Today you can read Smoot's essay on General relativity. Yesterday I watched Alexei V. Filippenko "Black Holes Explained" in the Great Courses series of the Teaching Company. If you go to their site you can see that Alex is a best seller of that company's products. "Understanding the Universe" is on sale, $570 off. I know comparisons are awful, Alex himself felt uncomfortable when I wrote in this blog sometime ago that he should get the Nobel Prize, the candidates for that prize seem to be Saul Perlmuter and Adam Riess. Nevertheless I can't help to write about the comparison between Smoot and Filippenko.
Both are distinguished professors at the best public institution of higher learning in the US and maybe of the world: the University of California Berkeley. We owe immensely to both men for our knowledge of space; but I think Prof. Smoot has gone farther.
This judgment is a bit unfair because I am using material published today, with something done last year by Alex. Fortunately I am in no committee at Berkeley to decide on the merits of these giants. I do have the right though, to write what I please in my blog; not completely, my wife already scolded me for some language used here. Nobody is an island. Here I go again, putting my foot in my mouth.
Smoot took off from where Verlinde left the gravitational community last December. Gravity is an emergent property of the Universe. Together with Easson and Frampton, he posted a great paper on the Los Alamos electronic archive: Entropic Inflation. On the other hand when I started to tell Alex about Frampton's idea that intermediate mass black holes may solve some of the riddles that he himself had discovered, he didn't seem to want to know. Maybe I did not express myself well, but he rejected Frampton's proposal. He didn't even know about Frampton and the entropic budget argument he has used to explain the acceleration of the Universe. By this I do not mean that black holes accelerate the Universe. Only that they point out to Frampton what is the importance of entropy considerations. Filippenko's discovery allows us now, to consider more seriously the old idea of Andrei Sakharov and others, that Gravity is an Emergent not a Fundamental Field.
In any case, today Smoot publishes an essay that validates the claim that maybe there is no Dark Energy, as Carlos Frenk assumes; all you need to know is that gravity is not a fundamental field of Nature.
The Kings are dead, long live the King.
Newton and Einstein are wrong, Verlinde is right!
Alex gives some exposure to Craig Hogan from Fermilab and GEO 600. Fermilab is a mile or so away from where I am writing this today, maybe Hogan will be right and Verlinde wrong, or maybe both are wrong; at this point any combination is possible, but scientists are betting all the time. My bet is for Verlinde.
Both are distinguished professors at the best public institution of higher learning in the US and maybe of the world: the University of California Berkeley. We owe immensely to both men for our knowledge of space; but I think Prof. Smoot has gone farther.
This judgment is a bit unfair because I am using material published today, with something done last year by Alex. Fortunately I am in no committee at Berkeley to decide on the merits of these giants. I do have the right though, to write what I please in my blog; not completely, my wife already scolded me for some language used here. Nobody is an island. Here I go again, putting my foot in my mouth.
Smoot took off from where Verlinde left the gravitational community last December. Gravity is an emergent property of the Universe. Together with Easson and Frampton, he posted a great paper on the Los Alamos electronic archive: Entropic Inflation. On the other hand when I started to tell Alex about Frampton's idea that intermediate mass black holes may solve some of the riddles that he himself had discovered, he didn't seem to want to know. Maybe I did not express myself well, but he rejected Frampton's proposal. He didn't even know about Frampton and the entropic budget argument he has used to explain the acceleration of the Universe. By this I do not mean that black holes accelerate the Universe. Only that they point out to Frampton what is the importance of entropy considerations. Filippenko's discovery allows us now, to consider more seriously the old idea of Andrei Sakharov and others, that Gravity is an Emergent not a Fundamental Field.
In any case, today Smoot publishes an essay that validates the claim that maybe there is no Dark Energy, as Carlos Frenk assumes; all you need to know is that gravity is not a fundamental field of Nature.
The Kings are dead, long live the King.
Newton and Einstein are wrong, Verlinde is right!
Alex gives some exposure to Craig Hogan from Fermilab and GEO 600. Fermilab is a mile or so away from where I am writing this today, maybe Hogan will be right and Verlinde wrong, or maybe both are wrong; at this point any combination is possible, but scientists are betting all the time. My bet is for Verlinde.
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