I swear, it’s harder to convince the average person that their behaviors and “choices” are determined solely by the laws of physics—and not by some kind of dualistic “ghost in the machine”—than it is to convince the average religionist that there’s no evidence for God. That’s because not only do goddies have a special reason to believe in dualistic free will—their attainment of paradise or hell depends on their free ability to choose—but all of us have a strong feeling of agency, as if we really could have chosen otherwise when making a decision. (The classic dilemma is a burger vs a salad at a restaurant.)
Let me define terms before I pose my question, a sort of survey of readers. And let me divide up people into three categories, A, B, and C.
A. Libertarians: Those who believe in a kind of dualism: that somehow our brains can really overcome the laws of physics and, were we to return to a previous situation of “choosing”, with every particle in the universe configured as it was before, we really could have chosen differently from how we did.
As I’ve shown before, a study by Sarkissian et al., surveying people in four countries, found that this is indeed the way most people conceive of the world: between 65% and 85% of people say that were they to return to an identical situation of choice, they could have chosen differently from how they did. (You can, if you wish, deny the Sarkissian et al. results, but they do match my anecdotal experience with people who have never discussed determinism and behavior.) Further, 60%-85% of people surveyed say that in such a deterministic world, people would not be considered “fully morally responsible” for their actions.
B. Hard determinists. (I am one of these.) Those are people who believe that our brains, being material objects operating under the laws of physics, can give only a single output from the inputs they receive (barring any quantum indeterminacy operating in our neurons). Our behaviors are solely and uniquely decided by our genes and our environments, and nothing else. There is no dualism, and if you returned to the “original situation” described above, you would always decide the same thing. We feel as if we are agents who could have chosen otherwise, but in reality we can’t. Hard determinists like me feel it’s pointless to talk about “free will.” Besides me, to other hard determinists are Alex Rosenberg and Sam Harris.
C. Determinist “compatibilists.” Members of this class share the view of hard determinists that in a given situation, with all molecules configured identically, we can do only a single thing. As Sean Carroll argues in his new book The Big Picture (p. 295):
Under naturalism [Carroll’s a naturalist] there isn’t that much difference between a human being and a robot. We are all just complicated collections of matter moving in patterns, obeying impersonal laws of physics in an environment with an arrow of time.
The difference between members of this class and hard determinists is that the class “C” members think that determinism is compatible with some conception of free will, though of course not the version adhered to by libertarians.
How compatilists conceive of free will differs: some say our “freedom” is simply the complexity of the human brain, which allows us to weigh different inputs (“reasons”) before acting in a way no other animal can, even if those weights are simply aspects of our neurons existing in our brains. Others say our freedom resides simply in not acting under duress: a person cannot “choose freely” to go to the store if he’s locked in jail. (My response, of course, is that the bars of a jail are no different from the bars in our mind that compel us to do one thing rather than another.) Because compatibilists disagree on what constitutes “free will”; the only thing they agree on is that we can conceive of human actions so that we have something called “free will.” Examples of compatibilists are Dan Dennett, Sean Carroll, and our own reader Vaal, who has argued elegantly for compatibilism on this site.
Readers who have followed our discussions know my view: I fit into class B, and consider the difference between classes B and C to be largely semantic. If you want to call the complexity of human brain programming as “free will,” so be it, even though that’s not what most people think of it. To me, it’s like saying to a Brit, “Okay, if you want to call a cookie a ‘biscuit,’ fine. They’re still the same thing.” But of course others disagree.
You’ll also know that the reason I bang on about this at length—frustrating compatibilist readers—is because I believe that fully grasping determinism has a huge potential effect on human behavior, including in particular how we treat transgressors or criminals. It also has import in politics in general: e.g., many Republicans believe in their “just world” philosophy that many people are poor simply because they made the wrong choices. Such a philosophy makes no sense under determinism. Finally, we all surely agree that accepting determinism will sink the libertarian free will inherent in many religions, which I think is a good thing. You simply CANNOT freely accept whether or not to hold Christ as your savior, or Muhammad as Allah’s prophet. To punish people for eternity on the basis that they could have chosen otherwise makes no sense at all.
