Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology

lppfusion.com

32 pointsmarchupfield38 comments

At first blush, this reminds me of the phenomena where, every time some problem with evolution comes up (a missing piece in the fossil record, say), the creationists pop up with "See! Darwin was wrong!"

arxiv would be completely right to refuse those "take that, Darwin!" articles.

On the other hand, maybe there are serious problems with standard cosmology, and other models besides the Big Bang are worth considering. Are there?

On a different topic: I would hope that a paper questioning the existence of dark matter would be admissible, since there are pretty clearly some real problems with that.

This isn't comparable to evolution theory where we have mountains of evidence of other species that were predecessors of the current ones. Or where we even have evidence of evolution happening during our lifetimes (e.g. Covid). The Big Bang theory is extremely speculative.

Empirical Science is about building theories based on observations. We have no observations that provide any kind of evidence that there was a big bang. Yes, we now that the universe is expanding, and has been for quite a while. So reasoning backwards, there must have been a time that the universe was a lot smaller than now. But that's it. We don't know how small it was before it started expanding. Maybe our universe started from a single point or even from nothing. Or maybe it bounced back after having contracted to a small but definite size. We just don't know. And actually, with the recent JWST observations, hints that support a big bounce or something similar are building up.

> The Big Bang theory is extremely speculative.

There is no other plausible explanation of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

This doesn't make it less speculative. What would is to incorporate less assumptions or to prove some its assumptions with practice.

I like speculativity very much, it's just a note on it.

The CMBR requires the existence of a dense, optically thick, hot state early in the universe. That's pretty much the Big Bang. There's nothing speculative about that, it follows from rather simple physics.

But anyway, give an alternative model that explains it. I'll wait.

It's pretty much the Big Bang but not quite. The Big Bang theory claims more than that: it claims that our universe started from nothing or from a single point. It needs some fancy new physics to explain our current universe from that: e.g. hyper inflation.

There are some alternatives to the Big Bang theory, e.g. the Big Bounce. This also claims the existence of a thick hot early state, but a bit more than a single point. This theory also explains cosmic background radiation.

No, the Big Bang doesn't assume the universe started from "a single point". Nor does it assume inflation. The Big Bang theory doesn't even go back to t=0. It leaves unspecified what happens at very early times. The BB is compatible with inflation, but theories of inflation were proposed well after the BB theory itself.

I didn't say the BB assumes inflation, I said it needed fancy physics such as inflation to explain the current state of the universe.

> The BB is compatible with inflation, but theories of inflation were proposed well after the BB theory itself.

Exactly, and the reason these theories were proposed was to 'fix' the BB itself. So of course they are compatible with the BB. There is no observation that asks us to consider something like hyper inflation, except if you assume that there has been a BB.

I don't have the scientific background to really argue with you on this; I'm just an enthusiastic amateur.

That said: Big Bang does explain an awful lot of stuff. I'm not sure what JWST observations you say call it into question, but wouldn't we need a lot more data before advancing Big Bounce or something else as an alternative?

As long as there is no direct evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, any other alternative is equally good IMO.

The JSWT observations putting some doubt on the Big Bang theory are the observations of very old galaxies. E.g. one was observed at a time that the universe was only 250 million years old (according to BB theory), really not much on a cosmological time scale. The thing about this galaxy was, that it seemed like a pretty normal galaxy already. Which makes people wonder how it could have formed so quickly.

Another observation casting doubt on the Big Bang theory is the (indirect) observation of some very early massive black holes. Again the question is how they could have formed so fast.

Well, ok. If direct evidence is what you want, cosmology is generally lacking in that. We're here, now, and nothing is going to change that.

@UIUC_06: sure, I agree. The lack of direct evidence is more often a problem in cosmology. Some even refuse to call cosmology a science because of that. But if all of them are speculative, then why refuse any other theory than the BB theory in arxiv?

I'm curious if the authors of the paper are taking advantage of the well-known current problems with our standard cosmology. I'm also curious if the other commenters are even aware of this as an issue independent of whether the article was published.

The analogy to a failed pull request is typically developer-centric and grossly off the mark. Reiterating the function of an editor ignores the context of this particular article, which I've taken the time to reiterate myself.

