[gagaJo]

Cosmology feels a lot like quackery these days.

Does it even bother to rely on physics? Physical experiments show explosions do not propel all matter at the same rate.

James Webb telescope recently found galaxies that were “too old”, would have formed right after the Big Bang. The prevailing wisdom was all matter spread out evenly due to the Big Bang, then coalesced into galaxies (I emailed various researchers to confirm I understood this was indeed the consensus).

But again, other physics shows that clusters of matter ejected from explosions are never uniformly distributed.

Just more evidence the well educated (I assume if it’s concensus driven even the best educated agree) are just typical people and their expertise should be challenged constantly rather than sit back and assume things are figured out.

As Asimov illustrated in the Foundation, if you aren’t measuring for yourself you’re serving someone else’s interpretation.

Hyper-normalized social society just leads to normalization of outputs, which helps preserve and propagate poor science.

[michaelmrose]

Aggressive dismissal of an entire field with minimal attempt made to understand it is never going to play well and following it up with sarcasm doesn't improve the situation.

Attempting to work backwards to the beginning of the universe from a single tiny point in time and space is fairly obviously going to be a lot harder than understanding the physics of events we can repeat, measure, and examine. This doesn't make them quackery and it does explain why many things remain poorly explained. A century from now its likely that many understandings will be retained and some will have been consigned to the bin.

People do challenge existing theories. Most frequently unsuccessfully. Because most novel hypothesis turn out to be wrong.

Riffing off the science fiction reference this isn't a process we can skip any more than authors can skip brainstorming, first drafts, rewrites and just skip to typing out the final draft.

In brief stop coming off like Agent Mulder. Everyone knows the truth is out there. If it takes a while to coalesce its not because the educated folks working on the problem too stupid to listen to basic physics. It's because the physics that explains the rest of the picture isn't written yet.

[gagaJo]

That’s exactly my point though; it’s incomplete but academics sell incomplete/wrong work to eat.

They’re just as much avoiding real work of keeping themselves alive as an aristocrat to noodle around something that will only ever be incomplete due to our axiomatic systems being leaky abstraction.

I’m a “Perelmanite.” The ethical and communication standards of academia serve its social influence goals, not science.

We get the gist of natures mechanics and know how to measure generally. Further specialization of the syntax rarely moves the needle, which still points at Einstein, Gödel, and other century old works, rarely the contemporary librarians of scientific texts except to say “yeah this customization still preserves the whole of relativity” or some other core body of work we infer modern research form.

Perelman figured out Riemanns at home, alone. Bailed on university as he found it mired in politics and manipulation of social agency to preserve itself.

See that recent article about institutions becoming road blocks to the progress they were created to resolve. There’s been article after article here about science depts veering into pseudo-science. When a workers salary depends on them ignoring truth… “meat suit needs to eat” wins above honesty and integrity.

[michaelmrose]

Science was never about the base nature of humanity. We remember it's successes and forget its foibles after they cease to be relevant.

[addaon]

> explosions… explosions

What are you drawing an analogy to explosions with in this comment? The Big Bang? Why do you expect the analogy to be as precise as you seem to take it to be?

[gagaJo]

Because researchers put on emotional costumes to serve how they pay for food and shelter, spend their time defending crap results for years/decades.

Let’s not pretend the replication crisis isn’t real and endemic within academia these days.

[michaelmrose]

Can you kindly boot up a few more universes so we can do replication properly. Also set the speed to 10,000,000,000x I don't have all year.

[Workaccount2]

The fact that you seem to be interested enough to email experts about ancient galaxies, yet still are referencing the big bang as an explosion, leaves me utterly confused about your level of knowledge, but leaning heavily towards "no idea what they are talking about".

The big bang was not an explosion.

[leptons]

>The big bang was not an explosion

Okay, then lets hear your interpretation of what it was.

[Workaccount2]

https://www.britannica.com/story/was-the-big-bang-actually-a...

[datavirtue]

A spinor?

[gagaJo]

Oh I’m sorry on an open forum where I don’t know every reader I use casual language.

This isn’t a forum for PhD defense.

So glad the takeaway is about a single word. While the idea that researchers are failing left and right which reaches into everyone else’s lives is left untouched. Likely because you’re the sort that relies on people buying the con about your efforts.

Reality is not a neatly organized set of decoupled microservices. It’s a monolith and bad science radiates through our lives.

Experts should not have the influence over society they demand.

[komali2]

But the core of your post seemed to be an instance of how all the cosmologists are wrong because their description of the universe as it relates to the big bang is wrong because the big bang is an explosion and explosions don't expand uniformly. Am I misunderstanding your point?

Do you have, like, a list of things they're wrong about maybe?

[datavirtue]

Yeah, spinors.

