We are consistently looking at the evidence and saying “we know there are only 13.8 billion years to work with… why do we see mature galaxies as they were 11 billion years ago, where are all these huge webs of galaxies and massive voids existing at the dawn of time coming from, ect.”
First question, what is the probabilty that space is actually expanding?
Assuming it is expanding, what is the probability it had to go back to a Big Bang? (Some models, have it contracting and expanding without a Big Bang)
And if there was a Big Bang, what is the probability that 2015 will be different than the last 90 years where how long ago the Big Bang happened gets pushed back a billion years once or twice a decade.
(Side note: This 1/H = 13.8 billion years business is fishy. If 1/H yeilds the age of physical reality as we know it right now, what’ll happen 14 billion years from now? 1/H will give the same value for the “age of the universe” when it would be 28 billion years old. It’s true that H is not thought to be constant, but if the expansion is now accelerating, H is moving in a different direction, therefore, with everyday, 1/H predicts a smaller age. It’s growing younger. Yet, over the decades our calculations went from 2 billion to 4 billion to 8 to 10 to 12 to 13.8, our observations are forcing older ages. 1/H is suspiciously close to c/H, 14.2 billion light years, also known as Hubble’s Length, or Hubble’s Radius, or Hubble’s Limit.)
It might be time for a rational cosmology. There isn’t a certainty about the expansion of space, dark energy, inflation. There is a small sampling of reality known as our Hubble Volume, of which there are many, not just one centered on Earth. Galaxies would presumably exist trillions of light years beyond our ability to detect them with electromagenetic radiation.
In our Hubble Volume, there is a cold spot in the CMB to the south. Imagine a Hubble Volume centered 2 * Hubble Radius to the south of us. Does an observer in that Hubble Volume see the same cold spot to their south?
In this cosmology, the CMB is warmer to the north because there are more galaxies in that direction. That’s considered an anomaly in the Big Bang theory because they should be equal, and equal to every Hubble Volume.
Well, there’s a weak gimme answer: scholarship (eleventh tenet of rationality). It’s science, even if not directly related to human cognition.
It’s also an interesting topic for rational discussion, in the sense of “here’s some evidence against a thing that almost everybody believes. What is your response to it?” Things I would expect to see (and of which there have been some) is comments about things like updating beliefs, offering evidence that the sources of this contrary evidence should not be taken as authoritative, attempting to assign priors to the accuracy of various theories or hypotheses and seeing what that says about our actual beliefs in this area (and how they change when new evidence is introduced), etc.
Besides, this is discussion. I wouldn’t say the post is suitable to be promoted on the main page, but neither are posts on many of the memes associated with LW (like peoples’ thoughts on friendly AI, or effective altruism). This post may turn out to be less correct than those topics (or may not), but this doesn’t make it any less suitable for posting here.
That’s a reasonable question. In general, it seems like there’s a broad notion here of what is relevant to “rationality”- and many users see issues in science of general interest as connected. There are also good reasons to see fundamental physics as potentially connected because it connects closely both to issues involving the Fermi problem as well as to issues involving anthropic reasoning. Examples of potential failure modes of the scientific community are also relevant (although our prior should almost universally be that no serious failure is likely to be going on).
What makes this a rationality post?
We are consistently looking at the evidence and saying “we know there are only 13.8 billion years to work with… why do we see mature galaxies as they were 11 billion years ago, where are all these huge webs of galaxies and massive voids existing at the dawn of time coming from, ect.”
First question, what is the probabilty that space is actually expanding?
Assuming it is expanding, what is the probability it had to go back to a Big Bang? (Some models, have it contracting and expanding without a Big Bang)
And if there was a Big Bang, what is the probability that 2015 will be different than the last 90 years where how long ago the Big Bang happened gets pushed back a billion years once or twice a decade.
(Side note: This 1/H = 13.8 billion years business is fishy. If 1/H yeilds the age of physical reality as we know it right now, what’ll happen 14 billion years from now? 1/H will give the same value for the “age of the universe” when it would be 28 billion years old. It’s true that H is not thought to be constant, but if the expansion is now accelerating, H is moving in a different direction, therefore, with everyday, 1/H predicts a smaller age. It’s growing younger. Yet, over the decades our calculations went from 2 billion to 4 billion to 8 to 10 to 12 to 13.8, our observations are forcing older ages. 1/H is suspiciously close to c/H, 14.2 billion light years, also known as Hubble’s Length, or Hubble’s Radius, or Hubble’s Limit.)
It might be time for a rational cosmology. There isn’t a certainty about the expansion of space, dark energy, inflation. There is a small sampling of reality known as our Hubble Volume, of which there are many, not just one centered on Earth. Galaxies would presumably exist trillions of light years beyond our ability to detect them with electromagenetic radiation.
In our Hubble Volume, there is a cold spot in the CMB to the south. Imagine a Hubble Volume centered 2 * Hubble Radius to the south of us. Does an observer in that Hubble Volume see the same cold spot to their south?
In this cosmology, the CMB is warmer to the north because there are more galaxies in that direction. That’s considered an anomaly in the Big Bang theory because they should be equal, and equal to every Hubble Volume.
Well, there’s a weak gimme answer: scholarship (eleventh tenet of rationality). It’s science, even if not directly related to human cognition.
It’s also an interesting topic for rational discussion, in the sense of “here’s some evidence against a thing that almost everybody believes. What is your response to it?” Things I would expect to see (and of which there have been some) is comments about things like updating beliefs, offering evidence that the sources of this contrary evidence should not be taken as authoritative, attempting to assign priors to the accuracy of various theories or hypotheses and seeing what that says about our actual beliefs in this area (and how they change when new evidence is introduced), etc.
Besides, this is discussion. I wouldn’t say the post is suitable to be promoted on the main page, but neither are posts on many of the memes associated with LW (like peoples’ thoughts on friendly AI, or effective altruism). This post may turn out to be less correct than those topics (or may not), but this doesn’t make it any less suitable for posting here.
That’s a reasonable question. In general, it seems like there’s a broad notion here of what is relevant to “rationality”- and many users see issues in science of general interest as connected. There are also good reasons to see fundamental physics as potentially connected because it connects closely both to issues involving the Fermi problem as well as to issues involving anthropic reasoning. Examples of potential failure modes of the scientific community are also relevant (although our prior should almost universally be that no serious failure is likely to be going on).