This is a long-winded preface to my question for readers, which I’ll put in bold. It’s this:
Philosophers squabble about the difference between classes B and C, whereas to Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus), a far more important argument is to be had between members of combined class (B + C)—the determinists—versus members of class A, the libertarians. To me, the latter argument, B + C vs. A, is of vital importance for making society better, while the argument between B vs. C is basically a semantic squabble that has an import on academic philosophy but not on society.
Do you agree with me or not? State you reasons. (Try to be briefer than I’ve been!)
Coyne: “I swear, it’s harder to convince the average person that their behaviors and “choices” are determined solely by the laws of physics—and not by some kind of dualistic “ghost in the machine…”
So this dance of particles we call a “thread” or “conversation” cannot have been otherwise, having been determined by the particular past arrangement of particles and vectors that in time became this conversation. It is far from clear, from this point of view, that there is any point in even having this conversation, given that it had to go this way. It should not be surprising that it’s therefore hard to convince the 60% to 85% who believe in libertarian free will that it makes any sense at all. Apart from a dualistic “ghost in the machine”, the fact of our most immediate knowledge, that we have a mind and can choose between alternatives (such as which argument on this thread makes the most sense, does not necessarily reduce to a mere dance of particles. Incidentally, the God question seems entirely superfluous to this point and seem like just another ax to grind.
Sorry, but I think you’re deeply confused. When you say there’s no “point” to having a conversation that was preordained, that makes no sense at all. Further, you just assert a form of dualism–that our “choice between alternatives” does not necessarily reduce to a mere dance of particles–and give no alternative. Read Sean Carroll’s book to see why it MUST.
Finally, your last sentence is snarky, and if you ever want to post here again, just apologize.
<>
Could you unpack that a bit? Frankly it seems about right to me. After all, there are no “points” in nature. In a context of reductionism / determinism, there is no “point” to anything. Everything just “happens”. The contemplation of reductionism / determinism certainly does encourage a sense of personal powerlessness – for good or ill. It will lead you to being a mystic or a nihilist, but you have to admit there’s an issue here.
People don’t act without a sense that their action will make a difference – that if they don’t act something less desirable will happen. They have confidence in their own agency.
Again again again again, that’s fatalism, not determinism.
Fatalists don’t look before crossing the street. Determinists look both ways first.
If you don’t understand why, read what I and others have already written in this thread about the distinction.
Also, consider: you’re proposing that you have some magical choice to not have this conversation because it’s determined that you will, indeed, have it, which renders it useless to have. Phrased like that, it should be obvious that there’s a flaw in the reasoning at some point along the line; hopefully, the other discussion in the thread will help you pinpoint the flaw.
Cheers,
b&
>
Interesting. Some people just go on and on, uncomprehendingly and seemingly compulsively responding to every post. It’s enough to make one believe that the posting process – in some cases – is completely automatic and no personal choice is involved.
Thank you for your feedback, Ben.
There are areas in need of further clarification and I would like your answers.
Physics is a science that is purely deterministic; I agree.
But determinism is not a science; Yes/No?
And you have more or less agreed that there are various concepts of determinism; Yes/No?
Your brand of determinism holds that whatever had happened could not have happened otherwise; of course what had happened had happened; how could it be otherwise?
As a hard determinist, you are of the view, presumably, that your birth was not an accident but something predetermined. It could have turned out that the child born would have been named Eliza Goren instead of Ben Goren if another spermatozoon had reached the egg by outpacing the one that resulted in the birth of Ben Goren; but this countervailing reasoning is not allowed in your brand of determinism; Yes/No?
Do you agree that a person can still think despite being blind and deaf and anosmatic? Yes/No?
If your answer is Yes, what are the determinants [assuming there are more than one] that would give rise to such thinking?
As PCC has noted and posted [“Sean Carroll on free will”], this passage appears on P384 of Sean’s book:
“To the extent that neuroscience becomes better and better at predicting what we will do without reference to our personal volition, it will be less and less appropriate to treat people as freely acting agents. Predestination will become part of our real world.