[mr_mitm]

> Just more evidence the well educated (I assume if it’s concensus driven even the best educated agree) are just typical people and their expertise should be challenged constantly rather than sit back and assume things are figured out.

As someone who worked as a cosmologist, I have trouble putting into words how wrong, out of touch and arrogant this statement is.

[gagaJo]

In my social scene are people who worked at Fermilab, whose work helped inform where LHC should focus its search for the Higgs. A PhD EE who has designed chips you use. The list is long.

A lot of my insight into academia (since it’s been almost 30 years since I graduated and left it behind me) is influenced by academics tired of and often disgusted by their peers dishonesty about their work. Theory after theory have more in common with religion; they were made up.

Historians in my social scene say there’s solid historical evidence advanced degrees were invented as a payola scheme between landed gentry and the church; money for BS theology degree the illiterate public could not falsify. Over specialization doesn’t really make net new discovery so much as normalize old ones, but we keep up the role-play of history and anoint geniuses and the like.

Give them resources and prestige to do some math. Grigori Perelman would like a word on what’s required resource wise to do math. Out of touch and arrogant westerners.

Similar trend going on these days where the innumerate serve BS they cannot begin to try to falsify. Just so happens much of it isn’t reproducible anyway, but the can’t argue that or the out of touch egos of a minority of the populace that make up academia would crumple in outrage.

Offense at minor slight is so endemic to human nature, so general an emotion it impacts all of us.

Out of touch and arrogant is applies just a neatly to academics being normal humans and all.

[1053r]

We have some pretty good ideas about just how "lumpy" the explosion of the big bang should have been. And yes, the best theories in cosmology disagree with the recent observations highlighted in this article. On the other hand, those cosmological theories are rooted in extremely strong physics which does things like predict various attributes of particles that have been measured extremely precisely and were predicted correctly. So the Hubble tension is real. My money is on the theory needing revising, but how? There are no great candidates for something to replace the standard model and our best theories in cosmology. There are plenty of candidates, but no obvious methods to choose a best one. This is science! Remember, the most exciting words in science are, "huh, that's odd." The Hubble tension is extremely odd!

[epgui]

You're so lost I'm not sure where to start.

Not that you really deserve help, with that attitude...

[WithinReason]

The Big Bang has nothing to do with explosions

[leptons]

Please enlighten us.

[epgui]

Wouldn't it be easier to just go take a look at the wiki article?

Or even to type "is the big bang an explosion" into your search bar?

[gagaJo]

I like how the primary rebuttal is my use of a non-standard academic term on a public forum non academics read. Hear that unzipping sound? That’s reality itself coming apart because the Jedi Sacred texts were not recited from just so.

Really just proving my point that academia is obsessed with little more than normalizing symbolic logic. Such conservatism and thought policing is en vogue across social contexts these days.

I earned a BSc in EE and bailed on an MSc in elastic structures as such notions about academia seemed pretty obvious to me all the way back in the 90s. It’s all mathematical generalization of how matter coalesces at speeds relative to light, arguing for such specific recitation of truth is the problem: you aren’t owed that. The “human” language aspect is arbitrary to me, but often seems to convince the public some BS is immutable physics only for the BS to be falsified decades later.

Scientists do a whole lot of saying what they promotes them, damn the externalities. Has more in common with our economics in that way; can human scientists coupled to human nature to keep their meat suit alive escape such a bias?

I’m not anti-science, I’m anti-contemporary institutions. Only 14% in the US hold more than a bachelors, yet their influence is wide and deep, and (charitably) forever incomplete. A minority have outsized influence over everyone yet their so-called discovery is often restatement of a well known phenomenon or just wrong, damn the externalities.

Resolving all scientific inquiry (I’m sure someone will take offense such specific an idea can exist; academics like to flip flop between arguing for generalization and specificity like typical humans) would mean knowing all states of all matter and energy. Physically impossible, there will always be “holes”. Outwardly academia is dishonest in that regard, and the incompleteness of their work. IMO out of fear society would turn against them. Probably rightly so.

Science is important. I’m not anti-science. I’m anti-institutions manipulating the actually innumerate into serfs based upon (charitably) incomplete and more often than not, outright wrong conclusions.

Academics want to go on about non-experts being wrong and their egos. Well academics are humans mired in the same human condition. Turn the mirror around.

[epgui]

What are you talking about?

[WithinReason]

It's more like a stretching rubber band, but in 3 dimensions instead of 1.

[leptons]

Interresting, but that analogy implies that there is a force that limits the exxpansion and a force that causes it to contract. I'm not sure that's what happens to this universe, and I'm not sure we can know.

[nabla9]

What you explain is the confusion that comes from reading news articles about science ans succumbing to nihilism and conspiracy theories.