🚀 go-pugleaf

frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:

> >to the Cosmological Bad Dream) there are scientific utterances that
> >I don't know whether to assign to (a) or (b), such as a detailed
> >description of the first three minutes in the existence of the
> >universe.
> 
> I think these things are clearly in category (a).  Why should a detailed
> description of the first 3 minutes of the universe be any less of an
> assertion than a detailed description of Paris last summer?  In neither case
> can we go back and look.  We make the best guess we can based on the
> evidence; we are prepared to modify it if new evidence disproves it; and
> there will always remain some residual doubt, since the evidence is
> necessarily incomplete.  The evidence in the case of the first 3 minutes of
> the universe is more sketchy, and so the amount of doubt is higher; and it
> may indeed be the case that the public does not understand the appropriate
> level of doubt and inexactitude for these kinds of statements.  But this is
> a conventional problem of misunderstanding, not anything fundamental.


      "The public" is hardly the only ones who don't understand the
appropriate level of doubt for these things. As I said in my original
post, Freeman Dyson, a physicist of some note, presenting himself as
public interpreter on these matters, plainly _does not himself believe
these matter ARE in doubt_! And don't tell me he's the only one. The
big bang model is highly dubious in every way that a model COULD BE,
yet if you go over to sci.physics and start casting asperions, you will
probably be deluged with the annoyed remarks of _true believers_, not
casual observers. To claim that the public is experiencing a
"conventional problem of misunderstanding" is stretching it a bit. What
we have is a self-serving group of people, i.e. cosmologists, who would
like nothing better than to be taken seriously in these pronouncements.
And they are.

      John E. Snodgrass [snodgras@cyber.net]

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