Periodically Repeating "Big Bang Was Not the Beginning" Story Never Has Substance

The fact that our universe seems to have suddenly originated is one of the most important facts that a human can learn, and also a fact with the utmost philosophical significance.  To understand the importance of this fact, we can consider what positions were taken before it was discovered that the universe suddenly originated. The principle philosophy of ancient materialism was a philosophy called atomism or Epicureanism.  There survives from antiquity one great literary work stating this philosophy, the famous work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. In that book Lucretius denied all claims of purposeful teleology in nature, and states the doctrine that the universe has always existed. Early in the work he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

Such a doctrine was very convenient for a materialist such as Lucretius. For one thing, it allowed him to deny that there was ever any purposeful creation event in which the universe began, something he did not want to believe in.  Secondly, the doctrine allowed him to suggest a possible explanation for how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order.  The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms,  combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time.  Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura:

"So much can letters by mere change of order

Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms

Can effect more combinations, out of which 

All different kinds of things may be created."

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock principle of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences  ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation.

Believers in an eternal universe got a rude surprise in the twentieth century. Scientists discovered that our universe had a sudden beginning, seemingly about 13 billion years ago, in an event they called the Big Bang.  There were two types of observations that established this idea. The first were a great number of observations of galactic redshifts establishing that the entire universe was expanding.  The second type of observations were observations of what is called the cosmic background radiation. The scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation, made around 1965.  Since then fancy space satellites have observed this radiation in great detail. The cosmic background radiation is a type of radiation that was predicted before 1965 as a consequence of a universe that had a hot, dense beginning.  

The discovery of the Big Bang was a very great blow against all those who believe that human existence is accidental or that the universe is accidental. The rather unfortunate term "Big Bang" is somewhat misleading, because it causes some to imagine something like a giant bomb that exploded. The theory actually depicts no such thing, but something far more radical: the idea of all of the matter and energy in the universe arising from an infinitely small mathematical point. It is rather hard to imagine anything that could be more suggestive of a universe being purposefully created out of nothing.   

The Big Bang is a thorn in the side of the modern materialist scientist. Such a scientist wants to believe that the universe has existed forever, because if the universe had existed forever, it takes off the table all talk of the universe being specially created by some divine power.  But, contrary to the wishes of materialist scientists, nature is telling us that the universe has not existed forever. 

It is therefore no surprise that we occasionally get some science news articles giving us what we might call "cosmic beginnings backlash."  There is a type of article that shows up every several months on the science news sites. It is an article that attempts to tell a "the cosmic origins story has been revised" narrative.  The article may claim that now scientists are not so sure that the Big Bang was the beginning. Or, more deceptively, the article may attempt to insinuate that the idea of a sudden cosmic beginning is no longer maintained by most cosmologists. There is never any substance in the articles of this type that periodically appear.  No actual news is being reported. All that is going on is a little "clouding the waters" analgesic activity trying to make atheists feel a little better. 

The latest example of this type of story is an article in the frequently misspeaking and frequently misinforming BBC Science Focus site, an article entitled "Scientists now think we CAN know what came before the Big Bang." The title is bogus, and there is nothing of any substance in the article. We have this deceptive subtitle:

"New theories from leading physicists offer compelling possibilities about what existed before the early Universe. One thing they’re agreed on is that the Big Bang wasn’t the start."

The subtitle is deceptive because no new theories are discussed, and none of the theories mentioned are theories describing a state before the Big Bang with any credibility. No one advancing such wildly speculative theories seems to actually claim that anything can be known about some state before the Big Bang. The theories mentioned are the cosmic inflation theory, something called loop quantum gravity, something called causal set theory, something called horava gravity, something called the epkyrotic universe, cosmic natural selection or cosmological natural selection, a cyclic theory of Paul Steinhardt and a cyclic theory of Roger Penrose.  All of these theories have been around for many years. 

• Cosmic inflation theory has been around since about the year 1980, wasting endless millions in research money without producing any results. Cosmic inflation theory is not a theory of something happening before the Big Bang. It is a theory that something special (exponential expansion) happened during a tiny fraction of the first second of the Big Bang. Cosmologist Ethan Siegel likes to pull a very misleading hairsplitting trick in which he redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it is defined as everything that happened at the beginning of the universe after the first tiny fraction of a second. That is misleading trickery, designed to sneak in some illegitimate claim of "before the Big Bang." The BBC article tries a little of the same empty semantic trickery, saying, "Therefore, if we use the Hot Big Bang definition (which most physicists believe we should), then inflation must be considered a pre-Big Bang scenario." No, the cosmic inflation theory is a theory of what happened during the first second of the Big Bang, and is not a theory of something before the Big Bang. 
• Loop quantum gravity is a theory that has been around since at least 2002, and is some version of quantum gravity, which is well-known to be a groundless never-well-established swampland of speculation. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Loop quantum gravity was chosen by only 5%. 
• Causal set theory is another version of quantum gravity, and since quantum gravity is a very much a "castle floating in the clouds" type of thing, it is premature to grant any weight to causal set theory. The theory dates from 2008, as shown here. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Causal set theory was one of the choices, but 0% chose that choice. 
• Cosmological natural selection is a very silly theory that I have discussed in four posts dating back to 2014.  The theory was some nonsense about black holes spitting out universes, which failed to ever explain how that could happen. The author of the theory (Lee Smolin) stated in a 2004 paper (page 38) that the theory made a firm prediction. He stated, "There is at least one example of a falsifiable theory satisfying these conditions, which is cosmological natural selection. Among the properties W that make the theory falsifiable is that the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses. This and other predictions of CNS [cosmological natural selection] have yet to be falsified, but they could easily be by observations in progress.” By now this prediction has been falsified. A 2019 news story told us that a neutron star has been discovered with a mass of 2.17 solar masses. A Google search for "most massive neutron star" will tell you that one neutron star (the "black widow pulsar") has a mass of 2.35 solar masses. Smolin now seems to have lost interest in his cosmological natural selection theory, which never actually explained how a universe could be born from a black hole. 
• Horava gravity is another version of quantum gravity, and at present no theories of quantum gravity have any credibility. The theory dates from 2009, so it is not a new theory. The wikipedia.org article on the theory states, "Observations of gravitational waves emitted by the neutron-star merger GW170817 contravene predictions made by this model of gravity." The article makes no mention of the theory predicting a state before the Big Bang. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Paul Steinhardt. It's something called the ekpyrotic universe theory, and has existed since 2001.  The theory has not attracted any support outside of Steinhardt and his handful of collaborators. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Roger Penrose. It is something called conformal cyclic cosmology, and has since existed since the year 2012. The theory has not attracted any substantial number of supporters. 