It doesn’t seem likely, however. Most people do maintain a certain degree of volition and autonomy, not to mention a complexity of cognitive functioning that makes predicting their future actions infeasible in practice.”
If determinism is true then what Carroll says in the second paragraph can be seen as nonsense. Agree/Disagree?
And this passage [P381]: “…Given only that incomplete information—the information we actually have—it’s completely conceivable that we could have acted differently.”
Yes, we have such a thing as countervailing reasoning and it is a logical principle. Yes/No?
Maybe as a determinist you are unable to think that if student1 was given a chance to re-take the same examination, with exactly the same set of questions, we might see him/her answering
questions 1, 3, 5, 8 and 9 [instead of 1, 3, 4, 6 and 9]?
You may argue of course that circumstances have changed, that they are no longer the same as before. And I would say: what do you expect? The river you stepped into a few seconds ago is no longer the same river; your stepping in has contaminated it.
So what had happened had happened – no one can change that. But you can’t be so irrational as to claim that the students had no choices to select from, when only five questions were required to be answered from a list of ten questions. Yes/No?
I think you mean counterfactual reasoning when you say “counterveiling”. It’s a good question, and I wonder how anyone can say “you couldn’t have done otherwise”, as opposed to “you didn’t“, without counterfactual reasoning.
Thank you, paultorek. Yes, I slippled there; it should be counterfactual. I was in fact thinking of adding another post to highlight the error but decided against it eventually.
I am still waiting for Ben’s response; the one question I am most keen for an asnwer is whether determinism is a science on the same plane as physics or chemistry.
Hard determinists are falling all over the place over determinism as a prime guiding force in their lives. I am not sure whether they have heard of David Deutsch’s view concerning knowledge; David said something about knowledge with these words: “Knowledge is a kind of information. That’s the simple thing. It’s something which could have been otherwise…”
in an interview with Sam Harris.
David Deutsch, in case you are not aware, is a physicist and author of several books, including The Beginning of Infinity.
I have in fact written to him for his answer to this question: Is determminism a science on the same plane as physics or chemistry?
I’m not aware of a science of determinism, if that’s what you’re asking.
But determinism is as much a fact and conclusion of physics as Evolution is a fact and conclusion of biology.
Sean Carroll wrote an ode to the Schrödinger Equation in his latest blog post. To summarize, we really do have a Theory of Everything, and it’s that equation. The only challenge is to figure out what the Hamiltonian is and what the wave functions are.
Granted, we’re never going to be able to answer those questions. But we can and should have overwhelming confidence (on the scale that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning) that all of existence is perfectly accurately described as the evolution of the Schrödinger Equation with a certain Hamiltonian and wave function.
Exactly as Newton (as formulated by Laplace) demonstrated that the orbit of Jupiter is the evolution of the gravitational fields of the massive systems with their respective momenta.
The fact that there are a great many patterns and similarities in the Universe coupled with our very limited knowledge and intelligence means that, as an effective strategy, it’s useful to extrapolate from those patterns. We can say that this certain set of patterns all have the same macroscopic appearance, and any of various numbers of different futures can evolve from such a set based on their microstates. Lots of people find themselves standing in front of the counter at an ice cream parlor, and the mechanism by which they decide between chocolate and vanilla are opaque to us. In reality, despite superficial appearances, each such instance is radically different at the microscopic level — and it’s the evolution of the microscopic system that you need to follow if you want to completely understand what’s going on. But our ignorance of the microscopic state makes them all look the same, which is why it seems like the various outcomes are equally (or proportionally) probable.
Hope that clarifies….
Cheers,
b&
>
Thank you for the input, Ben.
Some areas of my post are left unanswered, but that’s OK. Misinterpreting or overlooking certain point[s] in communication is not uncommon; happens frequently, in fact.
I am going to express further comments, in two posts, or more, if necessary, over what may seem like old hat.
