Questions of Conjecture in Physics.

[B-80]

Hey, I am a junior in physics at penn state and am currently in a philosophy class. We have an assignment to argue a question of conjecture(my professor specified he wanted a problem of the "did/does anything actually happen") in our fields(majors). I am kind of struggling to find a good topic for this paper. The basic idea is to play out both sides of the argument and then pick a side(it's more about reasoning skills than actually solving the problem). I am having some trouble picking a good topic for this paper(3-4 pages double spaced).

I have taken some higher level EM and Mechanics classes, but I have yet to really delve into the thicket of the theoretical side(plus they don't teach you anything that is heavily under debate at the Undergrad level).
First I thought the big bang might be a nice topic for this because it's something we can't observe and is put together by third hand evidence/observation. But I am having a lot of trouble finding people arguing against the big bang(other than religious groups). So does anyone know of a nice topic that is accessible to myself with my meager physics knowledge? Something that I can really find a debate on with two equalish sides. Or at least point me towards a list problems with big bang theory...

Thanks in advance.
-Bobak

 

[atyy]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/07/29/are-you-the-center-of-the-universe/

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1005.2165

This is more about the "Cosmological Principle" that the universe is spatially homogeneous on large scales, than the big bang, since at least some of these models still have big bangs http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0804.1787

 

[Fra]

I'd focus on the general structure of theories, and the scientific process.

"did/does anything actually happen"
...
something we can't observe and is put together by third hand evidence/observation.

Is there such a thing as an ultimate first hand evidence? More plausibly I think everything is ultimately about judging evidence at various levels of confidence, and them form an expectation of what did or did not happen.

One may consider how this works. Ie. how does this process of forming a rational expectation from evidence look like?

And is is really possible to tell knowing wether something really happened, or is there simply not difference? Then the question is, what differnce does any expectation make?

If we look at what difference expectations of a human player is, we soon realize we know the answer. Now, what would that mean in terms of physical systems?

/Fredrik