Rebecca Smethurst on the Crisis in Cosmology

See from 14 minutes 33 seconds.


I don't know why it's considered a crisis. It's basically because they now have enough data to a sufficient precision that they're able to discriminate between possibilities which they previously believed were identical. 😀 I think cosmologists and theoretical physicists (who use results from cosmology to discriminate between their models) ought to pay much more heed to philosophers like Searle and Putnam. See John Searle On Philosophy of Language and Reconstructing Edward Teller.

At 21 minutes 43 seconds the possibility that there is new physics that has never been proposed before, ... I suppose that's operationally equivalent to physics that has been proposed before, but has been forgotten, such as P.A.M. Dirac's hypothesis that gravity varies as the reciprocal of the age of the Universe. See Reconstructing Edward Teller.

See also this, from 13 minutes 27 seconds:


At 17 minutes 53 seconds she puts her finger on the problem, which is that there is no practical way to test new cosmological models. There is another associated problem, which is that the existence of different possible models tends to cause schisms in the academic communities, principally because of the way research funding is allocated. See Reconstructing Edward Teller. The problem was identified decades ago: On Progressive and Degenerative Research Programs.

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