At iai News Pavel Kroupa and Moritz Haslbauer report on a paper with a controversial finding: the standard cosmological model is wrong. We’re not as smart as we thought we were.
I’m not sure what the real world implications of this may be but I suspect it will have some.
Off topic, but heads up.
The decision to burn off the vinyl chloride in the Palestine, Ohio, train wreck will have produced large amounts of dioxin. Dioxin is not only toxic and carcinogenic, it persists for decades in the environment, and it bioaccumulates. Fish and wildlife in the area affected by the smoke plume will be inedible for a long time. Parts of the Palestine area and places downwind of the burnoff may have to be abandoned. There is likely to be a significant spike in cancers in the region.
Like Chernoble, this disaster was created by government experts.
I question the decision. 10% of the U. S. population lives in the Ohio River Basin.
The decisions made wrt that derailment are a microcosm of everything wrong with governance and regulation today.
Its not a question of being smart. There was a model that seemed to mostly fit observed data. As we get better data we will need to adapt/change our models. Seems kind of akin to saying Newton was wrong and wasn’t smart.
Steve
Except for actors, politicians, SF writers, and ER Doctors, “settled science” is errant nonsense. Using the modern Scientific Method, science is never settled.
Most physicists will happily admit that we do not truly know how things work. As measuring ability increases, scientific theories evolve. Dark matter & energy are today’s aether, and like black holes, they are placeholders that will be eventually modified.
(You can only validate existing theories using existing measuring instruments, and therefore, your theories are inherently limited. This also applies to the extent of your “universe”. Both a telescope and microscope expand it.)
I believe that we do not really understand how “time” works. With Quantum Mechanics, I suspect the strange observations are due to time distortions, such as time moving backward or jumping forward. With General & Special Relativity, I suspect that time is more distorted than the theories predict.
Physically, we can only detect three spatial dimensions, but if there are additional spatial dimensions we cannot detect, really weird shit starts happening. Things will suddenly appear and disappear, but due to the geometry, they are just moving into the dimension(s) we cannot detect.
Also, we have gone from a static, to an expanding, and now an accelerating universe. It would make sense that theories would need to change, and for people interested in science, that is a good thing.