@NatashaAnneBaker …
There’s a simple answer to this pathetic apologetics you’ve been fed by this specimen.
Three words. Testable natural processes.
Are cosmological physicists looking for a cartoon magic man in the sky, as an answer to the question of how the observable universe came into being. NO. The answer is an emphatic and resounding NO.
What they are looking for, is a testable natural process that will provide a sufficient explanation (I placed ‘sufficient’ in italics, as a hint that I was using the word in its mathematical sense - more in a moment).
Indeed, testable natural processes are what scientists have been searching for, ever since modern science was launched during the Enlightenment. Scientists have been looking for entities and interactions that they can test via experiment where possible, and, failing that, can find physical evidence for. In this endeavour, scientists have been rampantly successful, to the point where only swivel-eyed fundamentalists deny said success, and try to pretend that the testable natural processes in question don’t exist.
Now, with respect to the origin of the observable universe (emphasis deliberate), cosmological physicists have postulated a number of ideas that don’t involve a cartoon magic man from a ridiculous Bronze Age mythology. Indeed, I’ve devoted numerous column inches to this topic, and this detailed exposition on braneworld cosmology and its ramifications is one I recommend you persevere with (ignoring the puerile distractions that polluted that thread after I launched it of course).
At this point, it’s important to emphasise a salient fact. While we do not possess the means to test directly the braneworld model proposed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their two scientific papers on the subject, they provided us with the next best thing. Namely, they demonstrated that their mechanism would leave behind it, a signature of its occurrence in our observable universe, that we could search for and examine. In short, their model includes a testable prediction involving well-defined constraints upon the behaviour of the system. This is a feature you will never find in “Magic Man did it” apologetics.
I cannot emphasise enough how this distances cosmological physics from religious apologetics. While the theorists are several steps ahead of the experimentalists, some of the theorists have provided the experimentalists with the means to catch up, and actually perform tests of the theorists’ ideas. Steinhart and Turok provided just such an opening with their braneworld collision model.
That signature I mentioned above works as follows. Every time a source of wave energy exists (light bulbs and radio transmitters being two examples), there exists the possibility that the source can produce more than one wavelength at a time (light bulbs definitely fall into this category). When we have such a source, we can measure the quantity of each wavelength that is being produced by that source, and plot the data on a graph. That graph is known as the power spectrum for the source of wave energy. In the case of light bulbs, tungsten filament bulbs have a power spectrum that is skewed toward long wavelengths - the red end of the spectrum. Advanced LED lights have a more even distribution of wavelengths, and a flatter power spectrum curve.
Steinhardt and Turok’s wave energy doesn’t consist of light, however. It consists of gravitational waves, namely ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced whenever high energy events take place, such as neutron star mergers or black hole collisions. Their model predicts that the braneworld collision that launched our universe into existence, generated a flurry of gravitational waves resounding through space-time during the launch process, and that, more importantly, those gravitational waves had a very specific form of power spectrum - one biased toward short wavelengths.
Once this was announced in their papers, other scientists immediately set about working out how to build working gravitational wave detectors, expressly so that they could test this idea. Now, a few such instruments exist.
We have, of course, some way to go first. We have to learn how to tell those early, primordial gravitational waves apart from more recently produced ones. One method I can think of, is that more recent ones originate from very specific locations in space, and give away that location when they arrive here and set off Earth based gravitational wave detectors. Primordial gravitational waves, on the other hand, are expected to be omnidirectional, like the cosmic microwave background, and exhibit no directional preference. But I’m jumping the gun a little here.
The point is, we have a handle on how to tell whether or not Steinhardt and Turok’s ideas are right. We can perform an experimental test in this vein. Moreover, as far as I’m aware from the literature, Steinhardt and Turok’s braneworld collision model is the only one that produces gravitational waves of this sort, and therefore, a successful detection of that power spectrum is, as far as I’m aware at least, conclusive. Those two physicists walk away with a Nobel Prize, the moment this is announced.
Now, I mentioned above that the word “sufficient” has a specific meaning in mathematics. A necessary condition is one that has to be fulfilled, in order for specific subsequent ideas to be true, but does not guarantee that those ideas will be true. A sufficient condition is one that, if true, guarantees that the subsequent ideas will be true. In the context of this physics, the presence of the predicted gravitational wave power spectrum is a sufficient condition for the veracity of Steinhardt & Turok’s model. As I said above, they are a shoe-in for the Nobel Prize if that result is detected.
Of course, their ideas could fail at this hurdle. But even if they do, we’ve still learned something that we wouldn’t have learned, if we’d simply shrugged our shoulders and been satisfied with “Magic Man did it”. And that is a key concept that the mythology fanboys don’t want you to learn, namely that in the realm of science, even the failures are informative. They tell us it’s time to move on and try something else, and keep going until we hit the jackpot. Which is what Peter Higgs did for 40 years, until the Higgs Boson was finally found at CERN.
Yes, this pursuit could take centuries or even millennia to complete. But it’s far better to persevere with that effort, than to let mythology fanboy ignorance act as a drag anchor on progress, and be satisfied with glib assertions about a mythological magic man in the sky.
Hope this helps.
