Stephen Hawking And 32 Top Physicists Just Signed a Heated Letter on The Universe's Origin

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: May 12, 2017 at 9:44:43 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Stephen Hawking And 32 Top Physicists Just Signed a Heated Letter on The Universe's Origin
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]
>
> Stephen Hawking And 32 Top Physicists Just Signed a Heated Letter on The Universe's Origin 
> Sh*t just got real.
> By FIONA MACDONALD
> May 12 2017
> <http://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-and-32-top-physicists-just-signed-a-heated-letter-on-the-origin-of-the-universe>
>
> For centuries, people have puzzled over how our Universe began. But the heat just got turned way up on a debate 
> that's quietly been raging between cosmologists, with 33 of the world's most famous physicists publishing a letter 
> angrily defending one of the leading hypotheses we have for the origin of the Universe.
>
> The letter is in response to a Scientific American feature published back in February, in which three physicists 
> heavily criticised inflation theory - the idea that the Universe expanded just like a balloon shortly after the Big 
> Bang. The article went as far as claiming that the model "cannot be evaluated using the scientific method" - the 
> academic equivalent of saying it isn't even real science.
>
> In response, 33 of the world's top physicists, including Stephen Hawking, Lisa Randall, and Leonard Susskind, have 
> fired back by publishing their own open letter in Scientific American. The Cliff's note version is this: they're 
> really angry.
>
> Inflation theory was first proposed by cosmologist Alan Guth, now at MIT, back in 1980. It's based on the idea that a 
> fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded rapidly, spinning entire galaxies out of quantum 
> fluctuations.
>
> "By the time it slowed down, what had been a tiny, quivering quantum realm was stretched out until it looked smooth 
> and flat, save for speckles of denser matter that later became galaxies, stars, and planets," writes Joshua Sokol for 
> The Atlantic.
>
> In the following years, Guth's original idea was improved and updated by Stanford physicists Andrei Linde, and 
> they've since spent their careers refining the inflation model - which has become the leading theory for how the 
> Universe was born.
>
> In fact, most of us were taught inflation theory at high school and university when discussing the Universe's origins.
>
> Guth and Linde, along with cosmologists David Kaiser and Yasunori Nomura, were the ones who recruited the other 29 
> signees behind this week's letter.
>
> Interestingly, one of Guth and Linde's former colleagues, physicist Paul Steinhardt, is part of the trio they're 
> rallying against. Guth, Linde, and Steinhardt all shared the prestigious Dirac prize "for development of the concept 
> of inflation in cosmology" back in 2002. 
>
> But in the years since, Steinhardt has gone rogue, and has become an active critic of inflationary theory. He was one 
> of the authors of Scientific American's February feature, originally titled "Pop goes the Universe", along with 
> Princeton physicist Anna Ijjas, and Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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