This is going to be interesting to watch:
During the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.
[Link: Cosmologists Aim To Observe First Moments Of Universe]
Alan Guth’s cosmic inflation theory is already a leading candidate for explaining how our universe came to be the way it is from a Big Bang beginning. If a certain kind of gravity wave is detected, it will provide the theory strong support.
This also will be interesting to watch: If the test provides the hoped-for support, will observers conclude that the “microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time” must have been “random”? On what basis would they do so? Will observers conclude that Guth was also correct in saying that with inflation theory comes infinite multiple universes? Will they bear in mind that:
Unfortunately, cosmologists have no way of testing this prediction.
“Since these are separate universes, by definition that means we can never have any contact with them. Nothing that happens there has any impact on us,” said [Scott] Dodelson, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
Even with a confirmation of inflation theory, multiverse theory remains in the realm of philosophy, theology, and/or speculation. Its philosophical problems (here, for instance) and its intellectual prejudices (see the Carr quote at the end) need to be kept squarely in mind.
But none of that displaces the genuine fascination of learning more about the one universe we actually do live in.
No automatically-generated related posts found.
Yet since we all agree that it is at present (and perhaps essentially) impossible to know the nature of the supposed singularity (or any point before 10^-32 seconds after the ‘bang’), given that physics as we know it breaks down (and we don’t know how it breaks down), then similarly “cosmologists have no way of testing” anything related to the random or non-random origins of the supposed singularity. The God hypothesis is in the exact same camp as the multiverse hypothesis. So how can we judge the relative plausibility or probability of one over the other?
“Since these are separate universes, by definition that means we can never have any contact with them. Nothing that happens there has any impact on us,”