I have read several articles on determinism; but well before I started researching articles concerning determinism, I was engaged in Internet discussions with someone who was apparently a firm proponent of determinism. This person made the claim that my birth was determined or “pre-determined” long before I was born. If I remember correctly, the term “pre-determined” was definitely used, in his presentation of determinism. When I queried him as to the time of commencement of the deterministic or pre-deterministic process, he answered that it was probably from the time the universe began, the so-called Big Bang, in other words. He then advanced the cause and effect principle to support his claim that every event [a happening] had/has an antecedent cause. He refused to concede that physics has dispensed with the idea of causation; the discipline has no such thing as “a law of cause and effect,” and some physical phenomena are simply uncaused.
My belief has been and still is that the Universe is infinite but this can be only a matter for discussion, or speculation. Whether the universe is infinite or finite, we have no way of proving it, either way. However, if the universe is infinite, it would mean that it is immeasurable, shapeless, and it would also mean that it has no beginning. If the universe is finite but unimaginably vast, it would suggest there is a boundary; if there is a boundary we would still be left with a conundrum: What is behind the boundary, even if the boundary is, say, trillions of miles’ thick? If the boundary is something that stretches infinitely, then we have to admit that the Universe is infinite. Look up at the sky, and you see space; can space be imagined to have a beginning?
Determinism is just a concept that arose in the mind of some people; it is not a science and has never been. Educated people have no qualms in admitting that physics is science, chemistry is science and so is biology.
The articles I have read so far concerning determinism have been negative in their stand on determinism; in my next post I will provide links to some articles about determinism and append excerpts from these articles. One author is a Prof of Philosophy and a holder of a Ph D in neuroscience; another author is a Prof of Psychology; the other author[s] is/are also highly qualified. They all seem to disagree with your views on determinism.
As I have said, each of us is unique; thus what determinants are thought to exist, the effect, if any, on each of us may not be the same. On this point alone, I would contend that determinism is a useless concept.
R,
Where are you on reductionism ? Is your personal behavior more than the sum of the behaviors of your constituent particles? As science has progressed, a human has been understood increasingly well in terms of particles and their interactions. Quantum physics aside, these all appear to move deterministically, mindlessly, their past positions and future positions related mathematically in accord with “the laws of physics.”
Reductionism is not a good explanation for human behavior or how humans behave or should behave; that’s my short answer.
I am certainly more than the sum of my parts; I am composed of molecules or atoms, but without configuring the molecules or atoms in the manner they are arranged in my body, they are, shall I say, useless, without direction.
No reductionist would even think to suggest that reducing you to your constituent atoms and elementally sorting them into respective jars would result in something that continued to be human. You have to resort to the most magical forms of dualism to even hypothetically propose such a thing.
And you also have to propose magical dualism to account for whatever extra special sauce you think there is that animates the constituent pieces of your body. You you think a similar form of magic accounts for the motion of a car down the highway?
If you can take a reductionist view of automotive mechanics to understand how such vehicles function yet still recognize that it’s the orchestrated functioning of it all where the appearance of magic comes from, you should be able to understand how, at least in principle, the same basic idea is at work with living organisms.
Cheers,
b&
>
Whoa, boundary thickness? It’s not like the Starship Enterprise is gonna run into a giant wall labeled “end of universe, do not cross”. Richard, I think you should read up on special and general relativity (in that order of learning, but not that order of relevance). You’ll see that some of the questions you’re asking don’t make physical sense. The explanation is too long to attempt here, and I’m not the one who should try to give it.
But other questions do make sense, including, “some phenomena are simply uncaused”. Unfortunately, the answer depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. On some interpretations, radioactive decay (for example) is undetermined. There are probabilities, but no deterministic cause. But on the Everett (“Many Worlds”) interpretation, decay events have deterministic causes, and both decay and non-decay happen – in “separate” (for all practical purposes) “universes”, and in proportions governed by the amplitudes of the wave function. The probability of observing decay is the corresponding proportion. Wikipedia has some useful explanation.
But in my view, the determinism or indeterminism of the underlying physics doesn’t matter. Unless the chancy nature of the microlevel manifested in a massive way in human decisions – which would be very bad news, yes I said bad, for free will. Luckily, that’s ruled out by the reasonably consistent characters we actually exhibit.
