Monday, March 26, 2007

Anti-Big-Bang conference at Imperial College London

A conference will take place from Monday to Thursday:

The organizers are very tolerant so they have also invited people who dare to believe that the data support the standard model of cosmology. ;-)

However, attacks will be the main point. Lawrence Krauss and Subir Sarkar will argue that dark energy probably doesn't exist. (It is probably too dark and can't be seen, and what can't be seen is religion, not science?)

Tom Shanks will argue that the CMB has a bug because we don't see "shadows" of nearby galaxies in it. Alain Blanchard will show that there's no evolution of clusters seen in X-ray data, in contradiction with the theory. Jelle Kaastra and Niayesh Afshordi from Harvard will count the molecules in daily life, and by getting 40 percent more than we see, they will also falsify cosmology. Kate Land and Carlo Contaldi will point out an odd alignment but these people argue that inflation could explain it. Andrew Jaffe will argue that the Universe has an exotic topology. See

As YS has pointed out, a babe in the Universe, Dr Louise Riofrio of the aptly named Cook University, attends the conference and will report about it on her babe blog. She is well-known for her new cosmological theory, "M=t". The "M=t" (mass equals time) version of her theory of the Universe is in Planck units and in a few years, her collaborators will re-discover the Planck units and find this remarkably simple form of her theory of everything.

One of the most impressive virtues of the "M=t" theory is that it works (if you neglect all observations except for this paragraph). Recall that the age of the Universe is 10^{60} Planck times. The volume is thus about 10^{180} Planck volumes. Mutiply by the cosmological constant, 10^{-120} (the number from the C.C. problem), and you get 10^{60} again! In other words, the cosmological constant goes like "rho=1/t^2": the product of the cosmological constant and the holographic screen area equals one in Planck units. I am sure you know why. ;-)

Via Benny Peiser.