Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>
>
> John M writes:
>
>
>>When did you last learn that the tenets of ongoing
>>physics are only "provisionally" accepted as 'real'?
>>(I just wanted to tease members of this list.
>>Of course on THIS list 'thinking' people gathered and
>>such thoughts are not unusual. We are the exception.)
>>
>>An example is the Big Bang. Many scientists almost put
>>it into their evening prayer. Doubting is heresy.
>>This is why I scrutinize what we 'believe in' and try
>>alternate narratives: do they hold water? Are the new
>>(alternate) ideas palatable to what (we think) we
>>experience?
>
>
> I'm sure all the Big Bang theorists would say that they would
> change their views if new evidence came to light. Of course,
> there are thousands of ideas out there and most of them are
> pretty crazy, pushed by people who don't understand even
> the basics of what they are criticising, so it is understandable
> that these ideas would sometimes be dismissed out of hand by
> people working in the field. It is also undestandable that
> scientists are only human and get quite attached to the theories
> on which they base their careers, so they may not change as
> quickly as they ought to in the light of new evidence.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
In fact there are serious theories of the universe in which there is no
originating big bang. For example Paul Steinhardt has published papers on a
model in which the universe we see is one of two 3-branes in a
10-dimensional space.
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0403020
The origin of particles and energy and their flying apart as we see them is
due to collision of our 3-brane with the other 3-brane. He shows that this
can be a cyclic process in which the universe empties out due to expansion
and then another collision can occur. While a few individual scientists may
consider the big bang origin of the universe dogma, every scientist working
in a field like cosmogony wants to make his name by showing that current
theories are wrong.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Mon Aug 14 2006 - 03:25:55 PDT