Is this question about a recent paper on topic?

Question

Is this question on topic? Or should it be?

How come some people are claiming that the Big Bang never happened?

I actually had the same question (namely how valid is the conclusion) but felt it would be opinion based so I asked it in chat. Now that it's on the main page (and the "Hot Questions" bar) we started discussing whether it is on topic or not. No close votes have been cast at the moment, but I thought it might be worth clarifying here.

Reasons it might be off-topic:

1. Primarily opinion based. It asks if the assumptions and conclusions are valid.
2. Answers are mostly discussion. You can see in the comments that it is actually mirroring the same discussion we had in chat about it.
3. Non-mainstream physics. It's a new theory (although it is a peer-reviewed, published one now) that has not yet been verified and goes against the prevailing scientific opinion.

Reasons those reasons may not be good ones:

1. Because it has been peer-reviewed, there must be some validity to their claims. Even if it is limited to universes located within spherical cows.
2. Although it seems the answers are mostly discussion, they are all kind of presenting the same answer. And I know in the past that I have said that answers cannot make a question on topic so I personally have some mixed opinions about it.
3. Although non-mainstream in the sense it goes against prevailing opinion, I think this is exactly the kind of non-mainstream question we should allow. It is a "How and why does this buck the trend" question. It is also a "Are these assumptions valid to make" question if you really drill into the physics of the problem.

So that said, how does everybody feel about it being on-topic?

Answer 1

I personally don't have that much patience for this sort of hullaballoo, which seems to come and go periodically. Nevertheless we do play a role in it, and I think it's important that we respond to these sorts of questions appropriately. The flow goes something like

• Scientist comes up with crazy idea, and (a bit surprisingly)

• actually comes up with some plausible-looking maths that merit a closer look, so

• they send it off to a journal, and it passes peer-review with referee comments along the lines of "don't think it will take off, but this much is technically sound and worth publishing so people can find why exactly it won't work, maybe we'll learn something in the process". However,

• the journal's publicity department doesn't see the referee report and, caught by the trendy title and snazzy possibilities in the abstract, ships it off to a trendy news outlet mentioning the snazzy possibilities and dropping all the qualifiers behind the result, so

• it gets reported on some credible news site, and

• a bunch of readers get confused.

Our role is to stop it right there. Point out that it depends on frictionless cows and spherical surfaces. Give precise pointers to why the Established Theory does work and to the Mountain of Evidence that supports it. Explain why the new theory needs to explain a substantial fraction of that Mountain of Evidence before we'll start taking it as a real candidate for What Actually Happens in the World.

In short, we sort of need to interrupt the science news cycle pointed out by PhD Comics' Jorge Cham,

about halfway through. We want it to look something like this:

In particular,

• If the paper in question is indeed a peer-reviewed journal publication, and

• the paper in question does initially contradict a well established theory,

we should be a bit more lax in terms of keeping these questions open. A few comments on the usual close reasons:

• "It's non-mainstream" doesn't hold if it's actually in a peer-reviewed publication, because of how we structure that in the first place.

• It's unclear what you're asking is a pretty high bar for something like this. It's often the case that we as professional physicists are confused by one of these, and it takes us time to get to grips with what the paper is saying. For a student or someone in the general public, we should set a slightly lower bar if they see something in mainstream media which is backed up by a peer-reviewed publication, and are simply confused about how credible it is.

• It's primarily opinion-based and it most likely will remain so, with anything that's speculative like this. We do need to make an effort to keep it concise and to the point, but I think this is effort we need to make on keeping the answers trim and as low on discussion as possible, rather than something that makes us close the question immediately.

Apologies for the long, rambly post. Feel free to shoot me down with reasoned arguments.