None of the speculations mentioned above have any substance, because none are supported by observations. It is intrinsically impossible that there could ever be any observations supporting some theory of what happened before the Big Bang. The reason is that the Big Bang was a state of such extreme heat and incredibly high density that any traces of a state before the Big Bang would have been wiped out. 

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," or to look back prior to such a moment. 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," or to ever get signals from a time before the Big Bang. Such an impossibility is one reason why all theories of a state before the Big Bang are pseudo-science. Because no such theory can ever be verified or falsified, no such theory should be called scientific.  

Be Suspicious When Materialists Use Metaphors or Analogies

Materialists are always using metaphors or analogies to try to spread their ideas.  The figures of speech they have used are often misleading. Frequently repeated metaphors or analogies of materialists include the following:

"DNA is a blueprint for building bodies." It would be charitable to call this  a misguided metaphor, and avoiding such charity you can simply call the claim a lie. As discussed here, DNA does not contain any specification of the anatomy of a human, and does not even specify the structure of any of the cells that make up a human body. Even the building blocks of cells (organelles) are not specified by DNA. 

"Evolution is a blind watchmaker." A watchmaker is an agent that has the intention of creating a very complex device, along with knowledge of how to create such a device. Darwinian evolution has neither any intention nor any knowledge of how to construct things it has not yet invented. So this metaphor is profoundly misleading. 

"Evolution is a tinkerer." A tinkerer is a person who engages in trial and error changes in a device, with the intention of making improvements but without a plan. The only changes a tinkerer makes are changes he thinks may make an improvement. So, for example, a tinkerer may fiddle with the dials or knobs on his furnace, but will never try something like yanking out a pipe. Lacking any intention of making improvements, and lacking any policy of "only make changes that might improve things," Darwinian evolution is not a tinkerer. 

"Your brain is a computer." Human beings are able to do mathematical operations and remember things, but the brain bears no resemblance to a computer. In the post here I discuss seven things found in computerized systems that perform fast retrieval. The brain has nothing like any of these seven things.  Trying to explain human understanding, consciousness and experience with the idea that the brain is a computer is nonsensical, because computers don't understand things, are not conscious, and do not have experiences like human experiences.

"Arising from neural activity, the mind is like the scent that rises from the bubbling soup." This is a profoundly misleading analogy. Consisting of gaseous vapor, a soup scent is a disorganized physical thing that arises from another disorganized physical thing (a soup). But the mind is not a physical thing, and things such as your memory and thoughts can be very organized.  There are very good reasons for disbelieving that the mind arises from the body, and even if it did, that would be a case of something organized arising from a physical thing that is also extremely organized (the body), not a case of something disorganized arising from something disorganized.  

"Science is like a game that has special rules."  This claim is used by people who try to argue you that the "game of science" involves special rules rather comparable to board game rules such as the Monopoly game rule that you get $200 whenever passing "Go" or the chess game rule that bishops can only move diagonally. Such persons tell us that the "game of science" involves rules such as the rule that you must always assume natural causes, that it is forbidden to admit the possibility of mysterious human powers such as ESP, that you cannot admit the possible of invisible spiritual causes, and that you can never admit that what looks so much like design in biology really is purposeful design.  There are no such rules in science. Science has always been an activity lacking any formal set of procedural rules. In law there are large texts giving written rules of procedure in federal court. No such formal rules of procedure have ever been codified for scientists. Science has always been something with loose rules, little more than basic principles such as "don't fake data" or "document observations carefully." Games such as chess and Monopoly have a formal and precise set of rules that players are supposed to follow. Science has no such codified rules. And so in theoretical physics these days there is pretty much an "anything goes" type of atmosphere where speculation runs amok. 

In a recent post a physicist (Marcelo Gleiser) gives us another example of a misleading  metaphor. Digging up a metaphor that was buried long ago, for very good reasons, the physicist describes the universe's beginning by saying "it all started with a cosmic egg." The post is entitled "The quantum egg that birthed the universe."  Cosmologists are the scientists who study the beginning of the universe and the large-scale structure of the universe. Cosmologists do not typically maintain that the universe began in some state that could ever be reasonably described as a cosmic egg. 

The theory of the Big Bang arose from observations that the universe is expanding. Tracing the history of an expanding universe back in time, going back billions of years ago, cosmologists are forced to assume greater and greater temperatures and greater and greater densities. Can they trace things back far enough to reach some point of stability, where you might postulate the existence of some stable state of matter or energy that  might have existed in a static state, before the universe's expansion began? Not at all. 

It's easy to explain why no such stable state can ever be postulated at the universe's beginning. Let's imagine the universe at some very dense and hot state, a state so hot that it was too hot for atoms to be formed. In such a state of very high density all the universe's matter and energy would have created a tremendously high force of gravity acting to cause the universe to collapse in on itself. The only thing preventing such a collapse was the universe's expansion. If you take away the expansion, you have something like what exists when a very large star runs out of its nuclear fuel, and stops burning. Astrophysicists say that at such a time the star collapses into a state of infinite density called a singularity.  The star becomes not a stable unit of matter with a specific density, but a black hole of infinite density. 

