Recent content by peter.mason3

I notice that Brian Greene, in his Fabric of the cosmos, is pretty definite that the Steinhardt and Turok cyclical model will ultimately run down due to entrope build up and quantum mechanical considerations. I was surprised - he is usually so careful, that I guess this must be the definite...

Hi Turbo, "Every cosmological model is unproven." But you would admit that many cosmologists consider the standard big bang model proven, whether you agree or not with this. But my point was rather that infinity is pretty unprovable. Your solution to Olbers paradox seems tricky in...

There's your problem. The infinite universe is unproven, and comes with a number of problems - contradictions - known since Newton's time. Newton proposed God held the stars from universal gravitational collapse. Trying to get round Olbers paradox, as Turbo-1 tried to do above, leads to some...

Hi Garth, I think Warren is right. I was just looking up what Hawking and Penrose said, if it helps. In Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Hawking writes, “As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasised,” a good theory is characterised by the fact that it makes a number of predictions...

Scienitific method This is where Eric Lerner starts to go wrong. Its a simplistic philosophy which Lerner shouldn't take as a guide. In practice science does not proceed in this fashion. Both Stephen Hawking and more recently Penrose (2005) have said so. Without going into it, it is the...

thanks! Hi ZZ! Thats the best answer I could have hoped for. Thanks for taking the time. It's not me but the others I worry about! I wanted to say - but was worried about not knowing enough about quantum effects - this meson exchange thing - that two hundred years ago this year John...

more info: Heisenberg's 'exchange force' Background info: The author says: . The author has been reading B Hoffman's The strange story of the quantum, and may have picked it up from there, or may have misrepresented it from there. The next bit is definitely wrong: "Only in this way is...

I noticed someone posted on the internet (not on PF of course!) a largely senseless attack on science which contains a discussion of quantum mechanics and the view that neutrons change into protons and protons into neutrons in what they called a ceaseless exchange of identity. I think it's...