Slashdot Mirror
The Big Bang Vs. the Big Rumble
WBUR radio in Boston hosts a talk with two physicists, Alan Guth and Neil Turok, who represent, respectively, the consensus theory of the inflationary Big Bang and an upstart theory of the initiation of the universe in the collision of two three-dimensional "branes." Turok and Paul Steinhardt developed their "Ekpyrotic proposal" out of the mathematics behind string theory. In the audio the two physicists are perhaps more respectful of one another's views than the host wishes them to be. If you ignore the "let's you and him fight" framing of the debate, you will hear some interesting physics elucidated.
For the lazy
initiation of the universe in the collision of two thee-dimensional "branes."
I'm more interested in this. Could we have been misunderstanding zombies all this time?
You see theoretical scientists (you know the ones that have been working on stuff for decades and still don't have a single experimental piece of evidence) like to make up terminology and throw around big scary formulas to justify wasting time and money working on stuff that cannot even be proven experimentally. Sorry for the bitterness, but I wouldn't even call these people scientists. They might as well say that a giant spaghetti monster flies around and his noodly appendages form tiny knots and those knots are the elementary particles....BUT...OMG! the appendages are so thin that we cannot experimentally detect their presence...but they are there, trust us, here is a big hairy formula (don't worry about the solutions for know) it proves everything -- Give us another PhD!
Halton Arp's idea that "many high-energy, high-redshift quasars appear to be located in close proximity to, and interacting with, low-redshift, low-energy galaxies" has been proven incorrect.
1) Its impossible to explain quasar absorption lines, which must be due to foreground objects
2) Magification due to gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies neatly explains any excess of quasars near galaxies as seen on the sky and requires them to be at high redshift. See e.g. Detection of Cosmic Magnification with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Unfortunately, Arp and few others conveniently ignore the irrefutable evidence against their ideas. Luckily the rest of the astrophysical community understands scientific evidence. That's the reason that no one pays attention to Arp and colleagues.
Equally unfortunately there is always a group of people (especially on Slashdot) quick to embrace the romantic notion of the outsider "kicked off the telescope for his heretical views". After all, in the movies that's the guy that turns out to be right in the end ...