The basic description that cosmologists give of the universe's beginning is therefore not an expansion from some "cosmic egg" but an expansion from a singularity point of infinite density. The schematic diagram below shows the situation at the time of the Big Bang. Only with the expansion of the universe (shown by the black arrows) can you have something that counteracts the enormous inward force of the gravity. Stop that expansion (as in the case of some static "egg") and the inward force of gravity causes everything to very quickly crush into an infinitely dense singularity, like a collapsing very massive star that collapses to become a black hole. 

Of course, cosmologists like to speculate, and they pay their rent by churning out endless speculative models.  So there are thousands and thousands of speculative theories that cosmologists have created speculating about alternate possibilities. But the real question is: what the does the basic data generically suggest? What it suggests is a universe suddenly beginning to expand from a point of infinite density and temperature. 

Such a point cannot be reasonably described as a "cosmic egg." An egg is a stable structure which has within it complex arrangements of matter. Analyzing the proteins in an egg, we would find many complex arrangements of amino acids that have to be just-right to allow the egg to be the starting point of an organism. No such organized arrangement of matter could exist at some earliest state of the universe, which would be no more comparable to an egg than the beginning of a hydrogen bomb explosion would be like an egg. Of course, you could evoke the metaphor of some carefully constructed hydrogen bomb as being the "egg" of an H-bomb explosion. But that would be the careful design at the beginning that materialists such as Gleiser wish to avoid. 

In the paper "Did the Universe Have a Beginning" by Tufts University scientists Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, the authors describe several speculative scenarios, one of which they call the scenario of an "emergent universe."  They describe this speculative scenario like this: "This universe can be thought of as a 'cosmic egg' that exists forever until it breaks open to produce an expanding universe."  At the end of the paper we have a short section entitled "Did the Universe Have a Beginning?" The authors give this as their answer to the question of their paper title:

"At this point, it seems that the answer to this question is probably yes. Here we have addressed three scenarios which seemed to offer a way to avoid a beginning, and have found that none of them can actually be eternal in the past. Both eternal inflation and cyclic universe scenarios have H_av > 0, which means that they must be past-geodesically incomplete. We have also examined a simple emergent universe model, and concluded that it cannot escape quantum collapse. Even considering more general emergent universe models, there do not seem to be any matter sources that admit solutions that are immune to collapse." 

It seems that there could not have existed any "cosmic egg" at the beginning, because such a thing would have been too prone to the kind of collapse the paper refers to, something comparable to what happens when a very massive star very quickly undergoes a gravitational collapse to become a black hole. Gleiser's assertion that "it all started with a cosmic egg" is not a correct description of the Big Bang, and such language is not typically used by today's scientists who study the Big Bang.  

Another way in which materialists try to avoid a beginning of the universe is by theories of a cyclical universe. There is the theory that the universe's current expansion is only one of an infinite series of cycles, each consisting of an expansion of the universe (lasting billions of years) followed by a contraction of the universe (lasting billions of years). In his 2021 paper "Three Impossible Theories," the well-known physicist Leonard Susskind mentions why such an idea of an oscillating universe does not work, referring to the second law of thermodynamics:

"Besides being very bizarre this behavior violates the second law. The eternal oscillations constitute a perpetual motion machine of the third kind, whereas the second law requires the oscillations to eventually dissipate and the system to come to thermal equilibrium."

The idea of a universe that had existed forever was long a pillar of materialist thought. Early in the work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius,  the principle surviving work of ancient materialism,  he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock tenet of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation. Nowadays materialists have to resort to something much flimsier than the notion of an eternally existing universe: the word trick used by Gleiser of using the misleading term "egg" to try to plant in our minds the physically untenable idea of some egg that existed a while or maybe forever before exploding.  They're not candid enough to say: "We don't understand how we get such a lovely universe out of nothing."

A New Speech Taboo for Big Bang Experts?

In 2015 in the New York Times astrophysicist Adam Frank said this: "We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time." But recently Frank changed his tune, when he made the untrue claim that "the Big Bang says nothing about the creation of the cosmos." Not based on any new evidence, or even any new scientific paper, Frank's claim seems like just some bit of scolding finger-wagging that goes against what the majority of experts on the Big Bang have been telling us for decades. Very incorrectly, he says, "Cosmology says nothing about how the cosmos came to be."

Very strangely, Frank begins describing the Big Bang theory as if it was some theory of the evolution of stars and planets. He states this:

"We are often told that the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic creation — that it tells us how the Universe was created out of nothing and went on to evolve into all the galaxies, stars, and planets. The problem with that characterization is that only the second part of it is true."

No, the second part of that is not true. The Big Bang theory only deals with the universe's dense and hot beginning, before there were any galaxies, stars and planets.  Frank repeats this misstatement later, by saying this:

"Big Bang cosmology does not describe the Universe’s creation. It describes what happens after creation. It does so with spectacular success, giving a detailed roadmap for how a super-high-temperature, super-high-density Universe expanded and cooled, leaving us with everything we see today."

No, Big Bang cosmology does describe the universe's creation, and the Big Bang cosmology does not explain how we got "everything we see today." Big Bang cosmology describes the earliest physical state of our universe, a state of very extreme temperature and density. Big Bang cosmology does not deal with the evolution of the universe after its first billion years. 

And it isn't true that either cosmology or Big Bang cosmology has had "spectacular success" in predicting the current state of our universe. This claim by Frank is just another example of scientists doing what they so often do, which is making untrue boasts of having spectacular successes they haven't actually achieved. Such unfounded boasts mainly go on in biology and psychology, but also go on abundantly in astrophysics and cosmology. 

The basic theory of the Big Bang (with or without its optional "cosmic inflation" embellishment) fails to explain any of these things:

(1) The asymmetry of matter and antimatter. A long-standing unsolved problem not solved by the Big Bang theory is known as the baryon asymmetry problem or the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem.  This is why we live in a universe in which matter is billions of times more abundant than antimatter. The Big Bang theory in its current form does not predict such a universe, but instead predicts a very different universe: one with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe."

