Live data from Hacker News

The universe is expanding faster than expected

quantamagazine.org

241–242 of 242 posts

Re: The universe is expanding faster than expected

#241
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were not a YEC, then I'd think cosmology and physics are different because physics is a laboratory science where depending on our budget we can do anything from roll balls down inclines to produce quarks while with cosmology we have absolutely no control over conditions and can only make believe we do by sampling in a way that necessarily is corrupted by our biases. And the amount of data to sample from is plent…

I'm sorry to say your understanding of physics is pretty wrong. For both, we control almost nothing, we observe. To that end we build tools to observe. We want to observe to reject hypotheses or to get new insight on how nature behaves. In particle physics these are detectors, like the Super Kamiokande [1], which is just sitting there waiting for neutrinos to arrive from space. In the case of cosmology these are tele…

You don’t need to apologize for your discomfort at my choosing to understand things in a way I personally find sensible. This has never bothered me because in the areas where it pragmatically matters I’ve achieved success and in the areas where it’s academic I’ve at least somewhat satisfied my curiosity.

Collecting a catalog of phenomenological observations is the defining characteristic of a phenomenology. One may feign hypotheses as one likes to fit that data, but that activity, valuable though it may be, is qualitatively distinct from the proper science of predicting the phenomena before they are observed. Of course phenomenologies can provide the necessary insight for predictive science. Like all human endeavors boundaries can blur.

Sadly much so called science is just computer aided trunk wiggling[1].

[1] https://quotefancy.com/quote/1342664/John-von-Neumann-With-f...

Re: The universe is expanding faster than expected

#242
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s more like the balloon analogy or baking bread analogy is required because there’s no good way to explain what we observe without either analogies or math or unintuitive descriptions. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a higher spatial dimension that our observable universe is part of; we just haven’t observed it or can’t observe it. I guess we’re sort of like ants crawling on the surface of an opaque, seem…

> That doesn’t mean there can’t be a higher spatial dimension > that our observable universe is part of; we just haven’t > observed it or can’t observe it. Maybe we can not observe higher spatial dimensions, but we can observe a force that seems to propagate in higher spatial dimensions, thus there seems to be evidence of those dimensions. Light intensity, gravity, and electromagnetism decay at 1/r^2, which is the sa…

>> I would love nothing more than to hear what holes could be punched into this hypothesis.

I'm not a physicist either but believe that this is a well-known idea.

Post reply on HN