I don't have the time to look up the Supreme Court case you are referring to, but it involved a repainted BMW. The dealer never notified the buyer it had been scratched, and after he found out he sued. The actual damages were around $5,000, but the jury awarded multiple millions in punitive damages. The Supreme Court (purely in dicta) suggested that there was some low multiple that probably would represent the outer limit of a Constitutional punitive damages award. Here, however, there are no punitive damages at issue, and the precedent you refer to is inapposite.
If you are referring to the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause, good luck. The overwhelming trend over the last decade(s) has been a merciless evisceration of that protection, although the Supremes recently hinted in oral argument that the severe mandatory drug sentencing laws might need to be revisited.
Although this story begins with the proposition that string theory isn't adding-up, inflation itself is susceptible to some probing criticism. For example, neither the relative uniformity of the present universe nor its "lumpiness" (required for matter to form galaxies) are in any way required results of inflation; even the slightest variation in the initial quantum fluctuations thought to be responsible for the non-uniformity produce wildly different outcomes. That our universe came out the way it did, with physical laws and characteristics necessary for galaxy formation (and hence life), is statistically highly improbable. In fact, some inflationists have posited that there is a perhaps an unlimited number of expanding regions of space where these characteristics have not obtained, regions that will never intersect because space itself expands faster then the edges of these individual pockets. Further, inflation doesn't say much about the enormous amount of energy that is required to drive inflation; how does a force that acts so powerfully suddenly disappear and give way to the cause of today's much slower expansion?
An alternative to inflation that preserves much of string theory (at least M theory) is put forth in a book by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok called "Endless Universe." http://www.amazon.com/Endless-Universe-Beyond-Big-Bang/dp/0385509642/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2736756-6626517?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189688680&sr=8-1 The book details some of the intellectual and experimental hurdles in the development of inflation and advocates a cyclic universe with periodic collisions between closely-spaced dimensions. Although the book is non-technical (and I surely would not understand the math if it were included) the authors claim that every prediction inflation makes is equally well predicted by their theory. Additionally, some of inflation's more problematic results are avoided. According to the authors, the WMAP team has predicted that future experiments will be sufficiently sensitive to make measurements of phenomena that have different predictions under inflation and the cyclic model.
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I don't have the time to look up the Supreme Court case you are referring to, but it involved a repainted BMW. The dealer never notified the buyer it had been scratched, and after he found out he sued. The actual damages were around $5,000, but the jury awarded multiple millions in punitive damages. The Supreme Court (purely in dicta) suggested that there was some low multiple that probably would represent the outer limit of a Constitutional punitive damages award. Here, however, there are no punitive damages at issue, and the precedent you refer to is inapposite. If you are referring to the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause, good luck. The overwhelming trend over the last decade(s) has been a merciless evisceration of that protection, although the Supremes recently hinted in oral argument that the severe mandatory drug sentencing laws might need to be revisited.
Although this story begins with the proposition that string theory isn't adding-up, inflation itself is susceptible to some probing criticism. For example, neither the relative uniformity of the present universe nor its "lumpiness" (required for matter to form galaxies) are in any way required results of inflation; even the slightest variation in the initial quantum fluctuations thought to be responsible for the non-uniformity produce wildly different outcomes. That our universe came out the way it did, with physical laws and characteristics necessary for galaxy formation (and hence life), is statistically highly improbable. In fact, some inflationists have posited that there is a perhaps an unlimited number of expanding regions of space where these characteristics have not obtained, regions that will never intersect because space itself expands faster then the edges of these individual pockets. Further, inflation doesn't say much about the enormous amount of energy that is required to drive inflation; how does a force that acts so powerfully suddenly disappear and give way to the cause of today's much slower expansion?
An alternative to inflation that preserves much of string theory (at least M theory) is put forth in a book by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok called "Endless Universe." http://www.amazon.com/Endless-Universe-Beyond-Big-Bang/dp/0385509642/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2736756-6626517?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189688680&sr=8-1 The book details some of the intellectual and experimental hurdles in the development of inflation and advocates a cyclic universe with periodic collisions between closely-spaced dimensions. Although the book is non-technical (and I surely would not understand the math if it were included) the authors claim that every prediction inflation makes is equally well predicted by their theory. Additionally, some of inflation's more problematic results are avoided. According to the authors, the WMAP team has predicted that future experiments will be sufficiently sensitive to make measurements of phenomena that have different predictions under inflation and the cyclic model.
In any event, the book is a stimulating read.