Science Forums 2

[coldcreation]

[QUOTE=C1ay]Fair warning.

Mr. C1ay, stay cool,
I have to tell you that I don't even have an agent yet. I just finished it a couple of days ago... if ever this kind of work can be finished. I think it's an ongoing process. The reason I'm on line now is to see if anyone can pock a hole in my suggestions. For now I've posted quite a few ideas. I'm still waiting for some constructive criticism.

I don't my a little hostility from unknown people out there, but it's kind of easy to do that. Much more difficult it is to argur rationally about important topics, such as the cosmological constant and its implications for any theory of the cosmos.

Let's see what happens. I'll give it a shot for a couple more days, then I'll find another solution for some critical input.

For now, here is something to chew on: Richard S. Ellis (Caltech) has studied the ultra deep images in detail. One of the outstanding features of the ‘early’ universe is that galaxies out to redshift 7 appear to have normal stellar populations. These are not the big, bright, ultra-heavy 500 solar-mass 1st generation stars thought to have reigned at the time. Moreover, galaxies are fairly evolved. This means that those distant galaxies formed at an epoch assumed to be the dark age—detrimental evidence to big bang cosmology.

Also: The fudge factor, as the term was long known, has had many looks in its nine decades of life. Everyone agrees, however, that its last facelift was a disaster. The ugly conundrum is best summarized in the language extracted from a passage of The Accelerating Universe by Mario Livio, written in a clean, forthright, propulsive style:

“What exasperates the situation is the fact that…the most natural value theoretically expected for the contribution of the vacuum energy to omega is about 10 (to 123 power), while the measured value appears to be 0.6 to 0.7. Thus apparently by some mysterious process, the contribution of the virtual particles of the vacuum has been striped from its most natural value to 123 decimal places, leaving only the 124th place intact…thereby violating a basic requirement for beauty…in principle, the situation could be much worse than we think. Within the errors that are still possible in the values of the different contributions to omega, it could be that those contributions add up (God forbid!) to an omega (total) of 0.9 or 1.1, rather than 1.0. If this were the case, then even the most basic prediction of inflation in its simplest form would be jeopardized. I will ignore here such horrifying possibilities, simply hoping that nature has some mercy on us in our attempts to understand it…It is therefore not impossible that the prejudices against a dominant contribution by the cosmological constant merely reflects our present ignorance concerning where the ultimate theory is going to lead us…What does it all mean? Is it possible that we have come all this way, where in every step along the path our belief in the beauty of the universe has only been strengthened, to see it all collapse at the very end?” (Livio 2000, p. 192, 194, 195)