Many scientific undertakings are highly fruitful, producing important scientific results. A good example is the James Webb Space Telescope launched not long ago. Besides taking photos of many things in our galaxy at unprecedented resolution, the James Webb Space Telescope has made important observations showing that galaxies formed relatively quickly after the Big Bang, at a rate much faster than predicted by cosmologists. The James Webb Space Telescope has observed a galaxy with carbon existing only 350 million years after the Big Bang. According to existing theories, no such galaxy should have been possible before about 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
We seem to see a mysterious organization principle at work in the early Universe, something beyond the understanding of scientists. Similarly, in the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the birth of a baby nine months later, we see a miracle of organization utterly beyond the understanding of mechanistic science.
While projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope are highly productive, there are other big expensive scientific projects that are what we may call examples of "hamster-wheel science." Hamster-wheel science is science that keeps churning and churning year after year, but never gets anywhere, and never makes any progress. Perhaps the worst example of hamster-wheel science is the search for what are called primordial b-modes.
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 fiftieth 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. This was the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory), a theory which has since taken on hundreds of different forms.
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. A scientific paper 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)." The paper also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."
For many decades cosmologists have been lost in a strange little world of fantasy whenever they dealt with this cosmic inflation theory. As different versions of the theory have kept failing, cosmologists have kept producing new versions of the theory; and by now there are hundreds of versions of it, making predictions all over the map. All attempts to provide some empirical support for cosmic inflation theory have failed.
The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories have been that there would be observed something called primordial gravitational waves, gravitational waves coming from the very early history of the universe, possibly something that would have a feature called "b-modes." Although non-primordial gravitational waves have been detected (arising from times when the universe was already billions of years old), nothing has come from decades of searches for primordial gravitational waves, which have gone on for years with ever-more-fancy and ever-more-expensive equipment. A 2019 article states, "Models such as natural and quadratic inflation that were popular several years ago no longer seem tenable, says theorist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University." A late 2021 article (based on this paper) is entitled "Primordial Gravitational Waves Continue to Elude Astronomers." But rather than discarding a theoretical approach that isn't working, our cosmologists keep tying themselves into knots by spinning out more and more speculative ornate versions of the cosmic inflation theory (which already has many hundreds of different versions). This has all been a giant waste of time and money, without any real success.
The CMB-S4 project was a long-standing proposal to spend almost a billion dollars more on the huge fruitless money-wasting rathole that is cosmic inflation theory. Having failed in numerous previous attempts to detect primordial gravitational waves, using ever-more-expensive equipment, our physicists proposed that we spend 800 million dollars on a new project to detect these primordial gravitational waves. An analogy might be some billionaire who had this conversation:
Project Leader: I'm sorry, your 500 million dollar project to look for the Loch Ness monster has failed.
Billionaire: Well, there's only one thing to do. Let's spend a billion dollars on an even fancier project to look for the Loch Ness monster.
The Executive Summary of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel falsely describes the CMB-S4 project as one that "looks back at the earliest moments of the universe." An important fact of nature that will never change is that it forever will be physically impossible for any technology to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe." In its first 100,000 years the universe was so dense that every type of radiation coming from such a time must have hopelessly scattered, with all of its information as mangled as a top secret document passed through 1000 different paper shredders, and all of the resulting paper scraps being passed through 1000 paper scrap shredders. It will therefore be forever impossible to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe." Such an impossibility is one reason why cosmic inflation theory seems like pseudo-science. Cosmic inflation theory makes claims about what went on in the first instants of the universe, but it will forever be physically impossible to verify such claims.
What the CMB-S4 would have actually looked at is something called the cosmic background radiation, which dates from a time when the universe was about 300,000 years old. That was when the density of the universe dropped to a low enough level to let radiation freely pass around without every ray or particle being scattered by all that density. This cosmic background radiation has already been exhaustively analyzed by previous scientific instruments such as COBE. No evidence was found for the primordial gravitational waves predicted by cosmic inflation theory.
We have extremely strong reasons for thinking that scientists will never be able to find primordial gravitational waves that provide any evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. One reason is the failure of all previous searches to find such a thing. Another reason is that there are two very strong "signal confounders" which will always preclude scientists from being able to reliably say some faint trace of gravitational waves comes from primordial cosmic inflation. Those "signal confounders" are dust and gravitational waves produced by black holes, both stellar black holes and primordial black holes.
The failure to find the primordial gravitational waves predicted by cosmic inflation theory is like someone searching all of Loch Ness underwater, and failing to see the Loch Ness monster. The CMB-S4 project can be compared to someone saying, "Well, if we can't photograph the Loch Ness monster underwater, let's look for footprints on the lake bottom that the monster may have left long ago." The problem with that is you could never get convincing evidence from such a method. You might be able to claim some funny little thing seen on a lake bottom was a foot print of the Loch Ness monster, but it would never be convincing evidence. And so it is for the current search for primordial gravitational waves. If they are found, the signal would be so weak (and so capable of being explained by alternate explanations) that you would never have convincing evidence of primordial cosmic inflation.
