Contrabang! #15 One Free Miracle

You Must Not Trust Experiments That Claim The Existence Of Parallel Universes (link)

Nor those that claim the existence of dark energy, but that's another matter. Ethan gives a warning to ongoing research involving parallel universe theories. He cautions that the experiments are prone to false positive results because of poor understanding of the background noise, as occurred in the 1980s when scientists incorrectly determined that they had discovered cold fusion. Why, then, is he so optimistic about the LIGO detection of gravity waves? He should share the same skepticism that the weak signals they've allegedly found are likely just a product of the strong background noise.

Ask Ethan: Can We Really Get A Universe From Nothing? (link)

Ethan fields another difficult question, which is the premise that the entirety of the universe expanded from a single infinitesimal point of pure energy. This seems to contradict the theory for other singularities - black holes - which he has depicted in previous Starts With A Bang! articles as pulling in spacetime. Why does the singularity of the Big Bang instead push spacetime outwards?

His answer relies on dark energy, a mythical force that permeates the universe. He reckons that the primordial universe might have contained much more dark energy than it does today, which drove the expansion of the universe and was converted to normal matter/energy in the process. How was it converted? Of course there is no answer, as no one knows what dark energy even is.

[B]ecause dark energy is a property of space itself, when the Universe expands, the dark energy density must remain constant.

Does this not contradict his musing that there may have been much more dark energy in the past? How could there be more dark energy in the past if the dark energy density must remain constant? Further, this illustrates the major argument against dark energy, which is that it is a perpetual energy device which violates the first law of thermodynamics. Dark energy drives expansion, which creates more dark energy, which creates more expansion....and so on. It cannot be true, but physicists permit all sorts of nonsense so long as it is proceeded by the words dark or black.

Our intuition may not be reliable when we consider the physical concepts of nothing and negative/positive gravity, but that’s why we have science. When we do it right, we wind up with physical theories that accurately describe the Universe we measure and observe.

This is quite amusing, as the different groups can't even agree on the rate of expansion that they "measure and observe." Looking at different stars gives different numbers. But Ethan is quite sure that he has the correct theories to consistently predict the inconsistent measurements being made.

All of this stems from the modern scientists' need to push back the mysteries of existence to a sort of universal wind-up clock that proceeds mechanistically from its initial conditions. Ask them how or why the wind-up clock was set into motion, and they are left grasping at straws, but still are very confident that it all follows logically from that point. As Rupert Sheldrake quips about modern scientists, give them one free miracle, and they'll explain the rest.

Update: William Briggs has taken on this article as well on his blog.