Hey Cancer, quit trying to destroy the universe!

[Bazza]

Thanks Dean. I read the introductory paragraphs which gives me enough of an idea of where they are going. Rather than Scholasticism, the physicists should have been reading their Platonism. Their attempt to explain the multiverse idea with quantum many worlds reminds me of what I read in a book delineating the first principles of St Thomas & Plato (below). As such I believe the article is more philosophical and not scientific. I recall that Heisenberg stated that quantum mechanics/particles is analogous to Aristotle's Potential, which is to say that it has no corporality ie "non-being", quasi-real. The second philosophical issue I'd raise with their paper is the measurement problem...how can you measure events in another bubble universe? Thus, for me, the issue comes back to metaphysics, that is first principles. The scientists are attempting with multiverse theory, quantum mechanics, many worlds theory, and inflationary theory to provide an overarching theory (that is both top & bottom, horizontal and vertical) that gives context to physics. Plato, Plotinus and St Thomas were faced with the same issues. Below is in elucidation of Plato & Plotinus approach. This comes from a lecture given in 1939 St Thomas & The Greeks by Anton C Pegis:

 

“With Neoplatonism, the doctrine of Plato and Aristotle is fully organized into a coherent scheme of things. More specifically, the Neoplatonic theory of emanation is, for Professor Lovejoy, "an atempt at a deduction of the necessary validity of the principle of plenitude" 24. That is to say, in Plotinus more than in Plato "it is from the properties of a rigorously otherworldly, and the necessity of self-sufficient, Absolute, that the necessity of the existence of this world, with all its manifoldness and its imperfection, is deduced" 25. The theory of emanation explains how the many are generated from the One in a descending and hierarchical order until all possibilities are realized even unto the last and the least. Reality is thus an immense and continuous span embodying one life that proceeds from the outpouring of the transcendent Good. From the One to Intelligence, from Intelligence to Soul, from Soul to living and non-living substances, and from these to matter, reality stretches like Homer's golden chain without a link missing and without a link out of place. Nor must we suppose that the One gave forth of its life by any choice of its will or by any deliberation. It is as necessary to the One to overflow and to generate this universe as it is for it to be good. The universe must be and it must be as it is: only such a universe can proceed from the goodness of the Plotinian God. Necessity reigns supreme, for it rules even the divine life.”

 

Bit more (this is before the above quote in the book): 

“Two-Gods-in-One, of a divine completion which was yet not complete in itself, since it could not be itself without the existence of beings other than itself and inherently incomplete; of an Immutability which required, and expressed itself in, Change; of an Absolute which was nevertheless not truly absolute because it was related at least by way of implication and causation, to entities whose nature was not its nature and whose existence and perpetual passage were antithetic to its immutable subsistence.”

 

“If it be asked how many kinds of temporal and imperfect beings must this world contain? the answer is, "all possible kinds" 19. This is understood in the strictest possible sense and becomes what Professor Lovejoy calls the principle of plenitude according to which the Platonic universe contains realized within itself all possibilities. It is a full universe in the sense that in it all that can be, actually is. This applies not only to a fullness according to which the universe contains the whole range of the different kinds of things, but also to a fullness according to which "no genuine potentiality of being can remain unfulfilled.”

This post is a bit long, but hope you find it valuable. 

[DShomshak]

Not in the slightest. Sorry. I have no idea what this means, or how it might apply to actual scientists doing actual science such as, say, an ornithologist studying the behavior of puffins.

 

It's probably best to drop the topic.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Cancer]

The strength of the inflationary hypothesis as it was originally postulated back in the 1980s IIRC is that it solved the horizon problem, which is the observation that the entire observed Universe looks quite similar, even though in the standard Big Bang (without inflation), different parts of the Universe have never been in communication with each other (they are outside each other's horizons, in the jargon of cosmology), so it requires remarkably uniform initial conditions in the Big Bang for that to play out as we now observed.  In the standard Big Bang cosmology, there isn't any reason for that to be true.

 

The inflationary hypothesis was that there was an episode at very early times when the Universe expanded exponentially, creating new space in the Universe so that points which had been "adjacent" at early times were made to be distant from each other in a very brief time interval as the new space was created, and thereby became outside each other's horizons; but because they had been close early on, they had nearly the same initial conditions and physical circumstances at those points therefore evolved similarly despite being disconnected after the inflationary era.

