Sep 18, 2023 03:19 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 18, 2023 03:24 PM by C C.)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/the-b...al-with-it
EXCERPTS: There’s something comical about cosmology. A field that tries to explain the whole universe? Give me a break! We don’t even know how a brain makes a thought! But that’s what I love about cosmology, too--the contrast between this grand scientific endeavor and our benighted, mortal selves.
And over the last century, cosmology has given us a mind-blowing insight into our existence, which anyone can grasp [...] I love telling my students the tale of this discovery. ... Come on, I enthuse to my students after recounting them this scientific creation story, isn’t that amazing?
In my 1996 book The End of Science, I call the big bang one of the greatest discoveries ever. The theory will surely be tweaked and extended, but it will never be overturned, because it is true, just as heliocentrism and evolution by natural selection are true. So I claim.
But wait. What about a recent New York Times essay, “The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel,” by astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser? The James Webb Telescope, they report, reveals that galaxies formed “far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.” This standard model is a souped-up version of the big bang.
[...] Pardon my eye-rolling, but Frank and Gleiser are reprising, pretty much exactly, arguments I heard at a cosmology symposium in 1990. Thirty-three years ago! Attendees included Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, James Peebles, Martin Rees, Michael Turner, Alan Guth, Sidney Coleman and Andrei Linde... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: There’s something comical about cosmology. A field that tries to explain the whole universe? Give me a break! We don’t even know how a brain makes a thought! But that’s what I love about cosmology, too--the contrast between this grand scientific endeavor and our benighted, mortal selves.
And over the last century, cosmology has given us a mind-blowing insight into our existence, which anyone can grasp [...] I love telling my students the tale of this discovery. ... Come on, I enthuse to my students after recounting them this scientific creation story, isn’t that amazing?
In my 1996 book The End of Science, I call the big bang one of the greatest discoveries ever. The theory will surely be tweaked and extended, but it will never be overturned, because it is true, just as heliocentrism and evolution by natural selection are true. So I claim.
But wait. What about a recent New York Times essay, “The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel,” by astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser? The James Webb Telescope, they report, reveals that galaxies formed “far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.” This standard model is a souped-up version of the big bang.
[...] Pardon my eye-rolling, but Frank and Gleiser are reprising, pretty much exactly, arguments I heard at a cosmology symposium in 1990. Thirty-three years ago! Attendees included Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, James Peebles, Martin Rees, Michael Turner, Alan Guth, Sidney Coleman and Andrei Linde... (MORE - missing details)