(2) Why galaxies behave the way they do.  Stars in galaxies have a rotation behavior (in relation to galactic centers) that does not match what is predicted from what we observe about the abundance of ordinary matter in galaxies. Cosmologists have tried to fix this problem by advancing a theory of dark matter, a theory that does not at all derive from the Big Bang theory, and is not any kind of consequence of such a theory. This dark matter theory is in big trouble, as there has been no direct support for it, with dark matter never being directly observed. Dark matter also has no place in the standard model of physics, and many cosmologists say the theory conflicts with observations of satellite galaxies. 

(3) Why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.  Thirty years after the triumph of the Big Bang theory in the 1960's, cosmologists were surprised to discover something that they had not predicted: that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The Big Bang theory predicts an expanding universe, but not a universe expanding at an accelerating rate. To account for the acceleration of the universe's expansion, cosmologists had to introduce a speculation that most of the universe's mass-energy is something called dark energy, which no one has ever seen. Such an idea was not at all predicted by the Big Bang theory.  

(4) Why we got galaxies so quickly. The latest observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show large galaxies existing when the universe was only about 600 million years old, contrary to what cosmologists had predicted before such observations, that such galaxies should have taken more than a billion years to form. 

(5) The current abundances of elements. Dealing only with the early universe, the Big Bang theory does nothing to explain the current abundances of oxygen and carbon, which are believed to have arisen through stellar activity long after the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory does make predictions about the abundances of elements simpler than carbon: hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium. But the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the amount of lithium. This shortfall is called the cosmological lithium problem.  A university press release tells us, "The standard models of the Big Bang that are currently used predict an abundance of Li-7, the main lithium isotope, which is three or four times more than that determined via astronomical observations.

The five items above show that it is way wrong for Frank to claim that the Big Bang theory "describes what happens after creation," and "does so with spectacular success." It was equally incorrect for Frank to be claiming that the Big Bang theory "says nothing about the creation of the cosmos" on the grounds that it does not tell us how we got the matter and energy in our universe. A theory that describes the physical state at the beginning of our universe is a theory that is saying very much indeed "about the creation of the cosmos," regardless of whether it explains why such a beginning occurred. And the Big Bang theory does very literally describe the creation of the most abundant element in the universe,  describing the creation of hydrogen from a non-atomic super-hot "quark soup." 

Frank is right about one thing: the Big Bang theory does not tell us what caused the universe's origin. It simply describes the universe's origin, beginning as a state of seemingly infinite heat and density that seems basically the same as the universe suddenly popping into existence, with such heat and density dropping quickly as the universe expands. And because of a little-known facet of the Big Bang, we will never be able to get any observations that explain such a mystery. 

According to the Big Bang theory, the entire first 300,000 years of the universe's history were a state of extreme heat and density, with the density so great that all light and radiation from the beginning of the universe is hopelessly scattered a trillion quadrillion times.  There are no possible telescopes or scientific devices that will allow us to see back to the first years of the Big Bang. All radiation and rays and photons and waves from the first years of the Big Bang must have been scattered and mangled a billion trillion times over, making it forever impossible to telescopically determine what happened at the very beginning. Scientists may yearn to discover some merely physical cause that produced the Big Bang, but that can never happen. Scientists will merely be able to make unverifiable speculations about a cause of the Big Bang, speculations as unverifiable as theological speculations about the exact number of angels in heaven. 

It sounds to me like Frank is going a bit woke on us, by trying to introduce some new speech rule that cosmologists should not use the word "creation" when referring to the beginning of the universe. That will come as quite a surprise to cosmologists, who have been using the term "creation" in connection with the Big Bang for many years, as you can see from this query listing about 100 cosmology papers referring to creation while discussing cosmic origins. Frank is not actually a cosmologist (one of the scientists who specializes in the study of the early universe and the large-scale structure of the universe), but instead an astrophysicist dealing mainly with stars and galaxies. Cosmologists may not take kindly to him attempting to set up some new speech taboo that they must follow. We can imagine why a scientist might want to scold other scientists for using a phrase such as "creation of the universe," as such a phrase may create theological suspicions. 

Will we be seeing official speech guidelines like the imagined one below?

