Quote:
Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman
I still remain unconvinced about the idea that reliable information about the nature of the universe can be obtained, in the sense of "information very likely to be true", from the analysis of the microwave background which is said to be a relic of the big bang.
If you observe a pattern in the background radiation and then you come up with a model to account for it; why not come up with another model which accounts for the radiation, or another one, or another one....(and so on, and so on, till you have created a billion different models, all of them equally likely to be true)
As we know, theorists are very good at coming up with multiple models, all of which they swear are true.
Only problem is, observations usually disprove most of them...
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Hi Robert.
While I think Steven's responses generally cover my feelings on this, I'd add one more point.
I think a lot of what people see of cosmology/astrophysics from the 'outside' (including fairly knowledgeable amateurs) is more a reflection of what science journalists think will generate clicks or sell paper than what is actually going on in the field. I also think that sometimes it is driven by journalists' misunderstandings.
My recollection of my brief time on the 'inside' is that most day-to-day activity is actually spent doing fairly mundane work which serves the important but unexciting purpose of confirming and incrementally advancing our understanding of things within the existing accepted framework of our theories.
Of course, scientists take time out from this to speculate about wilder possibilities, since this:
- keeps one's mind open;
- can throw an interesting light on the standard stuff;
- might turn out to produce the Next Big Thing (and a Nobel prize); and
- is fun.
Unfortunately there seems to be a tendency for this stuff to be grabbed hold of in the press and presented as if it were representative of the mainstream activity in the field, which it's not.
A good recent example was Hawkings recent pre-print on black holes. This was a fairly high-level musing on some of the problems of applying quantum mechanics to black holes, and floated the idea that the event horizon might not be the sharply-defined impermeable barrier that is implied in GR. To put it in context:
- the paper was not peer-reviewed;
- Hawking acknowledged that a proper resolution of the matter would require a reconciliation of GR and QM, which still looks a long way off;
- the general macroscopic behaviour of a black hole would not be changed from our current picture, only some very specific long-term and extreme behaviour; and
- The paper was very clearly off the mainstream and speculative, and did not seem to present itself as otherwise.
But this wound up in the press as 'Hawking proves black holes don't exist'.
As far as I can tell, most GR research is devoted to:
- Trying to build ever more sensitive detectors in the hope of directly detecting gravitational waves;
- developing better mathematical techniques for solving the field equations; and
- Making lots of observations to collect relevant data; and
- Seeing how the data fits our theories and models.
but this is all a bit too dull to write stories about.