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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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"confirms theory" I know it's valid, but it sounds weird

I agree. Makes me think someone over-spiced the headline

How is it valid? "Conforms" to theory would be OK. "Tends to confirm" would be OK. "Fails to disprove" would be OK. We don't "confirm" theories. We don't "prove" theories.

The semantics of the title seem off and written by a non-scientist. A scientific theory cannot be proven, so the significant word choice of “confirm” is poor.

> written by a non-scientist

Yes, journalists aren't scientists.

Shame that instead of highlighting one of the many great things that this man did, they use incorrect phraseology to claim he did something he didn’t do.

Why not? Are you making some oblique reference to Popperian refutationalism or is your point just that it’s very difficult to 100% prove something, so often it’s more a matter of a significant updating of priors? If it’s the latter, using “proof” doesn’t seem like the worst shorthand to me. Anything more involved would go over the head of the average nytimes reader.

I assumed the average New York Times reader is above average in intellect and could appreciate an irrefutable word choice, like “advanced” in place of “confirmed.” I could be wrong.

Evidence of [x] is not proof of [x], but in this specific case the claim is particularly unreasonable.

Because while a cosmic microwave background radiation is something that would be expected from a Big Bang, its actual reality is weird and contradicted previous expectations. It has to do with casual connectivity. "A" can only possibly influence "B" if A could reach B at the speed of light. But the relative homogeneity of our universe is suggestive that parts of the universe which should not be casually connected, are causally connected.

So this discovery quickly led to the invention of cosmic inflation [1] whereby the early expansion of the universe is said to have dramatically accelerated well beyond the speed of light, and then slowed down - in order to enable these regions of space to become causally connected. No possible means or mechanism have been suggested, so it remains nothing but a rather inelegant hack to try to make what we observe fit a preexisting hypothesis that it largely contradicted.

As experiments to try to provide supporting evidence for inflation have also turned up negative, it's also becoming one of those contemporary model driven hypotheses that requires ever more exotic physics to even make it possible, as each failed prediction gets assimilated into the model to make it keep fitting what we see. Just add more epicycles. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Motivati...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis

> A scientific theory cannot be proven,

Yes, that's why the title doesn't say "Physicist proves Big Bang theory"

What does it means to confirm a theory?

It's unscientific nonsense.

What are you all on about? This phrase is used all the time in science.

Since Karl Popper we take science to be the development of falsifiable theories and experimentation to show them to be false (therefore ruled out) or not-false, therefore still theories. We don't say that General Relativity is proven -- we say that it is in agreement with all experiments carried out so far.

One does not 'confirm' the Big Bang theory. One finds evidence that does not disprove it. Or one finds evidence that does disprove it, then someone (possibly the same person or persons) elaborates a variant of that theory, or a whole sale replacement of it.

Note the prominence of the need for falsifiability in the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

https://www.google.com/search?q=karl+popper+falsification+qu...

So, yes, speaking of how a Nobel physicist "confirmed" the Big Bang [theory] is unscientific nonsense. What should one expect though? It's a headline in the New York Times, not Nature!

My above comment is at -3, which normally I'd not care about, but collective ignorance of what the scientific method is is a bit depressing.

You're acting like the people posting here don't know that about theories. Language works within contexts, and the context for "confirm" in science reporting tends to be finding strong supporting evidence. Since the discovery of the CMB ruled out a large chunk of the other theories and left the Big Bang as the leading candidate, it obviously fits the finding strong supporting evidence case.

We see similar titles every once in a while when someone does a new kind of test for relativity too.

Tired light forever!!!

It's clear by the title an athiest wrote this.

Why couldn't god have created the big bang? Science has nothing to do with religion.

A scientific theory cannot really be "confirmed." The word choice is suspect. The Big Bang Theory is consistent with many properties of the known universe, but cannot adequately explain others. Claiming it is the ground truth takes a leap of faith, which however small compared to religion, requires a measure of faith as implied.

What does that have to do with atheism? You don't think that people who believe in God sometimes makes mistakes when picking words?

It begs the question as to whether the author of the title actually believes the Big Bang is confirmed from a scientific point of view. That would suggest an atheistic belief.

You're conflating confirmation with some type of irrefutable proof which is both pedantic and plain wrong.

The job of people who write titles like this is to be very pedantic about word choice. I’ll have to disagree with you on this being a “plain wrong” interpretation of the given wording.

It's not the job of the people who write titles to be pedantic although it is reasonable of them to expect most readers to know the difference between confirmation and absolute proof. The problem here is not with the title.

If they were targeting an adequately scientifically trained audience, sure. I don’t think they are.

That doesn't have much to do with it, you're just mistaken about the (fairly common) usage 'confirms theory'.

The Bible states that God created light, stars and earth in seven days; on day 3 He created the earth, on day 4 the stars. That seems rather incompatible with the big bang theory.

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, definitely not flamewar tangents, and especially definitely not religious flamewar tangents. That's the last thing we need here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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