Minimum Viable Cosmology - 9

Time to rethink the λCDM model

It has been some time since the posting to this newsletter (2 months) — but hopefully this critique of Bjorn Ekeberg’s contributions will rekindle the efforts to define the components of a Minimum Viable Cosmology (MVC).

First of all it is interesting to know how Bjorn became involved in cosmology and how his philosophical approach lead to him becoming a leading critic of the Big Bang theory. His initial studies were in the interface between science and religion (belief) and how we constructed our theories of the world. Eventually as a philosopher of science he began to question the Big Bang cosmological model.

Despite Bjorn Ekeberg’s pessimistic view of his potential employment prospects as a science philosopher, he has given numerous presentations on cosmology and participated in several scientific forums with other eminent experts in the field. He is a favourite speaker at the IAI Talks.

In this part of his next talk he sets out the big problems in cosmology — the CMB, etc

He then illustrates some of the problems of changing the Big Bang Model.

Next Bjorn spends time explaining how the Scientific Method is used to advance science and how it can become a self-reinforcing cycle of errors and lead to the stagnation of cosmology. Below are some summary diagrams used in his video:

For me, the ONE big problem with the current model of cosmology is when the universe began — the Big Bang some 13,7 billion years ago.This was determined by running the mathematics of the expansion of the universe (the red shift) backwards until the calculation failed — the singularity. Basically a singularity is cosmological short-hand for “I don’t know what the f**k is going on”. The current universe will expand until it disappears into a black-hole (another singularity). In the meantime we will look for patterns in the sky. In other words we start with a singularity and we will end with a singularity — we go from: we don’t know how the f**k it started to we don’t know how the f**k it will end. This view is illustrated by Sabine Hossenfelder in the following video:

In the next posting we’ll consider what components do we have left in our search for a Minimum Viable Cosmology.