Psience Quest

Quote:"The crux of today's cosmological paradigm is that in order to maintain a mathematically unified theory valid for the entire universe, we must accept that 95 percent of our cosmos is furnished by completely unknown elements and forces (like "dark energy" and "dark matter") for which we have no empirical evidence whatsoever. For a scientist to be confident of this picture requires an exceptional faith in the power of mathematical unification.

In the end, the conundrum for cosmology is its reliance on the framework as a necessary presupposition for conducting research. For lack of a clear alternative, as astrophysicist Disney also notes, it is in a sense stuck with the paradigm. It seems more pragmatic to add new theoretical floors than to rethink the fundamentals." (Comment- think "more epicycles")

Quote:"Maybe the most current cosmology can offer is unbelievable alternatives to things no one wants to believe, for example, that the universe shows evidence of design. If so, if this field is in any way relevant to that problem, finding a new source of misdirection will become the goal."

Quote:"Either the universe has a beginning, or it doesn’t, and if it has a beginning we are not going to escape it with bouncing or multiverses or inflation or wormholes. We must accept the metaphysical consequences of a beginning and move on. Nearly everything that has failed about the Big Bang model has been added because of bad metaphysics, a refusal to accept the consequences of a beginning.

 The remaining pieces of the Big Bang model that are failing and which can’t be attributed to bad metaphysics were added from sheer laziness (or to say it more generously) from the limitations of paper-and-pencil calculations and primitive computers. We now have both better mathematical tools and better computers, so neither of these excuses work any longer. Therefore there is no reason to assume isotropic, homogeneous, non-magnetic solutions are the only valid ones."