INSTITUTE OF SCIENTIFICALLY SCIENTIFIC SCIENTISTS
Professors: please examine these new speech guidelines, which you must very carefully tiptoe to be deemed as "ideologically correct."
Forbidden speech: “The creation of the universe occurred 13 billion years ago.”	Approved speech: “Visible matter in space is mostly hydrogen which was suddenly created 13 billion years ago, but please don't call that a creation event.”
Forbidden speech: “Our universe's fundamental constants and laws are very well-designed and very precisely fine-tuned.”	Approved speech: “Our universe looks so very well-designed because the multiverse has fooled  us, with an infinity of universes conspiring to create a huge cosmic illusion."
Forbidden speech: “The biochemistry and physical organization of our bodies is incredibly well-designed.”	Approved speech: “Chance or random mutations have created the gigantic  illusion that our bodies are very well-designed, endlessly acting like some extremely skillful and determined  counterfeiter."
Forbidden speech: “There are two sexes, male and female.”	Approved speech: “Number of sexes? It's like Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors of ice cream.”
Forbidden speech: “Once again scientists failed in their attempt to create life from lifeless chemicals.”	Approved speech: “Although not creating either life or proteins, this experiment further vindicates the belief that life arose from a chance combinations of chemicals.”
Forbidden speech: “Our space observations found amino acids in only negligible amounts of about 1 part per billion.”	Approved speech: “Our observations show that the universe is teeming with the building blocks of life.”
Forbidden speech: “Scientists don't agree on this topic, and they have many different theories about it, which are kind of all over the map.”	Approved speech: “The scientific consensus on this topic speaks loud and clear in a single voice."
Forbidden speech: “Even the simplest living cell requires millions of very specially arranged atoms organized in just the right way.”	Approved speech: “To get life started, you just need some building blocks, or maybe some special spark.”
Forbidden speech: “Very many people have floated out of their bodies and reported traveling through a tunnel towards a mysterious light, or arriving at some realm where deceased relatives were seen.”	Approved speech: “Coincidentally very many people have had the same hallucination that begins with them traveling out of their bodies and ends with them seeing deceased relatives.”
Forbidden speech: “In natural history there are many times when many types of dramatic new biological innovations suddenly occur, such as the Cambrian Explosion.”	Approved speech: “Phenotypic variants can rather suddenly appear, resulting in biological diversification.”
Forbidden speech: “We don't understand the contents of the universe, which doesn't behave like we predict.”	Approved speech: “We understand the universe consists of 70% dark energy, 20% dark matter, and 5% regular matter, and don't accuse us of guessing just because we haven't actually seen any of that dark stuff."
Forbidden speech: “No one understands how a brain could store or instantly retrieve memories.”	Approved speech: “Although we cannot find them by microscopic examination of brain tissue, we may presume memories which last for decades are formed by the strengthening of synapses built from proteins lasting only a few weeks, a process we hope to understand one day after discovering some incredibly complex 'neural code' we still can't find.”
Forbidden speech: “No one understands how a brain could think, decide or imagine."	Approved speech: “We think we understand how a brain thinks: that it computes electrically, like a computer, like some strange computer with no software we can find. But don't be concerned when we zap brains with electricity or high-intensity MRI magnetic fields which would instantly destroy all data on a computer.”
Forbidden speech: “Psychical research and research on savants show the human mind is something of oceanic depth,  with a gigantic wealth of little-understood powers and capabilities.”	Approved speech: “We're all pretty much just monkey minds. Trust this statement, though it comes from little more than a monkey mind.”

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.  

Scientists Fail to Correctly Predict Some of the Universe's Element Abundances

The readable posts of widely read cosmologist Ethan Siegel can be read at forbes.com and realclearscience.com. Siegel sometimes makes extremely dubious statements about the Big Bang, the universe's sudden origin in a hot dense state. Contrary to what has been maintained by his fellow cosmologists for decades, who have always spoke of the Big Bang as being the very beginning of the universe, happening at Time Zero, Siegel has again and again tried to redefine the Big Bang as something that came after the beginning, after a period of exponential expansion called "cosmic inflation" (as he does in his most recent post). There is evidence that the universe suddenly began in a hot, incredibly dense state, something like the Big Bang, but there is no observational evidence for such a period of exponential expansion called cosmic inflation.  There is no scientific basis for claiming that the Big Bang occurred at any time after the very beginning, but only evidence that something like the Big Bang occurred at the very beginning of the universe.

Siegel has claimed that the Big Bang theory of the universe's origin has a wonderful record of predictive success.  In an over-enthusiastic article entitled "CONFIRMED: The Last Great Prediction of the Big Bang!" Siegel refers to predictions of the Big Bang theory, speaking as if they were all successful. He states this: "Each one of these predictions, like a uniformly expanding Universe whose expansion rate was faster in the past, a solid prediction for the relative abundances of the light elements hydrogen, helium-4, deuterium, helium-3 and lithium, and most famously, the structure and properties of galaxy clusters and filaments on the largest scales, and the existence of the leftover glow from the Big Bang — the cosmic microwave background — has been borne out over time."  

But the claim he makes about a successful prediction of lithium abundances is not at all correct, according to many other cosmologists, who say that the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the amount of lithium we observe in the universe.  In fact, they tell us the Big Bang theory predicts the universe should have three times more lithium than it actually has.  This shortfall is called the cosmological lithium problem.  A university press release tells us, "The standard models of the Big Bang that are currently used predict an abundance of Li-7, the main lithium isotope, which is three or four times more than that determined via astronomical observations."

Last month a paper by two scientists stated the following (using the symbol ⁷Li  to refer to the main lithium isotope):

"Assuming the best numerical value for the cosmic baryonic density and the existence of three neutrino flavors, standard big bang nucleosynthesis is a parameter-free model. It is important to assess if the observed primordial abundances can be reproduced by simulations. Numerous studies have shown that the simulations overpredict the primordial ⁷Li abundance by a factor of ≈ 3 compared to the observations."

The authors tried hard to search for some nuclear physics solution, using some computer search algorithm. But they came up empty-handed. They report their gloomy result as follows:

"We employ a genetic algorithm to search for simultaneous rate changes in these four reactions that may account for all observed primordial abundances. When the search is performed for reaction rate ranges that are much wider than recently reported uncertainties, no acceptable solutions are found. Based on the currently available evidence, we conclude that it is highly unlikely for the cosmological lithium problem to have a nuclear physics solution."

So the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the amount of lithium in our universe, failing by a factor of 300%. This is not at all the biggest failure of the Big Bang theory. Its biggest failure is that it predicts the universe should consist of equal amounts of matter and antimatter.  We know from experiments in particle accelerators that when two high-energy photons collide at very high speeds, they produce matter and antimatter in equal amounts. In the first instants of the Big Bang, the universe should have consisted of such high-energy photons, colliding with each other constantly, leaving equal amounts of matter and antimatter. A web page of the leading particle physics organization CERN starts out by saying, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But it is known that the amount of matter in the universe is actually at least 10,000 times greater than the amount of antimatter in the universe.  If even a tiny bit of antimatter came into contact with some matter here on our planet, it would create an explosion vastly bigger than a hydrogen bomb explosion. 

There are other cases in which prevailing scientific theories have failed to predict the current distribution of elements in the universe. A recent article at the Daily Galaxy site tells us that current theories fail to correctly predict the amount of gold and silver that we observe in the universe. 

