Let us look at all of the many examples of bunk, baloney and BS in a recent press release on the topic of a new telescope called SPHEREx. The press release can be read here. The topic was a new satellite that will be launched in an attempt to do studies related to the groundless theory of primordial cosmic inflation. Not to be confused with the seemingly well-established Big Bang theory that the universe suddenly began around 13 billion years ago, the theory of primordial cosmic inflation is the theory that for just a fraction of its first second, the universe underwent a super-fast type of expansion called exponential expansion.
CALTECH PRESS RELEASE | REALITY |
Title: “What Hundreds of Millions of Galaxies Can Teach Us About the Big Bang.” | Galaxies are believed to have formed billions or at least very many millions of years after the Big Bang. You can't actually learn anything about the Big Bang from studying galaxies, just as you can't learn about ancient times by studying the Renaissance period. |
Subtitle: “NASA's SPHEREx mission will provide new clues about the explosive, inflationary phase of our universe.” | No it will not, and there is no good reason to believe such an inflationary phase ever happened. The universe seems to have underwent a dramatic expansion early in its history, but there is no reason to believe that the universe ever expanded at an explosive, exponential rate, as imagined by the adherents of the cosmic inflation theory. |
“Among several big questions the [SPHEREx] mission is poised to answer is how our universe came to be.” | This claim is the most outrageous fiction. The mission cannot possibly tell us any such thing. Physical factors such as the very extreme density of mass-energy in the first 200,000 years will forever prevent any observation that could explain what caused the Big Bang, and will forever prevent any possibility of observing what happened during the first 200,000 years after the Big Bang. |
“SPHEREx will provide new clues in the quest to understand cosmic inflation, a much-studied theory that states our newborn universe expanded a trillion-trillion-fold in a fraction of a second—much less time than it takes to snap your fingers.” | While there seems to be good evidence that the universe expanded from a tiny point billions of years ago (in other words, that the Big Bang occurred), there is no good evidence that the cosmic inflation theory is true, and all attempts to get evidence for it have failed. There is zero evidence that "the universe expanded a trillion-trillion-fold in a fraction of a second" or that anything like such exponential expansion occurred. Instead of it being one theory, the cosmic inflation theory is a family of many hundreds of theories, making predictions “all over the map.” “Provide new clues” is a vague phrase used to try to justify research failing to either confirm or disprove a theory, often used for research of little importance or relevance. |
“As mind-bending as inflation is, the theory, which was proposed by physicist Alan Guth and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s, continues to stand the test of time, making several accurate predictions about features in our universe. " | A bad misrepresentation of the status of cosmic inflation theory. No distinctive and exact predictions of the cosmic inflation were ever verified. Since there are so many hundreds of versions of the theory, which each can predict many different things by varying the input parameters, inevitably some match to reality will be found. But no version of the cosmic inflation theory has had any impressive predictive success. |
"Now, the pressing question on most cosmologists' minds is not whether inflation occurred but how.” | The insinuation that most cosmologists believe in the theory is not backed up by any evidence. There is no secret ballot poll of cosmologists showing such a thing. At the end of a 2016 paper, the one here, there is a poll of cosmologists. In Question 11 of the poll, on page 77, cosmologists were asked to complete a sentence beginning with "Our understanding of inflation will..." The results were these:
It seems at the time of such a poll, there was no majority favoring of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, with a significant fraction of cosmologists rejecting it. In the eight years since the poll, there have been big expensive projects trying to get "primordial B-mode detection," but all have failed. If the poll were to be taken today, it would probably show an even larger fraction of cosmologists rejecting the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. |
"Inflation successfully describes our universe, but we are struggling to understand how it came about." | The theory of cosmic inflation does not successfully describe our universe in any detail. The admission about "struggling to understand how it came about" is an admission that there is no solid theoretical understanding of any physical cause that would caused the imagined cosmic inflation to have occurred. |
"SPHEREx's three primary goals are to explore the origins of water and organic molecules in planetary systems, the history of galaxy formation, and the mechanisms behind cosmic inflation—the "bang" in the big bang that set our universe in motion." | There are no conceivable observations of the SPHEREx telescope that could ever explain "the mechanisms behind cosmic inflation—the 'bang' in the big bang that set our universe in motion." |
" 'I can't think of a more profound question: studying the first fractions of a seconds of existence,' says Phillip Korngut, the mission's instrument scientist at Caltech. 'The clumpiness in galaxy positions is tied to quantum fluctuations in the early universe when it was unfathomably tiny and hot. We are making precise measurements of galaxy density variations and then will tie that back mathematically to what happened in the early universe.' " | No observations of the SPHEREx telescope will be anything like studying the first fractions of a second of existence. There are so many hundreds of different versions of the cosmic inflation theory (with predictions all over the map) that nothing we observe about galaxies will tell us whether such a theory is true. |
