If, for any reason, you decide to start contemplating the world around you (or inside you), you have two choices: You can use your own senses and reasoning to figure it all out, or you can rely on the senses and reasoning of others who did their own contemplating and, you know, wrote stuff down. Both have advantages and disadvantages and there’s nothing preventing you from combining them.
The primary disadvantage of (only) going solo is that there’s a tremendous amount of world to contemplate and you only have so much time in which to do it. On the other hand, there are and have been many more other people than there are of you. Some of those people have equipment that’s really expensive. Some of them spent a lot of time counting shrimps or staring at the moon, irradiating themselves, or being eaten alive by mosquitoes. And, thankfully, a lot of them wrote down how many shrimps they counted, and why they were counting shrimps, and took positions on what varying population densities mean. That’s fantastic. You don’t have to count shrimps. You don’t even like shrimps; they’re weird looking and you’re mildly allergic.
There are a few drawbacks, however, to relying on other people. The scale doesn’t really work if you have to read through all their data and all their methodology. It’s not as big or time-consuming or unpleasant as doing all of it, but it’s still too much to get through. So, you kind of have to rely on the people’s conclusions about what they saw and what they did and what it means. Okay. Fine. Maybe those conclusions were unbiased (ha!). Maybe they were diligent. Maybe people used statistical modelling was that was valid in some real sense. Maybe when they relied on other people’s work, that work was reliable, or, if they assumed facts, those facts were factual. Maybe because they know you can check their work, they did a better job. But, like, you can’t do all the experiments yourself. You can’t check everything. You just sort of have to take some of it on faith. You sure as shit aren’t counting shrimps.
Some of the contemplating you’ve absolutely already done for yourself is about the people in the world around you. Some of those people are stupid. Some are liars. Some are narcissistic, status-seeking, selfish assholes (cf. humans). The distribution of those traits amongst the people who wrote down their conclusions about the shrimps and quantum entanglement or whatever seems about the same as for any other set of people. So, some of the scientists’ conclusions are also stupid or wrong, lazy or fraudulent. And some of them are spot on, but you don’t really know which is which and neither do they, really.
Thankfully, science is set up so that, sort of, over time (centuries often), valid things probably win out. You can have higher confidence in conclusions that stand up to time and challenge. But you don’t live in ‘eventually’. You live now. The smartest people in the world thought some pretty crazy things for pretty long periods of time, often in the face of plenty of evidence and reasoning to the contrary. How you you know they’re right now or that you are?
If your contemplation is running toward the vast scales – what is the universe?, how is it made?, how does it work? – you are in the aforesuggested pickle. The high priests of modern science will give you lots of conclusions (the universe is 13.whatever billion years old, the expansion of the universe is accelerating, etc.). The data is availableish, but vast, and the equipment is expensive on GDP scales, let alone those of personal finance. (A YouTube search for ‘build your own Hubble’ yields results from the charming to the tangentially informative, but will not greatly assist you in constructing a functioning space telescope.) There’s a LOT of room for interpretation, for building faulty logic upon even faultier logic (talking to you, Boltzmann’s brain people). Thus, many of the Cosmology conclusions available to you when contemplating the universe are bizarre or confusing or utterly ridiculous. Some of those have won people Nobel prizes.
How to proceed? We can’t do all the observing and experimentation and concluding ourselves, but the scientists, even the high priests, are going to turn out to have been wrong anywhere from ‘almost all of it’ to ‘a fair bit of it’. How do we form opinions on which things are more likely to turn out to be complete phlogiston? (Excellent gambling advice over the last and next 20 years: take the under on “Are we on the brink of a fusion energy revolution? – like, it may eventually, happen, but unless brink is defined as “at any time in future”, then no, we are not on the brink.)
Science is supposed to be, but rarely is, a conversation. It’s also not really about the collection of testable data and processes, how ever important those are. It’s about the conclusions. We don’t test conclusions with a popularity contest (well, that’s how climate scientists do it, but that’s because their data is still pretty crap). How do we know which current Cosmology conclusions may be useful and which might be actively impeding our understanding of the universe?
Well, one thing we could do is to try and learn from the lawyers (seriously). We could cross-examine these crazy bastards. Poke holes in their arguments. Offer competing theories as a way to test their logic. The kinds of things modern Science seems to do too little of. Being cross-examined on your cockamamie ideas about quantum probability is less emotionally gratifying, it must be conceded, than sharing one’s immense wisdom with the masses on Nova or at some Ted talk. But since there’s a fair chance that your immense wisdom is actually balderdash, we’re going to insist on the cross examining no matter how unlikely the scientists are to agree to be cross examined. If the nonsense stands up to argument, then maybe we can adopt it into our own contemplations. No one has a patent on thinking about the universe. We have just as much right as the scientists. And while, in theory, they are more knowledgeable, what if most of their knowledge is wrong, which history tells us, it is.
The universe is not 13.whatever billion years old.
The second law of thermodynamics is complete tripe.
The universe can’t expand forever, or, if it can, we’re wrong about almost everything else.
The Hubble constant is incomplete or just wrong.
There’s no such thing as infinite anything or a singularity.
A Ride on the Dark Side.
Stop saying “Dark Matter”. Just say, “We don’t know.”
Gravity is a vector, not a “force”.
There is no multiverse.
Pluto is a planet, goddammit!
*All of the foregoing (excepting, obviously, the last), are conjectures not statements of fact (talking to you interwebs). No shrimps were physically harmed in the writing of this webpage. The emotional well-being of shrimps is not something the author can opine on nor, therefore, warrant in respect of the production of this webpage. Several shrimp biologists were treated rather harshly, but if you’re going to build a shrimp treadmill and become marginally and temporarily famous for it, then, you know, you should be able to take a bit of stick about it.
cosmic distance ladder. Instead of scaffolding distances from the solar system farther and farther out, this approach uses characteristics of the cosmic microwave background (the baby picture) to start to scaffold distances closer and closer to us. Moving forward in time, scientists use information about how galaxies are spread out across the universe and—as with SH0ES—supernova data. That came, this time, from the Dark Energy Survey, which aims to observe thousands of supernovae and hundreds of millions of galaxies to understand what dark energy has been like over the history of the universe. This Hubble constant estimate matched Planck s. “It’s kind of nuts how well it agrees,” says Edward MacCauley, the lead researcher. That agreement doesn’t make Planck and the inverse more likely to be right. In both these methods—the forward and reverse distance ladders— supernovae are used as ‘the middleman,’ says Scolnic. So if supernovae are happy to agree with either side, that means the problem isn’t with the middleman. It s something happening at one end. If our model is wrong, it has to be something about how we understand the universe today, or how we understand the universe as a baby, he says.