Scientists claim that the Big Bang produced only the four simplest elements: hydrogen, helium, beryllium and lithium.  They explain the origin of some more complex elements such as carbon and oxygen by appealing to effects inside stars, such as supernova explosions. That gets you up to elements with 8 protons in their nucleus:

Hydrogen: 1 proton in nucleus

Helium: 2 protons in nucleus

Lithium: 3 protons in nucleus

Beryllium: 4 protons in nucleus

Boron: 5 protons in nucleus

Carbon: 6 protons in nucleus

Nitrogen: 7 protons in nucleus

Oxygen: 8 protons in nucleus

A supernova remnant (Credit: NASA)

But what about much more complex elements, such as gold? Each gold atom has 79 protons in its nucleus. The Daily Galaxy article tells us that the explanation for atoms of such complexity has been one of colliding neutron stars.  Such an explanation sounds very fishy. We know that neutron stars (consisting of incredibly dense matter) can form when a large star explodes in a supernova explosion. But stars are so far apart (and neutron stars so uncommon) that colliding neutron stars should be a very rare phenomenon.  The number of neutron stars in our galaxy has been estimated as only 2000. 

We read the following:

“ 'Neutron star mergers did not produce enough heavy elements in the early life of the universe, and they still don’t now, 14 billion years later,' said Karakas. 'The universe didn’t make them fast enough to account for their presence in very ancient stars, and, overall, there are simply not enough collisions going on to account for the abundance of these elements around today.'  Instead, the researchers found that heavy elements needed to be created by an entirely different sort of stellar phenomenon—unusual supernovae that collapse while spinning at high speed and generating strong magnetic fields. The finding is one of several to emerge from their research, which has just been published in the Astrophysical Journal. Their study is the first time that the stellar origins of all naturally occurring elements from carbon to uranium have been calculated from first principles."

But be very suspicious when scientists tell you that the previous explanation they were giving you was wrong, and that there's some new explanation -- particularly when the new explanation appeals to something as seemingly farfetched and unlikely as the old explanation. "Unusual supernovae that collapse while spinning at high speed and generating strong magnetic fields" does not sound like a very plausible mechanism for generating gold. And the theorists concede that their new theory falls short in predicting the correct abundances of gold and silver. In the Daily Galaxy article, we merely read the scientists stating, "Silver is over-produced but gold is under-produced in the model compared with observations. " But looking up the relevant paper by these scientists, I find a more specific confession, where they state this: "We find that silver is overproduced by a factor of 6, while gold is underproduced a factor of 5 in the model." Oops, it sounds like our scientists are still failing to predict correctly the universe's element abundances:

Lithium: off by 300%.

Silver: off by 600%.

Gold: off by 500%.

Also, referring to a problem with predictions regarding the abundance of phosphorus in the universe, an article last month in the journal Nature told us, "There still remain strong contradictions between the nucleosynthesis models available and the chemical abundance pattern observed in P-rich stars."  It seems that our scientists can't explain very well the abundances of elements in our universe or the ratio of matter and antimatter in our universe. 

Motivated Reasoning of the “Cosmic Inflation” Storytellers

In 2017 Scientific American published a sharp critique of the theory of cosmic inflation originally advanced by Alan Guth (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory). The theory of cosmic inflation (which arose around 1980) is a kind of baroque add-on to the Big Bang theory that arose decades earlier. The Big Bang theory asserts the very general idea that the universe began suddenly in a state of incredible density, perhaps the infinite density called a singularity; and that the universe has been expanding ever since. The cosmic inflation theory makes a much more specific claim, a claim about less than one second of this expansion – that during only a small fraction of the first second of the expansion, there was a special super-fast type of expansion called exponential expansion. ("Cosmic inflation" is a very bad name for this theory, as it creates all kinds of confusion in which people confuse the verified idea of an expanding universe and the shaky idea of cosmic inflation. The term "cosmic inflation" refers not to cosmic expansion in general, but to the very specific idea that the universe's expansion was once a type of expansion -- exponential expansion -- radically faster and more dramatic than its current linear rate of expansion.) 

The article in Scientific America criticizing the theory of cosmic inflation was by three scientists (Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, Abraham Loeb), one a Harvard professor and another a Princeton professor. It was filled with very good points that should be read by anyone curious about the claims of the cosmic inflation theory.  You can read the article on a Harvard web site here. Or you can go to this site by the article's authors, summarizing their critique of the cosmic inflation theory.

Recently a very long scientific paper appeared on the ArXiv physics paper server, a paper with the cute title “Cosmic Inflation: Trick or Treat?” In its very first words the paper's author (Jerome Martin) misinforms us, because he refers to cosmic inflation as something that was “discovered almost 40 years ago.” Discovery is a word that should be used only for observational results in science. Cosmic inflation (the speculation that the universe underwent an instant of exponential expansion) was never discovered or observed by scientists. In fact, it is impossible that this “cosmic inflation” or exponential expansion ever could be observed. During the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, the density of matter and energy was so great that all light particles were thoroughly scattered and shuffled a million times. It is therefore physically impossible that we ever will be able to observe any unscrambled light signals from the first 300,000 years of the universe's history. So we will never be able to get observations that might verify the claim of cosmic inflation theorists that the universe underwent an instant of exponential expansion.

At the end of the paper the author claims that the cosmic inflation theory has “all of the criterions that a good scientific theory should possess.” The author gives only two examples of such things: first, the claim that the cosmic inflation theory is falsifiable, and second that “inflation has been able to make predictions.” His claim that the theory is falsifiable is not very solid. He says that the cosmic inflation theory could be falsified if it were found that the universe did not have what is called a flat geometry, but then he refers us to a version of the cosmic inflation theory that predicted a universe without such a flat geometry. So cosmic inflation theory isn't really falsifiable at all. So many papers have been published speculating about different versions of cosmic inflation theory that the theory can be made to work with any future observations. Harvard astronomer Loeb says here the cosmic inflation theory "cannot be falsified." 

