Far out cosmology: Before the big Bang (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 14, 2016, 00:51 (2995 days ago) @ David Turell

Will we ever understand why there is anything. This essay suggests we are following lots of dead ends:-https://aeon.co/essays/will-we-ever-understand-the-beginning-of-the-universe-"The science of cosmology has achieved wonders in recent centuries. It has enlarged the world we can see and think about by ontological orders of magnitude. Cosmology wrenched the Earth from the centre of the Universe, and heaved it, like a discus, into its whirling orbit around one unremarkable star among the billions that speed around the black-hole centre of our galaxy, a galaxy that floats in deep space with billions of others, all of them colliding and combining, before they fly apart from each other for all eternity. Art, literature, religion and philosophy ignore cosmology at their peril.-"But cosmology's hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don't know what came before it. They don't know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don't know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing.-***-"Steinhardt looks out on his field, and sees a generation of theorists tinkering with models, wasting whole careers fiddling at the edges of a 30-year-old idea. ‘I know why they're doing it,' he says. ‘It's easy to do. You can make hundreds of these models, and you can tweak them so they fit the data. But usually, those fixes aren't the answer. Usually, you have to do something new.'-"Steinhardt is trying to do something new. He spends most of his research time working on an alternative cosmological theory. He thinks the Big Bang might have been a reaction to a contraction, a bounce, perhaps one in a sequence of bounces that extends deep into the past and maybe into eternity. He is trying to figure out whether a bounce could have yielded a smoothed, stretched, uniform cosmos such as ours. Sometimes he feels isolated, but he knows how to chip away. His sense of possibility powers him through. He told me he thinks we might be edging up to a transformative idea. Something that could rearrange reality as we know it. Something of Copernican magnitude.-"We should be excited that inflation is in trouble,' he said. ‘That usually means we're on the brink of discovery. It means we're missing some idea, a really important idea. Something that's going to take over when it hits. Don't people want to be there for that?'"-Comment: Steinhardt is dismissing the string theorists. He is looking for a Big Bounce theory. This long essay is rich in description of the current battles of ideas. I've shown the beginning and the end, sort of.