Stephen Hawking and Colleagues Write Angry Letter Defending Theory
Proving a theory is always difficult, even for the world’s top physicists. In February of this year, three of the world’s top physicists decided to try and disprove the cosmic inflation theory.
Proving a theory is always difficult, even for the world’s top physicists. In February of this year, three of the world’s top physicists decided to try and disprove the cosmic inflation theory. As a result, they’ve had the other 33 world’s top physicists, including Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, Reiner Weiss, Alan Guth and Lisa Randall arguing back against this.
The cosmic inflation theory was first proposed by Guth back in 1980. It explained how the expansion of the Universe accelerated so quickly after the Big Bang and went on to describe how galaxies were produced by these quantum fluctuations. The trio criticizing the theory were Princeton physicist Anna Ijjas, Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb, and physicist Paul Steinhardt. “We should not just accept the assumption that inflation happened, especially because it does not offer a simple explanation of the observed features of the universe,” wrote the trio.
“Inflationary cosmology, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method… Some scientists accept that inflation is untestable but refuse to abandon it. They have proposed that, instead, science must change by discarding one of its defining properties: empirical testability,” the three continued.
It was that last part that upset Guth and the others the most and in response they said, “[The authors] close by making the extraordinary claim that inflationary cosmology “cannot be evaluated using the scientific method” and go on to assert that some scientists who accept inflation have proposed “discarding one of [science’s] defining properties: empirical testability,” thereby “promoting the idea of some kind of non-empirical science.”
With almost any theory there will always be someone who disagrees and because we know very little about the Universe it’s almost to be expected that there’s opposition. But, that shouldn’t stop anyone from exploring possibilities. He commented, “The fact that our knowledge of the universe is still incomplete is absolutely no reason to ignore the impressive empirical success of the standard inflationary models.”
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Rachel Kowalski
Rachel Kowalski is the Cybersecurity Analyst at TrendinTech, where she covers vulnerabilities, ransomware, supply chain attacks, nation-state operations and the security rules shaping organizations in the United States and Europe. Before moving into journalism she worked as a threat intelligence analyst at a security vendor and later reported for CyberScoop and the security desk at Wired, covering the SolarWinds compromise and the ransomware wave that hit hospitals and pipelines. Rachel holds a Master of Science in Cybersecurity from the Georgia Institute of Technology and attends Black Hat and DEF CON in Las Vegas each year, where she follows research from the security community. She writes to make risks and countermeasures understandable to people who are not specialists.
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