It is not at all true that the cosmic inflation theory has “all of the criterions that a good scientific theory should possess,” or even most of those characteristics. Below is a list of some of the characteristics that are desirable in a good scientific theory. You can have a good scientific theory without having all of these characteristics, but the more of these characteristics that you have, the more highly regarded your scientific theory should be.

1. The theory is potentially verifiable. While falsification has been widely discussed in connection with scientific theories, it should not be forgotten that the opposite of falsification (verification) is equally important. Every good scientific theory should be potentially verifiable, meaning that there should always be some reasonable hypothetical set of observations that might verify the theory. In the case of the cosmic inflation theory, we can imagine no such observations. The only thing that could verify the cosmic inflation theory would be if we were to look back to the first instant of the universe and observe exponential expansion occurring. But, as I previously mentioned, there is a reason why such an observation can never possibly occur, no matter how powerful future telescopes are. The reason is that the density of the very early universe was so great that all light signals from the first 300,000 years of the history were hopelessly shuffled, scrambled and scattered millions of times.
   
2. The theory merely requires us to believe in something very simple. A very desirable characteristic of a scientific theory is that it only requires that we believe in something very simple. An example of a theory with such a characteristic is the theory that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid collision. Such a theory asks us only to believe in something very simple, merely that a big rock fell from space and hit our planet. Another example of a theory that meets this characteristic is the theory of global warming. In its most basic form, the theory asks us to merely believe in something very simple, that humans are putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that such gases raise temperatures (as we know they do inside a greenhouse). But the cosmic inflation theory (the theory of primordial exponential expansion) does not have this simplicity characteristic. All versions of such a theory require complex special conditions in order for this cosmic inflation (exponential expansion) to begin, to last for only an instant, and then to end in less than a second so that the universe ends up with the type of expansion that it now has (linear expansion, not exponential expansion). We need merely look at the papers of the cosmic inflation theorists (all filled with complex mathematical speculations) to see that the theory fails very much to meet this simplicity characteristic of a good scientific theory.  In a recent post, the cosmic inflation pitchman Ethan Siegel tells us, "If you have an inflationary Universe that's governed by quantum physics, a Multiverse is unavoidable."  What that means is the cosmic inflation has the near-infinite baggage of requiring belief in some vast collection of universes. Of course, this is the exact opposite of the simplicity that is desirable in a good theory.
3. There is no evidence conflicting with the theory. A characteristic of a good scientific theory is that there is no evidence conflicting with the theory. The theory of electromagnetism and the theory of plate tectonics are very good theories, and there is no evidence against them. But there are quite a few observations conflicting with the cosmic inflation theory (the theory of exponential expansion in the universe's first instant). Such observations (sometimes called CMB anomalies) are discussed in this post. The observations are mainly cases in which the cosmic background radiation has some characteristic that we would not expect to see if the cosmic inflation theory were true. A scientific paper says, “These are therefore clearly surprising, highly statistically significant anomalies — unexpected in the standard inflationary theory and the accepted cosmological model.”
   
4. The theory makes precise numerical predictions that have been exactly verified to several decimal places very many times. This characteristic is one that the best theories in physics have, theories such as the theory of general relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, and the theory of electromagnetism. For example, the theory may predict that some unmeasured quantity will be 342.2304, and scientists will measure that quantity and find that it is exactly 342.2304. Or the theory may predict that some asteroid will hit the Moon on exactly 10:30 PM EST on May 23, 2026, and it will then be found (10 days later) that the asteroid did hit the Moon on exactly 10:30 PM EST on May 23, 2026. The cosmic inflation theory does not have this characteristic of a good scientific theory. It makes no exact numerical predictions at all. There have been published several hundred different versions of the cosmic inflation theory, each of which is a different scientific model. Each of those hundreds of models can predict 1000 different things, because the numerical parameters used with the equations can be varied. So the predictions of the cosmic inflation theory are pretty much all over the map, and it is impossible to point to any case in which it made a good precise successful prediction. When advocates of the cosmic inflation theory talk about predictive success, they are talking about woolly kind of predictions (like “the universe will be pretty flat”) rather than exact numerical predictions, and they are talking about one-shot affairs rather than cases in which predictions are repeatedly verified. Many a wrong theory can have an equal degree of predictive success. For example, a bad economic theory may predict various things, and may vaguely predict correctly that the stock market will go up next year.
   
5. We continue to get observational signs that the theory is correct. A desirable characteristic of a good scientific theory is that we continue to observe signs suggesting that theory is correct. The theory of plate tectonics has such a characteristic. Every time there is an earthquake in the “Ring of Fire” region that marks the boundaries of continental plates, that's an additional observational sign that the plate tectonics theory is correct. The theory of gravitation continues to send us observational signals every day that the theory is correct. But we do not get any observational signs from the universe that it once underwent an instant of exponential expansion, nor can we logically imagine how such signs could ever come or keep coming from such a primordial event.
   

So it is clear that Martin's claim that the theory of cosmic inflation has “all of the criterions that a good scientific theory should possess” is not at all true. Saying something similar to what I said above, a New Scientist article puts it this way:

But no measurement will rule out inflation entirely, because it doesn’t make specific predictions. “There is a huge space of possible inflationary theories, which makes testing the basic idea very difficult,” says Peter Coles at Cardiff University, UK. “It’s like nailing jelly to the wall.”

The tall tale of cosmic inflation (exponential expansion at the beginning of the universe) is a modern case of a tribal folktale, told by a small tribe of a few thousand cosmologists. Below is the basic piece of folklore of the cosmic inflation theory:

"At the very beginning, the universe started out with just the right conditions for it to start expanding at a super-fast exponential rate. So for the tiniest fraction of a second, the universe did expand at this explosive exponential rate. Then, BOOM, the universe suddenly switched gears, did a dramatic change, and started expanding at the much slower, linear rate that we now observe."