This is a topic that really frustrates me. Both sides make valid (non-technical, character-based) attacks on the other. On one extreme there is the textbook fringe pseudoscientist who calls out groupthink but constantly falls into fallacies rather than focusing on explaining empirical observations with the simplest and most accurate way possible. On the other extreme there is the career pseudoscientist who calls out the poor form of the fringe while not bothering to apply the appropriate level of scientific rigor to them either.

It's unfortunate simply how much ego is involved in this area. I'm not a plasma physicist. I'm not a cosmologist. I can just see when the idyllic scientific method is being short circuited.

For a quick toe-dipping in to Alfvein cosmology: check out the sci-hub for the 1986 IEEE Peratt paper "Evolution of the Plasma Universe: II. The Formation of Systems of Galaxies".

I'm not saying all elements of one model should be thrown out. Let's go one mystery at a time. How does galaxy evolution sound? Forget even trying to be certain of the Big Bang or alternatives until that's nailed down.

Considering how many speculative or opinion-based papers are available on arxiv with no problem whatsoever, the fact that arxiv rejected these particular three papers seems very...odd.

Considering how they host papers "refuting" Cantor and Gödel... seems like a weird time to get standards. https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4433

Perhaps they're too close to having valid points and might have to be taken seriously.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if whatever editors are responsible for cosmology papers are a little bit more on the stringent side compared to some other disciplines.

Editors of arxiv: "We aren't the place to publish insubstantial discussions. There are other places for that."

Guys who wrote the paper: "But it's substantial!"

Like... obviously the guys who wrote the paper think it's substantial, or they wouldn't have submitted it. The very idea of "we think it's good, so we want to publish this without anyone telling us it's not" is... silly. As a developer, this is like someone opening a PR, then getting mad if the PR is rejected upon a quick code review because "Well, I think it's good code!" Of course you do, that's why you opened the PR, but the whole point of review is to get others' opinions in case you're wrong.

Get a disinterested expert third party to review the work and say it's worth publishing, then you can complain to arxiv.

Or, taking the other approach, sure, you can publish it. Just not on arxiv.

Arxiv's editors decide what arxiv publishes. That's what editors are supposed to do.

Yep, which is literally what the editors told them according to their own account.

And, that is the problem.

"We have standards which your paper doesn't reach" is a problem? Is your ideal someone that publishes any and all papers submitted to them regardless of quality?

> Arxiv's editors decide what arxiv publishes.

Yes, and arxiv's editors apparently have no problem publishing lots of other papers that are at least as "out of mainstream" as these. So whatever criteria they are using don't appear to be being applied consistently.

bc I say so is a poor argument and you know it

I open PRs to facilitate discussion and get feedback.

Do not misquote. The direct quote is right there.

"There are many journals which would be interested in publishing a well-argued synthesis of existing evidence against the standard hot big bang interpretation. But MNRAS, with its focus on publication of significant new astronomical results, is not one of them."

This isn't rejection of a PR based on merit, it's selectively refusing to review a PR.

Does someone have a reasonably impartial source on what the hell is actually going on with the JWST findings?

Is this cranks?

LPP Fusion is run by Eric Lerner, who (based on his Wikipedia article[1]) seems to be a long-time crank who's been pushing plasma cosmology since 1991. He's using his nuclear fusion development company as a megaphone for this. (I'll let someone else try to figure out if the fusion company is legit.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner

Maybe Lerner is to some degree cranky, but really almost all cosmologists are, too. So it is a matter of degree. If you have a print publication where every page printed has to be paid for, you are obliged to be picky about what goes on those pages. For a purely online medium, that goes out the window. Then, all you should be filtering for is relevance.

To anyone in the field:

How plausible is Loop Quantum Cosmology/Loop Quantum Gravity as a Big Bang alternative?

It seems more reasonable to me, but this is like a blind man saying one painting looks nicer than another.

It’s not really a Big Bang “alternative” at all. It is possibly an explanation of how the early Big Bang got going.

Editors refusing to publish your work in their journal is censorship?

Nature and Science have censored me a few times then (got one through though!)

It is not "their journal".

If someone can prevent publishing they are de facto editors, even if they might not do grammatical editing. E.g. Bezos is probably an editor at his paper.

Just like busybody keepers of Wikipedia pages can keep out current information, just by assiduously reverting every change.

"I am CLEARLY being CENSORED because my ideas are SO RADICAL!"

Here we see the signaling call of the Physics Crank, which has been passed down from crank to crank over the centuries.

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