Big Bang an Illusion (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, September 15, 2013, 17:40 (4087 days ago) @ David Turell

GEORGE: According to this latest theory the Big Bang is just an illusion-http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743-It's the result of a collapsing 4-dimensional star! 
I suppose this is analogous to a sphere intersecting a plane and appearing to be a point expanding into a circle. Shades of Abbott's Flatland!
This gets rid of the need for inflation, which seems good to me, 
but on the other hand introduces an even more improbable scenario. 
First indications are it needs further refinement.-DAVID: But all the CMB findings support inflation with very close predictions. Everything we find supports inflation, weird as that seems. How do you prove a universe in a membrane? Talk about counerintuative.-Have I misunderstood the article? The authors postulate "that we detect the brane's growth as cosmic expansion. "Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the universe must have begun with a Big Bang..." (my bold)-QUOTE: "Despite the mismatch, Dvali praises the ingenious way in which the team threw out the Big Bang model. "The singularity is the most fundamental problem in cosmology and they have rewritten history so that we never encountered it," he says. Whereas the Planck results "prove that inflation is correct", they leave open the question of how inflation happened, Dvali adds. The study could help to show how inflation is triggered by the motion of the Universe through a higher-dimensional reality, he says.-Doesn't this mean that they accept inflation but they do not accept that the cause was a Big Bang? As for counterintuitive, is it any less fantastic than the theories that the universe came from nothing, or that the universe was made by an intelligence that has always existed?