
New model of the universe fits data better than Big Bang - drndown2007
http://www.physorg.com/news199591806.html
======
kscaldef
Based on little more than this summary of the article, it's not particularly
clear to me how this solves the purported problems it's trying to address.

First, it appears that this gets rid of the cosmological constant (which some
people seem to have an aesthetic aversion to, but there's no reason it
shouldn't exist) by replacing it with 'both a varying gravitational “constant”
and a varying speed of light'. In other words, it appears to make the model
more complicated and less aesthetically pleasing. Skimming the article, the
author appears to make a fairly arbitrary seeming argument about how those
constants ought to vary with time which simplifies things a bit, but it's
still more complicated than traditional GR with a constant c and G.

It's not clear to me how this model purports to solve the flatness problem.
There just seems to be an assertion that because the model predicts a 3-sphere
geometry that the flatness problem is moot, but that seems to dodge the
question. The whole point of the flatness problem is that space appears to be
flat, and not a 3-sphere or hyperbolic. If you say it's a 3-sphere, the
problem becomes why the universe ought to be so big that the curvature isn't
apparent.

Similarly, the claim to solve the horizon problem is unsatisfying. Most
attempts to explain the horizon problem require you to assume that the
universe was once much, much smaller and expanded very rapidly at some point
(inflation). This model appears to give you a knob to do that (variable speed
of light), but doesn't really say why it should have evolved in that way.

Finally, there are some red flags to be had here from observing that the
author works in the statistics department, appears to have never published any
previous physics research, and in 5 months has not gotten this paper published
in a peer reviewed journal and has not been cited by any other work.

Bottom line: I wouldn't put much weight on this.

~~~
brc
I'm not in a position to comment much on the substance of your article, but
this line: "that the author works in the statistics department, appears to
have never published any previous physics research, and in 5 months has not
gotten this paper published in a peer reviewed journal and has not been cited
by any other work."

irks me a little. Einstein was an unpublished patents clerk with a rocky
academic record when he developed and published the special theory of
relativity.

While prior publishing success and citations is undoubtedly a marker of good
thinking, it is erroneous, in my opinion, to exclude the work of someone based
of the fact they haven't. Because there are many, many precedents where
prevoiusly unknown people have published groundbreaking work. I think everyone
should be judged on the merits of their thinking, not on their status within
academia.

~~~
kscaldef
> I think everyone should be judged on the merits of their thinking, not on
> their status within academia.

Which is what the preceding 3 paragraphs of my comment were about. And I said
it was a red flag, not a reason to outright reject the paper. While there are
a few cases of outsiders making significant breakthroughs, it's rare. It's far
more common for outsiders to produce work with elementary errors, which is
what appears to be happening here (see the dissection at
<http://badphysics.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/nobang/>).

Also, for the record, Einstein was not unpublished prior to his SR paper:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein#Journal_articles))

------
btilly
My summary. _New class of theories with lots of tunable parameters can explain
existing observation through choosing the right parameters to tune._

The idea is worth exploring, but don't expect it to overturn the existing
orthodoxy overnight. Particularly given that we don't actually have a physical
model for how parameters can be tuned, and previous attempts to find evidence
of variation in fundamental physical parameters over time have so far failed
to find such variation. (See [http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1254/proton-
electron-mass-...](http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1254/proton-electron-
mass-constant-for-6-billion-years.html) for an example.)

~~~
alexophile
The class of theories is hardly even new. Dirac suggested the possibility of
variation in universal constants in the 30s. In the 80s and 90s, at least
three different instantiations of VSL popped up and have been getting varying
amounts of press ever since.

From John Barrow:

"[An] important lesson we learn from the way that pure numbers like α define
the world is what it really means for worlds to be different. The pure number
we call the fine structure constant and denote by α is a combination of the
electron charge, e, the speed of light, c, and Planck's constant, h. At first
we might be tempted to think that a world in which the speed of light was
slower would be a different world. But this would be a mistake. If c, h, and e
were all changed so that the values they have in metric (or any other) units
were different when we looked them up in our tables of physical constants, but
the value of α remained the same, this new world would be observationally
indistinguishable from our world. The only thing that counts in the definition
of worlds are the values of the dimensionless constants of Nature. If all
masses were doubled in value [including the Planck mass mP] you cannot tell
because all the pure numbers defined by the ratios of any pair of masses are
unchanged."

Quick plug: Probably the most public proponent of VSL is João Magueijo who
wrote a really interesting book on the process of challenging the scientific
orthodoxy, called "Faster Than the Speed of Light." It's an interesting (and
often scathing) view of the process of academic science.

------
magv
If you'll read the paper itself [1], you'll see that the author takes well
known equations, replaces some constants with functions of time and tries to
draw conclusions from there. In short, it's bogus.

You can read some of the funnier details at [2].

[1] <http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1750>

[2] <http://badphysics.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/nobang/>

------
imurray
As an academic, I would advise lay science enthusiasts to steer clear of
anything classified as "general physics" (or "general mathematics") in the
arXiv. There's far too much of it, mostly junk, and you'd be better spending
your time elsewhere.

------
nowarninglabel
Relevant - "Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC
existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered
from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the
question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man. All
other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered
also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in
all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last
question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of
that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC
organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and
brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done."

<http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html>

~~~
lpellis
How could you quote that far and not include the last sentence..

And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light----

~~~
joblessjunkie
Because that's the punchline and a spoiler, you killjoy.

------
d4nt
While I love reading articles about science they are almost always simplified
to the point if being frustratingly meaningless. Phrases like "as the universe
expands" loose all meaning when you're talking about time being converted into
space. If only there was somewhere that explained the implications of what
seems like this beautifully elegant idea in an equally elegant way... _sigh_

~~~
coderdude
At the very least I wish we had a 'grellas' for space and astronomy lurking
around here, just waiting to do a drive-by and drop a mega comment that
answers all of our questions.

~~~
kscaldef
I won't hold myself out as that much of an expert - cosmology was never my
specialty and I haven't been a practicing physicist for a decade - but see my
comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2006334>

~~~
nickpinkston
Wow - that post was more than I was expecting - kudos (from a complete
layman).

BTW - have you ever done speaking/books on debunking / explaining physics in
general? It seems like you'd be a shoe-in for a Brian Cox-type role as a more
hip face of physics - though maybe you'd like to avoid that...

------
Tycho
So if time, mass and length are convertible, does this mean we (the Defense
Department) could theoretically (secretly) make a 'time-bomb?' Sort of like an
atom bomb, except instead of releasing heat/energy, it releases a time-bubble
in which, I dunno, NP problems (enemy ciphers) could be brute-force computed
and solved within our lifetimes (wartimes).

~~~
sorbus
Lots of things are theoretically possible. However, I'm going to bet that it
would be a lot easier to just go off and find the guys with the plaintext (or
keys) and hit them until they give you whatever information you want.

------
andrewljohnson
I am kind of flummoxed by the opening sentence: "mass, time, and length can be
converted into one another as the universe evolves."

Later on, it goes on

"Mass and length are also interchangeable... Basically, as the universe
expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length."

How do you convert length into mass? The length of what?

~~~
Sandman
Also, the mass of what?

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ck2
So if the speed of light was slowing down, since everything else seems to obey
the same unknown rule, would we even know it? It would be impossible to
measure the change right?

~~~
ars
You can't change the speed of light by itself.

The speed of light also controls the mass-energy conversion. So if you slow
down light, then mass now has less energy.

Less energy means less gravity, and an entire cascade of related effects.

------
varjag
You know you see a crackpot theory when Google Ad on the page shows "Einstein
was wrong" with a link to crackpot site.

