He Makes It Sound Like Their "Standard Model" Is Mostly a Boast Habit

 Recently there was published a paper by astronomer Fulvio Melia entitled "A Candid Assessment of Standard Cosmology." Melia's paper is a critical analysis of the pretentious claims of cosmologists, the scientists who study the universe as a whole and the universe's origin. Melia gives some reasons for thinking that cosmologists know much less than they claim to know. Referring to the "lambda cold dark matter" model (often called the standard model of cosmology), Melia states, "One cannot avoid the conclusion that the standard model needs a complete overhaul in order to survive."  He states, "The argument against standard cosmology in its present form continues to grow as several major inconsistencies and inexplicable features resist concerted attempts at resolution."

Around about 1978, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) were puzzled by a problem of fine-tuning. They had figured out that the expansion rate of the very early universe (at the time of the Big Bang) seems to have been incredibly fine-tuned, apparently to about one part in ten to the sixtieth power. This dilemma was known as the flatness problem.

Around 1980 Alan Guth (an MIT professor) proposed a way to solve the flatness problem. Guth proposed that for a tiny fraction of its first second (for less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), the universe expanded at an exponential rate. The universe is not expanding at any such rate, but Guth proposed that after a very brief instant of exponential expansion, the universe switched back to the normal, linear expansion that it now has. The theory was devised to get rid of some fine-tuning, but it turned out that the theory required fine-tuning of its own in multiple places. So we had a kind of "rob Peter to pay Paul" situation in which it was unclear that the need for fine-tuning had been reduced. Melia says this: "It actually requires much more fine-tuning for the Universe to have inflated than for it to have been placed in some low-entropy initial state (Carroll & Chen 2004)." He also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."

On page 3 of his paper,  Melia refers to the most popular of the countless versions of cosmic inflation theory that cosmologists have contrived, the so-called "slow-roll" version. Melia tells us that such a version falls short by an "order of magnitude" (about 10 times) : "For all of the commonly used slow-roll inflaton potentials, the accelerated expansion due to inflation would have fallen short by about an order of magnitude."

In section 3 of his paper, Melia disputes a boast of cosmologists, that they have explained how galaxies and stars arose by an explanation that there were quantum fluctuations in the early universe that were magnified by cosmic inflation. Referring to an "inflaton field" that is often appealed to but still never discovered, he tells us this:

"The standard model also lacks an explanation for how these primordial fluctuations could have classicalized into the macroscopic perturbations we see in the largescale structure....The reality is that we cannot answer the question of how the hypothesized quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field turned into the classical perturbations responsible for the formation of large-scale structure. Nevertheless, the standard model proffers this narrative, without proof, that this is how stars, galaxies and clusters came into existence."

Oops, it sounds like some of our scientists have sewed on their chests self-devised achievement badges that they didn't earn. That happens very often in the world of science. On page 6 of the paper, Melia criticizes a boast about the Big Bang theory, the boast that it has been successful in predicting the abundance of elements. Referring to baryons (protons and neutrons that make up the cores of atoms), he states this:

"But as we shall demonstrate shortly, this is the point at which significant hand-waving needs to be introduced in order to account for the emergence of baryons (and the subsequent creation of the light elements)....One cannot ignore the deep, unanswered question concerning the origin of the baryonic component because baryons and antibaryons should have annihilated almost completely, leaving only a negligible abundance today. Yet we observe a far greater concentration than the standard model of particle physics

 and the first and second laws of thermodynamics should have permitted. So where did baryons come from?"

Melia is calling attention to a fact that undermines all claims that the Big Bang is a predictively successful theory: the fact that it cannot account for a universe like ours in which regular matter (with most of its mass in baryons) is vastly more common than antimatter (with most of its mass in antibaryons).  Referring to the abundance of helium in our universe, Melia states this: "the helium abundance is actually not predicted by the standard model, as is often incorrectly asserted."  Referring to ΛCDM -- the so-called "standard model" of lambda cold dark matter -- and BBN -- big-bang nucleosynthesis, or the creation of elements in the very early universe -- he says, " The only light element that can reasonably be used to test the ΛCDM BBN scenario is 7Li, and as is well known by now, the data disagree with the model’s prediction by over 10σ (Sbordone et al. 2010)."  This is a claim that the only elements whose abundance is predicted by standard cosmology is the Lithium-7 isotope of lithium, and standard cosmology makes a prediction about that abundance that is way, way wrong (10σ means 10 standard deviations, which is very far off the mark). 

