Comment on Cosmological Content

Peter Woit wrote a book titled 'Not Even Wrong'; many physics ideas haven't enough predictions to be falsifiable. One doesn't threrfore regard them as correct. Using science to try to refute spiritual ideas is a specious practice as it leaps beyond its own careful, rational, measured data structures. That sort of work won't even get a refereed article past the editors of Physics Journal B.

The natural selection process for promoting scientific theories was not always what it was today. Experimental science was more highly valued for much of the history of science, perhaps until Einstein's work was confirmd. In the 20th century particle physics and accellerators had more prestige than theoretical physics.

I was reading a book on VSL recently, and the author pointed out some of the conflict between Leibniz, Mapertuis and Voltaire regarding the relationship of material determinism of a universe generated from a first cause. Voltaire-a believer in God within a causal Netwonian paradigm did not at all appreciate the optimalization drift away of Leibniz and Mapertuis with the potential for uncertainty or change from pure determinism of physics.

The recent rise of theoretical physics has tended to follow from astronomical observations rather than from pure theory, or at least to have developed in parallel to it. Many theories of cosmology exist today concurrently, and the challenge is perhaps epistemological in entertaining them all simultaneously in thought rather than in dethroning one such as string theory. Einstein beleived the Universe was static, Hubble discovered the myriad of extra Milky Way Galaxies and then proportional doubling of distance and recessional velocity yet he had no idea about the expansion of space.

Zero-dimension membranes are not sillier than magnetic monopoles. Monopoles seem a logical contradiction though, since a magnetic field has a vector and going in one end (attractor) it is on the other end continuing on as a repeller. If a monopole simply attracted it might end up a black hole, and if it was a repeller it would soon exhaust itself. Within the Plank era there may have been many bizarre states that became feedback mechanisms for the expansion of space-time later even offsetting the validity of the conservation of energy principle.