There is a recent article in the news about how some leading scientists made a visit to Jeffrey Epstein's notorious pedophilia island where underage children were for years apparently raped and sexually trafficked. An NPR article tells us about a 2006 scientific conference funded by Jeffrey Epstein, who loved to mingle with scientists. It was a week-long conference called "Confronting Gravity." It was held in the Virgin Islands, and according to the article it was attended by "20 of the world's top physicists, including three Nobel laureates and three more who would later receive the prestigious prize." We read that the conference included a short trip to Epstein's notorious island:
"Along with the submarine, the scientists took a short boat ride for a barbecue picnic on Epstein's 70-acre island. Epstein had purchased Little St. James, or 'Little St. Jeff's' as he liked to call it, in 1998. It is a place that prosecutors say was used by Epstein to sexually abuse women and girls. But the physicists who visited the island say they saw none of that during their short stay.
The boat dropped off the scientists at the beach. Peebles said he remembers being met at the island by someone he described as 'a guide,' who cautioned the physicists, 'Don't go wandering off into the island.'
The group had its picnic near the Caribbean Sea. Guth said some scientists went inside Epstein's house just to use the bathroom."
The reference to Guth is a reference to MIT physicist Alan Guth. In the article we see a big picture of him. Some of my more suspicious readers may scoff at Guth's claim that the scientists only went to Jeffrey Epstein's house to use his bathroom.
I don't know what happened during the visit of these scientists to Jeffrey Epstein's house on Jeffrey Epstein's island that is now very widely regarded as being a site of sex trafficking and pedophile child abuse. But I do know that the NPR is stating a half-truth when it describes Guth as "the physicist who first proposed the theory of cosmic inflation, a concept that has become a pillar of modern cosmology." Guth did first propose the theory of cosmic inflation. But that theory is not at all a pillar of modern cosmology. It is instead a dead-end never-well-supported theory that for 46 years has caused cosmologists to waste endless man-years of time.
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 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.
It is utterly false that Guth's cosmic inflation theory is a pillar of modern cosmology. Cosmology is the study of the origin of the universe and the large-scale structure of the universe. That study can get along just fine without Guth's utterly unnecessary theory about exponential expansion occurring during the first second of the universe's history. The Big Bang theory does not need the theory of cosmic inflation, which is an utterly superfluous addition to that theory.
Within the study of cosmology, cosmic inflation theory has long 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 in 2024, 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 produced 7457 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 produced 4601 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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