ky yay and stuff. The Big Bang "theory" itself has evolved over the years; it had to be constantly modified because it is not supported by the data.
This is premature, and Andrei Linde seems to know it. He is equivocating, seeming to be close to tears of joy and having a drink to celebrate. Then he says that it would be great if the "discovery" is true. It is a nice way to say something without being committed to it, and actually saying nothing.
Yet again, we are given wild speculations before they are thoroughly investigated. People will say that the press is at fault, and that is partially true. But the scientists want the sensationalism, accolades, publicity and money just like other people, so they let the publicists run wild. No, not all of the press are quick to run wild with a partial story. Too many do so, however.
Worse, Evolution Autons will grab the stories and post them as if they had just killed God and discredited all of creation science — all because of incomplete analyses and ignoring other explanations of the questionable findings. You would think that they would learn, since haste to prove evolution or disprove God tends to backfire and cause great embarrassment.
Here is a bit of humor to start us off. It was originally an ethnic joke (the nationalities are changed in various places on the Web) that I re-purposed.
After having dug to a depth of 10 meters last year, scientists from Dawkinsania found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.This joke inadvertently illustrates how some scientists and their press will make big announcements without doing thorough analysis of their subject.
Not to be outdone by the Dawkinsanians, in the weeks that followed, Tysonian scientists dug to a depth of 20 meters, and shortly after, headlines in the Tysonian newspapers read: "Our archaeologists have found traces of 200 year old copper wire and have concluded that our ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than Dawkinsania."
One week later, "The New Phys Science Nature dot Org," a newspaper in Lost Angles, Nyeistan, reported the following: "After digging as deep as 30 meters in peat bog near the capitol city, Nyeistanian scientists reported that they found absolutely nothing. They have therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Nyeistan had already gone wireless."
Big announcement: The Holy Grail of cosmic irreligiosity, the "smoking gun" to prove the Big Bang and the inflationary universe, has been announced. Yippie ky yay and stuff. The Big Bang "theory" itself has evolved over the years; it had to be constantly modified because it is not supported by the data.
This is premature, and Andrei Linde seems to know it. He is equivocating, seeming to be close to tears of joy and having a drink to celebrate. Then he says that it would be great if the "discovery" is true. It is a nice way to say something without being committed to it, and actually saying nothing.
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| NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), T. Lauer (NOAO), and the CLASH team |
Worse, Evolution Autons will grab the stories and post them as if they had just killed God and discredited all of creation science — all because of incomplete analyses and ignoring other explanations of the questionable findings. You would think that they would learn, since haste to prove evolution or disprove God tends to backfire and cause great embarrassment.
Claims of a major breakthrough about the big bang are swirling in the news: is it inflation, or inflating the evidence?
In “Stop the presses!” style, the science news are simultaneously announcing that gravitational waves have been discovered that reveal evidence for inflation. Cosmic inflation stems from Alan Guth’s proposal in the 1980s that the universe underwent an unbelievable expansion (much faster than light) for just a few billionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second immediately after the big bang (see “State of the Cosmos,” 2/21/05). Despite undergoing numerous overhauls and versions, inflation theory has become somewhat of a “given” among cosmologists, because it neatly dispenses with two falsifications of the big bang, the horizon problem and the lumpiness problem. Still, some complained that it was (1) untestable and (2) it created as many problems as it solved. Science Now openly admits the idea sounds crazy:You can read the rest of this party-stopper at "Has Cosmic Inflation Been Discovered?"