Therefore, the proposed CMB-S4 project was a boondoggle. It cannot ever produce a compelling scientific result establishing a likelihood that primordial cosmic inflation occurred. All it can ever produce with the best of luck is some hazy, ambiguous, very debatable, hard-to-interpret result that will be no clear evidence of anything. It's like feeding the fuzzy Zapruder film into some artificial intelligence program. You won't learn anything new about the assassination of John Kennedy by doing that. At best you'll get some weak talking point that you might enjoy using in some debate.
A paper last year on the topic of the detection of primordial gravitational waves has the very misleading title "Using gravitational waves to see the first second of the universe." Because of reasons discussed above, it will forever be physically impossible to view the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, under the assumptions of Big Bang cosmology, because of photon scattering caused by the extreme density. The paper (for example on page 28 and page 60) discusses countless possible theoretical causes of primordial gravitational waves, reminding us of the impossibility of ever detecting the source of such waves if they were ever found. On page 94 we are told that there can be "many other sources" of such waves.
Any project to look for such primordial gravitational waves that have not been found after so much money has already been spent looking for such waves is like some project scanning the mud at the bottom of Loch Ness, looking for the faintest traces of monster footprints left long ago. No important and reliable science will come from such activities, which almost certainly will be a waste of time. The most that will ever come is some hopelessly murky results and some talking point for some eager theorist, or some busy work for scientists who can't figure out more productive things to do.
The main reason why cosmologists supported projects such as the CMB-S4 project is that so many cosmologists have wasted most of their careers on futile speculations such as the endless varieties of the cosmic inflation theory. Such scientists will eagerly vote to fund any "grasping at straws" project with the slightest hope of lending a little prestige to these speculative efforts, to minimize the chance that such scientists will one day have to stare themselves in the mirror and say, "I wasted most of my career on extravagant speculations that never were backed up by solid evidence."
The CMB-S4 project is a futile hamster-wheel project. The search for primordial b-modes is the epitome of futile hamster-wheel science that gets nowhere.
I recently read that the boondoggle CMB-S4 project has been axed. The CMB-S4 project was to be run in Antarctica. It seems that the National Science Foundation thinks that upgrading facilities in Antarctica is a higher priority than the CMB-S4. Meanwhile cosmologists will continue to waste billions on other futile boondoggle projects, such as the environmentally reckless "Dirty Dune" project looking for dark matter that scientists have already spent billions looking for without success. The cosmic inflation theorists may well try to make it look like they did not get to look for their hoped-for primordial gravitational waves, ignoring the fact that very many millions of dollars have already been spent over many years on failed searches for such things, in projects such as BICEP1, BICEP2, POLARBEAR, Keck and BICEP3, and work at the Simons Observatory.
Within the study of cosmology, cosmic inflation theory has been a money-draining "white elephant," a scheme allowing cosmologists to keep draining many millions of research dollars without ever producing any compelling observational results. The advocates of cosmic inflation theory have tried to justify their money-wasting and time-wasting activities by appealing to a bandwagon effect. Such people keep telling us that pretty much all the cosmologists agree about the truth of cosmic inflation theory. This is not true at all. In fact, according to a poll of cosmologists taken last year, not even half of cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory.
In the scientific paper, on page 9 we have the result of a 2024 poll of cosmologists attending a scientific conference. Here is the result of a question that does the equivalent of asking cosmologists: what percent of you believe in the cosmic inflation theory? The result is that only 44% of cosmologists endorse the theory.
Page 8 of the paper (discussing the result above) says that the cosmic inflation theory "does not command majority support." We have no claim in the paper that this was a secret ballot survey. A secret ballot poll might have shown even smaller support.
For 40 years cosmic inflation theorists have been making groundless boasts that almost all cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. An example is page 3 of the paper here, in which a zealous proponent of the theory assures us that a "vast majority" of cosmologists endorse such a theory, without offering any evidence to back up such a claim. The poll above indicates that not even a majority of cosmologists endorse such a theory. Never trust any proponent of a theory who claims that the theory is supported by the great majority of specialists in some scientific field, unless such a claim is backed up by a well-designed secret ballot poll of scientists, a poll substantiating such a claim. Scientists routinely make groundless or unfounded assertions claiming or insinuating that some theory cherished by them is supported by an overwhelming majority of people in their field.
The lesson of the cosmic inflation theory misadventure is exactly the same as the lesson of the supersymmetry misadventure. A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "inflation" in the title produces 7239 results, almost all papers on the cosmic inflation theory. A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "supersymmetry" in the title produces 4546 results. Both the cosmic inflation theory and the supersymmetry theory involved elaborate speculative attempts to "sweep under the rug" dramatic cases of very precise fine-tuning that had been discovered in nature. All of these papers were wastes of time and exercises in futility. Neither of these theories was ever supported by observational evidence, although endless millions were spent trying to get evidence for both of them. The cosmic inflation theory misadventure and the supersymmetry misadventure both teach the same lesson: when nature presents some very dramatic case of fine-tuning, do not waste huge amounts of time trying to devise elaborate theories designed to explain away such fine-tuning, and trying to sweep such fine-tuning under the rug; but instead accept such examples of cosmic fine-tuning, look for other examples of fine-tuning both in the universe and in biology, and ponder the implications of such fine-tuning that can be found so very abundantly throughout nature. The point I discuss here is discussed more fully in my post here, which explains the type of fine-tuning that supersymmetry attempted to sweep under the rug and explain away.
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