I watched an engaging BBC4 Horizon programme last night which mostly involved theoretical cosmologists putting forward their own ideas and a few arcane diagrams, and being just ever so slightly, but fairly nicely, dismissive of those of others. \u00a0Not all the ideas on offer seemed sensible, but I remember someone (who seemed to know what they were talking about) once saying that the right question in the quantum world was not \"is this a crazy idea?\", but \"is this idea crazy enough to be right?\".<\/p>\n
The focus of the programme was whether it was sensible to think of what happened before the big bang \u2014 or not. \u00a0Some thought yes, and others no, and some like Roger Penrose had changed their mind, and said how exhilarating it was to do this \u2014 but I knew that, in my much more modest way. \u00a0It was a bit like ESD argumentation, though on a slightly grander scale and with much better pictures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I watched an engaging BBC4 Horizon programme last night which mostly involved theoretical cosmologists putting forward their own ideas and a few arcane diagrams, and being just ever so slightly, but fairly nicely, dismissive of those of others. \u00a0Not all...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}