The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

I should correct an important misconception. Epicycles do not produce correct predictions.

Epicycles can produce correct point location of planets, but do not produce correct phase. Galileo observed heliocentrism-compatible phase of Venus with his telescope. That was the crucial experiment, not the simplicity.

It sounds like you are in a good position - you can have total control over what you work on. You could even write your own grants and get other people to research what you want alongside you. Since the traditional PhD path isn't showing that much success, doesn't it make more sense to just research what you want?

All the papers are free online and authors will generally discuss their work with you if you have intelligent questions.

BTW, this is what I do. I freelance about 20% of the time and spend about 50% of it reading physics papers. So far I haven't produced anything new, but I have greatly increased my intuitive understanding.

It doesn't. First to clarify what the CMB is. It's basically just heat residuals that seem to indicate that the universe was much hotter in the past. The problem is that these heat residuals are relatively homogeneously distributed. In terms of thermdynamics this makes perfect sense - the entire temperature of an area will gradually converge, like a pot of boiling water will eventually reach room temperature.

But physically what we observe does not make any sense. Like you probably know, nothing -- including action -- can be perceived to travel faster than the speed of light. The sun is about 8 light minutes away from us. If it somehow just suddenly disappeared, we'd still see it in the sky and continue to revolve around, what would 'now' be nothing, for about 8 minutes. The observation of its disappearance and the effective causality of its disappearance (and its effect on our orbit) would happen at or very near the exact same time.

The problem with the CMB is that areas of space that should not be causally connected since light itself has not had time to go from one to the other, seem to be causally connected. In other words, with our boiling pot in a kitchen room - the eventual equilibrium that the kitchen reaches (if we assume that that entire little region is all of the space in existence) is going to vary quite substantially whether you have an e.g. 100 cubic meter kitchen or a 200 cubic meter kitchen. We should observe both sides of space acting like two independent 100 cubic meter kitchens, instead we seem them behaving like a single 200 cubic meter kitchen.

This is a major and unresolved problem that threw much of what we know out the window. It directly contradicts the big bang. To 'resolve' this, we started creating a arbitrary special conditions. Cosmic inflation is one of these. There is absolutely no reason to believe that cosmic inflation ever happened - its sole and only reason for existence is to work as a 'fix' to make what we observe fit what we thought we'd observe. This makes it illogical to use derivative things as "evidence". In particular the nature of our current CMB is in no way meaningful evidence of inflation, because inflation was hypothesized, after the fact, in no small part to fit the CMB to what we thought we'd see! In other words calling the CMB meaningful evidence of inflation is trying to provide support to a hypothesis by suggesting that the observation said hypothesis tries to explain is meaningful evidence of that hypothesis.

Any not completely idiotic hypothesis will obviously be 'evidenced' by what it tries to explain. But we have a major problem when that 'evidence' becomes all you have to rely on, and that is exactly the case here.

Thank you, that's a good explanation- in the sense that I understand now what the previous comment, by Koshkin meant in responding to mine that there is no "wrong" frame of reference.

>> The location, and speed with which you are travelling is what general relativity calls a "frame of reference", and none of them are "correct" or "incorrect", they're just predictors for what observations will be possible from that frame.

OK, I see- "frame of reference" is a technical term, in General Relativity, that refers to your position in space, and determines what you can observe. Instead, I meant "frame of reference" as a more general "point of view" or "frame of mind" - a set of assumptions that give context to any observations and that inform interpretations of them.

Even going by the technical sense of a frame of reference, though, there are frames of reference that will not permit the cocrrect identification of a process that generates a set of observations- or at the very least, they will tend to favour incorrect interpretations of the observations.

I think that is in keeping with what your comment says about a frame of reference in General Relativity allowing a range of physical observations.

Right, so what was ground breaking about General Relativity, is that it challenged the newtonian axioms (assumptions) that there's a single universal clock, and that all objects within the universe are effectively rigid and exist in something resembling euclidian geometric space, and all move forward through time at the same speed. Newtonian physics explains many things very well, but couldn't explain other phenomenon.

Going from observation, that the speed of light is constant, regardless of how fast the light emitter is travelling relative to you, he made that the unbreakable assumption, and made the shape of spacetime flexible to always satisfy a constant speed of light. This theory was then confirmed when the light of a distant star was observed to bend when travelling through the strong gravitational field of our sun during a total solar eclipse.

Therefore the physics described by General Relativity have greater predictive power.

Quantum physics, can also predict everything in general relativity, but doing so is a lot more complicated than using general relativity. However, Quantum Physics can explain things that happen on small scales that General Relativity cannot. Quantum Physics has greater predictive power, but it's more convoluted. Like Epicycles. Einstein didn't like quantum physics and spent a great deal of time trying to debunk it, but, well, he couldn't.

This is all to point out that one should not confuse predictive power with complexity. Ockham's Razor is a rule of thumb that prefers "simpler" explanations for things. But the predictive power of the two competing theories must be equal for that to apply.