pre-Big-Bang activity evidence | Hacker News Reader

pre-Big-Bang activity evidence

arxiv.org

51 pointsccarpenterg19 comments

I think we're going to see a lot of papers like this. In a quantum gravity universe, we know there's no singularity at the big bang. Therefore, scientists are going to be looking through ways that we can see through to the other side of the big bang.

Even if their particular universe model isn't correct, there must be other models in which similar phenomena could occur. Interesting stuff.

Basically what I understand is they are saying "Hey, we're observing things that don't make sense to the big bang theory, so maybe there were multiple big bangs and then maybe if there were multiple big bangs there could be an infinite amount of them.. and what we are observing is the previous big bang's light. So we jumbled a bunch of numbers showing this is possible." But the paper fails to deal with the fact that, yes, if there were multiple big bangs, then maybe the "big" bang isn't really the significant big event everybody has it thought out to be -- there wasn't just one event that created everything. Although it sounds great. So they are just making excuses to keep the big bang theory alive and should instead just say 'we don't know what created the universe' and abandon the 'big bang' theory all together. There own paper disproves the entire big bang theory.

Their paper doesn't "disprove the entire big bang theory."

It does find some problems with the prevailing inflationary model (in which a short period of rapid inflation follows the big bang). Their model gives another way to solve the problems that the inflationary model solved. Other models might also work. And so science proceeds...

I guess I should had made it more clear in my post. Let me try again; if the current theory is stated as such "there once was nothing, and then there was one big bang that created everything in the universe and this was absolutely a single event", and then in the paper they conclude, "oh, wait, there were multiple events", then by extension the theory that everything was a single event -- called the big bang theory -- is no longer a true. No single event, no big bang theory. But no, they decided to interpret the data to fit around the conclusion of the big bang by using fancy names. You can't call something a 'single event' and have it both a 'single event' and 'multiple event' at the same time. It either was a single event or it wasn't! I'm not sure if I could be more clearer. Where is it in my logic can you show me that I am wrong?

Maybe they weren't talking about multiple simultaneous events (although the concept of time doesn't really apply anyway) but more about prior (in the sense of one having an influence on the other) events that had impact on the initial conditions for our current universe's big bang.

"hey, look, my idea has an internal logical consistencyyy.."

Apparently their idea also has external consistency with measurements.

Gurzadyan and Penrose are saying that there is observational evidence for a particular cosmological model known as Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). Specifically, the evidence comes from measurements gathered by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) (a satellite) and Boomerang '98 (a balloon flight above Antarctica in 1998, which also measured temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background).

Specifically, they claim to see the signatures of supermassive black hole encounters in the aeon prior to the Big Bang - these show up as families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Of course, other cosmological models might also be consistent with the measurements they cite.

The only consistency that exists with measurements is that theories are formulated as a potential interpretation of them.

So, back to my original hypothesis..

Note the second author.

Care to expand on that?

Basically, these observations only have significance if you assume that inflationary cosmology is correct.

Actually, these observations don't seem to fit with standard inflationary cosmology.

"...to reproduce the effects that we appear to see, within the framework of inflation, one would require a mechanism for producing recurrent explosive events close to the inflationary turn-off point. No such mechanism has ever been seriously contemplated."

(but someone might start seriously contemplating it now!)

a) This is just a post on the arxiv. Pretty much anyone can submit any crap to it. It's not peer reviewed.

b) It's not even clear that Roger Penrose really collaborated on it. The other guy could have just listed Penrose as a coauthor.

This paper was submitted nearly two weeks ago.

One would expect Dr Penrose to have issued a statement by now if he wasn't involved.

Instead, ten seconds on google reveals him discussing the research in question with a reporter from the BBC ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11837869

I am becoming concerned about these comments on articles that seek to discredit them without putting in effort commensurate with the article itself. I saw another earlier today where someone claimed that a statistical test used in an article was not correct, but provided little rationale other than the claim. Perhaps the commenter was right, but it strikes me that I must be more careful in believing off the cuff remarks, especially when comparing them with research papers that have been written only through much effort and care.

I suppose this is just another variant on cheap criticism that lacks the kind of expertise and context as the author of the thing criticized. You have to treat it with even more skepticism than the original.

"without putting in effort commensurate with the article itself"? You're suggesting that in order to be allowed to criticize something on a web forum, one would have to invest months of one's time beforehand?

Your own criticism seems to commit the logical fallacy of "argument by effort" (and assumes that there can't be any shoddily-thrown-together research papers or ones written by outright cranks).

How about we judge both articles and comments on the merit of their specific content?

Besides, reminding people that arxiv is not a peer-reviewed source and does not by itself lend credibility to a paper does not even represent criticism of the paper itself, just some additional context in which to judge it.

The fact is, the arXiv is seen as a legitimate and respectable place for scientists to post preprints.

V.G. Gurzadyan is well-known in the physics community and wouldn't risk his reputation by posting papers with phony coauthors.

Peer review and reputation are nice, but the acid test of any scientific model is whether it works. For example, is the model consistent with known observations, and does it make good predictions?

Right, but the problem is that us non-experts can't tell whether something posted on the arXiv holds water or not. Being posted on the arXiv carries very little signal.

Don't get me wrong: I love the arXiv and use it regularly. Long papers can be posted there, get disseminated quickly, and can be downloaded freely. The problem I have is that many people think anything on the arXiv is automatically true -- but there's lots of cranks posting proofs of P ?= NP and etc.

Yes, the acid test is obviously whether or not it works, but that's why we need to wait for the experts to figure it out and vet it.

The world in general is a legitimate and respectable place for physicists to publish preprints, but you still shouldn't believe everything you hear in the world. I think that's the point. It's not that arxiv sucks, but that it doesn't lend any credibility to the things published there, so we need to be skeptical. For those of us who are not the author's peers, taking non-peer reviewed work as anything more than speculation is likely to lead to false beliefs.

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