Dear James:
You commented on my essay:
"...that is, if we are willing to trade our preconceptions about what's logical for Nature's logic. "
Just getting started on your essay. Find it very remarkable that you are in possession of Nature's logic. Perhaps?! "
My reply is:
I certainly am not 'in possession of Nature's logic'. My point is that we tend to cling to what to us seems logical rather that to what is logical. Our logic isn't some infallible ability to distinguish sense from nonsense, but, evolved in a long history of trial-and-error, at best is but a poor reflection of nature's logic, which is what we want to decipher. Science is not about interpreting observations to fit our ideas about what is logical, a logic which may very well be based upon preconceptions, but about remaining alert for signs which may prove our assumptions wrong, our ideas of what is logical. The fact that every major breakthrough in physics was a conceptual revolution, a break from old, trusted assumptions and ways of looking at things, should help keep an open mind, which in practice is very difficult, as Max Planck found:
''A new scientific truth doesn't prevail by convincing its adversaries and show them the light, but rather because its opponents die out and a new generation grows up which is familiar with it.''
Though we have found it logical for millennia to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, it took much effort to trade the preconception that the Sun revolves about the Earth for Copernicus' view, for Nature's logic. I'm afraid that Big Bang Cosmology similarly represents a completely obsolete, pre-Copernican view on reality. To me what happens in present cosmology is very much like an alien society where the belief that their own planet is at the center of the universe is a truth which under no circumstances is to be relinquished. As a result the alien cosmologists must dream up an artificial, far-fetched, complicated hypotheses to explain things, complete with equations to enable them to predict motions of stars and galaxies and at the same time keeps that illusion intact, so their equations must in some way be convoluted to be able to correct for the erroneous belief. If observations are made which seem to contradict this belief, additional hypotheses are dreamed up to circumvent or to 'explain' away such observations, just like the cosmic inflation and dark energy hypotheses were invented just to save the fatally flawed big bang hypothesis.
What I want to do is break the taboo by showing a how things look like from a different vantage point, where no far-fetched hypotheses have to be thought up to explain observations. Though physics shouldn't be a playground for philosophy but a domain for statements which can be experimentally tested, some philosophical insights can have a huge impact on physics if they concern the interpretations of observations, even if they aren't verifiable by experiment, like the question whether the speed of light refers to a velocity or to a property of spacetime.
Anton