 

That inflation is accompanied by an enormous influx of energy, and there is a favorite idea for where that energy came from (and that emerges from ideas underlying Grand Unified Theories for the fundamental forces in the physical Universe).  Some aspects of those ideas lie outside our ability to test directly, though they are consistent with what we do observe in particle physics (which is another way of saying: those ideas do pass all the tests to which we are able to subject them so far).

 

I am not a cosmologist, but I do pay attention to the tests of cosmological hypotheses, and there's lots of ideas which are not testable and, by my understanding of how science is supposed to work, cannot be considered acceptable scientific theories.  Unfortunately, it has been found that you can sell a lot of popular-level books with that stuff, and the quality control for those is not the best, and none of the books addresses what tests of their ideas ought to be and what measurements need to be done.  And that phenomenon gives carte blanche to lots and lots of scientifically illiterate crackpots to drop massive, incoherent treatises on local physics departments and expect them to be read.  Test?  It's a beautiful idea, it must be correct!  Why should mathematical rigor, or what we actually are able to measure in the Universe around us, have anything to do with my beautiful idea?

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

 

It does seem like a lot. 

[Bazza]

Especially as the tweet states 35 while the tweet with the news stated 36. Woe the missing 1 septillion yottawatt. 

[L. Marcus]

It's from a genre that considers a magnitude to be an acceptable rounding error.

[Cancer]

"We don't care about factor of ten errors as long as they aren't in the exponent."

[Bazza]

On 10/16/2022 at 3:11 AM, DShomshak said:

Not in the slightest. Sorry. I have no idea what this means, or how it might apply to actual scientists doing actual science such as, say, an ornithologist studying the behavior of puffins.

 

It's probably best to drop the topic.

 

Dean Shomshak

To revisit this to attempt a simpler explanation of what I was trying to get at. Perhaps this will be a better approach:

 

Science: 

"In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." And: "The multiverse and quantum many worlds are really the same thing -- superposition -- occurring at vastly different scales. In this new picture, our world is only one of all possible worlds that are allowed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics and that exist simultaneously in probability space."

 

Neoplatonism:

Paraphrasing: "Necessarily, everything that can happen must happen, all/infinite potential must be realised/exhausted; this is descended from The One to the many in order to realise & complete the perfection of The One. Or: The One, necessarily emanates a plenitude in which every thing’s potential is realised, in which returns completed and completes The One.   

[Cancer]

6 hours ago, Bazza said:

Science: 

"In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." And: "The multiverse and quantum many worlds are really the same thing -- superposition -- occurring at vastly different scales. In this new picture, our world is only one of all possible worlds that are allowed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics and that exist simultaneously in probability space."

 

Where's that first quote from?  It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding.  Inflation, as it is now used in cosmology, has a specific meaning and very definitely was not eternal; by that slip, it sets up cosmology to become the target of a straw man argument.

[Pariah]

11 hours ago, Bazza said:

Science: 

"In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." 

 

The closest I could come to agreeing with that statement would be to quote something Sagan said in Cosmos: What is impossible in a hundred years may be inevitable in 100 million.

 

It's worth noting, though, that in comparison to the estimated age of the universe, e.g., ~13.5 billion years, 100 million years really isn't that long.

[Bazza]

7 hours ago, Cancer said:

 

Where's that first quote from?  It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding.  Inflation, as it is now used in cosmology, has a specific meaning and very definitely was not eternal; by that slip, it sets up cosmology to become the target of a straw man argument.

This quote is from Dean (last post, previous page) who got it from Scientific American's article "Can Quantum Mechanics Save the Cosmic Multiverse?" authored by Yasunori Nomura, dated June 1, 2017 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-quantum-mechanics-save-the-cosmic-multiverse/). The quote is: "In the words of Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the creators of inflation theory, 'in an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times.'" To paraphrase my good friend Dean, who offered similar words of wisdom to me: "you can take it up with Alan Guth".  

 As given in a previous post, eternity has a specific defined academic meaning in philosophy and nature. And agree that to physics, eternity is a straw man.

 

2 hours ago, Pariah said:

The closest I could come to agreeing with that statement would be to quote something Sagan said in Cosmos: What is impossible in a hundred years may be inevitable in 100 million.

 

It's worth noting, though, that in comparison to the estimated age of the universe, e.g., ~13.5 billion years, 100 million years really isn't that long.

 

Sagan is right, although my interpretation is likely differs to his intention. 
 

