[oraphalous]

> If you think there are others, please exhibit one.

If everyone like you attempts to rail road the imaginative process at the beginning of hypothesis formation, then we'll never get to the point of being able to exhibit one, should one be possible.

The demand for rigour at this point in a discourse - which was pretty clearly signalled by the commenter to be offered at a stage prior to substantive hypotheis formation - just shuts down the imaginative process. It's not constructive.

[rachofsunshine]

There's a difference between being closed-minded and saying "yes, we've obviously thought about this thing that you, someone with no apparent background in our field, thought of in ten seconds". And if you're an expert in any field that gets a lot of people who are interested, but not a lot of people who are experts, you hear these kinds of half-baked theories all the time, often with this exact "oh you orthodox experts just can't handle my field-disrupting free-thinking!" kind of framing.

I'm a mathematician by education, and I cannot tell you how many people insist on things like 0.999... < 1 without an understanding of (a) what the left side of that expression even means, (b) what a real number is, or (c) what basic properties the real numbers have. Going "no, you're wrong, and it would take me a couple of full lectures to explain why but trust me we're pretty sure about this" is a reasonable answer to that, provided that you have indeed established that to your own satisfaction, at least.

[gryfft]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

From Wikipedia, an intuitive explanation of an elementary proof:

> If one places 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, etc. on the number line, one sees immediately that all these points are to the left of 1, and that they get closer and closer to 1. For any number that is less than 1, the sequence 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, and so on will eventually reach a number larger than . So, it does not make sense to identify 0.999... with any number smaller than 1. Meanwhile, every number larger than 1 will be larger than any decimal of the form 0.999...9 for any finite number of nines. Therefore, 0.999... cannot be identified with any number larger than 1, either. Because 0.999... cannot be bigger than 1 or smaller than 1, it must equal 1 if it is to be any real number at all.

And then:

> The elementary argument of multiplying 0.333... = 1/3 by 3 can convince reluctant students that 0.999... = 1.

[bawolff]

Sure, but we are talking about a physical theory here not a mathematical one. There are always alternative physical theories, infinitely many. They may not be good theories, but they clearly exist. This has nothing to do with cosmology but more is a fundamental principle of logic.

To put another way, there is a big difference between saying some specific alternative theory is wrong/unlikely/bad, and claiming there exists no alternative theories at all regardless of quality.

[psychoslave]

It's just that 0.999... is an awful notation, in the sense that it invites people to complete these allusive ellipsis with whatever fit their intuition, possibly even different meaning depending on the context.

If we mean 9×10^-i for i from 1 to infinity, then let's just state so. Let's not blame people to interpret towards other direction when they are provided misguiding hints.

Regarding infinity, there is a constructive proof that it doesn't exists which work perfectly provided that there is an infinite amount of resources allocated to it's execution.

[eszed]

Whoa! What? Not a mathematician in any way (in case that isn't obvious), but I'd have totally thought 0.999... asymptomatically _approaches_ 1, but never reaches it, and so is <1. Is there a short-form explanation (that I might have a chance of understanding, lol) of why that's incorrect? I'd love to have my mind blown.

[thrance]

No one prevents new ideas from being presented, but simply suggesting the universe does not expand without giving any arguments for this position nor trying to explain the observed red shifts, contributes exactly nothing to the discourse. This, is not constructive.

[ants_everywhere]

> at the beginning of hypothesis formation

But the expansion of the universe has been thoroughly studied for over a century. We're past the brainstorming phase.

I generally think people should brainstorm to generate ideas and then filter them down. And it's true that filtering too early can significantly decrease the quality of ideas.

And it's also true that in a place like Hacker News there will be smart people from all sorts of backgrounds getting to experience the joy of exploring a new topic that they're not fully up to speed on yet.

The risk though is that somebody who thoroughly understands the field is reading your comment. So for that reason I think it's a good practice to always be aware that technical fields we're not expert in are usually more subtle than we initially think.

[dtgriscom]

When a random techie comes up with a completely novel hypothesis that contradicts a broad range of theories accepted by the vast majority of practicing physicists, the proper response is not to stop and say "Hmmm. I wonder if he's right. Let's talk about it."

[alexey-salmin]

Thanks, but I don't think it's a fair description of what happened here. I'm a mathematician who noticed that the statement "The totality of all the observations we have cannot be explained in any other way" is obviously false.

Explaining is neither hard nor useful and it's not what science is normally concerned with. The goal is to predict new observations not to explain known ones.

[JasonSage]

Why not? Seems perfectly normal to just talk about it.

I learn things all the time by wondering if somebody else is right. Much better than just thinking everything is simply the way I think it is now.

Even if you know somebody is wrong, talking about it is absolutely harmless.

[tqi]

On the one hand, I agree that those people are usually wrong and generally pretty annoying.

On the other hand, who cares? This is a random internet forum, not the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so maybe there is no such thing as a proper response?

[koolala]

What are you busy with? Are there any particular other subjects you would want to talk about instead?

[snowwrestler]

It seems pretty silly to think that we are collectively “at the beginning of hypothesis formation” about the structure of the universe today, in 2024.

[xwolfi]

BS, nobody has to listen to your imaginative process. Imagine away, build something that conforms with the data, then show it !

For now, we dont know any other way to explain than to say it expands, except maybe imaginative fantasies from amateurs on Hackernews, but does it count ?

[koolala]

What if it expanded from anti-mass? Couldn't we form testable hypotheses from that?

I looked it up on the Wikipedia page for Exotic Matter and there isn't much exploration or tested theories on it.