Why would anyone believe such a story that can never be verified? The answer is: because they have a strong motivation. The arguments given for the cosmic inflation theory are examples of what is called motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is reasoning that people engage in not because they have premises or evidence that demand particular conclusions, but because they have a motivation for reaching the conclusion.

The motivation for the cosmic inflation theory was that people wanted to get rid of some apparent fine-tuning in the Big Bang. At about the time the cosmic inflation theory appeared, scientists were saying that the universe's initial expansion rate was just right, and that if it had differed by less than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, we would not have ended up with a universe that would have allowed life to exist in it. That type of extremely precise fine-tuning at the very beginning of Time bothers those who want to believe in a purposeless universe. 

Saying that the universe's initial expansion rate was fine-tuned is equivalent to saying that the density was fine-tuned, for the requirement is a very precise balancing involving an expansion rate that is just right for a particular density (or, to state the same idea, a density that is just right for a particular expansion rate).  In a recent very long cosmology paper, scientist Fred Adams notes on page 41 the requirement for a very precise fine-tuning of the universe's initial density (something like 1 in 10 to the sixtieth power, which is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth).  On page 42 Adams states that, "The paradigm of inflation was developed to alleviate this issue of the sensitive fine-tuning of the density parameter."  That was the motivation of the cosmic inflation theory -- to sweep under the rug or get rid of a dramatic case of fine-tuning in nature. 

The folklore mongers who sell cosmic inflation stories may believe that they have got rid of this fine-tuning at the beginning. But they actually haven't. They've merely “robbed Peter to pay Paul,” by getting rid of fine-tuning in one place (in regard to the universe's initial expansion rate) at the price of requiring lots of fine-tuning in lots of other places. That's because all theories of cosmic inflation themselves require enormous amounts of fine-tuning. But with a cosmic inflation theory it may be rather less noticeable, because the required fine-tuning occurs in lots of different places rather than in one place.

Judging from a 2016 cosmology paper,  the cosmic inflation theory requires not just one type of fine-tuning, but three types of fine-tuning. The paper says, “Provided one permits a reasonable amount of fine tuning (precisely three fine tunings are needed), one can get a flat enough effective potential in the Einstein frame to grant inflation whose predictions are consistent with observations.” How on Earth does it represent progress to try to get rid of one case of fine-tuning by introducing a theory that requires three cases of fine-tuning? And the estimate of three fine-tunings in the paper is probably an underestimate, as other papers I have read suggest that 7 or more precise fine-tunings are needed.

This is not theoretical progress

We may compare the cosmic inflation pitchman to some person who wants to sell someone in Manhattan a car. “Think of all the money you'll save!” says the pitchman. “You won't have to pay $40 on subways each week.” But what the pitchman fails to tell you is that when you add up the cost of the monthly car payments, the cost of car insurance, and the cost of a garage parking space (because there's so few parking spaces in Manhattan), the total cost of the car is much more than the cost of the subway. Similarly the pitchmen of cosmic inflation theory tell us that the theory is great because it reduces fine-tuning in one place (in regard to the universe's initial expansion rate), and neglect to tell you that the total amount of fine-tuning (adding up all of the special requirements and fine-tuning needed for cosmic inflation to work) is probably far “worse” if you believe that cosmic inflation occurred.

What has been going on with the cosmic inflation theory is very similar to what went on for decades with the supersymmetry theory, a theory which physicists have been fruitlessly laboring on for decades. Like the cosmic inflation theory, supersymmetry was motivated by a desire to sweep under the rug some fine-tuning. In the case of supersymmetry, the fine-tuning scientists wanted to get rid of was the apparent fact of the Higgs boson or Higgs field being fine-tuned very precisely ("like a pencil standing on its point" is an analogy sometimes given).  An article on the supersymmetry theory discusses the fine-tuning that motivated the theory:

One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned.

Similarly, a paper on an MIT server entitled "Motivation for Supersymmetry" states the following (referring to the many new types of hypothetical particles called "supersymmetric partners" imagined by the supersymmetry theory):

Thus in order to get the required low Higgs mass, the bare mass must be fine-tuned to dozens of significant places in order to precisely cancel the very large interaction terms....However, if supersymmetric partners are included, this fine-tuning is not needed.

Physicists erected the ornate theory of supersymmetry, thinking that they were explaining away this very precise fine-tuning  in nature, "to dozens of significant places." But they failed to see that they were just “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” because the total amount of fine-tuning required by the supersymmetry theory (given all of its many different things that had to be just right) was as great as the fine-tuning that it tried to explain away. So there was no net lessening of fine-tuning even if the supersymmetry theory was true.

The MIT paper above says "many thousands" of science papers have been written about supersymmetry. Most of them spun out ornate webs of speculation, as ornate and unsubstantiated as the gossamer speculations of cosmic inflation theorists.  Supersymmetry has failed all observational tests, and now many physicists are lamenting that they wasted so many years on it. Our cosmic inflation theorists have failed to heed the lesson of the supersymmetry fiasco: that trying to explain away fine-tuning in the universe is a waste of time. 

Postscript: A recent scientific article makes untrue comments about the supersymmetry theory.  It amusingly claims that the theory is a "natural outgrowth of a mathematical symmetry of spacetime."  There's nothing natural about the supersymmetry theory, which is a very complex artificial collection of ad-hoc speculations.  The article tells us that the supersymmetry theory is "well established within particle physics,"  ignoring the fact that no evidence for the theory has ever appeared, and that it has failed all observational tests. This is what so many modern scientists and science writers do:  make untrue claims about the evidence status of cherished theories. 

A recent article in Scientific American says the following:

In the big “inflation debate” in Scientific American a few years ago, a key piece of the big bang paradigm was criticized by one of the theory's original proponents for having become indefensible as a scientific theory. Why? Because inflation theory relies on ad hoc contrivances to accommodate almost any data, and because its proposed physical field is not based on anything with empirical justification.