Inventing worlds

Isaac Newton

Physicists seem to have lost touch with reality. Instead of figuring out how the universe works, they dedicate themselves to designing possible universes, an activity that possibly they find pleasurable, but which doesn't seem very practical. The worst thing is that they often insist that their imaginary universes are real, putting speculations above experimentation and transgressing one of the fundamental principles of the scientific method: theories must adapt to facts, not the other way around.

One of the weak points of modern physics is the difficulty of explaining the passage of time. Since Newton’s theory, but especially with Einstein’s relativity, our physicists have not been able to deal with time. This happens, despite the fact that other conceptions of physics, such as thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, require unidirectional time: quantum superposition and collapse make no sense except with the hypothesis of irreversible time.

Black holes or gravastars?

As I explained in a previous post, our two fundamental physical theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, predict infinities that physicists don’t like. General relativity does this in gravitational singularities: the Big Bang and black holes. Quantum mechanics, in vacuum energy and the quantities that must be renormalized in quantum field theory.

Until a little time ago, the theory of black holes, formulated by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1930, stated the following: when a star 30 to 70 times more massive than the sun undergoes a supernova explosion, it expels most of its mass, but a part of it (at least 3.8 times more massive than the sun) collapses to such a point that it occupies zero volume, and so it will have an infinite density.

More scientific misrepresentations from the media

On my first day every year, lecturing in the degree on Telecommunications Engineering, I used to say this to my students:

Don't believe any scientific news published in the press or in generalist media. Most of them are false or have been misunderstood.

In previous posts I have mentioned several cases of scientific misrepresentation by the media, although sometimes the fault lies not with the journalist, but with the scientist, who tries to sneak in philosophical ideas based on reductionist materialism as if they were science. In this post I'm going to comment on three relatively recent news stories, published in the Spanish press, and try to explain what is really behind them.

Alternatives to the Big Bang

The Big Bang theory has a problem, which can be explained by the following set of questions:

• The farthest we can see is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which originated about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We cannot see directly what happened before, because it is hidden behind that radiation.
• It is true that we cannot see, but we can deduce what happened in those first 380,000 years by applying the standard physical theory, i.e. general relativity. It is also possible to check those deductions, for they offer predictions, such as the average composition of the cosmos, which fit well with the experimental data.
• The problem is, general relativity does not take us to time zero, the Big Bang itself. This theory can be applied only from 5×10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang (the Planck time), as quantum effects were predominant before that time, and we do not have a physical theory that unifies quantum mechanics with general relativity.