Re: The Instantaneous Creation of Infinite Space

From: Perfectly Innocent (perfectlyInnocent_at_as-if.com)
Date: 07/11/04 

Date: 11 Jul 2004 06:41:27 -0700

carlip@no-physics-spam.ucdavis.edu wrote in message news:<ccc95a$t8b$1@woodrow.ucdavis.edu>...
> In sci.astro Perfectly Innocent <perfectlyInnocent@as-if.com> wrote:
> > carlip@no-physics-spam.ucdavis.edu wrote in message news:<cc9h5j$318$1@woodrow.ucdavis.edu>...
>
> [...]
> > > Furthermore, the "exotic" topologies Luminet talks about are all FRW
> > > cosmological models -- specifically, quotient spaces of standard simply
> > > connected FRW models by finite groups.
>
> > There is nothing "exotic" about the FRW cosmological models according
> > to Luminet. He writes:
>
> > "Such fruitful ideas of cosmic topology remained widely ignored by the
> > main stream of big bang cosmology. Perhaps the Einstein-de Sitter
> > model (1932), which assumed Euclidean space and eluded the topological
> > question, had a negative influence on the development of the field.
> > Almost all subsequent textbooks and monographies on relativistic
> > cosmology assumed that the global structure of the universe was either
> > the finite hypersphere, or the infinite Euclidean space, or the
> > infinite hyperbolic space, without mentioning at all the topological
> > indeterminacy."
>
> This says nothing either way about whether these topologies are "exotic."

Historically, the FRW cosmological models meant, to the majority of
the pre-1990 mainstream relativists, just the 3 possibilities that
were cited by Luminet:

"Almost all subsequent textbooks and monographies on relativistic
cosmology assumed that the global structure of the universe was either
the finite hypersphere, or the infinite Euclidean space, or the
infinite hyperbolic space, without mentioning at all the topological
indeterminacy."

Trivially, every other model is "exotic."

> > > See, for example, the September 1998 issue of _Classical and Quantum
> > > Gravity_,
>
> > How many physicists are reading your journal and how many physicists
> > still trust their outdated GR textbooks?
>
> The papers in that issue have a total of more than 250 citations. The issues
> are certainly known to most people working in the field. The paper by Cornish,
> Spergel, and Starkman on the possibility of actually detecting nontrivial
> topology by looking at the CMBR generated a great deal of excitement; it's
> been cited more than 70 times, and made Science News, Scientific American,
> and a bunch of newspapers. So did the recent observational results that
> rule out large numbers of topologies.
>
> This is close to the field I work in, and I know many of the people involved.
> It's true that 20 years ago, most people in general relativity and cosmology
> didn't pay much attention to three-manifold topologies. But things have
> changed *drastically* in the past couple of decades, and now it's a standard
> part of research.

I don't believe that relativists deserve any credit for eventually
adopting a correct perspective when history clearly demonstrates their
dogged determination to evade simple mathematical facts.

Every outrageously pretentious charade must end.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9804/9804006.pdf
http://groups.google.com/groups?&selm=40eaf3cb%241%40news.sentex.net

Eugene Shubert

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