In the estimated age of aeviternity, time ceases to have quantity. It's worth noting, though, you have, by human nature, aeviternal abilities, e.g. intellect (nous).     

[Cancer]

Ah.  You are invoking theological concepts.  We're done.

[Old Man]

39 minutes ago, Bazza said:

aeviternity

 

I didn't believe this was a real word until I looked it up.  Of course, it still effectively has no meaning.

[Bazza]

It is indefinite timelessness. Or “lesser eternity” A scholarly paper by Henryk Anzulewicz is "Aeternitas - aevum - tempus. The Concept of Time in the System of Albert the Great". It can be found in the book: “The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and Its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy”, Edited by Pasquale Porro. published by Brill Academic Publishers, 2001.

 

If you are interested, I can pm it to you, as I found it on a quasi-legal site. 

 

Aeviternity is also used in the Traditional School of perennial philosophers. If interested I can suggest a book (or two or three). 

[Bazza]

1 hour ago, Cancer said:

Ah.  You are invoking theological concepts.  We're done.

Philosophy of nature, and Scientific American started it.   
 

(And I’m surprised just how many commonly used words also are included. I could make a list for future reference.) 

[Bazza]

And as an addendum, here is a recommendation of non-religious natural theology from a recent scholar. (And to be clear, natural theology is different to natural philosophy). 

 

There is also a Christian tradition of natural theology that has a long history as well. This may interest Pariah as it an intellectual & rational description of initial essence & existence, & causal reality. 

[Bazza]

In an ideal world, the a priori qualitative sciences and the a posteriori quantitatively empirical sciences would coexist and complement each other.

 

We are not there yet. 

[DShomshak]

18 hours ago, Bazza said:

To revisit this to attempt a simpler explanation of what I was trying to get at. Perhaps this will be a better approach:

 

Science: 

"In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." And: "The multiverse and quantum many worlds are really the same thing -- superposition -- occurring at vastly different scales. In this new picture, our world is only one of all possible worlds that are allowed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics and that exist simultaneously in probability space."

 

Neoplatonism:

Paraphrasing: "Necessarily, everything that can happen must happen, all/infinite potential must be realised/exhausted; this is descended from The One to the many in order to realise & complete the perfection of The One. Or: The One, necessarily emanates a plenitude in which every thing’s potential is realised, in which returns completed and completes The One.   

Ah. Yes, the parallel is a bit clearer. Not that I think Plato or Plotinus were Onto Something, cosmologically speaking, or that modern theoretical physicists are secretly into Neoplatonism. But yes, it's interesting how some ideas seem to return -- at least in a loose sense.

 

And it's enough that now I want to run a scenario in which Plotinus was a time traveler or talked to a time traveler.  So thank you.

 

Anyway, to give a *very* quick extension of Cancer's description of cosmic inflation, based on the various science articles I've read about it, showing how it leads supposedly competent scientists into very odd fields of philosophy and mysticism...

 

Alan Guth & Co. proposed a brief period of inflation during the Big Bang to make the observable universe homogeneous. IIRC, the brief period expands a region of space the size of a proton to the size of a basketball, or something like that. Then another phase change happens and the universe resumes "normal" expansion. But other physicists pointed out: How do you get the inflation to stop homogeneously, everywhere at once? If even the tiniest bit of the young universe is just a little late, it keeps inflating untio it's as big as the rest of the universe that stopped inflating. Okay, so part of that "freezes out" as another bubble of normally-expanding space-time, but again, a little bit probably keeps inflating, and so on, with no way to stop it, bubbling out new universes... forever?

 

And if you accept this, why do you assume our universe was the first? Can you even be sure it had a beginning? If you say, "Well, it had to," I don't see hgow anyone could measure and determine when it was.

 

Some physicists think this ain't a bug, it's a feature. One of the awkward aspects of the Standard Model is that it includes numerous physical constants whose values are apparently arbitrary -- but if they were the teeny-weeniest bit different, the universe would just be a haze of elementary particles, or all the matter would be in black holes, or otherwise not not capable of producing beings like us who could observe it.

 

Ah, but if the Big Bang never stops banging and spitting out an infinite cascade of new universes, with those physical constants randomly set, eventually some of them will have properties that allow for the formation of atoms, stars, planets, life, and us. (For more on this particular line of argumentation, look up the "Weak Anthropic Principle.")

