The Instantaneous Creation of Infinite Space

wrote in message ...
In sci.astro Perfectly Innocent wrote:
wrote in message ...

[...]
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still trust their outdated GR textbooks?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?&sel...ews.sentex.net

Eugene Shubert