Bartosz Milewski on Nostr: I expressed my doubts about cosmic inflation, so let me be more specific, lest you ...
I expressed my doubts about cosmic inflation, so let me be more specific, lest you think I'm just being a contrarian.
When we rewind the history of the Universe, we eventually reach a time when we know for sure that all our theories break down. This definitely happens at the Planck scale, but even before that we're just extrapolating what we know from accelerator experiments.
We know that the Universe must have emerged from this singular moment in a very uniform state, because we can see that the cosmic microwave background if very isotropic.
Even though we have no idea what happens at Planck scales, astrophysicists feel compelled to explain this uniformity by postulating that the early Universe underwent a violent period of inflation, fueled by a hypothetical inflaton field, and then magically underwent a phase transition, which stopped the inflation. Now this is what I call a hallucination.
When we rewind the history of the Universe, we eventually reach a time when we know for sure that all our theories break down. This definitely happens at the Planck scale, but even before that we're just extrapolating what we know from accelerator experiments.
We know that the Universe must have emerged from this singular moment in a very uniform state, because we can see that the cosmic microwave background if very isotropic.
Even though we have no idea what happens at Planck scales, astrophysicists feel compelled to explain this uniformity by postulating that the early Universe underwent a violent period of inflation, fueled by a hypothetical inflaton field, and then magically underwent a phase transition, which stopped the inflation. Now this is what I call a hallucination.