 

Except this also revives an old argument that intersects science and philosophy, based on thermodynamics. In brief: If enough particles carom around at random for enough time, they will produce anything that is physically possible. And indeed, given infinite time, will do so (vide Alan Guth) an infinite number of times. This was first enunciated by the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who is one of the biggest names in thermodynamics. He suggested this as an explanation for why the universe was not in a state of maximum entropy. Yes, the universe inevitably runs down, he said, but in an infinite universe with infinite time, eventually enough atoms will randomly come together to form a region of low entropy so planets, stars, etc. can exist for a while.

 

It didn't take long for other scientists to run the numbers and find that it was more likely that atoms would randomly come together to form smaller entities than the observable universe of Boltzmann's day. Like, say, a human brain just floating in the chaos and hallucinating that it's a person with sensations and memories. Given infinite space and time, it is indeed vastly more likely that you, reading this right now, are such a "Boltzmann Brain" than that you are an actual human being on an actual Planet Earth.

 

Big Bang cosmology brushes away the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis by making the universe finite in time and, I assume, space. The perpetual inflation multiverse brings it back with a vengeance. If you want a fuller exposition, consult the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

 

One critic says that Boltzmann Brains fail the "Monty Python Test": It's too silly. I see the point. A line of argument that ends by demonstrating that I am only a momentary hallucination appearing in quantum chaos and destined to dissolve back into it a nanosecond later seems rather self-undercutting. And even if it were true, so what? What am I supposed to do with this? But that the Inflation Multiverse leads to it is one reason why -- though I am neither a physicist nor a philosopher -- I confidently predict that inflation will turn out to be Just Plain Wrong.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Oh, and while I'm not really up on Neoplatonism -- I only did a brief survey as part of a writing project for Mage: the Awakening -- I'd guess  there's a big difference beytween the Neoplatonist idea and the inflation multiverse idea: I gather the "One" of Neoplatonism is divine, while the perpetuyal Big Bang of the multiverse hypothesis is just a mindless force of energy that spits out universes. Not divine, unless the god is Azathoth.

 

(Which could be a cool point to build a "Cthulhu Now" scenario around. Theoretical physicist studies Neoplatonism, goes MAAAAD... Sort of an updated "Dreams in the Witch-House.")

 

Dean Shomshak

[Bazza]

18 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Ah. Yes, the parallel is a bit clearer. Not that I think Plato or Plotinus were Onto Something, cosmologically speaking, or that modern theoretical physicists are secretly into Neoplatonism. But yes, it's interesting how some ideas seem to return -- at least in a loose sense.

 

And it's enough that now I want to run a scenario in which Plotinus was a time traveler or talked to a time traveler.  So thank you.

 

Anyway, to give a *very* quick extension of Cancer's description of cosmic inflation, based on the various science articles I've read about it, showing how it leads supposedly competent scientists into very odd fields of philosophy and mysticism...

 

I’ve found that some scientists including physicists are aware/influenced/usage Platonism, to some degree. This isn’t many, but it is there. Aristotle has more aware/influenced/usage than Plato. But it is a start.

 

Re Plotinus the time traveller. Your welcome. Have him meet Russian Pavel Florensky when the later was imprisoned in the Gulag, and have Florensky discuss his 1922 maths paper on imaginary numbers in geometry which includes mentions to Ptolemy, Dante, and Einstein. Given Plotinus’ aversion to maths, having Florensky advise him that if you go faster than the speed of light, you break Einsteinian space-time – what Star Trek calls ‘warp speed’ and into Dante’s super-luminous Empyrean. It would be one way to bust out of prison. 

 

Florensky’s paper is freely available on the web in Russian, and commercially published in English. I use it as an example of crossover with the humanities (Florensky was a polymath mathematician, scientist, inventor, art historian, philosopher, theologian, and priest).  

[Bazza]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

Oh, and while I'm not really up on Neoplatonism -- I only did a brief survey as part of a writing project for Mage: the Awakening -- I'd guess  there's a big difference beytween the Neoplatonist idea and the inflation multiverse idea: I gather the "One" of Neoplatonism is divine, while the perpetuyal Big Bang of the multiverse hypothesis is just a mindless force of energy that spits out universes. Not divine, unless the god is Azathoth.

 

(Which could be a cool point to build a "Cthulhu Now" scenario around. Theoretical physicist studies Neoplatonism, goes MAAAAD... Sort of an updated "Dreams in the Witch-House.")

