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That's an interesting idea. Do you have any thoughts on the fact that the structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation is exactly what we would expect it to be if the universe had expanded from a tiny state to its current state?

I'm unwilling to assume it "just randomly looks like that" given that a random distribution on a universal scale seems highly unlikely to show the large scale structures notable in the CMB.

I'm in no way endorsing this individual's proposal, but the argument you're using here is not as strong as you'd expect. A recurring trend in the past several decades has been that a contradiction in prediction is often simply massaged back into that prediction, at times quite arbitrarily. Then that previously contradictory observation can be used as 'evidence' for the newly retrofitted prediction. Of course that's at best circular logic and, at worst, something that can start sending us spiraling down the wrong path, faster than light.

So for instance the CMB did not support the big bang, it contradicted it. See: the horizon problem [1]. To reconcile this inflation theory was invented which arbitrarily suggests that the universe hit the accelerator hard, then slowed back down. There's no logic, mechanism, rationale or falsifiability. But it makes what we see fit what we predicted we'd see, so it's a pretty widely accepted part of modern physics. And this retrofitting now has a cascade affect that enables other theories to provide support for yet other theories -- such as what you're proposing here in that the CMB now 'supports' the big bang. It does so only if you add a very big asterisk there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem

I'm not a physicist, so maybe I'm misunderstanding the article you linked, but it seems to support my 1st post.

If you'll reread it you'll see that I mentioned nothing about a Big Bang, but rather that the CMB provides evidence that the Universe expanded from a smaller state to its current state, which is larger than its starting state.

From the linked wiki: "Differences in the temperature of the cosmic background are smoothed by cosmic inflation, but they still exist. The theory [Cosmic Inflation evidenced by the Horizon Problem] predicts a spectrum for the anisotropies in the microwave background which is mostly consistent with observations from WMAP and COBE."

It doesn't. First to clarify what the CMB is. It's basically just heat residuals that seem to indicate that the universe was much hotter in the past. The problem is that these heat residuals are relatively homogeneously distributed. In terms of thermdynamics this makes perfect sense - the entire temperature of an area will gradually converge, like a pot of boiling water will eventually reach room temperature.

But physically what we observe does not make any sense. Like you probably know, nothing -- including action -- can be perceived to travel faster than the speed of light. The sun is about 8 light minutes away from us. If it somehow just suddenly disappeared, we'd still see it in the sky and continue to revolve around, what would 'now' be nothing, for about 8 minutes. The observation of its disappearance and the effective causality of its disappearance (and its effect on our orbit) would happen at or very near the exact same time.

The problem with the CMB is that areas of space that should not be causally connected since light itself has not had time to go from one to the other, seem to be causally connected. In other words, with our boiling pot in a kitchen room - the eventual equilibrium that the kitchen reaches (if we assume that that entire little region is all of the space in existence) is going to vary quite substantially whether you have an e.g. 100 cubic meter kitchen or a 200 cubic meter kitchen. We should observe both sides of space acting like two independent 100 cubic meter kitchens, instead we seem them behaving like a single 200 cubic meter kitchen.

This is a major and unresolved problem that threw much of what we know out the window. It directly contradicts the big bang. To 'resolve' this, we started creating a arbitrary special conditions. Cosmic inflation is one of these. There is absolutely no reason to believe that cosmic inflation ever happened - its sole and only reason for existence is to work as a 'fix' to make what we observe fit what we thought we'd observe. This makes it illogical to use derivative things as "evidence". In particular the nature of our current CMB is in no way meaningful evidence of inflation, because inflation was hypothesized, after the fact, in no small part to fit the CMB to what we thought we'd see! In other words calling the CMB meaningful evidence of inflation is trying to provide support to a hypothesis by suggesting that the observation said hypothesis tries to explain is meaningful evidence of that hypothesis.

Any not completely idiotic hypothesis will obviously be 'evidenced' by what it tries to explain. But we have a major problem when that 'evidence' becomes all you have to rely on, and that is exactly the case here.

> Mathematics, so useful a tool in the past, cannot describe this situation. The only way to describe this system is by using the system itself; there are no shortcuts.

> Math, philosophy, reason and order are inapplicable because they are only rules-based approximations of a chaotic state.

This is really a superlative cop-out. "My theory is so genius that math, philosophy, reason, and order are insufficient to describe it."

Here's the ether guy again. It's all he can talk about.

Well, that sort of reaction to "out-there" ideas is kind of contributing to stagnation, don't you think?

How do you take someone seriously who says, "Mathematics, so useful a tool in the past, cannot describe this situation. The only way to describe this system is by using the system itself; there are no shortcuts. Math, philosophy, reason and order are inapplicable because they are only rules-based approximations of a chaotic state."

That's tantamount to saying that his theory is not based on data, logic, or even sound reasoning, and cannot be proven. Pretty much the definition of a crackpot theory. Of course, what he is actually admitting is that he doesn't understand and can't do the math.

Or how can you take someone seriously who says, "We’re stuck in a paradigm that doesn’t result in any valid fundamental predictions." This is so obviously false that the only possible explanation is that he is ignorant about the foundations of modern physics, what they are, how we got here, etc. The field is freaking loaded with predictions that have been proven.

I take it seriously because it echoes a sentiment I've seen expressed previously. If you're interested, I believe this post outlines the idea: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/11/logic-explainability...

The tl;dr is that physics is not necessarily explainable, however much you want it to be. So it's very possible that the underlying phenomena of reality is simply out of reach of theories (i.e. it's incompressible).

> That's tantamount to saying that his theory is not based on data, logic, or even sound reasoning, and cannot be proven. Pretty much the definition of a crackpot theory.

You misunderstood the post I think. It's not proposing a theory, or even a crackpot one. It's saying that maybe the underlying phenomena is out of reach of theories.

Nonsense. It’s just a rehash of the old steady state model. Further, any theory which itself claims to be unproveable, is a religious sentiment masquerading as science, and is a waste of mental effort.

Wolfram’s article is irrelevant to this discussion. It is a question of empistemology.

That would imply that there’s an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the Universe. So, where’s the antimatter?

The quantum foam is a shared component, an interface, between our universe and another universe that is majority anti-matter. When particles arise from the quantum foam, what we're observing is the half of a virtual particle pair that ended up on this side of the interface, and it is more likely to be the "matter" particle for some reason.

Lets get hypothetical. Suppose the quantum foam interface is, in fact, the event horizon of a blackhole as observed from the inside. Since we see a bias towards matter, we could expect that the "outside" universe would see a bias towards what we call anti-matter. Further, since we have blackholes in our universe which we can observe, we should see a bias towards matter in the Hawking radiation.

=This post brought to you by a physicist from a not-terribly-accurate sci-fi novella.=

> This is why “dark matter” exists out there and not down here.

Nope, everyone thinks that dark matter exists everywhere around us. That's why we are funding and running all sorts of dark matter detectors that are looking inwards, not outwards.