Richard, Paul has already given you a good response.
“Pre-determined” is a redundantly loaded term. Even “determined” isn’t so helpful. “Deterministic” is much better. The former terms strongly correlate with fatalism, which is an entirely different notion that’s completely unsupported by science.
Give me the mass of the Sun and Jupiter and their current relative locations and vectors, and I’ll tell you where they’ll be and what direction they’re headed in tomorrow and where they were and where they were going yesterday.
That’s the basic idea behind Laplace’s Daemon, and all of physics since then. Given a sufficiently detailed description of a system and the laws of physics that describe its evolution, you can work both backwards and forwards equally well to know everything about the system’s past and future — just from the present.
Now, of course, there are truly insurmountable practical obstacles to you or me or anybody else performing such predictions and retrodictions in arbitrary levels of detail and complexity — but that’s not the point. The point is that, as best we understand, and as we’ve understood consistently for centuries, that’s the way the Universe actually operates.
Indeed, as such, there’s strong reason to suspect that time is static, with all moments (past, present, and future) simultaneously existing. What I think of as “the problem of Now” is well explained by such a proposal; you only ever perceive the actual moment now. The impression of a flow of time is a result of the so-called entropic arrow of time, with our proximity to the extraordinarily low entropy of the Big Bang serving to point us to the past the same way that our proximity to the extraordinarily strong gravitational field of the Earth serving to point us to the direction of down. Examine any single static moment in time and the entropic arrow would give an observer at that moment the perception of movement, even though that moment itself is self-contained — and, indeed, that’s perfectly consistent with our actual experience.
It is a wide-open question in physics as to whether space and time are each finite or infinite. There’re really big problems with all four possibility (finite space and finite time, infinite space and finite time, and so on). My money is on infinite time and space, with something not unlike how the Born Rule is derived from Everettian Many-Worlds explaining why not everything imaginable is actually possible. Entropy in its most basic, statistical, sense (a count of the microscopic states with indistinguishable macroscopic states) is probably going to play a role.
Cheers,
b&
>
Paul/Ben,
Thank you both for the guidance/clarification.
My school education was not in science and the little I now know of science is the result of my reading, bits and pieces, of science articles from materials that came into my hands.
My question about whether the universe is infinite/finite was posed from a layman’s point of view. I recall [if my memory serves] Einstein and Stephen Hawking making claims about the Universe being infinite. The question of whether the Universe is infinite or not is an idea concerning space and/or time, but for me it would be easier to engage in speculation or imagination about space, the space we can see with our eyes or with the telescopes we now possess. And my thought experiment is this: if space is infinite, it is beyond proof, not by science or anything; if space is finite, there is still no way we can prove it, with our present knowledge/development. But can there be a plausibility of space being finite? How do we account for its finiteness? – these are questions that the man in the street may inquire .
About so-called Big Bang Theory, I have something to say about this, in my next post.
Ben.
Here are the links referred to in my post of Aug 25, 3.04 am.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~adinar/CV_files/TICS%20free%20will%20%26%20MR.pdf
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html
http://www.kirj.ee/public/trames_pdf/2011/issue_2/Trames-2011-2-147-155.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cultural-animal/200902/just-exactly-what-is-determinism
Someone [Rob Cook?] wrote that reason shows determinism to be wrong because fundamental to reason is freedom of thought. Therefore, if determinism is true, “it cannot be philosophically established to be true.” It could be argued that the theory of determinism thus renders itself irrelevant.
The funny [or strange?] thing about hard determinists is that they sometimes write [excusable of course] in terms of “should have,” “should not have” [this has happened here in this forum on several occasions], thus contradicting their own position on determinism, that what happened could not have happened otherwise.
Your last paragraph shows you don’t understand determinism or language at all. As Sean Carroll notes, one can use “free willy” language if it’s useful while still accepting that, at bottom, determinism holds. For example, if I tell someone who did something that he “should” have done the right thing, that may not imply that I think he could have done otherwise, but that in a future situation he could do something different, as this opprobrium could change his future behavior. To use your language, the funny (strange) thing about critics that make this argument is that they don’t understand the language like this can be a metaphor and not undermine determinism at all.