 

Dean Shomshak

The Cthulhu Now scenario “has been done”, ie Arthur Machen wrote a similar short story about a mad scientist attempting to ‘break the science barrier’ by having a victim go mad, and Josef Pieper wrote a short book on Plato’s divine madness. So I feel it has been done. 
 

If you were wanting a different scenario idea, and/or combine it with the second one below:

 

A British Museum Exhibit From Egypt, Seemingly Dead, Suddenly Woke Up

https://www.msn.com/en-au/travel/news/a-british-museum-exhibit-from-egypt-seemingly-dead-suddenly-woke-up/ar-AA1311VE?cvid=73031d2e064e408ca78a4e94889c3eec
 

Scientists Spotted Something That Appeared to Be Moving 7 Times the Speed of Light

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandscience/scientists-spotted-something-that-appeared-to-be-moving-7-times-the-speed-of-light/ar-AA131c9E?cvid=126f50fdaacb4d10a79f9ece05a05b7b

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

I submit without context.

 

[novi]

At least part of the problem is the intersection between the insatiable demand for more content by the 'news' and scientists seeking notice of any kind, whether for ego or to increase their chances of funding.  It also really doesn't help that most scientist speak a different language at work, and that every field has its own different language.

 

As for theoretical physicist bouncing untested hypotheses off each other, it's a net positive overall.  All science is built on the work of other scientists; no scientific theory emerges ex nihilo.  Even Einstein had to work off existing science.  And sometimes insights into science come from unexpected sources.  Max Planck accidentally invented quantum mechanics while trying to make better light bulbs, for instance.  So scientists should consider anything and everything.  The problem is when individual scientists try to misrepresent the significance or truth of their theories.  Some of that is just old fashioned human fallibility and the investment fallacy, some is caused faulty communications, or big egos, but there are some who essentially lie, saying things aren't really true just for attention.

 

Though I will admit that string theory, quantum multiverses, and eternal inflation are worrying in their inability to be satisfactorily proven or disproved.  And that it's unknown whether they can be developed into solid theories, or forever remain speculative.

[Bazza]

On 10/16/2022 at 6:44 AM, Cancer said:

The strength of the inflationary hypothesis as it was originally postulated back in the 1980s IIRC is that it solved the horizon problem, which is the observation that the entire observed Universe looks quite similar, even though in the standard Big Bang (without inflation), different parts of the Universe have never been in communication with each other (they are outside each other's horizons, in the jargon of cosmology), so it requires remarkably uniform initial conditions in the Big Bang for that to play out as we now observed.  In the standard Big Bang cosmology, there isn't any reason for that to be true.

 

The inflationary hypothesis was that there was an episode at very early times when the Universe expanded exponentially, creating new space in the Universe so that points which had been "adjacent" at early times were made to be distant from each other in a very brief time interval as the new space was created, and thereby became outside each other's horizons; but because they had been close early on, they had nearly the same initial conditions and physical circumstances at those points therefore evolved similarly despite being disconnected after the inflationary era.

 

That inflation is accompanied by an enormous influx of energy, and there is a favorite idea for where that energy came from (and that emerges from ideas underlying Grand Unified Theories for the fundamental forces in the physical Universe).  Some aspects of those ideas lie outside our ability to test directly, though they are consistent with what we do observe in particle physics (which is another way of saying: those ideas do pass all the tests to which we are able to subject them so far).

 

I am not a cosmologist, but I do pay attention to the tests of cosmological hypotheses, and there's lots of ideas which are not testable and, by my understanding of how science is supposed to work, cannot be considered acceptable scientific theories.  Unfortunately, it has been found that you can sell a lot of popular-level books with that stuff, and the quality control for those is not the best, and none of the books addresses what tests of their ideas ought to be and what measurements need to be done.  And that phenomenon gives carte blanche to lots and lots of scientifically illiterate crackpots to drop massive, incoherent treatises on local physics departments and expect them to be read.  Test?  It's a beautiful idea, it must be correct!  Why should mathematical rigor, or what we actually are able to measure in the Universe around us, have anything to do with my beautiful idea?

Cheers. 

[novi]

On 10/15/2022 at 4:14 PM, Cancer said:

The strength of the inflationary hypothesis as it was originally postulated back in the 1980s IIRC is that it solved the horizon problem, which is the observation that the entire observed Universe looks quite similar, even though in the standard Big Bang (without inflation), different parts of the Universe have never been in communication with each other (they are outside each other's horizons, in the jargon of cosmology), so it requires remarkably uniform initial conditions in the Big Bang for that to play out as we now observed.  In the standard Big Bang cosmology, there isn't any reason for that to be true.

