The Big Bang Vs. the Big Rumble

WBUR radio in Boston hosts a talk with two physicists, Alan Guth and Neil Turok, who represent, respectively, the consensus theory of the inflationary Big Bang and an upstart theory of the initiation of the universe in the collision of two three-dimensional "branes." Turok and Paul Steinhardt developed their "Ekpyrotic proposal" out of the mathematics behind string theory. In the audio the two physicists are perhaps more respectful of one another's views than the host wishes them to be. If you ignore the "let's you and him fight" framing of the debate, you will hear some interesting physics elucidated.

Link to MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

For the lazy [npr.org]

Listen to it!

[massivefoot]

To anyone who's got this far without having downloaded the mp3 [npr.org], go listen to it! It is actually quite interesting. And to anyone who's ever been lectured by Turok, don't worry, he isn't that bad when he's actually interested in what he's talking about...

Pyrothechnic vs. Ekpyrotic

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "Ekpyrotic" idea was well and thoroughly proven wrong by Andrei Linde in his work entitled "Pyrotechnic Universe".
Ever since that happened (2001) Mr. Steinhardt cannot accept that he's wrong and he still tries to make the pig fly. Since he cannot convince anybody in the academic community that the pig does fly he tries to get around that with press releases and radio shows. Good way to do science for a Princeton professor.

the host of this show needs to STFU

[Adult film producer]

just for a second and let these guys talk.. stop injecting himself into the conversation and stop trying to cast doubt on science with the stupid comments like, "Oh look, scientists are flip-flopping on the big bang.. are you freaked out? is science supposed to work this way? some folk in the heartland will be skeptical of this."

Re:Pyrothechnic vs. Ekpyrotic

[Anonymous Coward]

What I mean by "proven wrong" is the prediction of a very well measured quantity, the spectral index of perturbations of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The WMAP satellite has taken data for about 6 years (and is still taking data) and the spectral index has been measured to be 0.951 + 0.015 - 0.019 : http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/pub_papers/threeyear .html [nasa.gov]

The Ekpyrotic model makes an actual prediction for the spectral index; the value is -3. Initially the authors of the ekpyrotic model have calculated a value of 1 for the spectral index, but their calculation was just plain wrong.

Re:A Steady State Universe, Instead

[boot_img]

Halton Arp's idea that "many high-energy, high-redshift quasars appear to be located in close proximity to, and interacting with, low-redshift, low-energy galaxies" has been proven incorrect.

1) Its impossible to explain quasar absorption lines, which must be due to foreground objects

2) Magification due to gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies neatly explains any excess of quasars near galaxies as seen on the sky and requires them to be at high redshift. See e.g. Detection of Cosmic Magnification with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey [arxiv.org]

Unfortunately, Arp and few others conveniently ignore the irrefutable evidence against their ideas. Luckily the rest of the astrophysical community understands scientific evidence. That's the reason that no one pays attention to Arp and colleagues.

Equally unfortunately there is always a group of people (especially on Slashdot) quick to embrace the romantic notion of the outsider "kicked off the telescope for his heretical views". After all, in the movies that's the guy that turns out to be right in the end ...