Poor source and not meaningful.
On the contrary. Strassler is a working theoretical physicist, who worked a CERN, now at Harvard. His site is extremely useful for more accessible articles on physics.
Take a look at his published papers:
Associate, Department of Physics, Harvard University - Cited by 16,674 - quantum field theory - particle physics - string theory
scholar.google.co.uk
On the subject of the BB singularity, although it abounds in pop-science, I know of no current cosmologists who take it seriously any more. Much more relevant is that Matt Strassler doesn't either.
Did the universe begin with a singularity? A point in space and/or a moment in time where everything in the universe was crushed together, infinitely hot and infinitely densely packed? Doesn’…
profmattstrassler.com
I’m not making this up out of my head. Just yesterday I was involved in a long conversation with professors and post-doctoral researchers at Harvard, in which we discussed various exotic mathematical methods for exploring the inflationary epoch and the era before it. The possibility that there really is a singularity at the beginning of the universe never came up once.
Or you can look at papers by the world’s experts — say, one by Alan Guth, a 17-page review of “eternal” inflation (i.e. inflation that continues, at least somewhere in our very large universe, into the infinite future) — and although he devotes some pages to the issue of what might have preceded inflation, the word “singularity” does not appear anywhere in his text.
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Yet all over the media and all over the web, we can find articles, including ones published just after this week’s cosmic announcement of new evidence in favor of inflation, that state with great confidence that in the Big Bang Theory the universe started from a singularity. So I’m honestly very confused. Who is still telling the media and the public that the universe really started with a singularity, or that the modern Big Bang Theory says that it does? I’ve never heard an expert physicist say that. And with good reason: when singularities and other infinities have turned up in our equations in the past, those singularities disappeared when our equations, or our understanding of how to use our equations, improved.
Moreover, there’s a point of logic here. How could we possibly know what happened at the very beginning of the universe? No experiment can yet probe such an early time, and none of the available equations are powerful enough or usable enough to allow us to come to clear and unique conclusions.
The modern Big Bang Theory really starts after this period of ignorance, with a burst of inflation that creates a large expanding universe, and the end of inflation which allows for the creation of the heat of the Hot Big Bang. The equations for the theory, as it currently stands, can be used to make predictions even though we don’t know the precise nature of our universe’s birth. Yes, a singularity often turns up in our equations when we extend them as far as they can go in the past; but a singularity of this sort is far from likely to be an aspect of nature, and instead should be interpreted as a sign of what we don’t yet understand.
