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Comment by snarkconjecture | Hacker News Reader

> The standard cosmological model affords no such explanation

Einstein GR → Friedmann eqns → universe can be expanding or contracting

Rest of this amounts to "what about initial conditions? things become divergent at t→0"

Yes, this is called the Big Bang singularity, GR breaks down there. You are not the first person to notice this. It is considered one of the biggest open problems in the field.

The stuff about accelerating expansion is confused (AI?) slop which eventually gets around to admitting that there's no problem at t>0 and no change to the existing problem at t=0, so I don't know why you didn't just cut it.

This is some real "unsolicited snail mail to physics departments"-tier content, even for HN I think it's embarrassing to have this on the front page.

I guess because every code monkey in Silicon Valley has wet dreams about overthrowing the hidebound physics establishment for some reason

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Dunning Krueger is most prevalent in software engineers for some reason. Fortunately most of us grow out of it and begin to appreciate how hard other disciplines are.

>unsolicited snail mail to physics departments..

Would Ramanujan's unsolicited letter to Hardy be one of the kind that you describe here?

> this is called the Big Bang singularity, GR breaks down there.

Only in models that actually have such an initial singularity. Not all models do. Eternal inflation models, for example, do not.

What stuff about accelerating expansion are you referring to? The author is a physicist not just a barstool talker. He's right as you point out that there are huge interesting and unexplained phenomena that sometimes have pretty little names that discourage further question asking. It's sad to see such negativity instead of engaging with the material a bit

> The author is a physicist

While this is true, it's also true that out of all of his published work in physics (which you can find at the "Google Scholar" link on the Author page of his log), none of it, as far as I can see, is about the hypothesis described in this article. All his writings about that appear on his blog. Which means that, if he has tried to get any of this published in peer-reviewed journals, he's failed.

This could mean that he is a visionary whose insight is not recognized by the establishment, which is the story he tells. It could also mean that his speculations actually don't lead anywhere useful. My Bayesian prior is heavily on the latter.

Why do you have to use your statistics, when you can use arguments addressing the problems in the articles?

Sounds lot like you are using appeal to authority.

I would say the appeal to authority was in the post I responded to: "the author is a physicist". I was simply pointing out that "physicist" is a broad term, and the fact that he has that job title doesn't automatically make him knowledgeable about the specific subject area in question.

As for the actual article, I think it's too vague to even be able to criticize anything specific. It's words strung together, but no actual testable model that I can see. (One key red flag: the page where he says the "mathematical details" are--does not even have a single equation.)

One red flag that jumped out at me was, not a single link to a published paper, or even an arxiv preprint. Just other blog posts. Actual physics isn't done in blog posts. What has actually been published about all this for other physicists to critique? It's easy to make anything sound plausible if no one else but you gets to speak.

Probably because physicists are not going to entertain stuff that is trying to get them out of their comfort zone...

If you look on arxiv.org you will see all kinds of speculations by physicists that go outside our best current models. AFAIK a paper doesn't even have to be submitted for publication in a journal to be posted as a preprint there.

Also, there is always the alternative explanation that the reason other physicists have not paid any real attention to the author's claims is that those claims are, as I said in another post upthread, too vague even to criticize. (Wolfgang Pauli used the phrase "not even wrong".)

>Actual physics isn't done in blog posts

Wolfram didn't get the memo

> I guess because every code monkey in Silicon Valley has wet dreams about overthrowing the hidebound physics establishment for some reason

Too much focus on the tech in Star Trek when you're a kid, I imagine. Shoulda focused on the morality.

Physics/cosmology-related HN submissions tend to have poor comment quality, so this being upvoted to the front page isn’t too surprising, unfortunately.

Aren't laymen allowed to wonder about these things and share their thoughts?

You should remember that the groundwork on which all the scientific pursuits stands on was built by curious laymen ...Today it seems that without a Phd (apparently even that is not enough, given the reactions to this post), you are not allowed to ponder about such things...

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