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Questioning cosmic inflation

Rewriting the origins of the universe

6th February 2023
| Avi Loeb is Head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
1,129 words
Read time: approx. 6 mins

The cosmic inflation hypothesis is needed for the Big Bang model to work, but in its current form, it remains a mere hypothesis, unable to be falsified. A new proposal for how it could be put to the test could result in overthrowing the Big Bang model altogether, opening up new possibilities regarding the origins of the universe, argues Avi Loeb.

 

Scientific theories often require tweaking to fit the data, but sometimes when those tweaks are big enough, they end up becoming theories of their own. The biggest tweak to the Big Bang model has been the introduction of the cosmic inflation hypothesis. According to this theory, the universe went through a phase of exponential expansion soon after its coming into existence. The only problem is, we can’t seem to test this theory. In the language of philosopher of science Karl Popper, cosmic inflation doesn’t appear to be falsifiable. 

That might be about to change. In a recent paper, Sunny Vagnozzi and I propose a way of testing the cosmic inflation hypothesis. By developing detectors that search for the thermal gravitational wave background created 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang - the smallest possible fraction of time -  we could put the hypothesis to the test. Detection would mean the falsification of the cosmic inflation hypothesis and, by extension, a challenge of the Big Bang theory and a radical transformation of our understanding of the origins of the cosmos.

Avi Loeb
6th February 2023

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Bud Rapanault 11 February 2023

So a hypothetical and completely unobservable event, supporting a hypothetical and completely unobservable creation myth, might be falsified by the future detection of some hypothetical and completely
unobservable particles (gravitons) - hypothetically (of course)? Whatever that nonsense might be, there is no justification for calling it science. It's just an eruption of mathematicism running amok in the halls of academia where once upon a time people actually engaged in scientific inquiry.

No longer. Mathematicism, the ancient, delusional belief that some mathematical model underlies and determines the nature of physical reality has made an unscientific, illogical, and absurd mess of modern theoretical physics. The empirically baseless, not to mention physically absurd, not to mention logically inconsistent, Big Bang model is the misbegotten offspring of mathematicism. Science it ain't.

Mike Pollock 9 February 2023

Of course, the Big Bang is falsifiable. If time doesn't exist, what does? It's falsifiable because the notion completely ignores the first law of thermodynamics. The universe expands with no explanation ignoring Newton's third law. The universe was "created" hot with no explanation breaking the second law. It is the most falsifiable assumption that could exist.

Avi questions the big bang theory but then describes what happened as if it is a fact. Which direction do we look out to see where the Big Bang happened? Every direction? Wouldn't that make the Earth the center of the universe? As if the Big Bang happened right here? Wouldn't that be a geocentric model like the Earth being the center of the universe?

There is only one process our universe possesses to make matter expand and contain heat and that is a collision. The "unfalsifiable" explanation to what could have happened 13.8 billion years ago is that our universe had two, maximum entropy objects floating in space that contained the mass of the observable galaxies and they weren't the only ones. They happened to collide at an extreme speed and create quark plasma shrapnel just like every test in a particle collider does. The result is the expanding galaxies that were all created instantaneously with all the energy they would ever have. This theory is unfalsifiable because it actually could have happened. Collisions have destroyed life on Earth but they also created it by taking maximum entropy, lifeless matter like our Moon and transformed it into minimum entropy quark plasma that had the chance to start life with entropy.

If someone wants to redefine the inflationary model, they have to do it by eradicating everything about the Big Bang theory. Nobody seems to want, or be able, to do that. Breaking all the laws of physics seems to be unfalsifiable with the Big Bang.

Edwin Hubble discovered the galaxies expanding in an already existing, static universe. He did not discover the universe expanding and that's what many scientists including him tried to convey. Somehow, they were completely ignored over father Georges Lamaîtres interpretation. Now, why did that happen? It's the most important question in all of physics and astrophysics.