 

While this is true, it is also not complete.  Inflation also answers 2 other problems with a relatively simple explanation.  Being a hat trick is its strength.  The other two problems being the flatness problem and the monopole problem.

 

The flatness problem is that the universe is flat.  Glib, but bear with me.  General Relativity is an accurate description of the universe on large scales, as far as we can tell.  If you make a few simplifying assumptions and play with the math, you get the Friedmann equations; they are much simpler than full GR, and provide a usable approximation of our universe at large scales.  The variable of the equations relevant here is k, the curvature of space.  In a very simplified sense, it describes whether parallel lines converge, diverge, or neither.  As luck would have it, there are features in the Cosmic Microwave Background that we can predict the size of; measuring how large they appear will tell us how much the observable universe is curved.  Surprisingly, they are exactly the size we expected, which means a flat universe, to within 1%.

 

The problem comes from the fact that absolute value of k must increase with time, and should have increased by a factor of roughly 10^60 during the age of the universe.  Either the universe is perfectly flat, or k was improbably small at the beginning of time.  Inflation is an attractive third option here because it would have caused any initial value k to shrink to almost 0, and a locally flat universe.  As to why this is preferably to just letting k be 0, it's that k can only be zero if there is a Cosmological Constant and it takes on one exact value.  Not impossible, but none of our theories suggest a reason why that would that would be the case.  At the moment, inflation is felt to be a more reasonable explanation than the others.

 

As for the monopole problem, it specifically refers to magnetic monopoles, but also covers other cosmological oddities that may have been produced in the early universe.  A magnetic monopole is an isolated north or south magnetic pole; every known source of magnetism in the universe is a dipole, having both poles.  Many of the post-Standard Model theories predict that a bunch of magnetic monopoles should have formed in the very early universe.  Enough that we should have seen one by now, or even enough to mess with the formation of elements in the early universe.  Inflation would solve the issue by reducing the density of monopoles down to ~1 per observable universe.  And thus make it unlikely we'd ever see one.

 

Now, monopoles are completely speculative.  It would not be surprising that we haven't found one if they don't exist.  Unfortunately, we are currently unable to prove that they can't exist.  And in quantum mechanics, everything not forbidden is compulsory.  So either they must exist, or new physics will disprove them.

 

On 10/15/2022 at 4:14 PM, Cancer said:

I am not a cosmologist, but I do pay attention to the tests of cosmological hypotheses, and there's lots of ideas which are not testable and, by my understanding of how science is supposed to work, cannot be considered acceptable scientific theories.  Unfortunately, it has been found that you can sell a lot of popular-level books with that stuff, and the quality control for those is not the best, and none of the books addresses what tests of their ideas ought to be and what measurements need to be done.  And that phenomenon gives carte blanche to lots and lots of scientifically illiterate crackpots to drop massive, incoherent treatises on local physics departments and expect them to be read.  Test?  It's a beautiful idea, it must be correct!  Why should mathematical rigor, or what we actually are able to measure in the Universe around us, have anything to do with my beautiful idea?

 

I would say that some of the problem is that we've answered most of the hows in cosmology, and are left with the whys.  And neither General Relativity or the Standard Model provide any compelling explanations for why the universe is as it is, nor any obvious direction as to where to look next.  Well, there is one obvious direction, which is sadly inaccessible - the singularity of a black hole.  Every other time a scientific theory has contained singularities, a better theory has come along that got rid of them.  So we do know exactly where GR should break.  But GR also says that all of those singularities are unobservable to the rest of the universe, hidden by event horizons.  It's kinda frustrating, actually, that we can't poke the one glaring fault in GR to see how it reacts.

 

Anyway, the whys of the universe.  The Standard Model predicts how particles interact with each other to a ridiculous level of precision.  The issue is that it has 25 independent variables that can not be predicted from theory, but must be measured by experiment.  And GR has one itself.  Some scientists take offense at having so many independent variables, finding it inelegant; more are just concerned with why those variables take the values they do.  Because changing any of them even a little bit would result in vastly different universes, almost all of them incompatible with matter as we know it, much less life.  And every theory to try and explain why has so far been hopelessly speculative.  Again, it's frustrating.