That's so rich LOM....do you really think I find your scientific understanding credible?
It's my job.
Someone who posts a couple of copy and paste equations purporting to refute a peer reviewed paper
There are hundreds of such papers published all the time. I'm not refuting it, as once again it is untestable. If you would like me to upload a dozen or so similar papers, all peer-reviewed and all concluding different things about the origins (or lack thereof) of the big bang, I'd be more than happy to.
before an audience of non-first class mathematically skilled anonymous posters
How does the audience factor into this? All you are claiming is that you can't evaluate my argument any more than you can understand paper. However, this isn't the only place that I've critiqued such articles, and one such place is both public, not anonymous, and the audience consists of other researchers. And you can read many another critique there or at my blog.
and which paper got world media attention, and distribution..
That's the problem. Popular science, particularly as it exists in the forms of online or print articles in general magazines, newspapers, etc., rely on methods and are of a nature diametrically opposed to the sciences and scientific research. For the media, it's all about getting the latest and newest information, which is great when it comes to politics, events (from local car accidents to warfare), and so forth, but is terrible for when it comes to scientific research. For scientists, peer-review is at best a way to filter out garbage, and at this even the best fail: see
Retraction Watch ("Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process"; their blog is far more well-known than mine and far older, but is somewhat akin, and they recently referred to one of my blog posts). Retractions are when a journal has to "retract" (unpublish) its peer-reviewed papers, because it turns out that they are garbage. As for the ones that are neither retracted nor published for bad reasons (such as a journal with a reputation for publishing questionable research, which
Physical Review journals are certainly not), they are simply those deemed worthy of the
real peer-review: the receptions and critique of the scientific community. This can take years, even decades.
You may recall the 2012 announcement by CERN that they had found the infamous "god particle", the standard model's predicted particle: the higgs boson. This particle was so well-known that it was discussed/featured in popular sources (from TV shows like
Numb3rs to many a news article) well-before the announcement. When it was announced, the media coverage was explosive. All sorts of claims about how important this discovery, most involving how this discovery practically completed the standard model of particle physics (or actually did). After a few months, one could barely find a mention in any popular sources. Ask yourself why, if this was such an important discovery, we've seen nothing even close to the original coverage about new things known or how this discovery has mattered.
In technical sources, we find a different story:
"While the importance of the discovery of the Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS experiments cannot be easily overstated,
many experimental tests remain in order to determine whether the new particle is truly the Standard Model Higgs boson." (emphasis added)
Yu, F. (2014). Anatomizing exotic production of the Higgs boson.
Physical Review D,
90(1), 015009.
Note that this quote is taken from a paper published in a
Physical Review journal, and is from 2014. Similarly of the 2012 Higgs discovery, "the current precision of its measured properties
does not yet allow one to definitely identify it as the standard model Higgs boson" (Bernardi, G., & Herndon, M. (2014). Standard model Higgs boson searches through the 125 GeV boson discovery.
Reviews of Modern Physics, 86(2), 479. (emphasis added).
I could cite many other such peer-reviewed papers questioning both the nature of the 2012 discovery and the standard model. So where are the media articles "physicists doubt CERN discovered Higgs" or "New research indicates CERN announcement premature" or some similar title? Why, despite hundreds of studies of the 2012 discovery, do we find almost no popular science articles at all?
Because unlike scientists, reporters are interested in what is new, and they already reported the Higgs was found in 2012, making anything about it old news or at best good enough for a single article here and there that focuses on a single study (as your article did) and is quickly forgotten.
I give you the opportunity to convince me you have some substance to you
I'm not interested in whether you believe I have "some substance", but in the nature of popular science reporting vs. actual scientific research (hence my creation of a blog devoted to this and the reason for many of my posts here or the many answers I've given researchers via ResearchGate. If the fact that scientific reporting on something as huge as the Higgs Boson was not only inaccurate but also reveals how unconcerned science reporting is with actual science doesn't convince you that you can't trust such articles, and if you don't want me to show you how many other studies I can provide you that are published by peer-reviewed journals yet disagree with the study your article refers to, then you aren't interested in the study at all. I have no interest in debating the nature of the origins of the universe (or lack thereof) if you have no interest in the actual science literature and what it can and cannot tell us.
I'm going to respond to this only because it can fit what I have said about studies such as the one your article referred to.
First, from a popular science source:
"SLIVERS of a second after the universe was born, it ballooned at nearly the speed of light. This vision of cosmic expansion, called inflation, got a big boost last week with the announcement of the first sighting of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space-time linked to the universe's rapid growth spurt.
The findings, reported by the BICEP2 team, are already helping physicists sort through the mountain of theories for how inflation happened."
Grossman, L. (2014). Cosmic ripples put inflation to the test.
New Scientist.
Now from a peer-reviewed journal:
"The BICEP2 Collaboration’s potential detection of B-mode polarization in the cosmic background radiation (CMB) has justifiably ignited enormous excitement, signaling as it may the opening of a powerful
new window onto the earliest moments of the big bang.
The implications are profound, including a possible confirmation of cosmic inflation and exclusion of rival explanations for the origin and structure of the cosmos." (emphasis added)
Smith, K. M., Dvorkin, C., Boyle, L., Turok, N., Halpern, M., Hinshaw, G., & Gold, B. (2014). Quantifying the BICEP2-Planck Tension over Gravitational Waves.
Physical review letters,
113(3), 031301.
For background, see
Origin of matter and space-time in the big bang.
For even more background and theories concerning the nature of the pre-big bang universe, see
Gasperini, M. (2008).
The Universe Before the Big Bang: Cosmology and String Theory (
Astronomers' Universe). Springer. (interestingly, the author's final chapter begins "The key message we hope to have transmitted to the reader in this book is that there are neither observational data nor incontrovertible theoretical arguments to support the belief that the Big Bang represents the beginning of the Universe, and that before the explosion there was 'nothing'." However, the author also writes in the same chapter "My personal and modest opinion (as far as it may count in this case) is that the Universe was born according to God’s will, with an act of creation having its ultimate and complete purpose in human beings").
For a peer-reviewed paper on another theory of the nature of the pre-Big Bang universe, see
Bars, I., Chen, S. H., Steinhardt, P. J., & Turok, N. (2012).
Antigravity and the big crunch/big bang transition.
Physics Letters B,
715(1), 278-281.
For a skeptical review of this and all other such research, see
Bojowald, M. (2008).
Harmonic cosmology: how much can we know about a universe before the big bang?.
Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science,
464(2096), 2135-2150.
I've also uploaded/attached
Bojowald, M. (2007). What happened before the Big Bang?.
Nature Physics,
3(8), 523-525.
