When Cosmology Clickbait Uses a Silly Switcheroo

Scientists have told us innumerable times that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, a mysterious event in which the universe kind of exploded into existence, expanding from a point of possibly infinite density.  But nowadays we will sometimes read an article in our science news feeds (or our science news sites) claiming that the Big Bang was not the beginning. 

Some of these articles are articles describing some new super-speculative paper describing some wildly imaginative scenario that has yet to gain appreciable acceptance among cosmologists.  Such "hot-off-the-presses" theories are of very little significance, since they are 99% speculation. 

But more than one of "the Big Bang was not the beginning" articles published in mainstream media in recent years have been authored by a single person: Ethan Siegel, a cosmology PhD who works as a tireless writer on science topics.  The latest example of Siegel's dubious reasoning on this topic may be found here, an article entitled "We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began."

Siegel tries the same old trick he has tried in similar articles:

(1) Going against what cosmology professors have been teaching for decades, Siegel effectively redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it does not refer to the very beginning of the universe, but to something that only started the tiniest instant after the beginning of the universe, at a time a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe. 

(2) Switching the chronological order that cosmologists have taught for decades, that a hypothetical "cosmic inflation" phase occurred the tiniest fraction of a second after the start of the Big Bang, Siegel speaks as if such a hypothetical "cosmic inflation" phase occurred the tiniest fraction of a second before the start of the Big Bang. He refers to "the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation." 

Having made this little switcheroo involving such shady redefinition, Siegel then claims that the Big Bang was not the beginning, his reasoning being that the Big Bang did not occur until after some "cosmic inflation" phase lasting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.  This kind of word parsing and hair-splitting and semantic skullduggery is as silly as the claim below:

"My client Waldo Wipkins denies that he caused the accident by pressing down on the accelerator of his car with his foot. He says the movement of the car was first started by the the rolling of his car downhill produced by the force of gravity, which preceded his pressing down of the accelerator by a tiny fraction of a second."

In his article, Siegel speaks (as he usually does) as if the "cosmic inflation" theory was a single theory that has been predictively successful.  It is no such thing. There are many hundreds of versions of the cosmic inflation theory. Most of these are mathematical models with input parameters that can be varied. What is predicted by any of these models always depends on what input parameters the model is given.  Each of these models predicts a very wide variety of things, like some political theory that predicts that the next election might be won by either the Republicans or the Democrats or the Green Party or the Libertarian Party (depending on what input parameters you give the theory). Given many hundreds of versions of the cosmic inflation theory, each predicting a wide range of outcomes depending on what input parameters they receive,  the truth is that the predictions of cosmic inflation theory are all over the map. 

There are no observations establishing any cosmic inflation theory, and since the predictions of the cosmic inflation theory are all over the map, there is no basis for claiming that it has any impressive record of predictive success.  To the contrary, scientists have failed in their attempts to find evidence for the main prediction of the theory (primordial b-modes). Noting the complete failure of searches for the primordial B-modes, a scientist recently stated, "If, however, future measurements continue to find no gravitational-wave signal, it will likely imply that we must seriously reconsider our inflationary models or perhaps dismiss inflation altogether, which would be a significant paradigm shift." 

Below is a NASA visual giving a chronology of cosmic events, one of countless visuals I could produce to show that the long-standing habit of cosmologists has been to describe the Big Bang as coming before an alleged "cosmic inflation" phase, not after such a phase as Siegel claims. 

Credit: NASA

Should we trustingly bow to the authority of Siegel, when he makes boasts about the cosmic inflation theory being predictively successful or supported by observations? I see no strong reason why we should. Although he is a cosmology PhD,  Siegel is not a cosmology professor, and he has apparently never authored or co-authored any scientific journal paper dealing mainly with the Big Bang, the universe's beginning, or the theory of cosmic inflation.  A search for his scientific papers on the physics paper server (https://arxiv.org/) gives us the following scientific papers, all written before 2009:

• Dark Matter in the Solar System
• Non-linear structure formation and the acoustic scale
• What Millisecond Pulsars Can Tell Us About Matter In The Galaxy
• Probing Dark Matter Substructure with Pulsar Timing
• Dark Matter In Minimal Trinification
• Dark Matter on the Smallest Scales
• Can Electric Charges and Currents Survive in an Inhomogeneous Universe?
• Cosmological Structure Formation Creates Large-Scale Magnetic Fields
• Effects of Inhomogeneities on Cosmic Expansion
• A Thermal Graviton Background from Extra Dimensions
• Towards a Precision Cosmology from Starburst Galaxies at z>2

None of these papers deals mainly with the extremely specialized topics of the Big Bang theory or the cosmic inflation theory.  Since Siegel has no published scientific journal papers dealing mainly with the Big Bang theory or the cosmic inflation theory, it seems there is no strong reason why we should think that he is qualified to be redefining the term "Big Bang" so that it comes after some proposed "cosmic inflation" phase (contrary to the majority of cosmologists), and also no strong authority-trust reason why we should put much weight on his claims about the cosmic inflation theory being well-grounded.  Siegel has written many articles on cosmic inflation theory, but on this topic he tends to keep repeating the same old dubious cheerleader talking points over and over and over again from one article to the next, just as he keeps repeating over and over and over again in different articles a set of selling points trying to get us to believe in the dubious hypothesis of dark matter, something never observed.  We see in such articles an uncritical repetition of very dubious triumphal legends of the cosmologist tribe. 

