Far out cosmology: Steinhardt musings (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 19:56 (3432 days ago) @ David Turell

He doubts inflation and multiverse as non-answers. Still hopes superstring theory might work, but admits 30 years of almost no progress.:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/12/01/physicist-paul-steinhardt-slams-inflation-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/-
"I have to admit that I did not take the multiverse problem seriously at first even though I had been involved in uncovering it. I thought someone would figure out a resolution once the problem was revealed. That was 1983. I was wrong. Unfortunately, what has happened since is that all attempts to resolve the multiverse problem have failed and, in the process, it has become clear that the problem is much stickier than originally imagined. In fact, at this point, some proponents of inflation have suggested that there can be no solution. We should cease bothering to look for one. Instead, we should simply take inflation and the multiverse as fact and accept the notion that the features of the observable universe are accidental: consequences of living in this particular region of the multiverse rather than another.-"To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation.-"Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.-"These concerns and more, and the fact that we have made no progress in 30 years in addressing them, are what have made me skeptical about the inflationary picture."