Your nature.com article is interesting: Templeton at work again!
I disagree with Rob Cook (or whoever) on two counts. I don’t think freedom of thought excludes determinism. And more directly, no knowledge-process is more reliable than a deterministic one. Not that determinism could be *philosophically* established; it’s a *scientific* matter, and so, would always in principle be up for re-examination, but so is pretty much everything.
Jerry
is libertarian free will defined? who controls the ghost in the machine? seems a bit circular in the first place, so should it be rejected straight off the bat?
Brendan
Many have pointed out the inherent problems with a “ghost” that is somehow detached from the brain. But that argument doesn’t convince those people who have such a strong feeling of agency. Plus that argument is pretty arcane, so I tend to avoid it. LFW is usually defined operationally: in a given situation, you could have chosen otherwise.
The Big Bang Theory (BBT or BB model) is the prevailing cosmological theory of the early development of the universe.
There are, however, scientists who do not subscribe to BBT and some of them [including
Halton Arp, Anthony Peratt, Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Eric Lerner] have produced
evidence and/or arguments refuting BBT. The NewScientist [July 2, 2005] published
an interesting article captioned “End of the beginning” about the views of some scientists
that appear to be a challenge to BBT. These scientists were in fact claiming from their
observations and studies that the Big Bang could not have happened as alleged. It appears
[http://www.cosmologystatement.org/ Aug 21, 2010] that there was an earlier article with
over 30 supporting signatories which was published, as appended, in NewScientist
[May 22, 2004]:
An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things
that we have never observed-—inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most
prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the
observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no
other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be
accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at
the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.
But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the
hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic
background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the
universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same
temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.
Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth
despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for
the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than
that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the
light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only
about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars
in our galaxy [contd next post].
continuation from previous post:
What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that
have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s
supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily
increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology
of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.
Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history
of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an
evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches
can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of
light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation,
and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have
even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big
bang has failed to do.
Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain
every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development
has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and
alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of
ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say
that “science is the culture of doubt”, in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not
tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative
to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that
saying so will cost them their funding.
Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or
wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on
red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics,
are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to
the spirit of free scientific inquiry.
Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are
devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peerreview
committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As
a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining,
irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory [contd next post].
[continuation from previous post]
Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a
fundamental element of the scientific method—the constant testing of theory against
observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible.
To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a
significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and
observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee
that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from
outside the field of cosmology.
Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang’s validity, and its alternatives,
would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the
history of the universe [end of excerpt].
Sorry, but that rant against the Big Bang Theory reads much like Creationist objections to Evolution.
Just a few examples:
Inflation is directly observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background. Dark matter is even more directly observed via gravitational lensing and other detailed mapping of the density of galaxies. Dark energy was initially predicted by Einstein who rejected his own idea because it didn’t fit the data at the time — and then observations of the accelerating redshift of distant galaxies fit Einstein’s prediction perfectly.
Oh what nonsense. The initial discovery of the CMB was a perfect fit for le Maitre’s cosmic atom, and it utterly baffled its discovers until they started talking to cosmologists. They first thought it was interference from pigeons nesting in the equipment, until they got that cleaned up.
…is the proverbial bad joke of cosmology, proposing electromagnetic interactions waaaaaaaaaaaay out of bounds for how electromagnetism actually behaves.
…is completely incompatible with the Hubble Constant, plus steady state predicts a blindingly bright universal night sky. Those and similar fundamental problems with the idea caused it to be abandoned a century ago.
Pure quack poppycock — no different from Intelligent Designers complaining that they can’t get research funds. In reality, the most notable Nobel of modern physics would go to the person who could upend the Big Bang Theory — just as an equivalent Nobel would go to whoever managed to overturn Darwin.
I rest my case….
Cheers,
b&
>
Nice job Ben.
“I rest my case….”
I hope you can free up a day if I’m ever in traffic court.