One such legend is that the cosmic inflation theory reduced the amount of fine-tuning needed at the universe's beginning, by eliminating the need for an initial expansion rate fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the fiftieth power.  The claim was never true, because cosmic inflation theories require so much fine-tuning of their own (in at least three places) that the need for fine-tuning of initial conditions is not actually reduced.  A 2019 paper states "the theory of inflation requires finely tuned initial conditions" and that it "is therefore far from clear that inflation truly solves the fine-tuning puzzles that it was designed for." Another paper (referring to fine-tuning required by the cosmic inflation theory) says, "The staggering amount of fine-tuning which is required disturbs many cosmologists."

What writers such as Siegel do is endlessly repeat boasts that the cosmic inflation theory solves several problems. We will never know whether such boasts are just tribal folklore of the small tribe of cosmologists. This is because no can ever reproduce the imagined cosmic inflation to verify that it actually solves any problem.  For example, would cosmic inflation (exponential expansion) actually result in a smooth universe? There's no way to ever know.  We can't reproduce cosmic inflation and see how smooth a universe results.  We can also never look back far enough in time to verify that cosmic inflation actually occurred, because the density of matter and energy was so great during the universe's first 300,000 years that nothing can be observed from those years (all light being scattered a billion times by such density). 

I may note that the scientific papers advancing versions of the cosmic inflation theory are some of the most obscure and hard-to-read papers that have ever appeared in scientific literature, rivaled in obscurity only by the papers of string theory.  An example from last month is here. Such papers are typically filled with huge numbers of obscure mathematical equations that are very poorly documented.  All kinds of obscure italicized symbols will appear that are almost never explained.  It is as if most of the writers of such papers were thinking that the only people who can ever understand such cosmic inflation papers are people like themselves who write cosmic inflation papers.  But since Siegel is not a writer of published scientific journal papers on cosmic inflation, what confidence can we have in his pronouncements about such a theory? 

Relying on an appeal to a never-observed "inflaton field" as imaginary as werewolves, the ever-changing cosmic inflation theory is like a continually shape-shifting monster. The very great obscurity of papers presenting versions of cosmic inflation theories is one of the major reasons for thinking that cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the Big Bang theory) should be dismissed as pseudoscience.  When there are many hundreds of versions of a theory, presented in papers written in the most hard-to-decipher text and the most intractable and poorly documented mathematics, then it can rightly be said that no one can justifiably claim to know that the predictions of the theory tend to be successful. Similarly, the works of the philosopher Hegel are so very obscure that no one can convincingly claim that  Hegel did or did not correctly predict the general features of modern society. 

Speaking about the cosmic inflation theory, Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll says here, “When perturbations are taken into account, inflation only occurs in a negligibly small fraction of cosmological histories,” and then spells that out as a fraction less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The leading cosmologist Roger Penrose has described cosmic inflation as a thermalization process, and has stated, “There is, however, something fundamentally misconceived about trying to explain the uniformity of the early universe as resulting from a thermalization process.” He states that any thermalization process doing anything would have “been even more special before the thermalization than after” (The Road to Reality, page 755). Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt says this:

"The irony is that our understanding of inflation has changed dramatically. We no longer believe that inflation makes any of those predictions so that none of the magnificent observations made over the last 30 years can be viewed as supporting inflation. Since 1983, it has become clear that inflation is very flexible (parameters can be adjusted to give any result) and generically leads to a multiverse consisting of patches in which any outcome is possible. Imagine a scientific theory that was designed to explain and predict but ends up allowing literally any conceivable possibility without any rule about what is more likely. What good is it? It rules out nothing and can never be put to a real test."

Why does Siegel keep writing these articles claiming that the Big Bang was not the beginning, on the basis of some semantic hair-splitting claiming that something starting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe was not the beginning? I suspect the reason is that such claims facilitate sensational-sounding clickbait headlines causing high readership of poorly reasoned articles.  Such articles create the impression that something new and very important has been discovered, which is not at all true. In this century gravitational waves were observed for the first time, but only from freak cosmic events with no major relevance to cosmology. There have been no really major discoveries in cosmology this century.  If scientists ever start modifying their definition of the Big Bang, that will not be a discovery, but merely some semantic jiggling. 

Siegel's article contains an ad, which gives us a clue as to why so many clickbait false alarm articles appear in the science press these days.  Web sites get ad revenue money when people click on sensational-sounding headlines to reach web pages containing ads.  A good rule might be: be less trustful of any dubious-sounding online science story whenever the story contains an ad.