Significant theoretical development in BB models?

[Neeyik]

Unfortunately none of my university contacts work in this (or related) fields but we all know that a few regulars here do!

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0605/15bigbang/

Crunch-Bang-Crunch-etc theories have appeared before but to my inexperienced eyes, this work seems to have something more significant about it, even with the restrictions of the model. Can anybody cast a more critical and knowing eye over the article please?

 

[Fred]

Yea this falls in what many like to call the theorists playground. Early, quantum cosmology is (to be nice) rather far removed from experiment and certainly rigorous theoretical microphysics.

The original paper on these bounce solutions I believe goes back to Martin Bojowald.

Anyway generally this falls under the rather large (and IMO badly motivated) treatment of QG known as Loop Quantum Gravity. Its model specific of course.

Anyway, there are plenty of articles around the web praising and criticising this approach to QG, so I won't get into that tired debate. Amongst specialists in the field, its a rather active but a stark minority point of view (the people who work on it are otoh intellectually legit).

 

[KimB]

Yeah, that article seems to present far too much certainty. The simple truth of it is that we can't probe before a certain point, because we don't yet have the experiments to do so. This analysis is just the possible result of one of many candidate theories.