
Why you don’t overturn the Big Bang via a media interview - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/why-you-dont-overturn-the-big-bang-via-a-media-interview/
======
SoftwareMaven
The article closes by asking press officers and reporters to be a little more
critical of the material they pass on. Unfortunately, that is extremely
unlikely to happen. There is too much information to be critical of and
incentives are not aligned to make that happen. If the press passes on a
breathless press release that turns out to be false, they just point the
finger at somebody else, but in the meantime, they've driven traffic to
whatever organization they're working for.

Ultimately, the scientist should be held accountable for this in his
community. Similar to the massive black eyes Fleischmann and Pons got for cold
fusion[1], Quach should be dragged across the carpet for this.

1\. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion> (my poor alma matter :)

~~~
hammersend
"If the press passes on a breathless press release that turns out to be false,
they just point the finger at somebody else, but in the meantime, they've
driven traffic to whatever organization they're working for."

I think this is overwhelmingly the toughest problem to solve here for any
mainstream rag. Take the Sydney newspaper mentioned in the article for
example. If their competitors publish the more dramatic version of the story
replete with the sensationalist headline while the Sydney Morning Herald in an
attempt to maintain some semblance of journalistic integrity don't, guess
which papers the public are going to buy. It's obvious where the incentive
lies.

Unfortunately the reality is the public isn't going to change as it is in
human nature to pay attention to the more "surprising" news (Tiger! in caveman
days). So if the public isn't going to change and the market rewards yellow
journalism what's left? Regulation? I don't know.

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MichaelGG
From the PR:

    
    
      > "Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales," Quach said.
    

My only source of knowledge is having read a pop-physics book or two, but I
thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is very non-
continuous and chaotic?

And, reading the PR, it doesn't seem to be that breathless nor does it say
it's overturning the Big Bang. It read more like "hey there might be another
thing that happened during the Big Bang and that might make 'cracks' that we
might be able to see".

~~~
hammersend
"but I thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is
very non-continuous and chaotic?"

It is and the funny thing is this guy has a funny definition of "now"
considering Max Planck discovered light travels in discrete quanta. In 1900.
Around the time of Einstein submitting his first paper and _before_ his paper
on Special Relativity. I would imagine whoever signed off on the PR copy is
aware of this as well as other inconsistencies. Makes you wonder.

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jboggan
Jorge Cham nailed this phenomenon:

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174>

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geuis
"A number of theories have been proposed over the years to explain why there
are four dimensions (three space, one time) instead of some other number..."

Time is not a dimension. It is a property of space, hence "spacetime".

[http://m.phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-
dimensio...](http://m.phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-
dimension.html)

~~~
Steuard
Time is very much a dimension: spacetime is well described as a 3+1
dimensional manifold.

Reading your link, I have no idea what those researchers are talking about
(nor did it inspire me to look at their actual article). The "1 time + 3 space
dimensions" structure of the universe is exceedingly well established
experimentally by the essentially perfect verifications of the predictions of
relativity that we use every day (in GPS, for instance). It's possible (though
unlikely, from what I've seen here) that they have some deep new insight into
the nature of time, sure. But _any_ successful theory of time will have to be
almost indistinguishable from standard 3+1 dimensional spacetime under
"ordinary" conditions, or else it will contradict a huge body of experimental
evidence. So even if what these folks are saying somehow makes sense, saying
"time is not a dimension" would still be wrong in many important ways.

