Inflation Sinking

In the 1970's as today, rising prices were on everyone's mind. Inflation was proposed to explain uniformity in the cosmic microwave background (which shows that the speed of light has slowed) and other puzzles. Physicist Alan Guth and others proposed that the early Universe expanded at warp speed, many times faster than light. Inflation would violate both the First Law of Thermodynamics and Relativity's stipulation that nothing can travel faster than light. Theorists invoked mysterious "scalar fields" and "inflatons" to explain their idea. None of these inferrences has ever been observed in nature. Inflation theories have multiplied like epicycles, providing comfortable careers for Guth and others.

April is also the 96th anniversary of the Titanic sinking! Back in 2006 (when St. Louis reached 1000 viewings of this blog) we saw The Puncturing of Inflation and Inflation Leaking. The leak in Titanic didn't look bad at first, but ship's designer Mr. Ismay did some quick calculations and realised they were sunk. Like the first boats from a sinking ship, leading scientists are abandoning the inflationary paradigm. At the beginning of this New Year physicist Paul Steinhardt publicly abandoned inflation, and is now working on cyclic universes. Read the links for more.

As with the string enterprise, inflation theorists are increasingly desperate to prove their idea. 5 years ago they prevailed upon the WMAP team to interpret the data their way. More recently they have claimed that gravitational waves would be a "smoking gun" proof. Too bad that gravitational waves have never been detected. Monday Physicist Lawrence Krauss, who has been arguing against inflation since 1992, revealed to us what he has been up to. In the new issue of Physical Review Letters; Krauss, grad student Katherine Jones-Smith and associate professor Harsh Mathur show that these waves, if detected at all, could come from an entirely different source. So much for smoking guns.

Inflation predicts that the Universe is geometrically flat, like the Earth. The WMAP angular correlation function is from Glenn Starkman and Dominik Schwarz, Scientific American August 2005. Inflation predicts that density fluctuations are the same at all scales, leading to the red prediction curve. In fact fluctuations are nearly zero for angles greater than 60 degrees. Note the error bars--inflation's prediction is ruled out by both WMAP and COBE. As surely as a ship's sails disappearing over the horizon, this shows that the Universe is curved with the radius predicted.

Though it has been useful to cosmologists, the inflationary paradigm can not, repeat can not be proven. Humans can not time-travel to the first 10^{-33} seconds, and no human experiment can approach the titanic energies and densities near the Big Bang. A real Theory would offer a falsifiable prediction: that the speed of light has changed. No experiment can prove that c is constant, for a more accurate experiment can always prove that foolish. It is very possible to prove the Theory. Type Ia supernovae, the "Faint Young Sun" and Lunar Laser Ranging can all be interpreted to show not just that c has changed, but that it has changed in exactly the amounts predicted.

Here's why we are winning: An independent mind is far more agile than a group mind. Independent thought allows new ideas to be considered, checked, discarded or advanced at the speed of thought. Group minds are slowed by speed of communication, time for ideas to be digested by members of the group, organizational rot and reluctance to part with familiar notions. Old paradigms will last until their proponents go to their grave, then a better Theory takes over..