"Scientists introduced the theory of cosmic inflation to explain certain features of our universe that were hard to make sense of with the big bang theory alone." | This is not at all true. The features mentioned do make sense "with the big bang theory alone," under the assumption that the Big Bang was purposefully caused to lead to a habitable universe. The theory of cosmic inflation was advanced solely to avoid such an assumption, which conflicted with atheistic preferences of cosmologists. |
"The goal of the BICEP–Keck collaboration is to search for telltale signs of inflation: curly patterns in polarized light called B-modes. These swirly patterns may have been produced as gravitational waves—which are ripples not in matter but in space-time itself—washed through the swelling cosmos. The current phase of the collaboration, called BICEP Array, includes the most sensitive receivers yet, each about 10 times more powerful than the earlier generation. Although the collaboration has not detected B-modes, it has set the field's strongest upper limits on their brightness." | We have here a description of a gigantic failure of the cosmic inflation theory. Vast sums of money have been spent looking for the B-modes the theory predicted, but no such B-modes have been found. The failure is a strong reason for rejecting all of the claims the Caltech press release has made about the cosmic inflation theory, and for disbelieving in such a theory. |
"Using SPHEREx's galaxy maps, scientists will be able to look for a tantalizing feature of many theories of inflation that has been nearly impossible to address until now—namely, whether or not the distribution of tiny ripples of matter formed at the time of inflation follows a so-called Gaussian distribution." | Many versions of the cosmic inflation theory predict such a Gaussian distribution, and many other versions of the theory do not predict such a Gaussian distribution. So the described observations will not help determine whether the cosmic inflation theory is true. |
"Physicists think that inflation was caused by a repulsive blast that came from a high-energy field referred to as the inflaton—in other words, from a single field." | The so-called inflaton field is entirely chimerical, having no basis in any established physics. Cosmologists speculating about an inflaton field are in the same class as theologians speculating about the wind pressure caused by the flapping of angel wings. |
"By measuring the degree to which galaxies clump together across the sky, researchers can test complex non-Gaussian models of inflation against the simpler Gaussian ones." | This statement confirms what I said above, that measuring such galaxy clumping will not actually do anything to confirm the cosmic inflation theory, because there are both "Gaussian" and "non-Gaussian" versions of the theory. |
"Chen Heinrich, a Caltech research scientist on the SPHEREx team, notes that the kinds of quantum-scale particle and field interactions they are studying cannot be reproduced in a lab on Earth. 'The universe has done the experiment for us,' she says. 'We can learn about the earliest moments of our universe by analyzing the cosmic web of galaxies. It's crazy cool.' " | Not crazy cool, just silly enough to be called crazy. You cannot learn about the earliest moments of the universe by analyzing galaxies. |
When you add up all the money that has been spent trying to confirm the theory of primordial cosmic inflation and all the money that has been spent trying to confirm the theory of dark matter, you have a sum of something like 3,000,000,000 dollars. No good evidence for been found for either thing, so the dollars have been wasted. These efforts are schematically depicted in the visual below:
Below are some relevant quotes:
- "Two improbable criteria have to be satisfied for inflation to start. First, shortly after the big bang, there has to be a patch of space where the quantum fluctuations of spacetime have died down and the space is well described by Einstein’s classical equations of general relativity; second, the patch of space must be flat enough and have a smooth enough distribution of energy that the inflationary energy can grow to dominate all other forms of energy. Several theoretical estimates of the probability of finding a patch with these characteristics just after the big bang suggest that it is more difficult than finding a snowy mountain equipped with a ski lift and well-maintained ski slopes in the middle of a desert. More important, if it were easy to find a patch emerging from the big bang that is flat and smooth enough to start inflation, then inflation would not be needed in the first place. Recall that the entire motivation for introducing it was to explain how the visible universe came to have these properties; if starting inflation requires those same properties, with the only difference being that a smaller patch of space is needed, that is hardly progress. Such issues are just the beginning of our problems, however. Not only does inflation require starting conditions that are difficult to obtain, it also impossible to stop inflation once it gets going....If inflation took place the CMB should contain evidence of cosmic gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime caused by the early stretching—yet it does not." -- Three cosmologists (link).
- "The problem is that no particular model of inflation has been shown to work yet." -- Physicist Philip Gibbs (link).
- "The staggering amount of fine-tuning which is required disturbs many cosmologists." -- Two physicists, referring to the cosmic inflation theory (link).
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