At a conference in 2015, Penrose said :
"inflation isn't falsifiable, it's falsified. ... BICEP did a wonderful service by bringing all the Inflation-ists out of their shell, and giving them a black eye." (...) Penrose's shocking conclusion, though, was that obtaining a flat universe without inflation is much more likely than with inflation – "by a factor of 10 to the googol power!"
Please read about this guy :
Roger Penrose (...) mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics.
I read much more than the average person about it and my experience & education allows me to know how scientific research works. The fact is, not only inflation but Lambda CDM is dead.
There is a lot more to say about it.
With all due respect to Penrose – who is indisputably brilliant – in probability when you start to say things like, "X is
10^10^100
times more likely than Y," it's actually much more likely that there's some flaw in your priors or your model of the system than that such a number is actually reflective of reality.That's true even for really high probability things. Like if I were to claim that it's
10^10^100
times more likely that the sun will rise tomorrow than that it won't, then I would have made much too strong a claim. It's doubly true for things like the physics of the early universe, where we know our current laws are at best an incomplete description.I think what's also great with Penrose is that he doesn't care about money or politics, which are major factors guiding what other physicists will say.
He already proved himself and doesn't need to argue about pity things. He can even allow himself to make some jokes about
10^(10^100)
or talk seriously about it... I wouldn't know.Finally, if I add the immense chance of talking to him this wouldn't be my preferred topic.
Penrose is also pretty controversial. I didn't know he was dead-set against standard cosmology but I'm not surprised.
Most cosmologists still assumed LCDM, at least up until JWST started throwing spanners into the works. Notice the tone the Wiki article takes, it uses words like "believed" instead of "proposes". I'm curious what Penrose prefers.
Edit: It looks like he prefers his own Weyl curvature hypothesis, which I'll have to read up on. This is his subfield so he gets to have big ideas.
I like what you say. So, in a few minutes I will make a new root comment inside this post so you could continue this thread some more with me.