I thoroughly enjoyed the article.
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Regarding the scoffers — people should be skeptical of each and every result they are told about science — it’s the only way to truly understand how it works. It’s just unfortunate that the tone is less than friendly.
I remember that when first encountered Euler’s Identity, I believed it was bullshit. “How could you raise e to some imaginary number, and how would it ever get to -1?”
I thought it was like some poem with symbols, not something with a truth value. When a few years later I got an explanation, I was much more able to understand why it was true and why it was important because I had good reasons to believe it false.
I was similarly skeptical about the red shift when I encountered it about the same time. “All this from the color of light? There must be a lot of other explanations.”
However, if you go through the steps, it isn’t just the color of light. There is a huge body of corroborating evidence — spectra, Cepheid variariables, all this stuff. At the end, it seems impossible to come up with another mechanism that explains all the data.
In Isaac Asimov’s popular science writing, each claim that he made was backed up by a specific experiment or observation. “We know that the electron is ‘left-handed’, because of this and this and this and this.” He answered the question, “Why do we know this to be true?” as he went.
Even though was familiar with the material in the article, I found myself asking, “How do we know this is true? This is a long time ago. If I were trying to convince a skeptical third party that this were true, how would I go about it without saying, ‘Some guy on the internet told me…’?”
I hasten to add that I’m not expressing doubt here as to the truth value of what you are presenting — I’m complaining that the article describes what is today believed to be true, but doesn’t really present the case for why this so — what experimental evidence led us to conclude that this model of the early universe is accurate.
