About a year ago, physicist Brian Cox appeared in a video at SpaceWind TV: “Imagine if I told you that our universe has been around forever, even before the Big Bang. It might sound pretty wild, right? Well, hold onto your hats because renowned physicist Brian Cox is on board with this mind-bending idea”. With a major assist from cosmologist Roger Penrose,

The philosophical stakes are high, as Brian Cox explains:

Cox: There are theories now that suggest, as I [2:32] mentioned, that there may be more than one universe and potentially an infinite number. It’s a mind-boggling idea, isn’t it?

And I should say one extra thing: If that’s true, then some of those theories say that what we call the constants of nature — so, things like the strength of gravity, the speed of light, the masses of the particles, can vary from universe to universe.

And then you ask the question, well, why is our universe so perfect for life? Why do stars make carbon and oxygen, the elements that you need for life? Why is everything so beautifully balanced so that living things can exist?

The answer, in these cases, is because, well, every universe exists, every possible combination of the laws of nature exists in different universes … if there are an infinite number of them, it’s inevitable because there’s every possible kind of universe.

And [I] stress that this is very speculative stuff but the first thing I said about inflation, the idea there was this exponentially fast expansion before the Big Bang — if you want to use that language — that’s not speculative, that’s mainstream cosmology

So this is an effort to discredit the known facts of the fine-tuning of the universe for life by asserting “very speculative stuff” about an infinite number of universes, based on the rapid expansion of our universe that culminated in the Big Bang.

Image Credit: rolffimages - Adobe Stock

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon offers an assessment of the claims made in the video:

I’m 5 minutes into the video, and all I’ve heard from Brian and Sir Roger is speculation. Complete and utter evidence-free drug-trips of AI-graphics posing as physics. I’ll keep watching and post the time of the first data.

At 5:56 they mention the James Webb image of the “oldest” galaxy, but they show pictures of other galaxies before they finally [6:15] show the fuzzy red blob. Then they say it supports Sir Roger’s cyclic universe (CCC) theory. It does nothing of the sort, unless you think substituting speculation for a faltering Big Bang theory is support.

As an aside, Sir Roger’s CCC theory relies on two non-physical assumptions.

(1) that black holes can violate thermodynamics by destroying entropy.

(2) that the vacuum can spontaneously make particles.

Both are not just unsupported, but experimentally falsified assumptions. (Not that we have a convenient black hole to stuff entropy into, but we have the math to see what would happen to the galaxy if we did.)

As Bertram Russell pointed out 100 years ago, one bad assumption is all you need to deductively prove you are the pope. And Sir Roger has two.

Betting the farm

Then we segue back to the founder of “inflation” cosmology, Alan Guth himself.

Now I don’t want to denigrate the expertise of these experts, but they have bet the farm on their speculations, and will go to their graves believing that validation lies just around the corner.

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) bet the farm on the unobserved Hawking radiation, which years after his death, remains unconfirmed. So committed was he, that he discarded classical black holes, rather than deny his theory about radiation.

Likewise, Guth’s inflation has gone through 4 iterations and 3 grad student generations with no consistency in sight. He says there’s no explanation for the evenness of the Big Bang, which many refer to as “fine tuning”, leaving his theory as the only non-religious alternative. But his theory is now so complicated and arcane, it employs many more fine tuned parameters than the original one he rejected. Frankly, his baby is ugly, and there’s no reason to favor it.

At 14:00 the narrator then takes Guth’s speculation into speculation squared territory as he moves into the multiverse concept. Note that the multiverse concept makes Sir Roger’s theory wrong, and makes Guth’s theory irrelevant. Yet somehow these more pedantic speculations are intended to ease us into the inner sanctum of the multiverse gnosticism.

Mumbo jumbo

There follows a mumbo jumbo of meaningless phrases, shots of Einstein and General Relativity, and then suddenly at 17:00 we get Neil deGrasse Tyson, a showman lacking only a tophat and cane.

He introduces us to a rather threadbare speculation that the Big Bang is actually a white-hole — the output side of a black hole in another space-time. It’s threadbare because in the last 60 years or so of this speculation, many objections have been raised to it. A newer speculation with fewer critics might have been better. At 17:50 we get more James Webb Space Telescope pictures of galaxies and we are told that “the galaxies are older than the universe”.

No, they aren’t. Rather, they are older than “galaxy-building models” can make them. Which means we need to work on our models, not that we need to redo the Big Bang. In fact, galaxies are a few hundred million years after the BB, and couldn’t invalidate the BB model if they wanted to.

After a review of the Big Bang theory, accompanied by completely irrelevant graphics, we are brought back to Tyson’s discussion of multiverses, and from thence to Sir Roger’s cyclic universes theory (CCC).

(Yes, the theories contradict each other, but the point of this video is not facts or information, but theology.)

Sir Roger talks about a controversial paper from 15 years ago claiming experimental validation of his CCC theory, but the paper was subsequently invalidated by several researchers. It was one of those “weird data analysis” papers like Mann’s hockey stick. With better technique, the effect goes away. I’m not even sure if Sir Roger believes it anymore. We are treated to a poor review of CCC, ending with some speculation about time.

The whole video is such a hodge-podge of physics, speculation and AI graphics, it leaves me feeling like I’ve been on a bad LSD-trip. Which, undoubtedly, is the whole point — that, and the YouTube clicks to get remuneration.

We hear so much these days about the need for more trust in science. Making science sound like a carnival of unlikely stories is not helping.