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases. If the universe is now 13 billion years old, the universe's entropy at the time of the Big Bang must have been incredibly low, too low for scientists to be able to account for. On page 8 Melia  says, "The standard model currently has no explanation for why the Universe was initially in a very low entropy state (as required by the second law), and for how the CMB acquired such high entropy so soon after the Big Bang." Referring to an Initial Entropy Problem or IEP of how the universe could have began in a state of such low entropy (as it it apparently did), Melia says this on page 9:

"The IEP has been one of the most contentious issues in standard cosmology. It remains unsolved. Neither the equilibrium models nor the inflationary paradigm can adequately account for the very low initial entropy without relying on a lack of ‘naturalness.’  If the initial state of the Universe was random, characterized by a uniform probability of microstates, it should have been born with maximum entropy, representing thermal equilibrium, not the extremely unlikely low-entropy configuration required by ΛCDM. At face value, the standard model of cosmology thus appears to be inconsistent with the first and second laws of thermodynamics, constituting yet another conflict with our fundamental physical theories."

On page 9 Melia also tells us this: "The appearance of supermassive black holes at redshifts z > 6.3 (Fan et al. 2003; Jiang et al. 2007; Willott et al. 2007; Jiang et al. 2008; Willott et al. 2010a,b; Mortlock et al. 2011; Venemans et al. 2013; Bañados et al. 2014; Wu et al. 2015) and primordial galaxies at z ∼ 10 − 12 (Bouwens et al. 2011; Zheng et al. 2012; Bouwens et al. 2013; Ellis et al. 2013; Brammer et al. 2013; Coe et al. 2013; Oesch et al. 2013; Bouwens et al. 2014), creates a serious conflict with the formation of such objects within the timeline predicted by the standard model (Melia 2013b, 2014)." On page 13 he tells us this: "These initial detections by HST have been characterized as an ‘impossibly early’ galaxy problem, but the more recent discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) (Castellano et al. 2022; Labbe et al. 2022; Harikane et al. 2022; Naidu et al. 2022; Furtak et al. 2022; Bradley et al. 2022; Atek et al. 2022; Bouwens et al. 2022) of well-formed ... galaxies at redshifts extending out to ∼ 17, with some confirming ALMA observations (Fujimoto et al. 2022), have greatly exacerbated this apparent conflict with the standard model."

These recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope are observations that effectively "look back in time" 13 billion years, because they are looking at the edge of the cosmic horizon, about 13 billion light-years away. Cosmologists had predicted that no galaxies would be seen at such distances, and had predicted that galaxies did not form until about 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The new observations tell a very different story, of galaxies being well-formed by only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.  This is a problem of the universe getting organized way too fast for scientists to account for. 

Melia ends his paper by saying "this collection of seemingly insurmountable inconsistencies and paradoxes ought to convince even its most diehard supporters that a major overhaul of the standard model is called for." But is it a good idea to try and replace one pretentious dogmatic system with some other pretentious dogmatic system? There is no actual rule in science that when you have some big elaborate theoretical contrivance that purports to explain things, it must stand until it is replaced by some other more successful elaborate theoretical contrivance that purports to explain such things.  

In the world of software, there is a type of event called a rollback. When a rollback occurs, a database or program is restored to its previous state. A software publisher might release version 3.1 of its software, and might discover that the version has serious bugs. The publisher may then announce a rollback of version 3.1, withdrawing it from the market, and advising its customers to revert to the previous version, version 3.0. The same thing can happen in the world of science, but rarely does.  A rare version of a rollback in science occurred with the BICEP 2.0 affair. Scientists announced that they had discovered gravitational waves from primordial cosmic inflation, and had thereby proven one of their favorite theories. Later in the same year support for this claim collapsed.  

A simple rollback could occur in the world of cosmology. Scientists could confess that they don't really understand the composition of the universe, that they don't really understand how galaxies formed, that they don't really understand why the initial expansion of the universe was so fine-tuned, that they don't really understand why galaxies rotate the way they do, and that when they recently published what they called a "dark matter map of the universe," they were misspeaking because dark matter has still never been observed.  But that's unlikely to happen, because it's like their  rule is "a boast must stand until it is replaced by an equally boastful boast."