# The Paper

I learned from Often In Error that the paper of Riess et al, reporting on the research that was in the recent NASA press release, is out. It is here.

(Aside:- I must use the term “cosmic jerk” in an everyday sentence one day…. probably not as a term of endearment….)

-cvj

#### 55 Responses to “The Paper”

• nc

See comment 9 above by me in response to patronising abuse from an arxiv “expert”:

“… but I do know the basics of general relativity and its solutions from a course on cosmology and also Iâ€™ve studied quite a bit more about it independently…” – NIGEL COOK.

â€˜Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation … Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.â€™

- R. P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999, p186-7.

• The comments are appreciated, even the slightly negative ones. It shows that this subject is garnering interest. Having read them all, some books about tensors, and especially Nigel’s pointed comments, it is perfectly reasonable to use units of mass density for T, just as Einstein did. If prediction fits the data this precisely, there must be something to the theory.

• Louise… don’t just read those books like they are novels ….to really understand the things people are suggesting here, you’ll need to work through them quite a bit, I’d venture. Good luck.

Best,

-cvj

• lurken

Itâ€™s sad seeing someone who is clearly intelligent, creative, and passionate about science wasting their talents in such a misdirected way.

Intelligence, creativity and passion/motivation are obviously important. But selectivity is crucial. No matter what you do, science, art, journalism, or something else, if you are not able to recognize and discard your bad ideas then you’re not getting anywhere.

Because even among the most talented people bad ideas are the norm and good ones the exception, being creative but not selective is the same thing as not being creative at all.

• In the past month I have read a few books on Relativity and found that Friedmann’s equations work equally well applied to mass density or energy density. Therefore it is trivial to see that $\kappa = 8 \pi G$ and a fixed c is not required for GR. The math is under Friedmann Is In the Air Today. If great minds think there is a mathematical error, I am in good company. Happy ’007!