Cosmology: confusion (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, June 08, 2014, 14:55 (3822 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Still a huge debate over Biceps 2, and a refutation of multiverses-http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6921-The passage you quoted was from a response to the original article, which goes much further in its scepticism concerning inflationary theory itself, as follows:-"He also takes the occasion to note the odd fact that while BICEP2 results have been claimed to be proof of inflation and the multiverse, if they turn out to be wrong, that's fine too:-The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the 'smoking gun' proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?-The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multi¬verse, every¬thing that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable...-Taking this into account, it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless."