Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply
wrote in message ...
In article , greywolf42
writes:

I thought that GUTs require omega = 1.0. Are they all wasting their
time?

No GUT ever required Omega_matter = 1 in any meaningful sense. (As I
said before, at most one could argue that inflation---which might be the
consequence of some GUT---could point to Omega_matter + lambda = 1.)

What used to happen is that the GUT guys would come up with their
particle du jour and suggest it as a dark matter candidate, suggesting
that its predicted mass would be about right to explain the "missing
mass", or even make Omega_matter = 1. (Of course, my feeling is that
they looked up the answer in the back of the book to get the numbers to
come out right.) This is brilliantly described he

http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/flowchart.html

Ten years ago, I was as critical of the confidence of many cosmologists
in the then standard model as greywolf is at present. I'm not critical
as a matter of course, but only when I think something is wrong. My own
view is that, in the last 10 years, driven primarily by data but also by
arguments such as those of Coles and Ellis, the amount of dogma has
decreased and, partly as a result, the current standard model looks
quite promising. Again, the difference is that today's standard model
is driven primarily by data, while 10 years ago the then standard model
was driven primarily by theoretical prejudice.

Well, we have something in common, then. However, what I have seen is not
an increase in data supporting the 'theoretical prejudice,' but in
theoretical prejudice 'creating' and 'correcting' data to match the
theoretical prejudice.

I consider the probability minimal that the dogma 'just happened to be
correct.'

greywolf42
ubi dubium ibi libertas