Post by thread:[TECH]:: Inflation Deflated

First foot :-). This is an example of one fairly extreme end of what I expect we may see in the new [TECH] tag. User opinion will shape where the boundaries are at the [OT] end of the range and Bob Blick & users will probably shape what we see at the [EE] end. I'm all in favour of having [EE] doing justice to Electrical Engineering with [TECH] accommodating anything that fails the EE purity test. Any ongoing deep and philosophical discussions that arise from material such as this (hard to imagine :-) ) would probably migrate to [OT]. Russell McMahon 13 July 2008 14:07 NZT ______________________ "Inflation deflated? - The big bang's toughest test." This is a full text transcript of an article in a recent New Scientist magazine. I assume (possibly incorrectly) that they are entitled to publish it here. Summary: Improving measurement accuracies of variations in the cosmic microwave background information pose severe challenges to the current best cosmological universe model. _____________ While the "inflation" model of the big bang has been for 25 years been the best explanation of how what we see in the universe came about (inflation posits expansion much faster than current light-speed very soon after the bb to allow "communication" of information that we now see that could not be explained by the present laws of physics) it has had no real experimental or measurement support and its predictions matched reality only moderately. This paper covers recent analyses by Benjamin Wandelt, a cosmologist at the University of Illinois, that suggest that measurements of variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation very badly fail the predictions made by the inflation model. This conclusion is liable to be firmed up or falsified in the next few years as measurement accuracies continue to improve. http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2008-June/003204.html Russell McMahon