Interesting. But where did your Big Bang get the flame, guys? No fuel, no flame; no flame, no mechanism. Or have you discovered creation ex nihilo?
Big Bang
Peering into the origin of time
Via a curious universal pattern of correlated pairs of objects.
Has the universe really stopped making sense?
Or is it just not giving some people the answers they want?
A Darwin snark for a new Nobelist
If one is just looking for something to be snarky about, it is best not to engage with any serious issues. In that case, puffing popular Darwinism at every opportunity is the best choice available. There’s sure no Nobel for that.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the future of particle physics
Hossenfelder: The standard model works just fine with that number and it fits the data. But a small number like this, without explanation, is ugly and particle physicists didn’t want to believe nature could be that ugly.
Penrose and Craig explain the universe for us at Unbelievable
Penrose surely offers a more thoughtful debate than Dawkins (who refused to debate Craig) and Krauss (who did but complained afterward) anyway. Too bad we had to wait till 2019 to see it.
Dark matter is older than the Big Bang?
The media release refers to “time before the Big Bang.” The idea that time did not begin, for our purposes, with the Big Bang would be contested by some. That raises arrow-of-time issues.
Ethan Siegel: How we can get a universe from nothing?
Siegel: In order for inflation to end, that energy has to get converted into matter and radiation. The evidence strongly points to that happening some 13.8 billion years ago.
Yes, the Big Bang could be wrong, but what would that really mean?
Actually, multiverse cosmology would make a starting point irrelevant or else subject to endless redefinition. Powell’s bookmark-able summary can’t address the problem, of course, but that’s precisely what the multiverse does. Facts no longer matter much because contradictory facts have equal status.
Continuing efforts to erase the beginning of time
It’s quite clear that Siegel’s objection to the idea of a beginning to the universe is philosophical. Most of the nonsense one hears, generally, can be traced to unwillingness to admit that.
Hawking’s idea that the universe had no beginning is still alive, on life support
At Quanta: After two years of sparring, the groups have traced their technical disagreement to differing beliefs about how nature works.
Rob Sheldon: The real reason there is a crisis in cosmology
Nearly everything that has failed about the Big Bang model has been added because of bad metaphysics, a refusal to accept the consequences of a beginning. The remaining pieces of the Big Bang model that are failing and which can’t be attributed to bad metaphysics, were added from sheer laziness.
At Scientific American: Understanding the cosmology crisis
All that said, faith in mathematics is better than faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot because the mathematics might make sense someday.
Researcher: Finding helium hydride today confirms its presence from within 100,000 years of the Big Bang
Compared to evidence-free claims about the multiverse, news about the filling in of the missing pieces of Big Bang cosmology attracts little attention. Could that be because, however well-attested, the Big Bang is unpopular among cosmologists? (Due, we are told, to its apparent theistic implications.)
Researchers: Universe’s proposed first chemical detected for the first time
Researcher: The lack of evidence of HeH+ caused some doubts whether we do understand the formation and destruction of this special molecule as well as we thought,’ Güsten tells Chemistry World. ‘This concern is gone now.’