On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 Edgar L. Owen <[email protected]> wrote: > First Linde didn't "prove" eternal inflation as you claim. >
That wasn't what I claimed. Linde showed that if eternal inflation is untrue then so is Guth's entire inflation idea, and then we're back to trying to solve the very serious problems that have infected the Big Bang Theory from day one, the horizon problem and the flatness problem and the monopole problem. And we need to explain how Guth's incorrect theory nevertheless managed to make such a amazingly accurate prediction of what the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation would look like, and why the Big Bang Theory was able to very accurately predict the amount of Hydrogen and deuterium and Heliun-3 and Helium-4 and Lithium-6 and Lithium-7 that the universe would contain. When he first came up with it Guth admitted that a major flaw in his theory was he couldn't find a "graceful exit", he couldn't figure out why the entire inflation field would ever disappear. A few years later to Guth's joy Linde found the answer, it never does completely disappear, it grows faster than it decays. > Eternal inflation is a theory. > Yes, as is Guth's original idea. > In fact you yourself admit this when you write "IF Linde is correct..". > Yes IF, or rather IF Linde AND Guth are correct because if Linde is wrong then so is Guth. > The other approach, which you hint at, is that even if a physical > infinity existed it would be unobservable. > And some would say that if something is unobservable in principle then science shouldn't talk about it. But what about a theory that makes both observable and unobservable predictions and the observable ones have been spectacularly confirmed to amazing accuracy as Guth's inflation theory has been? Is it really scientific to just ignore the unobservable predictions when there is no theoretical reason to suppose they would be less true than the observable ones? > > And since we can make a good case that only observables exist > No, you can not make a good case that only observables exist! I am quite sure you could not find a single cosmologist who would say that the things we could theoretically observe if our telescopes were just big enough is all of the universe that there is because the entire 13.8 billion year old universe has a radius of 13.8 billion light years and we just happen to be at the very center of it. When we look at a galaxy 10 billion light years away we know that if there are astronomers on it then some of the stuff they're observing we will never ever see regardless of how much telescope technology advances, and some of the stuff we see they never will. We can observe them but we can't observe all that they can observe. > judging by some of the other nonsense they believe, there is probably > some physicist somewhere that believes in anything. If science has taught us anything over the last few hundred years it is that personal incredulity alone is not enough to figure out how the world does and does not work. And I don't know what the true nature of reality is but whatever it is it will be weird. John K Clark -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
